Film: Back to the Future

By Emily C. Reubush

I recently read that the 1980’s were pretty much a write-off for films, a claim with which I have to completely disagree. Sure, maybe it was a little light on art (though you did have David Lynch’s ‘Blue Velvet’, Woody Allen going wild and Kurosawa’s ‘Ran’, to name a few), the films of the 80’s had a profound and lasting effect not just on film for decades to come, but on pop culture at large.

The 80’s, which began a thoroughly-depressing 32 years ago, saw the rise of the blockbuster (for better or worse). Before that decade, only a handful of movies really made a gigantic impact at the cinema, such as ‘Gone With the Wind’ and ‘Ben-Hur’. In the mid-70s you had ‘Jaws’and ‘Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope’ filling millions of seats across the country; but it was the 80’s when this new phenomena really took hold with two more episodes of ‘Star Wars’, three ‘Indiana Jones’ adventures, ‘Back to the Future’, ‘Batman’ and ‘Superman II’. These are the sorts of films we now identify with the word ‘blockbuster;’ big sets, big effects, big action. But you also had comedies and family films, such as ‘E.T. the ‘Extra-Terrestrial’, ‘Ghostbusters’ and ‘Beverly Hills Cop’. This was when going to the movies really became a default method of entertainment and also became a time when you could easily take movies home.

Left: Ghostbusters (1984) Right: Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1983)

It was a huge decade for true action/adventure with the aforementioned Indiana Jones films, ‘Die Hard’ and ‘The Terminator’ (the sequels of which we are still enduring today). This was the rise of Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Norris and Willis. It was no-longer ‘too soon’ for films about Vietnam as ‘Platoon’, ‘Full Metal Jacket’, ‘Good Morning, Vietnam’, ‘Casualties of War’, ‘Hamburger Hill’ and a number of other films followed the lead of ‘The Deer Hunter’ and ‘Apocalypse Now’ of 1978 and 1979, respectively.

Left: Die Hard (1988) Right: Platoon (1986)

The slasher became an uber-popular genre, endlessly copied and sequeled. Sure, to be technical, the Michael Myers vehicle ‘Halloween’ was released in 1978, but had three sequels in the 80’s. ‘Friday the 13th’ spawned Jason in 1980 and released a sequel or spin-off every year throughout the 1980’s. Freddy Krueger completed the best-known trio of psychos in 1984 via ‘The Nightmare on Elm Street’, and managed to fit another four Nightmares into the decade. Beyond the incredible number of films (16!) that these three franchises released in the decade was an innumerable barrage of movies looking to cash in on the public’s blood lust.

Left: Friday the 13th (1980) Right: Pretty in Pink (1986)

However, the genre that may best define the decade is that which focused on teenagers’ daily lives, rather than their gory deaths. John Hughes solidified high school stereotypes and pop in film with ‘Sixteen Candles’, ‘Breakfast Club’, ‘Pretty in Pink’, ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’ and ‘Weird Science’. There were ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High’, ‘Adventures in Babysitting and Heathers’, ‘Risky Business’, ‘Flashdance’ and ‘Footloose’.

It’s impossible to cover a decade in cinema, even the cinema from one country, in one vaguely-cohesive piece, which is why we’re dedicating two weeks to it; but in just the last 500 words a solid case has been made for the enduring legacy of 80’s film. How many times have the words ‘Luke, I am your father’ or ‘wax on, wax off’ repeated since their first projected utterance? How many generations will have to pass before a hockey mask becomes just a hockey mask again? Maybe it was the evolution of Western society and decades of political fatigue, the evolution and affordability of technology, or just a collective wish to be lost in a fantasy, but the films of the 1980’s were so embraced that they have become deeply engrained in pop culture and are likely to remain so for decades to come.