Desperate Reassurance in the '80s
There may be no decade – particularly in terms of its cinema – that is more misunderstood in the popular mind than the '80s. What was in truth a decade of enormous psychological complexity – if we can speak of a nation having a psychology, and I think we can – gets flattened into a parody of pastel colors and women's shoulder-pads, ridiculous commercials and MTV. What was strife gets turned, by memory, into banality. What was a great psychic process of covering up by wishing away, a burying of unease, a repressing of social anxiety by an enthusiasm so great and forced that it could not be anything but hollow – all of this is forgotten, buried, turned away from, so that we can remember the '80s in a way that pleases us, for certain strange, discomfiting reasons of our own.
How shall I convince you of this complexity? Let's start with the action movie.
Take First Blood, from 1982. It tells the story of a drifter named John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) who is trying to reconnect with society after the trauma of the Vietnam war has shattered his life. He journeys to find an old friend, only to discover that the friend has died of cancer brought on by Agent Orange. He moves on, finds himself summarily drummed out of a small town by malicious cops who see him as nothing more than street trash. When he refuses to leave – because what they are doing to him is immoral, as well as needlessly cruel – they abuse him. Big mistake.
Rambo was turned into a lethal killer by his country in order to prosecute the war; now he turns those skills against the police force he's in conflict with. An all-out battle in the temperate rain forest of Washington state ensues. It's one man against the police and all the reinforcements they can bring to bear. At the end, Rambo surrenders rather than continue the bloodshed, but not before he explains that it's his treatment by his own country that has put him in this state.
First Blood is the number one movie in America for three weeks in a row upon its release, goes on to make almost fifty million dollars against a budget of fifteen, and spawns a franchise.
The conservative/liberal politics of the film aside, it's clear that nine years after America withdrew from the Vietnam War it's very much still on the minds of the population. Did America mistreat its veterans? Were they spit on in airports, or was this an urban legend? What kind of military honor should they be accorded, and why did they so commonly feel cast aside by society? And how should the nation work through its complicity?
These questions were intense enough that they spawned a peculiar mini-cycle of films.
Uncommon Valor from 1983 (also directed by Ted Kotcheff, who made First Blood) puts onto the screen a scenario much on the minds of the population at the time: what if the American soldier in Vietnam had been so entirely physically and spiritually abandoned that there were POWs still being held in Vietnam, a decade after the war? Gene Hackman plays a Colonel in the Marines who puts together a shaggy team of vets who sneak into Vietnam to find out.
They discover POWs, of course, and heroically rescue them, tragically losing some of their numbers along the way; the film operates as a kind of red-blooded response to, and reprise of, The Dirty Dozen, from 1967, a film which is also transparently about the war in Vietnam, although it's set in the Second World War. Where The Dirty Dozen is cynical about the machinery of war and what it does to human beings, Uncommon Valor seems to feel that the real heroism of war has been forgotten, that the military and the men who served in it – so often seen as participating in a massive injustice against the Vietnamese – should instead be celebrated for their nobility. The film made thirty million dollars on a budget of somewhere in the range of a million.
More movies in this vein follow. Chuck Norris gets in on the action with three Missing In Action films, in 1984, 1985, and 1988, all of which tell more or less the same story as Uncommon Valor. Not to be outdone, Sylvester Stallone gets Rambo out of jail and sends him to Vietnam to rescue POWs in 1985's Rambo, which, once again, tells the same story. America has left its servicemen behind, forgotten them, and they need to be rescued.
What on earth is going on? How is this comprehensible in today's world, in which the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seem to have sunk beneath the surface of American cultural history with little more than a few ripples, while our action movies tell stories of superheroes fighting off galactic invasions, or bands of family-oriented car thieves driving their hot-rods around on the polar ice caps or jumping them into space, or loner hitmen out to wreak havoc because of anguish over their murdered dogs?
What happened in the '80s was that the Vietnam war, and the disruptions of the '60s more broadly, ripped a hole in the American psyche (or perhaps, more accurately, the psyche of the groups who were dominant in the country at the time) that the culture was working frantically to patch up, or paper over.
A country that liked to think of itself as being able to do no wrong had done wrong. A country that liked to think of itself as invincible had been defeated. A country that believed in the idea that it was a melting pot, in which people of all races and classes were somehow magically (ie. through their belief in "the American dream") liquified into homogeneity had found itself divided, at each other's throats. Generations had been torn apart, beliefs ripped in half.
So what did that country do? It set about telling itself desperate stories of re-unification. Soldiers who had been abandoned were rescued. Morality tales were spun about going back and righting the wrongs of the past.
But the past cannot be righted, because it's already gone. So what's left is a transparently anguished reassurance.
Take Red Dawn, from 1984. The story feels as though it's set squarely in the Cold War America of the '80s: the Soviets invade, and a group of courageous high-school kids in rural Colorado take up arms to fight in the resistance against their nefarious new overlords.
Scratch the surface, though, and it becomes clear how tightly Red Dawn is still held in the grip of the previous decade.
Because one of the other things that had happened in Vietnam was that America had found itself occupying a position that ran directly counter to its national myth. That myth involves a plucky young nation forging itself against the grip of an imperialist foe, George Washington's irrepressible army poking their noses out from behind trees to pick off the blundering, ponderous forces of England, backwoods Kentucky marksmen proving their homespun valor at the Battle of New Orleans, dauntless Texans under siege at the Alamo, truth and valor triumphing against overwhelming odds.
America was revolutionary, it was the upstart, it was the freedom fighter…until it found itself, in Vietnam, taking the place of the occupier, the vastly superior force in a far-off land trying to stamp out bands of poorly-armed peasants, blundering around aimlessly and violently and without political clarity. America had become King George's England. We were the redcoats.
And so what does Red Dawn do? Re-stages this affair, but with the positions satisfyingly reversed. America is once again the little guy being invaded and needing to defend itself, once again has moral clarity on the field of battle. It's as if the film insists that history was wrong – America could never be that guy – and all it takes is Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen to set the story right.
This continual need to suture the wounds in the body politic inflicted by the '60s extends through an astounding number of the action films of the '80s, sometimes overtly, sometimes subtly. Lethal Weapon, from 1987, gives us a pair of characters. One is a traumatized Vietnam vet (the war has now been over for fourteen years) and the other is a thoroughly domesticated family man. The two, at the opening, hate each other, cannot be reconciled. And yet through the action of the film the veteran slowly becomes re-assimilated into American life, a happy adjunct member of his partner's family. He has been rescued, that is, as surely as the POWs in Uncommon Valor.
This project of reassurance, this attempt to argue that we weren't really what we had been shown to be, sneaks its fingers into a vast range of the violence-oriented films of the decade. Commando (1986, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Heartbreak Ridge (1986, staring and directed by Clint Eastwood) set out in their own ways to recuperate the image of the United States military, casting it as the out-gunned opponent of freedom-threatening forces. Predator (1987, Schwarzenegger again) plays on the still-dominant cultural images of fighting in the jungle – inescapably tied to the Vietnam War for anyone living in the '80s – with its tale of outgunned Americans faced by an impossibly powerful visitor from another planet. Aliens (1986), Navy Seals (1990) and A Few Good Men (1992) all in their own subtle ways live with the specter of American military heartbreak, as do so many others.
If one wants an inkling of just how long this trail of psychic disturbance stretches out for, one only has to think of Kevin Klein's character crying out in 1988's crime comedy A Fish Called Wanda, "We did not lose Vietnam! It was a tie!" or Gary Busey's character in 1991's Point Break recalling his presence at the siege of Khe Sanh, or Tom Hank's titular character in Forrest Gump (1994) trying desperately to convince Americans that the entire decade of the 1960s had been little more than a loveable comic romp that had taught us all a lot of very important life lessons, or Steven Spielberg in 1998's Saving Private Ryan waving his hands and insisting that we must remember that America was, indeed could never be other than, the heroic fighter for freedom against overwhelming odds.
And all of this is not to mention the more straightforward attempts to deal with the legacy of the war, such as The Killing Fields (1984), Platoon (1986), Full Metal Jacket (1987), Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), Hamburger Hill (1987), Casualties of War (1989), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and the rest.
It's not that these films are not a part of the story, simply that what has been interesting me lately is the submerged conflict of the decade, the way it plastered a smiling face and a new day in America political advertisement over fracture lines that extended twenty and thirty years into the past.
Which brings me to perhaps the most fascinating part of the '80s: its lighthearted comedy and adventure films.
Given the national psychic context, one does not have to strain one's mental apparatus to begin to see something submerged coming to the surface in 1985's Back to the Future. A suburban white boy travels back in time to save and re-unify his family. Of course, the trauma can't be faced directly, so instead of traveling back to the time of real dis-unification, the '60s, he goes just a bit further, to the '50s. There, things are comfortable, cheerful. His mission of re-establishing America as a safe space where people can feel good about themselves can be cast as a happy-go-lucky gambol, addressing the thing that is too traumatic to be faced – the recent history still covering the country in its shadow – without having to address it directly. Because that kind of looking-away is key to avoidance.
And what about the decade's seemingly spontaneous turn to films oriented toward children and the child-like sensibilities of adults? Why this yearning for a reassertion of innocence? Why Spielberg's famous and continuing attempt to put the pieces of the nuclear family back together again? What had been lost, what had been broken, that created such a need for this reassurance?
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), like Back to the Future, whisks us back to a simpler, gentler time, when the bad guys are bad, and the good guys are American. In E.T. (1982) a lost alien needs to be saved by a little boy, who is himself spiritually rescued in the process; in The Last Starfighter (1984) an alien war gives a teenage boy who is an expert at playing video games the chance to be an intergalactic hero.
If Predator evinces a kind of wish for a violent alien to come down so that we can remember the nobility of our military might, these films seem to evince a wish for something, anything, to come down from the stars so that our children can be set onto the right course again. And then Enemy Mine (1985) takes this story and twists it to become the tale of a human and an alien, soldiers in opposing armies, who find themselves stranded on the same planet and forced to become friends. It is John Boorman's Hell in the Pacific (1968) – which tells the same story but with American and Japanese servicemen – re-staged, stripped of the savage taint of Vietnam, a message not to worry because things are okay. That conflict between us and the folks who look different than us need bother us no longer.
In Goonies (1985), the kids become the heroes, fighting off the mean old cynical nabobs of the adult world and, once again, re-discovering that the past (now in the form of a pirate ship bearing treasure) is something wonderful after all, rather than a fearsome and depressing tale of violence. It's a more juvenile version of Poltergeist (1982) in which the transgressions of the past – here literalized as the building of a suburban housing complex on top of a Native American burial ground – come roaring back to terrify us, only to be defeated by a plucky and caring American nuclear family.
Vietnam, trauma of the 1960s, begone! Trouble us no more!
And by the time we get to The Karate Kid (1984) we have begun to recuperate the martial spirit into the teenage body itself. The wise old soldier teaches the white kid from the Valley that violence is okay as long as it's used for noble causes; Daniel LaRusso is like a pint-sized version of John Rambo, except that this time there's no danger – there can't be a danger, because we won't allow it to be seen! – that his training in violence will result in anything but heroism.
The darkness is being vanquished, bit by bit, and yet the fact that we still need to vanquish it speaks to some lingering effect of it that troubles us, cannot be scrubbed away completely.
And who better to try his hand at that remediation than Tom Cruise in Top Gun (1986)? His father died in disgrace in an earlier war, but Cruise with his kilowatt smile will prove to us once and for all that – no matter the strange troubling memories, the feeling that something is still not right in America – what we really need is some good 'ol red-blooded ass-kicking to make things right again.
I could go on and on, through The Never Ending Story (1984) and Labyrinth (1986), and Stand By Me (1986), through the decade's fascinating horror films and its continual staging of inter-generational repair, and the rest. It's a decade rife with agony covered by cheer, with psychological complexity emerging in the strangest ways. And my point – despite the occasional bombast I engage in – is not that everything in the 1980s can be reduced to the Vietnam War or the events of the 1960s.
Nor is it that these are hateful films that should be derided. Many of them are wonderful, and many of them I love.
My point is, I suppose, to urge care in memory. Every decade is complicated. Every decade has submerged currents running through it that can be fruitfully discussed if one wants to understand where we came from and where we are.
This includes our own decades.
I wrote above that our own blockbuster cinema seems to take vanishingly small interest in the military conflicts of our time. But this is not to say that it bears no relation to the things assaulting us today, the things wounding us or terrifying us or that we’re struggling with. Perhaps even more so than that of the '80s, our blockbuster cinema is one of immersion of fantasy worlds, where we can escape from our reality and submerge ourselves in stories of the triumph of good over evil.
Which raises, of course, precisely the question of why that escape and submersion, not to mention our re-casting of the '80s as a time far different than it actually was, feels so necessary to us…
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