Listening to 1984: An Experiment in Time Travel - Part 11 of 12

Are "The Killing Fields" and "Missing in Action" the same movie? Is Vladimir Putin a 1980s-style action villain? And, who will win the 1984 election? (Okay, pointless question). The penultimate entry!

The story so far: Sometime in 2019, I had a premonition that 2020 was going to suck. So— I decided to spend the year re-experiencing my favorite year from my childhood: 1984. By "re-experiencing" I mean listening to the music, watching the TV shows and movies, reading the news magazines and books, and listening to "American Top 40" and "Newsweek on Air" week-in, week-out, in chronological order. Weirdness ensued. I kept a journal. It took longer than expected, and by the start of 2022 I was still in 1984…

(Note: If you just came onboard and are thoroughly confused, start with Part 1.)

November 2, 1984 / February 10, 2022

The Killing Fields. Sam Waterston, John Malkovich, Spalding Gray, and, I think, the guy from Coach. It’s a good movie, a tough movie—not an ideal movie to watch in 2022, with so much loss in the air, though I don’t know if there is ever an opportune time to stare atrocity in the face.

One of my friends on Facebook said this was the worst movie he had ever paid money to see. By “worst,” I’m guessing he meant, “robbed all the joy and light from my life and took my hard-earned cash for the privilege.”

My own optimism is fragile. I’m a wounded optimist—an optimist with a history of anxiety and some depression. I’ll grant that The Killing Fields is realistic; maybe it is the true face of the world. But if I have any hope of keeping my head in the game, I need to take in this kind of media sparingly.

Let’s talk about Sam Waterston for a moment though. He is young and vibrant here—a physical live wire. This is not the rail-thin, twitchy, head-to-one-side Waterston of the Law and Order era. But even in this earlier, more muscular iteration, he is playing to type—a square-jawed, outraged crusader whose motivation for risking life and limb in the face of the Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia is perplexing. What is the point of such recklessness? Is he going after a Pulitzer? The glory of being the hero of an award-winning motion picture in ten years? (Sydney Schanberg, Waterston’s character, is a real person, though the overlap between film and reality is tenuous).

Two things: I enjoy this tougher version of Sam Waterston—spitting out cynical asides and fleeing peril at every turn—but I’m not buying Sydney Schanberg as portrayed in the screenplay. He seems, at best, a composite—a cypher for the idea of the dogged, uncompromising journalist. But the writers have given him no backstory. He lives, apparently alone, in an apartment in New York City. He works for The New York Times. He listens to opera. That’s about it.

I can buy that Schanberg tried unflaggingly to locate Dith Pran, his loyal Cambodian translator/collaborator who was arrested by the Khmer Rouge and forced into backbreaking labor after the takeover. I’m not buying Schanberg drunkenly lolling around his NY apartment after his return to the US, blasting opera while watching videotaped documentaries about the Cambodian conflict (which conveniently explain the U.S.’s tangled involvement to us, the viewers.) I reel from the heavy hammer blows of this ridiculous scene.

More interesting is Pram’s story. Pram (played by Haing S. Ngor, an actual refugee from the regime) is real, though his backstory, like Schanberg’s, is also thin in the screenplay. In his harrowing journey from imprisonment to daring escape and eventual freedom, he proves himself to be cunning and resourceful. The character (and actor) upstages his western counterparts, and I wonder if the film might have been stronger if it were told entirely from Pram’s perspective. Okay, I don’t wonder… I know it would have been stronger. But the western audience seems to need the comforting familiarity of the western characters. That probably goes for me as well, given how I gravitated to Waterston.

November 6, 1984 / February 24, 2022

Election Day

I have made my choice for the 1984 presidential election. But I will keep it private. Despite having written for a number of politically oriented publications over the years, I have gotten through my career without boosting for one or the other party. No reason to start now, even though we’re in the past.

I will say this: If I were to lose my time-traveler’s knowledge of the future and go to bed on the evening of Nov. 6, 1984, not knowing the election’s outcome, I would sleep well. I like both men.

Mondale has, I feel, been unjustly maligned by history. He is a talented and thoughtful man: a strong candidate in any other season. I found him the sincerest of the three Democrats jockeying for the nomination, if not the most electrifying.

And Reagan, despite his deficiencies, is already (by 1984) a special person in our history. Simply put, he made us feel intrinsically good. I’ll keep saying it: This is a precious thing. Mondale’s argument that a leader must be more than a cheerleader is well taken, but this inspirational quality of Reagan’s is not nothing; its scarcity in the history of the American presidency attests to that.

Election Night

(A Kacey Musgraves lyric from the future springs to mind: “Is there a word for the way that I’m feeling tonight? Happy and sad at the same time.”)

“Tonight is the end of nothing; it’s the beginning of everything.” -Ronald Reagan

The beginning of everything. Not a bad subtitle for this little project. There are lots of things kicking off in ’84, an idea brought home in the arrival of some new(ish) faces: “Albert Gore Jr.” from Tennessee, Mitch McConnell from Kentucky, both elected to the Senate. Plus Bill Clinton is re-elected to his governorship in Arkansas (“Look at that boyish face,” says Tom Brokaw) and Joe Biden of Delaware is re-elected to the Senate.

It’s the beginning of everyone (or most everyone) deciding not to care about the deficit. It’s also the beginning of the end of the Cold War, though we don’t know it yet.

1984 is where I tiptoe onto childhood’s offramp—which, for me, feels a bit like the end of everything. There are still a few more years to go of being a kid, but 1984 has been the peak.

And November 1984 is the beginning of Walter Mondale’s return to a saner, more human-scale life away from the glare of the spotlight, which is a silver lining to the monumental blow of losing a presidential contest. His concession speech is both heartbreaking and generous. He’s a good man—a better man than we usually see in politics, and he deserved better than the ignominy of only winning his home state plus the District of Columbia. We could use more people like him on the public stage. But people like him generally don’t have use for a public stage.

Yet there is something stirring in the incumbent president’s reelection by such a wide margin. Reagan’s critics are visible and principled, but in a messy democracy this is as close as we’re likely to get to the country speaking in one voice (excepting in the aftermaths of mass-trauma events like 9/11 and Pearl Harbor). The mandate is clear and there is little confusion. You’ve got your marching orders, Mr. President. Go to it.

November 8, 1984 / March 1, 2022

The Keaton kids launch a proto AirBnB while their parents are away on Family Ties. Alexis Colby (née Carrington) is convicted of murder on Dynasty. (Obviously it was someone else in her dress and wearing a wig. Or a waxwork dummy. I mean, come on!) But what’s that insistent tapping on the window? Is that 2022? Oh, yeah, there’s a war on—albeit a proxy war. And we are once more pitted against… the bad guys from 1984. (Only, Red Dawn isn’t happening in Colorado, it’s happening in Ukraine.)

"Vladimir Putin" by AK Rockefeller is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

That ripple in the time-space continuum has turned into a riptide. Vladimir Putin is a 1980s action-movie villain: steely eyes, pouty lips, receding hairline, frequently bare-chested, and a judo master to boot.  Which begs the question: Do I prefer this Russia as an adversary, or the one from 1984? Which is more dangerous? My gut feeling is that everything is more dangerous, more likely to run off the rails, in 2022.

In 1984, we are dealing with the Communist Party and the Politburo. The pre-Gorbachev Soviet leaders are more or less interchangeable, and nothing happens on the Soviet side without consensus. In 2022 we are dealing with one guy, which makes it more of a Hitler situation.

But the 2022 events are coming to me on a time-delay. In these final months of my time-travel experience, I’ve finally developed the discipline to keep the modern news media at bay—at least during the workweek. And this discipline comes from a non-1984 figure—Time Ferris—whose concept of the “low information diet” has taken hold with me, at least in regard to news.

Which is not to say that I don’t care. The problem has always been that I care too much—that I get consumed, as I almost was by the 2020 election and its aftermath. And, as with the 2020 “riot season,” I’ve been keeping these latest developments at arm’s length for my own sanity.

November 10, 1984 / March 7, 2022

Watching a Milwaukee November 1984 news broadcast, uploaded to YouTube all these years later. The program ends and we get what I believe was called “snow”: that grainy wash on the screen when you’re watching unrecorded (or erased) videotape—another ubiquitous image of my childhood that I had forgotten. Also stirring the memory circuits: “windchill factor” (a long-lost term for this midwestern refugee).

On the sports front, it emerges that the UGA Bulldogs just lost to the Florida Gators 27-0. Ouch! And that’s the sum total of my Georgia football knowledge for 1984.

November 15, 1984 / March 10, 2022

In 1984 I feel as if I’m stuck in an endless loop of Family Ties and The Cosby Show. Tonight’s Family Ties episode, “Best Man,” is a lovely meditation on change, and how a new romantic relationship (or any kind of domestic change) can instantly alter a person’s other friendships. I’m reminded of my fight-or-flight response when a good friend, previously on call for spur-of-the moment hangs or concert adventures, got engaged—a nonsensical reaction on my part, given that I am married and a father and typically overscheduled. My tumultuous feelings, just like in this episode, evaporated immediately when I met the new partner and observed the joy, rejuvenation, and purpose she brought to my friend’s life, and he to hers. I was happy for them both.

I am also put in mind of the dizzying shift I felt many years ago when a good friend learned that his wife was pregnant, becoming the first of my close-knit group of college buddies to cross this threshold. It was clear that a corner had been turned—that our dynamic would soon be altered beyond recognition, even as our love for each other was sure to continue. By chance I was traveling with him when he heard the news over the phone. And I recall those moments directly afterward in the hotel bar, each of us nursing drinks, my friend’s normal exuberance tempered by his awestruck contemplation of this turn of events.

As Alex’s father advises his son on Family Ties, these types of change are inevitable. Clinging to the way things were ultimately causes more pain for all sides than acceptance of the change. It’s not lost on me that I’m receiving vital advice from the past on the folly of holding onto the past, in the midst of a project that has been all about holding onto the past for dear life.

I can carry all of these ideas at once: Change is inevitable; the grief that accompanies change is inevitable; the past can never be recaptured; letting go of the past is hard; letting go of the past is liberating; the present is frightening; the present is all there is.

November 16, 1984 / March 11, 2022

Missing in Action. Look, I know it’s a schlocky B-movie, but they could at least try. In the Vietnam flashbacks, Chuck Norris’s Special Forces unit looks like the Grateful Dead. And there’s Chuck running around without a helmet, shaggy-haired, bearded, hauling his big-ass gun through the rice paddy. I wonder what actual Vietnam veterans made of this spectacle, or of next year’s Rambo. Maybe they were just relieved that Hollywood belatedly discovered they had fought a grueling war.

Thesis: Are Missing in Action and The Killing Fields essentially the same movie? In both films we have scenes of the hero pacing his stateside hotel/apartment like a caged tiger, tormented by his TV set—inexplicably tuned, in both cases, to PTSD-inducing footage from Southeast Asia. The morally upright crusader, haunted by the past, pines for justice. I would love to somehow combine the movies. Sam Waterston starts pumping iron, goes back to Cambodia, back to those Killing Fields to rescue his loyal translator who he left behind. He kills a bunch of Khmer Rouge along the way. There will, of course, be a scene of Sam emerging, slow motion, from the muddy waters of the river, firing round after round from his submachine gun that is somehow not waterlogged. The bad guys get mowed down; despite their rigorous training they are no match for this shaggy, soggy, helmetless American. And somehow, none of this provokes an international incident—except for the minor consternation that greets the film from certain quarters upon its release.

I think both movies would be improved by this blending, though I don’t know where that would leave Chuck Norris—bumped from his plum role by the newly invigorated Sam Waterston, who will no doubt go on to take a Liam Neeson-circa-2010s-turn and star in a bunch of revenge thrillers. Perhaps, in this alternate timeline, Norris will have a late-career resurgence as the brilliant and tetchy DA in Law and Order.

November 18, 1984 / March 18, 2022

Wilmington, North Carolina’s Michael Jordan (along with his signature sneaker) is having a tremendous rookie year in the NBA, playing for the Chicago Bulls. I will be hearing all about this guy—and especially those shoes—in sixth grade. I don’t know when I will actually lay eyes on him, but the idea of Michael Jordan will quickly transcend the confines of basketball fandom and saturate playgrounds and classrooms across America. It starts in 1984.

Newsweek runs a feature this week on serial killers, a grim trend that will increase in visibility over the next couple decades, only to be eclipsed by school shootings. I used to be a fan of the serial killer genre of books and movies, back when I harbored the illusion that the world in which these things happened was somehow different than the one I inhabited (and could therefore be observed from a secure distance). But I associate this genre more with the 1990s—Silence of the Lambs, Se7en, the novel The Alienist, and the short-lived X-Files spinoff Millennium. Those, plus the popularity of grunge rock, contribute to the dreariness of that decade in my memories. But enough of that. It hasn’t happened yet, nor does it need to.

It’s interesting that the psychologist interviewed in the accompanying Newsweek on Air radio segment points to the sexual revolution (with its attendant divorce rate) and the rise of violent visual media as contributing factors to the spike in serial killer cases. Two observations: 1) It’s surprising (from a 21st century standpoint) to hear such a conservative argument put forward and taken seriously in the mainstream media. 2) Completely outside of the serial-killer conversation, we in Catholic-land were shielded from the divorce epidemic. Divorces were still anathema to Catholic culture in the 1980s; I had just one classmate with divorced parents. Culturally we were in a bubble, blissfully unaffected by the “epidemic of broken homes,” as it is phrased in the piece. The phenomenon of “Latchkey kids” was also largely foreign to our group—though we did enjoy a degree of unsupervised freedom unknown to subsequent generations. Of course, the lack (or perceived lack) of the divorce option can keep troubled families locked in turmoil. And hindsight reveals the supposed trustworthiness of the Catholic hierarchy to have been, in many locales, a false front, with problems far more serious than the divorce rate lurking beneath. Still, my memory of my little enclave is of stability. I am grateful to have grown up in the waning days of this now-vanished world.

Next up: The Final Chapter