Listening to 1984: An Experiment in Time Travel - Part 4 of 12
Robin Williams defects. Culture Club peaks. Julio Iglesias and Willie Nelson perpetrate an outrageous humble brag. And, in 2020, Orwell makes an appearance and I literally begin _listening_ to 1984.
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.
(Note: If you just came onboard and are thoroughly confused, start with Part 1.)
April 6, 1984 / April 6, 2020
I wasn’t fully prepared for the power of Paul Mazurky’s Moscow on the Hudson: its sincerity, its fragile optimism—which is deepened, of course, by my knowledge of Robin Williams’s future suicide. Williams plays Vladimir Ivanoff, a Russian circus performer and musician who defects from the Soviet Union during a state-sponsored visit to New York. The movie follows his struggles to assimilate to American life. He starts with starry-eyed optimism, moves into disillusionment, then bitterness, finally to arrive at a more nuanced appraisal. “America is a strange country,” he writes his family. “Strange and wonderful.”
Uniquely, I think this movie gets the US right. And of course it takes an immigrant’s viewpoint to do that. Watching it now, it’s impossible not to think of the fraught dynamics of the 21st century migrant crisis, and there is simply too much to unpack there, but Moscow on the Hudson depicts a phenomenon specific to its time and place (defection during the Cold War) and should be viewed with that in mind. The defection scene itself, which takes place at Bloomingdale’s, is funny and dramatic and vey public (It gets caught on television news cameras), setting Vladimir on the long and winding road toward American citizenship—a fascinating journey that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen depicted on film.
Who but an immigrant could see this “strange and wonderful” country with fresh eyes? Immigrants want this thing, fight for this thing, that the rest of us are born into and largely take for granted. Most of them, by the end of the citizenship process, know more about the country than its native-born inhabitants. Immigrants, too, can see the many ways that the reality of America might fall short of its myth, yet, given the circumstance that brought them here, can place those shortcomings within a more realistic context than its native-born critics can often manage. Moscow on the Hudson witnesses to this journey—largely an internal one—more powerfully than any other movie, novel, or TV show I have come across. Why is this movie not more widely known?
April 7, 1984 / April 7, 2020
In 2020, I stare out at an empty beach. I have brought the kids to coastal North Carolina, where my wife has been attending to estate matters after losing her mother to cancer earlier this year. Our original plan had been to wait until the summer to bring everyone here, but there was no way of knowing if air travel would get locked down.
Tonight, a bright yellow moon hangs low in the sky, full to bursting. The family all together. Feelings of solidarity and claustrophobia. And loss. Exhaustion in nearly every moment, but also gratitude.
I had wanted to skip out on 2020 so badly. I knew it would be a lousy year, but I thought the lousiness would be external to us. Who would have thought that the nearly forgotten 1990s movie Outbreak would come to life. Suddenly, 1984 flickers. It’s still on the screen but it’s fuzzing over like an old video tape. But the songs of 1984, strong as they are, pulse through my days. Reagan, through his force of personality, flits around my consciousness. Mondale? I’m waiting for his entrance.
But in 2020, John Prine has died from the coronavirus and the British prime minister—a polarizing but vibrant personality—hovers in critical condition. And we are all trapped in our homes. This is an extraordinary year. The events of the last month dwarf the recent impeachment of the president (only the third in the country’s history). Through it all, the waves come in and out. I walk the Wrightsville Beach loop surrounded by fit and active residents of all ages. Were there always so many joggers here, or are people running from the tide of illness bearing down on us?
Timelines collide and warp against each other. 2020 feels like 1984, but not the year; 2020 feels like the book Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Wrightsville walking loop may be open, but the beach itself is closed—and under surveillance. I see a dad with his two small children, sneaking out to take a dip in the water. The father glances furtively back as the kids splash in the waves. And the thought crosses my mind for just a moment that I should call the police. I mention out loud my worry that there is no lifeguard present. And it’s my daughter—my six-year-old daughter—who talks me down. “Their dad is right there, looking right at them. And they’re only playing in the shallow part where the waves roll onto the sand.” If this is what happens to ostensibly libertarian me after just a few weeks of lockdown, then I see now how easily we will acquiesce to power, given the right reasons. Meanwhile, in 1984, Rockwell’s anthem reverberates.
I always feel like somebody’s watching me.
I have no idea if the man and his kids got caught. They were gone the next time I looked.
2020 is vivid and insistent. And yet my family and I watch it play out from our beach bubble. Elsewhere—Italy, Spain, Seattle, New York City—there is chaos, tragedy on a grand scale. Not enough ventilators to go around. Surging unemployment. A society pushed to the brink. Here in Wrightsville, everyone is fit and tan: joggers, cyclists, walkers. No one appears to be sick. Hardly anyone appears to be worried about being sick. And maybe they don’t need to worry. Is this On the Beach? Or is it simply on the beach? I pace within this beautiful condo but I don’t move much beyond it. Just the walks round and round the loop—the same steps so many times it's a wonder I haven’t left indentations.
In some ways, then, this should be the perfect opportunity to project backward into a time when everyone moved. What is 1984 if not movement? A riot of motion and sound and vision and brightness everywhere. Well, not quite everywhere, but I’m not dealing exclusively with reality here.
Is music 1984’s greatest contribution to posterity? Maybe I’m biased because I take in the world through sound first, but it is astonishing to me that a full 80-90% of each week’s American Top 40 is comprised of songs I consider stone-cold classics: works by Michael Jackson, Billy Joel, Elton John, Eurythmics, Duran Duran, Cyndi Lauper, Van Halen, Pointer Sisters, Phil Collins. Just incredible that this stuff was coming out all at once.
And then there was Boy George and Culture Club. Here was a band that really made the parents nervous, but, subversively, few could quarrel with the music. It was classic, well-constructed pop (some of it top shelf; their 1982 single “Time (Clock of the Heart)” was, in my view, one of the best songs of the decade). Remove George’s gender-upending visual presentation and there was zero controversy. Add the visual element and, voilà, instant notoriety—and mega stardom. And it seems to me that George was too fragile a soul to handle this. Who could?
I have some hangups with the sound production though. “Karma Chameleon” ought to have rocked more. It almost sounds as if the lead vocals, instruments, and backing vocals were recorded at different times in different studios. George’s voice is always warm and natural, but you have these shrinkwrapped backing vocals that all but smother the lead. (I have no arguments with the underlying songwriting).
More successful is “Miss Me Blind.” Now that is a well-executed jam, with some lead guitar reminiscent of Ernie Isley of the Isley Brothers. Hard to believe that this will essentially be the end of the line for Culture Club, at least as a creative entity with any kind of cultural force.
“Do you really want to hurt me / Do you really want to make me cry?” he sang in an earlier hit. Well, yes, I guess a lot of people did want to hurt him and make him cry in the 1980s, so Boy George was courageous, a harbinger of an age that wouldn’t arrive for another generation or two. Just wish he could have kept bringing his A-game to the music.
In February 1984, Star Wars aired on network television for the first time. (This does tie in with April 1984 / 2020, so bear with me.) This momentous occasion was accompanied by a stereo simulcast on WCCO FM. It’s difficult to explain this concept to subsequent generations who take Bose soundbars and Atmos mixes for granted, but in the ‘80s you were usually stuck with a TV’s built-in mono speaker for your sound. However, many households had component stereo systems in the living room—generally superior, sonically, to what people have on-hand for music listening today. A simulcast was an opportunity to harness those stereos to create a temporary home theater environment via an FM broadcast of the soundtrack to whatever big event—typically a football or baseball game, but sometimes a movie premiere or concert—was happening on TV.
When Star Wars came on TV, we had no VCR yet. But my mom had the idea of purchasing a couple of audio cassettes so I could record the simulcast. The whole concept blew my mind; I had not been aware that you could buy tapes in a store that you could then use to make (to my ears) pristine-sounding copies of records, other tapes, and radio broadcasts. I knew that audio tapes existed and you could record your own voice, but it didn’t seem possible that professional recordings could be copied directly, short of parking a portable voice recorder in front of a speaker. This was the beginning of a long obsession.
The big night arrived. We turned on the TV, dialed in the FM station on our Toshiba radio & cassette boombox, and started recording. And over the next year and beyond, I played that tape down to its threads, reliving Star Wars in my mind. For a good while I had every line of the movie memorized.
(2024 Editor’s note: I suspect my 2020 self was conflating two events here: the 1984 network TV premiere of Star Wars and a 1982 pay-per-view broadcast, which was simulcast on FM radio. I say this because I don’t remember the audio tape having any commercial breaks. The fact remains that we watched the network premiere and I played my Star Wars tape constantly, well into 1984.)
Two passions were born: one, recording: broadcasts, albums, voice; manipulating tapes; making crude edits; listening everywhere. The other passion was for audio drama over visuals. Audio as rocket fuel for the imagination, unencumbered by the confining edges of the television screen. The FM simulcast of Star Wars was an accidental radio drama, but within the year I would be introduced to dramatic productions that were made specifically for the audio medium: old time radio shows and more contemporary BBC productions.
That experience of listening to the audio of something that was originally presented on a screen—and the imaginative delight that accompanied it—has returned unexpectedly in April, 2020. During the lockdown, the only exercise I have been getting is my long walks around the Wrightsville loop in the evening—a mental lifeline, and a chance to get outside while few others are out and about (lessening the chance of “community spread.”) The problem is that this cuts into the time I was to have been watching movies and TV from 1984. I had been falling further and further behind in my viewing until it dawned on me—during one of my walks, appropriately—that the technology must exist in 2020 for ripping audio from the Amazon Prime and YouTube videos I have been watching: the modern equivalent of my 1984 simulcast recording. And so I’m back in the game, taking in Cheers, Hill Street Blues, and news broadcasts while endlessly circling the loop. And here is an interesting realization: Despite the fact that the 1980s are considered a visual era, I find the sound of 1984, at least the pocket of 1984 that I’m listening to, more impressive than the images. After a full week of listening to the “must-see TV,” along with my regular diet of American Top 40 and ’84 album tracks, I managed to grab an hour to watch some MTV from April, 1984 and it was a shocker: the wedding of pop music at its zenith with the shoddy images of music video in its infancy. There’s the J Geils Band jumping around in overalls and playing with paint in “Freeze Frame” (an admittedly fun video), Big Country riding around on three wheelers and scuba diving—basically wasting the record company’s money—in “In a Big Country,” Phil Collins clutching his fists and emoting over a montage of scenes from the movie “Against All Odds” in the video for the title track. Magnificent songs, but their strange, halting, rudimentary videos diminish the musical source material.
As I go through these days, I like to think that I have the look of 1984 fixed firmly in my mind—that it has never left me. But when I get the opportunity to actually see the footage, I feel the shock of the intervening thirty-six years. In this grainy footage I can see every one of the tree rings of my life, and there are more of them than I realized. What disorients is that the present too can feel continents away, and so I tumble through time, fixed to no particular date or place.
April 8, 1984 / April 8, 2020
On TV this month (in 1984): the heavily promoted George Washington miniseries. (Oh how I miss the network miniseries!) It stars Barry Bostwick as young-to-middle-aged George. I have a vague memory that watching this may have been a school assignment. It was definitely discussed in Ms. Heinbockel’s 4th grade class, and there was interest from my dad at home.
Thoughts on this first episode so far: It’s detailed, engrossing, but definitely an ‘80s TV production. It has that washed-out film quality you see in shows like Airwolf, and long single-camera shots—which I do not believe are the result of artistic choices, but rather the lack of funds and time (and perhaps cameras) to do a tightly edited, multi-perspective cut. (That is my “I don’t know anything about filmmaking but I know something is off” take.) All of that could be overcome by committed acting, but Bruce Bostwick is all wrong for the part. I don’t know what the producers were thinking. He doesn’t look or act anything like the George Washington that any of us imagine. I think my dad may have griped about Bostwick as well as the pacing, as in “Are we ever going to get out of the French and Indian War?”
Still, I’m caught up in it. The writing is good. And something in the lost genre of the network television miniseries just pulls at the heartstrings. These things were events. Unless you were on the cutting edge and had a VCR, you could only see them on TV during airing. And, I gather, they were lucrative propositions in the wake of the successful The Winds of War just a year earlier.
I know that the 21st century narrative is that screen time is bad for kids. I fully endorse that premise, and it has been a guiding force in my parenting. But it seems to me that all screen time is not created equal. I have to admit that many of my happy memories of childhood are of my family congregated around that big, boxy color TV set, sometimes with our TV trays out. And productions like The Winds of War, The Blue and the Gray, and George Washington always brought out my dad’s enthusiasm for history, which was (and still is) infectious.
April 10, 1984 / April 10, 2020
Bostwick is growing on me. He is still more of a TV action-hero type than Founding Father, but as Washington grows as a military commander, and as he ages and greys, so too does Bostwick seem to grow into the role. Was the real George Washington like this? Hot-blooded, brooding, magnetic? I’m having a difficult time squaring that with the regal, almost feminine face on the one-dollar bill: those soft features, that sloping nose, the aura of quiet majestic dreaminess… I find none of that in Bostwick. But I suppose that before a man becomes “father of his country,” he is, after all, a man—and given that this man took up arms against his own government, he would have to have been a little tempestuous. Maybe?
I wonder when the wooden teeth come in.
The miniseries engages in some character-scrubbing, typical of the heroic founding-father genre. You see, George is a slaveowner, yes, but the real lightening rod causing strife on the plantation is that familiar literary/film trope of the brutal overseer. George doesn’t get his hands dirty; he even intervenes on behalf of the slaves and prohibits the splitting up of families. He makes a point of telling colleagues he has “stopped selling slaves.”
This may be true to the extent that Washington’s generation of Southern statesman-slaveholders was visibly more uneasy about the inherent contradictions in their dual roles as people-owners and democracy-builders than subsequent generations of that class would be, but how many times am I going to see the Antebellum (or in this case, pre-Antebellum) troubles offloaded to the overseers? And, I mean, were non-psychotic overseers unavailable in the work pool? (I suppose brutality was in the list of job requirements, but still…)
It would be refreshing to see one of these pre-Civil War figures portrayed in full. That is, simultaneously touched by greatness and limited by the era’s social parameters, unaware of, and unapologetic to, the opprobrium of future generations. But with Hollywood, we usually get either a whitewash or a tear-down. Complexity and context don’t sell a lot of movie tickets.
There is an added wrinkle. I don’t fully “get” the American Revolution. Had I been alive at the time, the whole thing would have seemed ill-conceived and suicidal to me. You mean you want to take on those guys—the ones with the king and the giant army—over taxes, quartering soldiers…and tea?? I’m certain I would have been a loyalist. How’s that for counter-revolutionary? I mean, if you’re going to go retro, why settle for being only a partial throwback?
April 21, 1984 / April 21, 2020
Two birthdays: my 46th and 10th. Spending my 46th in a familiar condition: I forgot to apply sunscreen before going outside and now my neck is burned and blistered. How many times in my childhood did I experience this, starting with an ill-fated sunbathing adventure in Hawaii at age two?
46—paused in paradise. They re-opened the beaches yesterday for exercise: walking, swimming, frolicking in the waves. (But no towels allowed. No stationary gathering.) A fine gift—not exactly freedom, but a far cry from some of the northern states where residents have been ordered to wear masks while going outside.
My 10th birthday: I don’t remember it. Did I have friends over, and if so, whom? Dustin Bouma? Mark D’Andrea? David F? (With whom I had of my first sleepovers. He had Michael Jackson posters on his wall. An idyllic, bright, sunshiny house and family. But an attempt at a reciprocal sleepover fell apart when he got homesick. I don’t think he actually stayed the night, and that seems to have been the end of the friendship. David, lost friend of 1984, where are you?)
“Don’t Answer Me” by the Alan Parsons Project is riding up the charts on this day in 1984. I get a lump in my throat whenever I hear it: the wistful verses and gigantic chorus evoke for me my tenth and eleventh years. I am certain the song was a background staple (via FM radio) during family roadtrips across the country in 1984-1985, as was the band’s “Eye in the Sky” a few years earlier.
Weirdly, the Alan Parsons Project are a prog-rock back who typically trade in obtuse, unwieldy epics—and yet they cranked out a handful of top-40 hits that were simultaneously anthemic and melancholy—nostalgia in its noblest form. But here’s the irony: In one sense, “Don’t Answer Me” is the sound of my childhood: the epic sweep that seems to contain every mile of highway rushing past the window on those family trips; a song that makes me want to slip down the timestream and not come back. And yet “Don’t Answer Me” is not emblematic of the sound of the 1980s; it is actually a note-perfect pastiche of Phile Spector’s wall-of-sound hits from 20 years earlier, especially the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby.” It was likely meant to give my parents the same lump in the throat feeling that I have now when I hear it. I was not the intended target but I’m a victim nonetheless!
The words are not terribly important: “Don’t answer me / Stay on your island / Don’t let me win.” It’s the music, the cavernous production, hypnotic melody, the unshowy but just right vocal delivery, that does it.
Anyway, I take the lyrics ironically. He does want her to answer him, to let him in, to let him win. Of course he does. And the song likewise dares the listener not to get swept up in a reverie of memory and loss. Listen to it. You feel that ache? It’s the best feeling in the world.
*****
And in other news—
“To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before.” WTF, Willie? This is one of the more egregious humble brags to grace popular music. (See also Bruno Mars’s “Young Girls”.) I want the names of those responsible for this atrocity; I want the names of the writers, producers, record executives who earmarked this as a single; I want the names of their family members, their acquaintances; I want… okay, okay officer, I’ll back away from the ledge. Okay, already!
But seriously. I wonder if the original lyric went like this:
To all the cash I’d like to make
That’s sitting now in someone else’s bank
Still, Julio Iglesias: I will grant that this is an effective stealth entry into the American market. Because, damn you, Julio—I am hooked on your buttery ethereal trilling! That heartbroken fluttery warble. Yes, I want to console you and raise my glass to you. Is there a more perfect voice out there?
I give! I give! I concede that you’ve loved a lot of girls before. I just don’t want to hear about it! And don’t pretend you’re brokenhearted about it. You disingenuous bastard!
Sigh.
But here’s the thing about Julio. I used to think that this was a guy who’d had it easy. Well, turns out all that easy living was born in fire. That catch in his throat didn’t come from nowhere! As relayed on the April 21 episode of American Top 40, his earlier soccer career was cut short by a car crash that damaged his spine and rendered him unable to walk for two years. It was only then, hospitalized and uncertain of his recovery, that he began playing guitar as a means of regaining dexterity in his hands. Naturally, he sang along and from that moment forward everyone forgot that he had ever played soccer.
As for the origins of “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before,” turns out it was written by Albert Hammond and the very savvy Hal David (lyricist on countless Burt Bacharach classics). Well, paraphrasing Reagan, I guess you can’t argue with success.
Bonus: Intriguingly, Julio and Willie’s take was not the only version of the song released in 1984. Merle Haggard also covered it on his album It’s All in the Game, predating the pair by a month or two, and I have to say his version is a revelation. With the Hag, it doesn’t sound like a humble brag at all. He truly sounds as if he has lost everything, and is now only sustained by the fading glow of his memories. Earlier rant notwithstanding, maybe this song is all right?
April 22, 1984 / April 22, 2020
Spring in Minneapolis. Always my favorite time. Winter 1984 had been brutal for the adults but magical for us kids. Now that annual miracle is here: leaves and birds return to the trees. With a shadow side: The towering whitish-grayish snow mounds on every curb begin to melt down to a viscous grayish sludge, inevitably mixed with dogshit. (Did no one use baggies in 1984?) But— the sheets of snow-ice become a network of creeks and rivers, and that melting down makes my heart buoyant, even as I pine for one last end-of-season snowstorm.
April 25, 1984 / April 25, 2020
Magnum P.I. comes into focus with two episodes: “Rembrandt’s Girl” and “Paradise Blues.” With a talented writer, the key ingredients combine to produce magic. What had previously been missing—a good story; a genuine mystery—falls into place, and the show’s classic status becomes self-evident. What a marvelous character Thomas Magnum is, and who else could play him but Tom Selleck? Who else could bring the combination of swagger and vulnerability, toughness and gentleness, coolness and geekiness. It’s clear that the character’s true self is tentative, regretful, and sensitive, and that the dashing, action-oriented PI is largely a construction. All this in a TV show that mostly plays it light and is on intimate terms with the ridiculous. Hill Street Blues it ain’t, but it has a way of sneaking things in. I’m hooked.
Now, Hill Street Blues… if Magnum is the brightness and flamboyance of the 1980s, subtly undercut with the memory of Vietnam, Hill Street Blues flips that formula. The predominant emotions are desperation, anxiety, and exhaustion, but there are undercurrents of levity and even hard-won joy. Magnum’s setting is a wide-open tropical paradise. Hill Street is closed-in, urban, and gritty. It’s not as tightly written or acted as shows that came later, such as The Wire or The Shield; in fact, it comes off as downright whimsical compared to those. But I may like it better. It has so much heart, and because it’s a network show—with the attendant restrictions in place—it can only push the envelope so far. It’s challenging, it straddles the edge of darkness, but it is not overwhelming. Of the great, realistic, arc-driven cop dramas, it is the first and possibly the best.
April 26, 1984 / April 26, 2020
On this date in 1984, tornadoes touch down in the “bedroom community” of St. Anthony, MN. No fatalities, but 20+ injuries including a stroke. I remember the suddenness of those twisters, the siren—which, come to think of it, sounded like the bomb-raid wail you hear in movies about WWII-era London. Waiting out the danger in our perpetually cool basement. My mom was always over-cautious about these tornadoes; as I recall, most of the neighborhood ignored the warnings, and indeed, in the nine years we lived on Dupont, there was never a serious situation. But there was a very powerful tornado that hit a few years earlier when we were living in a duplex on Snelling Ave. We emerged from the dark, dirt-floored basement to find uprooted trees lying across roads and sidewalks. The image of a massive tree resting on a partially collapsed roof is one of the permanently imprinted visuals of my childhood, though I don’t recall which storm or location would have produced this result.
I have a nostalgia for the basement sittings. Not the time at the Snelling house; I remember bugs crawling around in that basement soil. But Dupont— sitting in our wood-paneled basement drinking Sun Tea, listening to Dad’s hand-held transistor radio, reading books and comics by flashlight if the power had gone out. Of course, the warm feelings here derive from the absolute certainty that the power would come back on, and in short order. The knowledge, based on all previous experience, that the storm would blow over, and that even if it turned out to be a bad one, people would be immediately dispatched to fix the damage. Such sweetly naïve assurance.
People often speak of a “sheltered” childhood in derogatory terms. What kind of upside-down world produces that condescension? Shelter is vital to survival. Shelter brings feelings of safety and peace. Everyone should be so lucky as to have a sheltered childhood. Having a process of coming out of that shelter is important too, but that is a different topic.
So I think of that Dupont basement, and I’m nostalgic for its sturdiness, its shelter. I think of my childhood and what my parents provided for us—through great toil and sacrifice, I now understand—and I get much the same feeling. For whatever reason, I was mainly hunkered down with my family in 1984. It was not quite Covid conditions; I had friends at school and in the neighborhood, with whom I played. But mainly the year was spent with my family, building that foundation together. It carried me through some difficult times in my twenties and it holds today. And we’re all still here.
To illustrate my point and provide a living example of how this process is ongoing, my son just climbed up into my lap for a snuggle. I am, at this moment in his life, his champion and protector, the architect of his shelter. May he grow strong and secure in its protection.
*****
Interesting factoid buried in the bottom half of the 10PM WCCO News Bulletin from April 26, 1984: Jim Eisenreich, a player on the Minnesota Twins, is beginning “a new round of treatment” for a “nervous disorder… that has caused him to miss action.” A Google search reveals that he has Tourette’s Syndrome and temporarily retired from baseball between 1984 and 1987 to address his condition. By 1990 he was fully back, playing for a different team, and a few years later he played in the World Series.
I’m surprised there haven’t been any books and movies about this guy. Perhaps it’s because Tourette’s occupies an odd place in the public consciousness. While general knowledge and sensitivity toward the condition has grown in the decades since 1984, I think the unruliness of its symptoms—which can include, in some of the most attention-getting cases, the uncontrolled blurting out of profanity and racial epithets and the like—and the long-slog, trial-and-error nature of the cognitive therapies used to treat it, has barred the disorder from the sort of “triumph over adversity” Hollywood depictions that other afflictions have received. (There is no Tourette’s version of “A Beautiful Mind,” for instance.) Also, because Tourette’s can be socially disruptive, I don’t believe the public gives much thought to the interior life of the sufferer; it’s all about minimizing the disruption.
But I have a dog in the race. Obsessive-compulsive disorder, my own lifelong challenger and unbidden teacher, is a frequently cited co-occurring condition with Tourette’s, and there are commonalities in the inner experiences of Tourette’s and OCD sufferers. So I feel for Eisenreich and I admire his courage. He had to endure a deeply embarrassing and distressing condition in the most public of spaces. The fact that he ultimately returned and finished out his career with distinction is a triumph. I would see that movie.
*****
Other items of note: Reagan is heading off to China, enthusiastic about strengthening US-Sino relations. The epic George Washington miniseries has completed with the improbable victory of the colonists. I wonder how many people in the audience waited patiently for Washington’s presidency and went apoplectic when the credits rolled at the conclusion of the Revolution. (You have to wait for the second miniseries, suckers!)
Closing impressions on the George saga: I thought it was entertaining and informative. I can see the hand of the producers (and the popular historians behind them) trying mightily to transmogrify an unruly story with many inconvenient aspects into mythology. My favorite part: the crossing of the Delaware, in which the actors, for just a few seconds, assumed the positions of the famous painting.
The hairstyles of 1984 (which were not entirely absent from the George Washington miniseries) deserve some contemplation in this journal. It seems most everyone had a sort of hair helmet. Women’s hair tended to be shorter than it was in the ‘70s, but bigger, more fluffed up. Gel didn’t seem to be a big thing, but hairspray was clearly “in.” It all looks alien to me now, yet I realize—with a shiver—that I myself didn’t fully shed my 80’s styling habits until about 3-4 years ago. That means I was actually only out of the 80s for, at most, four years.
In other news: Heather Locklear is making a splash in two shows: Dynasty and TJ Hooker. Wait a minute, why am I not watching TJ Hooker? (Okay, that may be a self-answering question.)
April 30, 1984 / April 30, 2020
April brings us an oddity: a very serious Tarzan movie with the unwieldy title Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes put together with the lavishness and care one might normally associate with a Merchant Ivory production. Listening to Greystoke, as I take my evening walks, presents some unique challenges. We get easy-to-follow dialogue as Tarzan’s (or, using his English name, John’s) parents set out from nineteenth century Scotland for—the Belgian Congo? Some moneymaking venture in darkest Africa. Tragedy ensues. First, a shipwreck. The parents survive, and the mother gives birth to a healthy son. But she succumbs to malaria. And the dad, as far as I can make out from the audio, gets killed by apes. John, on the other hand, is nurtured and reared in the simian community. Here all comprehension ceases. The ensuing half hour consists of grunts, howls, and crashes. It sounds very frantic. The adult Tarzan (played by Christopher Lambert) finally acquires his animal voice—he actually yells “Roar!” loudly and impressively. (I swear it is not a bad film). The human dialogue comes back in with Tarzan’s rescue of a Belgian explorer who teaches Tarzan—John?—the rudiments of human language and eventually reunites John with his extended family in Scotland. Awkwardness ensues. (I wanted to say “hilarity,” but that’s not quite right).
Overall: impressive acting (apart from some Lambertian quirks), gorgeous music, an elegant and spare Robert Towne script. But there is something missing, I’m not sure what. Hugh Hudson, the movie’s director, said that what ended up on the screen was 70% of the movie he wanted to make.
I don’t know that Greystoke tells us much about 1984; it could have been made anytime, and in fact the screenplay dates to 1974. It did bring the world Andie MacDowell, who suffered the indignity in this film—her screen debut—of having her voice dubbed over by Glenn Close.
The movie takes a dim view of civilization, though it is not without its own quirky type of optimism. If there is not a “shining city on a hill” in Greystoke, there is at least a shining jungle that John can return to—for the moment.
Next up: Part 5.