Listening to 1984: An Experiment in Time Travel - Part 5 of 12
"Cheers" and "Sixteen Candles": not what you remember! Also, I ask, "where's the beef?" and take a hard pass on "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom." Plus, Night Ranger channels Kate Chopin.
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.)
May 3, 1984 / May 3, 2020
Watching an hour of MTV footage from May 3, 1984. “True” by Spandau Ballet comes on, those opening notes triggering a vertigo-inducing stab of nostalgia (a feeling I’ve become very familiar with over the course of this project). And the video starts out promisingly: misty silhouettes of the bassist and drummer bringing their A-games. But then singer Tony Hadley comes in. It appears that he is not used to the camera, and every gesture is exaggerated as if he is trying to project to someone in the back row at a concert. Once again, an exquisitely recorded song is undermined by a video that stumbles. I’ve seen this earlier with Big Country’s “In a Big Country” and Thompson Twins’ “Hold Me Now.” People are still figuring out the medium.
It can go the other way. The video for Wang Chung’s “Dance Hall Days” elevates a fine track to something excitingly offbeat and, at moments, sublime. The camera pans over a crowd of ballroom dancers—initially frozen in place, then set in motion by a chord change to spin and drift across the floor. Singer Jack Hues, sinewy and charismatic, demonstrates that he is at home in the medium of film.
(Interestingly, Wang Chung shot an earlier video for this same song, which is interesting in its own right).
Even in my childhood, I understood on some level that MTV was held together by spit and duct tape. But it would have gone over my head that the veejays appeared to be stoned out of their minds. This isn’t so much a revolution as a slacker fest.
I’m sure I’ll have more to say about the culture of MTV as I go, but I did want to make an observation about a curious trend in early ‘80s videos. Two in particular—Bon Jovi’s “Runaway” and Night Ranger’s “Sister Christian”—appear to tell the same story: an innocent, sheltered young woman finds herself in a strange and initially terrifying new environment, but comes to a Kate Chopin-style sensual awakening courtesy of… a bunch of hard-rock knuckleheads.
At the start of the “Sister Christian” video, the titular young lady is graduating from what appears to be a Catholic girls’ school. Meanwhile, Night Ranger are, inexplicably, rehearsing their song about Sister Christian in a practice space (chapel?) on school grounds or somewhere nearby. Later (or is this before the graduation ceremony?), Sister Christian and a couple of classmates accidentally barge in on the members of Night Ranger dining in a room adjacent to the practice space. The girls rush to the restroom where they fix up their hair and makeup—the better to impress Night Ranger, apparently, But when they return to the dining room—gasp!—Night Ranger are gone. They may have returned to their practice space; it’s not entirely clear. But as we near the end of the video, Sister Christian catches sight of the band getting ready to pull away from the school in a convertible. She and her two friends break free of the nuns that are accompanying them (Is Sister Christian a nun in training?) and they jump into the convertible with the appreciative young men. They all ride off into the sunset, heading for an adventure of life-affirming personal discovery or perhaps an orgy. But before they’re barely a mile out, the driver takes a turn too fast, half of the occupants are thrown from the overcrowded car—no one was wearing seatbelts, you know?—and the car flips over and bursts into flames and everyone dies. (Okay, if you must know, I invented that last part). Anyway, there you have it, The Awakening for the teenaged male audience of 1984 MTV. Sort of.
It’s a good song though, innit?
I don’t have the patience to outline the events of Bon Jovi’s “Runaway” beyond a thumbnail sketch. It’s the same story but more feral and with a nuclear holocaust overlay. We see the Runaway transform from a protected girl into a nearly animal wild-child, the better to hang with the barely-out-of-the-jungle members of Bon Jovi. They’re just what the Runaway needs in order to find herself—or something.
Every single person holding a guitar, microphone, or pair of drumsticks in either of these videos looks like he walked straight out of Spinal Tap, except for the gentle, soulful pianist on “Sister Christian.” He looks like he may have dropped in from an early 2000s Brooklyn indie rock band. A fellow time traveler hiding in plain sight?
*****
Some thoughts on Sam and Diane on Cheers: Has there ever been a more mismatched pair? What is the point of this—to encourage people to seek out partners completely wrong for them?
All right, all right… the show is endlessly entertaining—enchanting even—and there is an undeniable spark between Ted Danson and Shelley Long. This is a good example of the divergence between entertainment and real life and how we’re in trouble if we take too many life lessons from entertainment. Imagine a TV show about an emotionally and intellectually compatible couple, working together toward common goals, supporting each other and compromising when necessary, and…and… zzzzzzzzzzzzzz
But tension, conflicting interests and desires, spite! –that’s the stuff! I don’t know if it’s good for the world, but it’s stimulating and we crave it.
Still, Sam and Diane seem like a bridge too far. I’m not sure if I should root for them. On paper you could say that they soften each other’s rough edges. Sam is 100% unapologetic about his shortcomings. He is comfortable in his own skin, loves a good time—a regular guy. His very presence takes Diane down a few notches. All good. In theory Diane elevates Sam and challenges him to think outside his normal…well, she challenges him to think. But do we really want that? Does the world need a cultured Sam Malone? See how it breaks down?
I recognize two things here:
1) I am biased.
2) I speak for the masses; I’m as certain of that as of the solidity of the floor beneath my feet. Sam may be a knucklehead, but he’s not annoying. Diane is lovely, smart, and gentle-hearted, but she’s also annoying, mostly humorless (we laugh at her more than we laugh with her), and a scold. If you have more than one Diane in any given situation, the center will not hold. And this is not a gender thing; there are lots of male “Dianes.” But no party ever got deflated by a Sam.
And you know what? I’m being a Diane about Cheers. The show is a classic.
May 4, 1984 / May 4, 2020
Sixteen Candles. I wonder how many people have watched this recently. The beginning of this movie is the ‘80s I remember, and hits the nostalgia mainline: the colors, the clothes, the music. Molly Ringwald all insecure and adorable, staring longingly across the dance floor while Spandau Ballet’s “True” takes us to that place. Sweet, surging pain, accompanied by paradox: I’m home, but I can’t truly go home. I left, but I never really left. And, goddamn it, the future didn’t turn out the way I wanted. I’m not speaking of my future, but the world’s. The only nagging false note in this first half is the portrayal of the Chinese exchange student, “Long Duk Dong”: his otherness, puppy-dog enthusiasm, and apparent cluelessness played broadly for laughs. Still, I shrug it off. And anyway, there is something refreshing about a movie (and an era) that is not hamstrung by political correctness.
Second half gets underway. The Asian jokes come on at a faster clip. And then we descend into a prolonged apocalypse of underaged intoxication. At some point, statutory rape may have occurred (though the parties involved are in high school). Then there are the jokes about women’s periods—which I remember were a ubiquitous feature of the 1980s. And inexorably I feel myself peeling away from my cherished decade.
21st century qualms aside, my bigger issue is that much of this second-half material is, to me, grindingly unfunny. The sister’s wedding gets derailed because she has her period and takes four muscle relaxers. What? The beautiful prom queen blacks out and has sex with the freshman “geek,” who is also blacked out. They wake up, realize they had sex, and think they might have enjoyed it. (Well, that’s a crisis averted).
What’s most startling is that Sixteen Candles was made and marketed for young people. Just about everyone in my 4th-5th grade class, apart from me, saw this movie close to release. It was PG for Christ’s sake. There is even a scene where the dad grins and gives his daughter (Molly R) the “OK” sign as she drives off to get it on with the senior boy she has been infatuated with for the whole movie.
To be fair, there is also a beautiful scene between father and daughter—a lone high point in the movie’s final stretch—in which he empathizes with the highs and lows of adolescence and the searing pain of unrequited love, saying, “That’s the reason they call them crushes.” It’s moments like this that have put John Hughes’s face on my generation’s Mount Rushmore.
Am I coming down too hard on Sixteen Candles, perhaps being a bit of a “Diane” (to continue with my metaphor from above)? Maybe. The post-‘80s consensus is that the movie was groundbreaking for its honest portrayal of adolescence. It may be that Hughes’s later movies nailed that formula better, but Sixteen Candles kicked the whole thing off. And while the plot of the movie seems over-the-top, the character Hughes created for Ringwald, and, of course, Ringwald’s performance, did indeed channel adolescence to an uncanny, cringe-inducing degree. Perhaps I am such a product of the Hughes era that I am unable to grasp the absence of such portrayals prior to his emergence. So I have a lot of love for John, for his career as a whole (especially Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), and for significant parts of this movie. But not all of it.
The Cheers season finale, served up with a side of domestic violence, proves similarly jarring: Sam and Diane slapping each other, doing the three Stooges bit with the noses and ears. It’s startling to watch now, but, inevitably, we in 2020 will be judged similarly by the future. We are oblivious—right now—to our blind spots. As the Sixteen Candles dad might say, “That’s why they’re called blind.” So grace is required all around. (And anyway, it is an impressive feat of physical comedy, filmed, as we are constantly reminded, “before a live studio audience.”)
May 11, 1984 / May 11, 2020
My reading during the first few months of my tenth year consisted almost exclusively of the Target Doctor Who novelizations and Larry Hama’s G.I. Joe comic series for Marvel. Speaking of which, things get interesting in the May, 1984 issue. We already had a reference to “the immortal bard” last month. Now we have the subplot of Major Bludd’s poetic aspirations and Cobra Commander’s assertion that he will never be as great as “Shelley, Keats, or McKuen” (!) Here, I see a writer starting to have fun with the short straw he has drawn. So what if the assignment consists of promoting each new action figure as it hits the shelves? (Current offerings: Duke and Roadblock). This is where it starts to become delightfully demented. I know that Zartan and those twins are around the corner.
Now here is an area where 1984 will seem alien to subsequent generations. G.I. Joe was a blatantly pro-military line of toys rolled out to very young kids. Tanks, assault rifles, bomber planes—we loved it. The cartoon, which I believe started later, tried to dilute the potency with laser cannons and a body count of zero (which was also a trope of the thematically adjacent The A-Team), but in the comic book, characters die frequently (though not any from the main toy line), and the guns have real bullets. Also, Roadblock is an aspiring chef.
I enjoy this idea of a massive war being waged between the U.S. Army’s most elite fighting force (G.I. Joe) and the diabolical paramilitary organization COBRA in places like Staten Island, NY—home of the “Chaplain’s Assistants School” (which happens to be the cover for G.I. Joe HQ)—and the midwestern anytown of “Springfield.” What, you don’t remember the pitched battle on Staten Island in February 1984, when Dr. Venom, Quinn (the Eskimo), and General Flagg all shuffled off this mortal coil? I had forgotten it myself. But Snake Eyes never did.
May 11, 1984 / Mary 11, 2020
The May 10, 1984 issue of Rolling Stone eulogizes Marvin Gaye, shot and killed by his own father on April 1. I was oblivious to Marvin Gaye in 1984. But in 1986, the song “Heard it Through the Grapevine” exploded via the claymation California Raisins. The commercial was everywhere, and we did some kind of skit to the CCR version of the song in Ms. Strickland’s music class at Annunciation. During the process, one of my classmates—Jon Knoll? John Neerland? Tom O’Rourke?—grumbled, “The Marvin Gaye version is better.”
My awakening to R&B and soul music was belated. Of course, the sounds were always there: They clung to the edges of popular music in the 1980s and took center stage with the Jacksons and Prince, though I was ignorant of the soul antecedents to, say, Hall and Oates or the Eurythmics. Pulp Fiction, in 1994, lit the fuse for me with its prominent use of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.” As was often the case in those pre-Internet days, I turned to my in-the-know friend Matt Brown for guidance, and he delivered up two CDs: The Funk-Soul Hits Vol. (?…the number escapes me) and Marvin Gaye’s Greatest Hits. With the Gaye CD I gravitated to the second half: cuts from What’s Going On, Let’s Get It On, probably something from Here, My Dear. And, of course, “Sexual Healing” and probably one other track from Midnight Love.
A revelation to this sheltered midwestern white boy raised on mostly white rock ‘n’ roll: R&B, especially in its 1970s variety, was as innovative and expansive as the best of psychedelic rock, and oftentimes more emotionally powerful. And Gaye was one of the genre’s greatest pioneers: a restless explorer, monster vocalist, jack-of-all-trades musician. He was also a soft-spoken, unfathomable mystery. The circumstances of his bizarre death were a strangely fitting culmination of a life that seemed to stir a cauldron of conflicting, highly combustible ingredients.
Gaye was as troubled as Kurt Cobain, who would take his own life roughly a decade later. But the legacy Gaye left behind was richer and more varied. It clawed beauty back from agony.
*****
The Natural: A better movie than I remembered. Beautifully lit, expertly paced. It does not hurry, and it draws out its central mystery like a bow string. Redford: quiet, brooding, controlled, pitch perfect as the older Roy Hobbs, though his scenes as the younger iteration strain credulity. We also have a trio of ladies who harbor differing intentions toward “the Natural”: trigger-happy widow Barbara Hershey, (Athens GA native) Kim Basinger as a Marilyn-esque siren, and Glenn Close, great as always, as the loyal and long-suffering first love. Barry Levinson, hot off Diner, consolidates his gains. Similarly, Randy Newman is solidifying his status as a film composer after his successful (and award-nominated) work on Ragtime.
Some of this I remember from the first go-round: the vivid and over-the-top baseball scenes, Kim Basinger dropping her fur coat. I remember Hobbs coming back from a slump. But everything else I had forgotten—or perhaps never grasped in the first place.
Glenn Close: “I believe we have two lives: the life we learn with and the life we live with after that.”
(She’s half right. Most of us spend all our time on the first and don’t get to the second.)
Now, before I get too misty-eyed, there are a couple of problems with the movie that ought to be noted. One is those aforementioned over-the-top baseball scenes. Hobbs hits his epic homerun ball into one of two banks of lights—so why do both banks explode and rain gentle sparkly bits of fire over the field? (I know they’re connected on a circuit, but I don’t think it would happen like that!) It’s a peculiar feat that ruined the movie for me at ten and still causes me to scratch my head. And how did Hobbs’s predecessor in the Knights manage to get himself killed by running through a wall that appeared to be made of cardboard?
“Inquiring minds want to know,” as the 1980s-era commercial puts it.
May 13, 1984 / May 13, 2020
The Soviets have decided to sit out the 1984 Summer Olympics in LA. Why? Fuck if I know. Something about their new leader—Chernenko—wanting to make a point. I’ve enjoyed the reactions from some of the US athletes: “More gold for us!” I find that sort of honesty refreshing. Let the pundits and Olympic commission be high-minded.
A remarkable article appears in the May 1984 Rolling Stone by Mike Sager about “wayward” Vietnam vets holing up in the Interzone of Thailand—seemingly unable to leave Asia, unable to return to an America they don’t recognize. Damaged, needing something—unsure what. It’s a brilliant piece of writing, ending with an understated and deeply disturbing profile of a former soldier-turned-priest with PTSD who is apparently being relieved of his position. This is the darker side of a story Magnum P.I. is also trying to convey. Magnum, of course, takes a positive spin: the vets are mostly happy-go-lucky, living it up in Hawaii. But they too are haunted and not quite willing to return to the mainland. Flashbacks to “in country” are a recurring plot point of that show.
In 1984, Vietnam is still a fresh memory. There is still hope for tracking down those missing in action: maybe they’re still being held prisoner deep in the jungle. Or maybe they’re wandering around Ho Chi Minh City (née Saigon) like Christopher Walken at the end of The Deer Hunter (though I guess people don’t wander aimlessly in communist countries, do they?). Such hopes will soon fade, but in 1984 they are very much alive and will even fuel the next Rambo movie.
May 19, 1984 / May 19, 2020
The monoculture of 1984 is starting to get to me. Not the entertainment—which I like very much—but the commercials dancing around the edges: Yoplait; Starburst; Fostex acne cream with benzoyl peroxide; Lee jeans; the aggressive cigarette ads in Rolling Stone; Tupperware; all of the canned, bottled, shrinkwrapped food products advertised everywhere. The ad industry has the population of 1984 gripped tightly in a way that is not happening now. Granted, in 2020, people still think and move in herds—maddeningly so in the realm of social media—but the Internet has obliterated the fashion and food monopolies. There is this “artisanal,” DIY thing happening in these categories that just wasn’t in the mix in 1984.
It is in the commercials—particularly the local commercials—that I feel the greatest distance from the past. In the grainy lines running across the screen, I see every one of my intervening 36 years. But I can close my eyes and I’m back there: spring 1984, the Boulevard Theater (Home of 99-cent movies), Beeks King of Pizza, the long walks home with my friends Eddie and Erik, when the sun shining down on us seemed so much brighter and younger than the sun outside my window today. I remember that big box of a TV in our living room—the way that it had to warm up with the picture fading in, and how we never really got a good visual during the day because of the glare of the sun on the convex screen—and how that was OK; it was understood that we shouldn’t be watching TV during the daytime anyway, just like adults shouldn’t drink alcohol before 5PM.
But of course it did come on during the day. Not continuously, but my mom watched a couple of soap operas: General Hospital for sure, maybe Days of Our Lives (or One Life to Live; I get these mixed up.) There may have also been a Jane Fonda’s Workout video. (“Hanoi Jane” was temporarily forgotten as the future Mrs. Turner reinvented herself credibly as a fitness mentor to harried suburban mothers everywhere.)
Aha – video! Sometime during 1984 our General Electric VCR appeared, probably May or June. As with a lot of our tech, this was a gift from my Grandpa. It was a beast of a machine, built like a tank and just as big as one. It loaded from the top rather than the front, and I used this machine from 1984 straight through to 2001 when that same Grandpa brought a more modern replacement down to where I was living in Statesboro, GA. At that point I took the (then still working) GE to Goodwill. It was the sensible thing to do, but I always regretted letting it go. It worked just about as well on the day I gave it away as on the day my family acquired it. I know it is not advisable to become attached to things, especially big clunky things that are obsolete, but so many memories are bound up in that machine. It was noisy, like an old car. If you clicked the “Stop” button on the corded remote, the guts of the mechanism made a sound like a 300-pound football player being slammed against a wall. If you hit fast-forward or rewind, it sounded like a plane taking off. I recognize now that the audio and video quality of VHS was subpar, but as with all analog media there was a feeling of substance, of finite reality: Two hours of a recorded movie or TV program took up physical space on the tape. And the quality of the recording gradually decayed, giving a sense of the passage of time and the amount of viewing each cassette had endured. I miss all that. It’s human scale, unlike the bottomless Netflex queues (that is, bottomless until your queued movies and shows get culled in the service’s continual weeding process).
The VCR brought a new development: We were no longer tethered to 1984. A universe opened up in video rental, and my family embarked on its own time-travel voyages, taking in old James Bond movies, endless re-watchings (at my behest) of the Disney movie The Black Hole and a screening (at my Dad’s behest) of the Nick Nolte movie Cannery Row. We didn’t rent a ton of movies, but I vividly recall perusing the VHS shelf at Southdale Public Library—the first library in the vicinity to offer one-week video rentals.
I remained primarily a bookworm though, perhaps because we had just that one color TV and VCR, and there were five of us competing for its use. (At some point my parents got a small black-and-white TV for their bedroom, but there was no VCR attached to that.
More memories surfacing: countless trips to the Southdale mall, especially Target—which seemed to contain the entire world. It had a respectable music section: Dad got his Men at Work Business as Usual and Toto IV cassettes there. I eyed the fluorescent cover of Culture Club’s Colour By Numbers in fear and awe. And for three years we flirted with purchasing Michael Jackson’s Thriller but my parents never closed the deal. (There may have been some “stranger danger” at play there).
WLOL was the pop radio station. Just writing those letters gives me a shiver of déjà vu; my ten-year-old self must have scribbled them out many times. There was also an AM station that played mainstream stuff that was a bit softer: Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” and Wham’s “Careless Whisper” (but I’m getting ahead of myself with that one.)
May 20, 1984 / May 20, 2020
I don’t really “get” the whole Gary Hart thing. He is in a big dustup with Walter Mondale in 1984, attempting to take down the Democratic presidential frontrunner by drawing attention to Mondale’s ties with the unions and the staid Democratic establishment. But unlike Barry Sanders vs. Hillary Clinton, I’m having a difficult time grasping what Hart brings to the table. “Where’s the Beef,” Mondale asked Hart in a debate. A good question, from my perspective. And so, the Democratic party is doing its periodic circular firing squad routine on the eve of a consequential election.
Mondale has impressed me though—a surprising development. It’s true that his star wattage is dim next to Reagan’s, but honestly, I don’t think Hart’s is much brighter. I don’t dislike Hart by any means, but Mondale seems more sincere and authentic, and Jesse Jackson is the candidate with actual star power.
Hart’s brand is the “upstart with echoes of Kennedy.” But what could be more predictable than that? I find Mondale’s lack of interest in such posturing refreshing. (2024 Editor’s note: My friend Jeffery J. Rogers, a historian, drew attention in the recent Listening to Your 1984 post to Hart’s impressive bibliography as an author—including well-regarded books on James Monroe and Thomas Jefferson; clearly there was more going on between those ears than what came through in the ’84 media I consumed).
May 23, 1984 / May 23, 2020
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: I’ve never been able to get all the way through the movie, and I can’t bring myself to watch it now. Sorry, but life is too short. I remember lots of chases—including a pretty good sequence in a mine—some brain-eating, a sidekick named “Short Round,” and a scene where a guy’s heart gets pulled out of his chest. (I didn’t see this part until many years after the movie came out, but just the idea of it traumatized me in 1984.) I know it made $333 million, but I think I can safely move through my life—and my 1984 journey—without a fuller knowledge of this Raiders sequel (or, more correctly, prequel). I’ve heard it’s better than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull though.
May 27, 1984 / May 27, 2020
One of the strongest and most substantiated critiques of the Reagan administration—recognized in 1984 and reiterated in subsequent appraisals—is of its clandestine activities in Central America. And yet I do have some sympathy for the much-derided “domino theory,” which I know that Reagan and many in his administration believed in. The domino theory—roughly stated, that if a country in an unstable region tips toward a particular ideology that is being actively promoted by outside forces, other adjacent countries are likely to follow suit—seems to be borne out both by history and by current events in the 21st century. We seem to be experiencing a domino effect in 2020 of countries lurching toward autocracy, so the notion of Central and South America in the 1980s potentially tipping over into the communist column, cheered on not just by the Soviet Union but also nearby Cuba, does not seem far-fetched. The libertarian in me recoils at the idea of letting our intelligence services run roughshod over these sovereign nations south of our border. The cynic in me understands that there are financial interests also in play, making our motives less pure than a simple desire to stave off Soviet encroachment. But that basic fear—that one day we will wake up and find ourselves surrounded by countries whose systems of government are opposite of, and hostile toward, our own, and that this might have an impact on our internal stability—has a visceral effect at the fight-or-flight level. Paranoid as these feelings may be, they resonate in the gut.
*****
A memory: waging pretend wars with the neighborhood kids, chasing each other around with cap guns and also cartridge-mounted squirt guns that looked exactly like Uzis. All of these were quite realistic looking, which boggles the mind now. The Uzis were not neon-colored and see-through, like the water guns you see now; they were black or dark grey like real Uzis, and battery powered. The cap guns, similarly, were silver or gunmetal grey. That’s a vivid memory: a roll of caps, the gun hammer coming down on each one. Pop! A spark, a whiff of smoke. We used to have fun with those caps: lay a roll on the sidewalk, focus the sun’s rays on it with a magnifying glass. That first lick of flame, a curl of white smoke. Then: pop! pop! pop!
Boys bursting from hedges, aiming guns at each other, pretending to die. It seems strange now. But, I dunno, we were outside playing. Perhaps we had it better than what came after—kids locked inside, absorbed in Call of Duty.
May 26, 1984 / May 26, 2020
The book The Life Extension Companion (a follow-up to the 1982 surprise bestseller Life Extension) is flying off the shelves in 1984. Its authors, Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw, claim that their recommended cocktail of vitamins and hormones will help anyone reach the age of 109-110. That’s probably an oversimplification, but it’s the aspect of the story that Newsweek on Air seized on. Among other things, the authors claim that male baldness is preventable and that “two sedentary scientists in their 40s can have the physiques of teenagers.” Hmm…a quick glance at Dr. Google reveals the authors, circa the 1980s, not exactly looking like teenagers or anyone under 40, but it’s possible their underlying health was youthful?
The Newsweek on Air anchor quipped to his co-host, “Well, I guess there’s no way to disprove any of this apart from waiting until the participants are in their 70s.”
The moment is here, so how are the people behind Life Extension faring? Again, this is hard to gauge—recent photographs are difficult to source—but I can at least report that they are alive. Durk Pearson looks his age.
Still, there is something endearing about this couple. They seem to genuinely love each other; in 1984, they are obviously enjoying the wild ride of fame and sudden attention. And they are true believers; I get the impression they view themselves as being on par with the scientists who cracked the double helix. They may be delusional, but they are riding a mass delusion: the idea that the best life is the one that is dragged out as long as possible. Maybe I would feel differently at 108, looking forward to my 109th birthday (brought to me by Life Extension!) But I don’t know; my hunch is that I would feel pretty worn out by that point.
The rap on the 1980s is that it was a materialistic and superficial era. The massive success of Life Extension certainly lends ammunition to that idea, and then there’s a cheeky Yoplait commercial: “I chose rich!”—punning on the stereotype that women choose their mates based on the accompanying bank account. The knowing smirk of this commercial—the fact that it was pitched to, and surely landed with, an audience that got the joke—speaks to the apparent correctness of that materialistic rap.
It is true. The 1980s were materialistic, no doubt about it. The movie Wall Street didn’t come out of a vacuum. And I’m still trying to disentangle from all of those commercials I took in—starting from before I was verbal and stretching into early adulthood. How much money did I spend over the years, and how much debt did I go into, attempting to sate appetites that were seeded during commercial breaks in the middle of Saturday morning cartoons?
The mainstream masses in the 1980s wanted stuff and they wanted to live forever (or long enough that it might start to feel like forever), and so the success of Life Extension was no surprise. It makes no difference that it may have been premised on the flimsiest of pseudoscientific claims; the threshold is low for selling people on the dream of immortality.
There is an interesting coda to this story that warrants further investigation: A couple of years after Life Extension and its sequel dropped, its authors published a “scientific thriller” called The Dead Pool. Yes, this is the same Dead Pool that got repurposed and became a Dirty Harry film of the same name. I recall reading that Clint Eastwood was a “smart drugs” (the ‘80s term for what we now call supplements) enthusiast at one time, and I’m guessing the seemingly random journey of The Dead Pool from obscurity into the final installment of the Dirty Harry franchise has something to do with that connection. (2024 Editor’s Note: Further research reveals that Pearson and Shaw were advisors on an earlier Eastwood film, 1982’s Firefox. What? How? Why? I’ll leave it to a less-exhausted writer to untangle that web.)
(Still further research on Eastwood reveals that he now favors diet, exercise, and sleep over elaborate vitamin cocktails, so it does not appear that we have Life Extension to thank for his remarkable third act as an auteur during what would be most people’s retirement years.)
Vanity. Acquisitiveness. Holding onto the last threads of life until our gnarled, arthritic claws crumble away—is this the legacy of the 1980s? Was it a godless age apart from TV evangelists and some spirited geopolitical cajoling from Pope John Paul II? I refuse to believe it. If what I’ve described was the mainstream, then there were surely countercurrents and I hope to find them.
Next up: Part 6.