Listening to 1984: An Experiment in Time Travel - Part 8 of 12

"Red Dawn" invades the summer; Michael Jackson jumps the shark; Reagan shimmers and Mondale fades. Welcome to August 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. It took longer than expected, and by spring 2021 I was still in 1984…

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

August 10, 1984 / March 9, 2021

Red Dawn. Well, damn. Look at this heat-seeking missile making direct impact in the middle of all this patriotic fervor—right at the tail end of the Olympics, with the Russians boycotting. For writer/director John Milius, that’s every roulette wheel, every row of bananas on the slot machine lining up. And if it’s good for him, just imagine how good it is for the White House: Olympics, Red Dawn, patriotic frenzy… Boom!—Reagan wins the election. He wins it in the middle of August, with San Francisco still sleeping off the hangover from the Democratic National Convention.

As for the movie itself, it’s actually terrifying. I can hear the critiques: It’s absurd, overblown, unrealistic. Yes, it is all of those things. What would be the strategic value of a joint Russian/Cuban operation taking a small town in Colorado? Why is the “re-education camp,” and the occupied town, for that matter, so poorly secured? And just how inept are these enemy forces, that they can be put on the ropes by a bunch of high school kids? And yet, in the wake of the recent (2021) military takeover in Myanmar, in the wake of the Capitol madness on January 6, in the wake of a full summer of civil unrest in major American cities—including night after night of pitched apocalyptic battle in Portland, of all places—and after a full year of feeling restricted in my movements, it plays my 2020-2021 tensions like a violin. Kitschy? Yes. By Milan Kundera’s definition (elucidated in the 1984 bestseller The Unbearable Lightness of Being), it is pure, uncut, nationalistic kitsch. It is also a museum piece: surely this is the high-water mark of rah-rah pro-America filmmaking, which may be equaled in intensity by Missing in Action and forthcoming Rambo features, but never in quality.

Yes, there is artistry here, even in the bombast. “Don’t you boys cry for me again. Don’t do it ever. Avenge me!” That’s Harry Dean Stanton, owning the movie in his couple minutes of screen time. And we’ve got Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, shotguns, bows and arrows, drinking the blood of your first (animal) kill. Hoo-ah! I’m not going to pretend I don’t love this. And wait, what? Jennifer Grey and Lea Thompson, literally appearing out of nowhere, because it’s the 1980s and we need these two to get the party started! (I want to say that Milius parachuted them into the story but no, that was another character: “The Colonel.”)

Is this good or bad for our briskly moving drama? And did Grey and Thompson’s presence succeed in its apparent aim of drawing in female moviegoers or at least securing some buy-in from the female audience members already attending under duress?

(Of course, I’m coming into this armed with my future knowledge of these two actresses. At this point Grey is not yet an icon, and in fact Red Dawn is her first major film role. Thompson is one year away from Back to the Future.)

A few words as the Wolverines’ (our protagonists, the child-guerillas) terror campaign gets underway: Their first action—the murder of three hapless occupying soldiers who make the mistake of going sightseeing near the spot where our intrepid high school students are camped out—directly results in the execution of some of the kids’ parents. Not really an optimal out-of-the-gate move, but it does give us some choice Swayze moments: “One thing’s for damn sure. No one here is going home, ever again.” And also- “Let it turn to something else.”

This is something I’ve known about writer/director John Milius for a while: At top-level, things don’t always hold together. His worldview can be comedically bombastic. But at the sentence level, at his best, his dialogue stands next to Tarantino’s. (See the Theodore Roosevelt monologue from The Wind and the Lion, or pretty much any scene from Apocalypse Now, which he scripted.) And he picks the right actors. Could anyone other than Patrick Swayze have sold this movie? (It’s also startling to realize that Charlie Sheen is the moral center of Red Dawn. And he’s wonderful.)

This doesn’t take away from the problems. The insurgent Wolverines number a little over half a dozen, only three of whom have any experience with firearms. Yet they prove capable of inflicting large numbers of casualties on fortified enemy positions. For a time, the Wolverines receive tactical support from “The Colonel” (a terrific Powers Boothe) who, as previously mentioned, literally parachutes into the story. But astonishingly, it’s the Colonel who gets killed.

Still, it was a master stroke, if highly improbable and more than a little irresponsible, to make the heroes high-school age. I cannot overstate how huge this movie was among my male classmates. I was prohibited from seeing it—with good reason!—but every other ten-year-old boy I knew was acting out scenes from Red Dawn within weeks of its release.

So yes, the release of Red Dawn was perfectly timed. It was also horrifyingly timed, coming out just a week after the mass shooting at a McDonald’s in San Ysidoro. And those images in the movie of a high school getting shot up, and of high schoolers wielding tactical weapons, would not seem so far-fetched a decade and some change later in the wake of Columbine. So Red Dawn is both a museum piece and, unfortunately, a harbinger.

August 18, 1984 / April 6, 2021

“17” by Rick James debuts at number 35 on American Top 40. Holy Mother of God, this was a top 40 hit during my childhood? It makes the later Winger hit of the same name sound like an anthem of chaste propriety.

Mid-to-late August 1984 is a bit of a black hole. “17” seems to have been struck from the historical record, along with the more innocuous—but also more annoying—Michael Jackon/Mick Jagger trainwreck “State of Shock,” which climbed as high as #3 on the pop charts. This period is a black hole in my memory, too. What was I up to after that Scotland trip? I’m guessing that the summer reading program at Washburn Library (our neighborhood branch on Lyndale Ave.) was well underway. This may have been the summer that I read H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine in one or two sittings in an old armchair in our basement. Did I have any inkling that my future self would be time-traveling back to join that young boy in the chair?

But if what preceded and what follows this mid-August lull has led us to forget these couple weeks, we have also lost hold of a couple of minor treasures. Jermaine Jackson’s “Dynamite” embodies something of what the title suggests, and Sérgio Mendes’s “Alibis” is a tight little wonder—a deceptively upbeat song about infidelity and heartbreak. And the tide of Purple Rain lifts all boats. “Let’s Go Crazy” and “When Doves Cry” are both in the charts, along with Sheila E’s “The Glamorous Life,” which, the world will eventually discover, was written and largely played by Prince. The purple wave is unstoppable.

But let’s linger for a moment on the appropriately titled “State of Shock,” as in, it’s shocking that this was a coda to Michael Jackson’s spectacular winning streak. Somewhere light years away, this is all unfolding in real time. Perhaps aliens are raising their antennae (or organic receiver nodes) and tuning in to the distant blue planet to hear— oh God, here it is— “I need mouth-to-mouth… resuscitation.” Yes, “State of Shock.” That call-and-response between Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson also includes the line, “You got me deep-fried.”

Was this song ever played again anywhere after 1984? And yet, it hangs onto the charts during its release year like a tenacious virus. “Look at me,” Mick implores over and over in his creepy old-man stalker voice. No! Avert your eyes and ears, America. I love the Jacksons and I love the Stones, but this song sucks donkey balls.

Tina Turner redeems the chart with “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” which can only mean that Ray Parker Jr. continues to hold the stop spot with “Ghostbusters.” Is it an unconscious or deliberate rewrite of Huey Lewis and the News’ “I Need a New Drug”? And, is it degrading the sacredness of intellectual property to say that Ray’s take is superior? (I’m going to stick my neck out even further and reveal that, deep in my hidden heart, “Ice Ice Baby” bests “Under Pressure,” and “Can’t Touch This” bests “Super Freak.” In both of those cases, the lifted version surgically isolates the key sonic element of the original, cuts away all extraneous artistry, and pounds the hook home in a relentless, trance-inducing—some would say “mind-numbing”—loop.)

Ray Parker, you are on top of the world right now. They are dancing in the streets to your song. You have worked your way up from itinerant guitarist to sideman to solo superstar. You’ve got Chevy Chase and Bill Murray in your video. Success is at hand, and my oh my, is it ever sweet! Do you know what is coming? Because hell hath no fury like Huey.

August 23, 1984 / April 12, 2021

Reagan caps off his coronation at the Republican National Convention. Somewhat unique among Republicans, he casts himself as a forward-thinking visionary. But, as is typical with conservatives, there is also a nostalgia for a lost golden age. I referenced in an earlier entry that “Make America great again” popped up as a campaign slogan in 1980 but was less relevant in 1984 because America was great again. In this RNC speech he ties the two threads together, saying, “We came together in a national crusade to make America great again, and to make a new beginning. Well, now it’s all coming together.”

The speech ends with a striking paean to diversity. In fulsome language, Reagan describes the path of the Olympic torch through diverse states and peoples on the way to the stadium in Los Angeles, effectively limning the contours of America’s melting pot. He then closes with a full-throated salute to immigration. I don’t recall if I saw this speech in 1984, but Reagan’s optimism was readily apparent then and has stuck with me ever since. It’s why I responded to Obama’s “audacity of hope” but not 2020’s Summer of Rage. And it’s also why the Trump era has left me cold. There may be a well-documented dark side to the Reagan era—and I’ve heard people expound at length on how Reagan’s policies and rhetoric were at odds. Was the optimism simply a calculated political ploy? Does it matter? Reagan himself seems to have been a true believer. A sizable subset of Generation X took it to heart, and we’ve been looking for its successor ever since.

August 25, 1984 / April 21, 2021

"Walter Mondale Minnesota DFL button" by Mpls55408 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Walter Mondale passes away in 2021. But how can this be? I’ve been spending a lot of time with the man. Yes, in 1984 he has gray hair and bags under his eyes. Yes, he has a certain world-weariness, but he is still fit and vital. Again, the shock hits me that the year I’m “living” through is now 37 years ago. I’m suffering timestream confusion, which ought to be brought home by the fact that I turned 47 today.

Walter – “Fritz” – you still live for the duration of this project. You are an honorable man. Had you played your hand at a different time, things might have gone differently. But perhaps some of your honor derives from your quixotic yet principled attempt to unseat the most broadly popular president of the modern era. You strike me as a realist, but there must be a wild dreamer in you. Otherwise, wouldn’t it have made more sense to wait until 1988? You are thoughtful, courteous. So far as I can tell, not a whiff of scandal surrounds you. The most they can pin on you is that the “special interests” have your ear, which might carry weight if it were not true for just about every successful politician of 1984—and 2021.

Fritz – I like that you hold things back. I sense you have a rich and varied life outside the public sphere, one we will never be privy to.

Fritz – sad, brooding owl face with a smile that’ll break your heart. They say you’re “bland,” but they just don’t get the Midwestern thing. Still waters run deep.

Next up: Part 9