How is it that we went from the Civil Rights 60s to the anti-war, "Free to be You and Me" 70s to the "War Games" 80s? And how has that transition impacted our current culture and political landscape? These are among the questions David Sirota sets out to explore and answer in this book.
Sirota opens by describing his own experience of the 80s - how the decade had its own feel and style and even language, which language he still finds himself thinking in. He grew up believing that the movies, television and other cultural accoutrements which formed the basis of his formative years were just good, clean, exuberant fun. Yet as the 80s shows, images and themes have resurfaced in the last few years, Sirota has come to believe that there was something much more powerful - subversive even - about the 80s. He argues that there was a deliberate, conscious, propagandistic re-working of previous generations to create a new 80s' mass mindset of materialism and martial/military dominance.
Sirota argues that 80s propaganda deliberately re-worked previous generations to create the twin myths of "The 50s" and "The 60s". The 60s were portrayed as a period of radical upheaval and violent instability - a "bad" time in our history (the gains of the Civil Rights Movement thereby getting swept under the rug). The 50s, meanwhile, were portrayed as the antidote - a stable, peaceful time when children were respectful, father knew best and America had "values". If we want to "return" society to its pre-1960 "good", we need to throw out the hippies and return to the clean-cut, all-American 50s.
Sirota next explores the 80s generation's heroification of certain individuals (mainly sports and movie stars, personified by Michael Jordan) and the companion message, "Just Do It." It was, Sirota argues, the ultimate in "rugged individualism", the height of Ayn Rand's "Objectivism". You can be a star or an idol. You can be all you can be. You are the most important person. Sirota explores how this has led to the phenomenon of "reality TV" and being famous for being famous.
Sirota then explores the generation's impact on America's opinion of the military. Public opinion of and faith in the military bottomed out in the 70s with the failure of Vietnam. Sirota argues that 80s propaganda - namely Hollywood movies produced in conjunction with the Pentagon - reversed that trend. The myth of the "Spat Upon Veteran" was spawned and the failure of Vietnam was explained as a failure of will - the American people gave up when the going got tough and the military wasn't "allowed" to win. In order to achieve military dominance and unwavering American support for the American military, Hollywood (and the Pentagon) cranked out heroic movies like "Top Gun" and "Red Dawn".
Finally, Sirota explores the impact of 80s culture on race relations and recognition. In the 60s and 70s, blacks were struggling - often violently - for their place in society. As blacks appeared in more media roles, TV shows began exploring racial issues and depicting black struggles in ways which confronted and challenged white viewers with their own racism. But in the 80s, however, racism was declared dead. Bill Cosby's Huxtable family "proved" that, with the "right" attitudes, blacks could be just as economically and socially successful as whites (which, of course, in the reverse means that any failure of blacks to achieve such success must be their own fault). Never mind that the 80s actually saw a widening of the gap between whites and blacks (along with the propagation of the "welfare queen myth). The bargain that blacks had to buy into in exchange for representation in the media was the acceptance of the "post-racial world" myth that never confronts whites with the reality of racism.
Sirota makes a number of good points and its hard to argue with the fact that the 80s marked a radical shift in many ways. However, I think Sirota over-argues his point and greatly over-generalizes. He plays fast and loose with dates and concepts to fit the data into his theory and he ignores data which doesn't fit. For example, "the 80s" seems to encompass everything from Carter through the first Gulf War, which Sirota argues "capped off" the 80s. Except that the Gulf War didn't even start until 1991.
Also, Sirota seems to believe that because he was immersed in 80s culture, that everyone else was too, and that it was the sole, or at least main, defining force in the 80s. However, I'm six years older than Sirota and I never saw half of the movies (let alone the TV shows) that Sirota lists off. Seems to me that someone's parents let him watch a tad too much TV and too many movies. For evidence of just how obsessed Sirota is with 80s culture, read the footnotes on page 90 (which ruminates in obsessive detail about the movie "Ghostbusters II) and page 96 (which challenges readers to match a number of 80s TV/movie "heroes" with their shows). The reality is that the 80s, like every other decade, was much more heterogeneous. There were still plenty of liberals, anti-war types, feminists, civil rights advocates, etc. - not all of us were holing up in our basements playing war games.
Second, Sirota seems to believe that time started and ended in the 80s. Michael Jordan was the first made-to-order "hero". The militarism and materialism of the 80s were unique in history. And, furthermore, the 80s were the beginning of a linear course which has led straight to the economic collapse and three concurrent wars of recent history.
But, of course, Jordan wasn't the first "hero". Arguably, Jesus gets that honor (or perhaps Buddha). But even in more recent decades there was Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Ali, Elvis Presley, Bruce Lee, etc. And, of course, 80s materialism isn't significantly different that what could be found in the "Gay [18]90s" or the "Roaring 20s". And our country has been involved in an endless round-about of wars ever since its founding.
Furthermore, Sirota neglects trends that have arisen since the 80s. The 80s may have been the decade of the Power Rangers, but since that time the two most beloved children's characters ever created - Barney and Elmo - have arisen and both are still going strong, preaching their messages of sharing and caring and getting along with polite manners. In the 90s America enjoyed a relatively peaceful decade with few external military conflicts (that we knew about, anyway), and we seemed to like it that way. When George Bush launched the war on Iraq, tens of thousands of protesters filled the streets for weeks at a time - not the kind of behavior you might expect from pro-military 80s kids.
Finally, there are a number of ways in which Sirota really makes it hard to take him seriously as a writer at all. First, he insists on trash-talking in a way that not even the worst 80s movies ever did. Most of it can't be printed in a review, but for one rather mild example, on page 129, Sirota tells us: "The press release went on to list Bush's most slobbery kisses of the Pentagon [arse]" (except that "arse" isn't quite the word Sirota used). Was such graphic language really necessary? Interestingly enough, on page 137, Sirota writes, "...the White House was "[expletive] with the wrong guy." So a-words and s-bombs are okay, but he draws the line with the f-bomb?
Second, he repeatedly refers to the middle of the country as "flyover country". I certainly have no respect for Sarah Palin, but Sirota plays right into her hands when he dismisses the area where tens of millions of people (including myself) live and work as not worthy of anything other than flying over. Middle America might not be any more "real" than coastal America, but it still is real America.
And finally, Sirota makes some ridiculous comparisons. On page 48, he opines, "Sure, many Americans ended up hating Bush for what he did with his authority, just as many Bulls fans hated Jordan for opting to end his career on the Washington Wizards." Yeah, I hate Michael Jordan the same way I hate George W. Bush, what about you? And on page 79 he writes, "Conservatives cheer when politicians sell off Eisenhower-era public infrastructure (highways, bridges, etc.) to foreign private firms. Liberals demand those same politicians "get the government out of our bedrooms."" Sure, politicians have just as much rights managing our bedrooms as they do managing public infrastructure.
With a whole lot of rigorous application of scholarship and intellectual consistency (and writing like an adult), Sirota could have written a serious book that could make a significant impact on the way we think about the impact of cultural forces over the course of the last several decades. But the reality of this book is just a bit of light food for thought that is a lot like celery: not really digestable and easily eliminated. 2.5 stars
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Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now--Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything Hardcover – March 15, 2011
by
David Sirota
(Author)
| David Sirota (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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Wall Street scandals. Fights over taxes. Racial resentments. A Lakers-Celtics championship. The Karate Kid topping the box-office charts. Bon Jovi touring the country. These words could describe our current moment—or the vaunted iconography of three decades past.
In this wide-ranging and wickedly entertaining book, New York Times bestselling journalist David Sirota takes readers on a rollicking DeLorean ride back in time to reveal how so many of our present-day conflicts are rooted in the larger-than-life pop culture of the 1980s—from the “Greed is good” ethos of Gordon Gekko (and Bernie Madoff) to the “Make my day” foreign policy of Ronald Reagan (and George W. Bush) to the “transcendence” of Cliff Huxtable (and Barack Obama).
Today’s mindless militarism and hypernarcissism, Sirota argues, first became the norm when an ’80s generation weaned on Rambo one-liners and “Just Do It” exhortations embraced a new religion—with comic books, cartoons, sneaker commercials, videogames, and even children’s toys serving as the key instruments of cultural indoctrination. Meanwhile, in productions such as Back to the Future, Family Ties, and The Big Chill, a campaign was launched to reimagine the 1950s as America’s lost golden age and vilify the 1960s as the source of all our troubles. That 1980s revisionism, Sirota shows, still rages today, with Barack Obama cast as the 60s hippie being assailed by Alex P. Keaton–esque Republicans who long for a return to Eisenhower-era conservatism.
“The past is never dead,” William Faulkner wrote. “It’s not even past.” The 1980s—even more so. With the native dexterity only a child of the Atari Age could possess, David Sirota twists and turns this multicolored Rubik’s Cube of a decade, exposing it as a warning for our own troubled present—and possible future.
In this wide-ranging and wickedly entertaining book, New York Times bestselling journalist David Sirota takes readers on a rollicking DeLorean ride back in time to reveal how so many of our present-day conflicts are rooted in the larger-than-life pop culture of the 1980s—from the “Greed is good” ethos of Gordon Gekko (and Bernie Madoff) to the “Make my day” foreign policy of Ronald Reagan (and George W. Bush) to the “transcendence” of Cliff Huxtable (and Barack Obama).
Today’s mindless militarism and hypernarcissism, Sirota argues, first became the norm when an ’80s generation weaned on Rambo one-liners and “Just Do It” exhortations embraced a new religion—with comic books, cartoons, sneaker commercials, videogames, and even children’s toys serving as the key instruments of cultural indoctrination. Meanwhile, in productions such as Back to the Future, Family Ties, and The Big Chill, a campaign was launched to reimagine the 1950s as America’s lost golden age and vilify the 1960s as the source of all our troubles. That 1980s revisionism, Sirota shows, still rages today, with Barack Obama cast as the 60s hippie being assailed by Alex P. Keaton–esque Republicans who long for a return to Eisenhower-era conservatism.
“The past is never dead,” William Faulkner wrote. “It’s not even past.” The 1980s—even more so. With the native dexterity only a child of the Atari Age could possess, David Sirota twists and turns this multicolored Rubik’s Cube of a decade, exposing it as a warning for our own troubled present—and possible future.
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBallantine Books
- Publication dateMarch 15, 2011
- Dimensions6.25 x 1 x 9.25 inches
- ISBN-100345518780
- ISBN-13978-0345518781
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
An Essay from Author David Sirota
Five ’80s Flicks That Explain How the ’80s Still Define Our World
Back To Our Future posits that the 1980s--and specifically 1980s pop culture--frames the way we think about major issues today. The decade is the lens through which we see our world. To understand what that means, here are five classic flicks that show how the 1980s still shapes our thinking on government, the “rogue,” militarism, race, and even our not-so-distant past.
1. Ghostbusters (1984): Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz, Egon Spengler, and Winston Zeddmore seem like happy-go-lucky guys, but these are cold, hard military contractors. Between evading the Environmental Protection Agency, charging exorbitant rates for apparition captures, and summoning a Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, the merry band shows a Zoul-haunted New York that their for-profit services are far more reliable than those of the Big Apple’s wholly inept government. At the same time, the Ghostbusters were providing 1980s audiences with a cinematic version of what would later become the very real Blackwater--and what would be the anti-government, privatize-everything narrative of the twenty-first century.
2. Die Hard (1988): Though the 1980s was setting the stage for the rise of anti-government politics today, it was also creating the Palin-esque “rogue” to conveniently explain the good things government undeniably accomplishes. Hitting the silver screen just a few years after Ollie North’s rogue triumphalism, John McClane became the ’80s most famous of this “rogue” archetype--a government employee who becomes a hero specifically by defying his police superiors and rescuing hostages from the twin threat of terrorism and his boss’s bureaucratic clumsiness. This message is so clear in Die Hard, that in one memorable scene, McClane is yelling at one police lieutenant that the government has become “part of the problem.” Die Hard, like almost every national politician today, says government can only work if it gets out of the way of the rogues, mavericks, and rule-breakers within its own midst.
3. Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985): “Sir, do we get to win this time?” So begins the second--and most culturally important--installment of the Rambo series. The question was a direct rip-off of Ronald Reagan’s insistence that when it came to the loss in Vietnam, America had been too “afraid to let them win”--them, of course, being the troops. The theory embedded in this refrain is simple: If only meddling politicians and a weak-kneed public had deferred to the Pentagon, then we would have won the conflict in Southeast Asia. Repeated ad nauseum since the 1980s, the “let them win” idea now defines our modern discussion of war. If only we let the Pentagon’s Rambos do whatever they want with no question or oversight whatsoever, then we can decisively conclude the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan…and we can win the neverending “War on Terror.”
4. Rocky III (1982): Before the 2008 presidential campaign devolved into cartoonish media portrayals of the palatable “post-racial” Barack Obama and his allegedly unpalatable “overly racial” pastor Jeremiah Wright, there was Rocky III more explicitly outlining this binary and bigoted portrayal of African Americans. Here was Rocky Balboa as the determined but slightly ignorant stand-in for White Middle America. Surveying the diverse landscape, the Italian Stallion could see only two kinds of black people—on one side the suave, smooth, post-racial Apollo Creed, and on the other side the enraged, animalistic Clubber Lang. Rocky thus gravitated to the former, and reflexively feared the latter, essentially summarizing twenty-first-century White America’s often over-simplistic and bigoted attitudes toward the black community today.
5. The Big Chill (1983): This college reunion flick from Lawrence Kasdan is hilarious, morose, and seemingly nostalgic for the halcyon days of the past; but powerfully propagandistic in its negative framing of the 1960s. Over the course of the film’s weekend, character after character berates the 1960s as an overly decadent age that may have been rooted in idealism, but was fundamentally destined to fail. Sound familiar? Of course it does. The 1980s-created narrative of the Bad Sixties can still be found in everything from national Tea Party protests to never-ending culture-war battles on local school boards. The message is always the same: If only America can emulate the Big Chillers and get past its Sixties immaturity and liberalism, everything will be A-okay.
From Publishers Weekly
Sirota (The Uprising) ushers readers back to the era of big money and bigger hair, the yuppie and the Gipper to show how the 1980s transformed—and continues to influence—America's culture and politics. As Carter's presidency began to crumble in 1978, a revival of back-to-the-'50s theater, television, and film productions (Grease, Happy Days, La Bamba) overtook grittier 1960s imagery of "urbanity, ethnicity and strife" and came to define the Reagan era in a country eager to forget—or unwilling to learn from—the failure of Vietnam. Sirota argues that the combination of Reagan, the "candidate of nostalgia"; hypermilitarist movies that re-demonized communism; and sophisticated marketing campaigns glorifying the cult of the individual led to our current culture's narcissism and obsessive pursuit of wealth and celebrity. In his effort to fit current trends to his overriding thesis, Sirota occasionally makes some sweeping statements, such as claiming the military's public relations campaign was so successful that Americans "never dare question" the military, ignoring the numerous anti–Iraq War protests and the outrage over the Abu Ghraib photographs. But the many of his arguments are well informed and sparkle with wit and irreverence. (Mar.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review
"Sirota makes a compelling case that 1980s culture and politics have an outsized influence on how we think now. To build his case, he apparently hacked my brain and downloaded my entire age-7-to-age-17 cultural intake. From Rerun Stubbs on ‘What's Happening’ to the ‘Missile Command’ videogame, the roots of how we think now are there. Scary. Wildly entertaining -- and scary."—Rachel Maddow, host The Rachel Maddow Show
"I went into Back to Our Future thinking that I had grown up in an era of endearingly mindless pop-culture entertainments, and came out of it convinced that from my childhood on I had been fed an almost endless stream of ruthless mind-bending propaganda of a sort that would have made the Soviets sick with jealousy. David's book is simultaneously hilarious and horrifying. The part that freaked me out was how at the end of reading this thing you feel (and here I'm using a metaphor pertinent to the subject matter) like Sean Young's replicant character in Blade Runner, sick to discover that the harmless memories you thought were your own were actually planted there by some sick committee of totalitarian bureaucrats. You'll never think of Mr. T the same way. " –Matt Taibbi, author of Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America
“An irreverent, astute and provocative look at the ways in which the culture of the Me decade shaped three decades of me first politics. People may think we live in the age of Reagan, but really it's the age of Alex P Keaton.”—Christopher Hayes, editor of The Nation
"Max Headroom, Ferris Bueler and Alex Keaton... Self centered capitalistic narcissists or fun pop culture icons? David Sirota cracks this mystery. Well not really a mystery.... Just read the book."—Adam McKay, director and writer of Anchorman
"I went into Back to Our Future thinking that I had grown up in an era of endearingly mindless pop-culture entertainments, and came out of it convinced that from my childhood on I had been fed an almost endless stream of ruthless mind-bending propaganda of a sort that would have made the Soviets sick with jealousy. David's book is simultaneously hilarious and horrifying. The part that freaked me out was how at the end of reading this thing you feel (and here I'm using a metaphor pertinent to the subject matter) like Sean Young's replicant character in Blade Runner, sick to discover that the harmless memories you thought were your own were actually planted there by some sick committee of totalitarian bureaucrats. You'll never think of Mr. T the same way. " –Matt Taibbi, author of Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America
“An irreverent, astute and provocative look at the ways in which the culture of the Me decade shaped three decades of me first politics. People may think we live in the age of Reagan, but really it's the age of Alex P Keaton.”—Christopher Hayes, editor of The Nation
"Max Headroom, Ferris Bueler and Alex Keaton... Self centered capitalistic narcissists or fun pop culture icons? David Sirota cracks this mystery. Well not really a mystery.... Just read the book."—Adam McKay, director and writer of Anchorman
About the Author
David Sirota is a journalist, nationally syndicated weekly newspaper columnist, and radio host. His weekly column is based at The Denver Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Portland Oregonian, and The Seattle Times and now appears in newspapers with a combined daily circulation of more than 1.6 million readers. He has contributed to The New York Times Magazine and The Nation and hosts an award-winning daily talk show on Denver’s Clear Channel affiliate, KKZN-AM760. He is a senior editor at In These Times magazine and a Huffington Post contributor and appears periodically on CNN, The Colbert Report, PBS, and NPR. He received a degree in journalism and political science from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. He lives in Denver with his wife, Emily, and their dog, Monty.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Die, Hippie, Die!
Every time one of these ex-hippies comes prancing in from yesteryear, we gotta get out the love beads and pretend we care about people. - Alex P. Keaton, 1986
For the past several days I've been noticing a steep rise in the number of hippies coming to town. . . . I know hippies. I've hated them all my life. I've kept this town free of hippies on my own since I was five and a half. But I can't contain them on my own anymore. We have to do something, fast! -Eric Cartman, 2005
In 1975, a Democratic Party emboldened by civil rights, environmental, antiwar, and post-Watergate electoral successes was on the verge of seizing the presidency and a filibuster-proof congressional majority. That year, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest were two of the three top-grossing films-the former a parody using the late-sixties sexual revolution to laugh at the puritanical fifties, the latter based on the novel by beat writer Ken Kesey. Meanwhile, three of the top-rated seven television shows were liberal-themed programs produced by progressive icon Norman Lear, including All in the Family-a show built around a hippie, Mike Stivic, poking fun at the ignorance of his traditionalist father-in-law, Archie Bunker.
A mere ten years later, Republican Ronald Reagan had just been reelected by one of the largest electoral landslides in American history, and his party had also gained control of the U.S. Senate. Two of the top three grossing films were Back to the Future, which eulogized the fifties, and Rambo: First Blood Part II, which blamed sixties antiwar activism for losing the Vietnam conflict. Most telling, All in the Family's formula of using sixties-motivated youth and progressivism to ridicule fifties-rooted parents and their traditionalism had been replaced atop the television charts by its antithesis: a Family Ties whose fifties-inspired youth ridicules his parents' sixties spirit.
The political and cultural trends these changes typified were neither coincidental nor unrelated, and their intertwined backstories explain why we're still scarred by the metamorphosis.
The late 1970s and early 1980s marked the birth of an entire industry organized around idealized nostalgia, and particularly midcentury, pre-1965 schmaltz. You likely know this industry well-it survives in everything from roadside Cracker Barrel restaurants to the Jersey shore's Old Time photo stands to Michael Chabon's novels to Band of Brothers-style miniseries glorifying the valor of World War II vets- and it first found traction in the 1980s creation of The Fifties(tm).
Turning a time period into a distinct brand seems common today, what with the all-pervasive references to generational subgroups (Gen X, Gen Y, etc.). But it was a new marketing innovation back in the 1980s. As Temple University professor Carolyn Kitch found in her 2003 study of mass-circulation magazines, generational labeling is "primarily a phenomena of the last quarter of the 20th century," and it began (as so many things have) as an early-1980s ad strategy aimed at selling products to Baby Boomers and their parents.
Like all sales pitches, fifties hawking employed subjectivity, oversimplification, and stereotypes. For eighties journalists, advertisers, screenwriters, and political operatives seeking a compelling shorthand to break through the modern media miasma, that meant making The Fifties into much more than the ten-year period between 1950 and 1959. It meant using pop culture and politics to convert the style, language, and memories of that decade into a larger reference to the entire first half of the twentieth century, all the way through the early 1960s of the New Frontier-those optimistic years "before President Kennedy was shot, before the Beatles came, when I couldn't wait to join the Peace Corps, and I thought I'd never find a guy as great as my dad," as Baby from the classic eighties film Dirty Dancing reminisced.
Why The Fifties, and not the 1930s or '40s, as the face of the entire pre-sixties epoch? Because that decade was fraught with far less (obvious) baggage (say, the Depression or global war) and hence was most easily marketed in the saccharine entertainment culture of the devil-may-care 1980s.
Indeed, as the Carter presidency started to crumble in 1978 and Reagan began delivering fiery speeches in preparation for his upcoming presidential run, the crew-cut-and-greaser escapades of Happy Days and the poodle skirts of Laverne & Shirley overtook the sixties- referencing urbanity, ethnicity, and strife of Norman Lear's grittier sitcoms. In movie theaters, Animal House and Grease hit classic status almost instantly. These successes encouraged the culture industry to make the eighties the launching point for a self-sustaining genre of wildly popular back-to-the-fifties productions.
There were retrospectives such as Diner, Stand By Me, and Peggy Sue Got Married and biopics of fifties icons such as The Right Stuff, La Bamba, and Great Balls of Fire! There was Hoosiers, with its bucolic small towns, its short shorts, and its nonbreakaway rims. There were Broadway plays such as Brighton Beach Memoirs and Biloxi Blues, commemorating the honor, frugality, and innocence of the World War II years. And there was a glut of new Eisenhower biographies.
Even 1980s productions not overtly focused on decade nostalgia were decidedly recollective of fifties atmospherics.
There was Witness, which used the story of a Philadelphia cop's voyage into lily-white Amish country to juxtapose the simplicity of America's pastoral heritage against the crime-ridden anarchy of the black inner city.
There was Superman and Superman II-films that reanimated a TV hero of the actual 1950s, idealized Clark Kent's midcentury youth, and depicted his adulthood as the trials of a fedora-wearing anachronism trying to save modern Metropolis from postfifties peril. And there were the endless rip-offs-the Jets-versus-Sharks rivalry of West Side Story ripened into the socs-versus-greasers carnage of The Outsiders, while the hand-holding of Grease became the ass-grabbing of Dirty Dancing.
Through it all, pop culture was manufacturing a Total Recall of the 1950s for a 1980s audience-an artificial memory of The Fifties that even came with its own canned soundtrack.
Though we tend to think of the late 1970s and early 1980s as the glory days of punk rock and the primordial soup of what would become rap, Wurlitzer-ready rockabilly and doo-wop were the rage. This was the heyday of the Stray Cats and their standing base, the moment when Adam Ant released the jukebox jam "Goody Two Shoes," and Queen's rockabilly hit "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" hit number one on the charts. As the Hard Rock Cafe and Johnny Rockets franchises created a mini-fad of fifties-flavored restaurants, the B-52s' surf rock was catching a new wave; Meat Loaf was channeling his Elvis-impersonation act into the absurdist 1950s tribute "Paradise by the Dashboard Light"; and ZZ Top was starring in music videos featuring a muscle car that Danny Zuko might have driven at Thunder Road. Even Billy Joel, until then a folksinger, was going all in with a blatant teenybopper tribute, "Uptown Girl."
This sonic trend wasn't happening in a vacuum-it was thrumming in the shadow of the chief missionary of 1950s triumphalism, Ronald Reagan.
The Gipper's connection to The Fifties wasn't just rooted in his success as a midcentury B-movie actor nor in his American Graffiti pompadour. The Fifties had long defined his persona, career, and message. Here was "the candidate of nostalgia, a political performer whose be-bop instrument dates from an antediluvian choir," as The Washington Post wrote in 1980. Here was a man campaigning for president in the late 1970s and early 1980s calling for the country to go back in time. And not just a few years back in time-way back in time to the dreamy days before what he called the "hard years" of the late 1960s.
"Not so long ago, we emerged from a world war," Reagan said in a national address during his 1980 presidential campaign. "Turning homeward at last, we built a grand prosperity and hopes, from our own success and plenty, to help others less fortunate. Our peace was a tense and bitter one, but in those days, the center seemed to hold."
Writing to a campaign contributor, Reagan said he wanted to bring forth a "spiritual revival to feel once again as [we] felt years ago about this nation of ours." And when he won the White House, his inauguration spelled out exactly what he meant by "years ago": The lavish celebration dusted off and promoted fifties stars such as Frank Sinatra and Charlton Heston.
This wasn't a secret message or a wink-and-nod-it was the public theme of Reagan's political formula. In a Doonesbury comic about the 1980 campaign, cartoonist Gary Trudeau sketched Reagan's mind as "a storehouse of images of an idyllic America, with 5 cent Cokes, Burma Shave signs, and hard-working White People." When naming him 1980 "Man of the Year," Time said, "Intellectually, emotionally, Reagan lives in the past." The article added that the new president specifically believes "the past"-i.e. the The Fifties-"is his future." And as both the magazine and America saw it, that was the highest form of praise- just as it is today.
This all might have gone the way of New Coke if the early-1980s celebration of The Fifties(tm) was happening in isolation. But those Bob Ross paintings of happy Levittown trees and Eisenhower-era blue skies only became salient because the eighties placed them in the American imagination right next to sensationalized images of Woodstock and the Kent State massacre.
Securing that prime psychological real estate meant simultaneously doing to the sixties what was being done to the fifties-only with one twist: Instead of an exercise in idealization, The Sixties(tm) brand that came out of the 1980s was fraught with value judgments downplaying the decade's positives and emphasizing its chaos.
Through politics and mass media, a 1960s of unprecedented social and economic progress was reremembered as a time of tie-dye, not thin ties; burning cities, not men on the moon; LBJ scowls, not JFK glamour; redistributionist War on Poverty "welfare," not universalist Medicare benefits; facial-haired Beatles tripping out to "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," not bowl-cut Beatles chirping out "I Want to Hold Your Hand."
Some of the sixties bashing in the 1980s came from a media that earnestly sought to help Baby Boomers forgive themselves for becoming the buttoned-down adults they had once rebelled against. Some of it was the inadvertent side effect of an accelerating twenty-four-hour news cycle that historian Daniel Marcus notes almost always coupled references to the sixties with quick "shots from Woodstock of young people cavorting in the mud, perhaps discarding various parts of their clothing or stumbling through a drug-induced haze."
And some of it was just the uncontrived laziness of screenwriters and directors.
"Getting a popular fix on the more elusive, more complicated, and far more common phenomena of the sixties is demanding because a lot of it isn't photogenic," says Columbia professor Todd Gitlin, the former leader of Students for a Democratic Society and author of The Sixties. "How easy it was to instead just make films about the wild people, because they are already an action movie, and their conception of themselves is already theatrical."
The revisionism and caricaturing revolved around three key themes, each of which denigrated the sixties as 100 percent awful.
The first was the most political of all-patriotism. Love of country, loyalty to America, national unity-these were memes that Reagan had been using to berate the sixties since his original jump from Hollywood to politics.
During his first campaign for California governor, he ran on a platform pledging to crush the "small minority of beatniks, radicals, and filthy speech advocates" at Berkeley who were protesting the Vietnam War. As president, he railed on nuclear-freeze protesters (like Steven and Elyse Keaton in that first season of Family Ties) as traitors "who would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority."
The media industry of the time followed with hypermilitarist films blaming antiwar activists for America's loss in Vietnam (more on that in the chapter "Operation Red Dawn"), and magazine retrospectives basically implying that sixties social movements were anti-American. As just one example, a 1988 Newsweek article entitled "Decade Shock" cited the fact that "patriotism is back in vogue" as proof that the country had rejected the sixties-the idea being that the sixties was wholly unpatriotic.
But while flag-waving can win elections and modify the political debate, it alone could not mutate the less consciously political, more reptilian lobes of the American cortex. So the 1980s contest for historical memory was also being waged with more refined and demographically targeted methods.
For teenagers, The Fifties(tm) were used to vandalize The Sixties(tm) through a competition between the Beatnik and the Greaser for the mantle of eighties cool. As historian Daniel Marcus recounts, the former became defined as "middle-class, left-wing, intellectual and centered in New York City and San Francisco"-that is, defined as the generic picture of weak, effete, snobbish coffeehouse liberalism first linked to names such as Hart and Dukakis, and now synonymous with Kerry, Streisand, and Soros. Meanwhile, the Greaser came to be known as an urbanized cowboy-a tough guy who "liked cars and girls and rock and roll, was working class, usually non-Jewish 'white ethnic' and decidedly unintellectual."
This hero, whose spirit we still worship in the form of Joe the Plumber and "Bring it on" foreign policy, first stomped the Beatnik through the youth-oriented iconography of the 1980s-think idols such as the Fonz, Bruce Springsteen, and Patrick Swayze; movies like Staying Alive, Rocky, and The Lords of Flatbush; bands such as Bon Jovi, Guns N' Roses, and Poison; and, not to be forgotten, the chintzy clothing fad of ripped jeans and tight white T-shirts.
For adults who experienced the real fifties and sixties, the propaganda had to be a bit less overt to be convincing. So their memories were more subtly shaped with the arrival of a life-form whose mission was to absolve the hippie generation for becoming the compromised and depoliticized elders they had once railed on and protested against.
This seductive species became known as yuppies-short for young urban professionals.
The invasion of the yuppies and all of their requisite tastes, styles, and linguistic inflections officially commenced when Newsweek declared 1984 the Year of the Yuppie, following the publication of The Yuppie Handbook and the presidential campaign of Gary Hart-a New Agey candidate who looked as if he carried a dog-eared copy of the tome around in his breast pocket. A few months later, Adweek quoted executives from the major television networks saying their goal in coming years would be to "chase yuppies with a vengeance"-a prediction that came true, according to Rolling Stone's 1987 report on a series of hit shows that the magazine called Yuppievision. By 1988, a suited Michael J. Fox eating sushi was on the cover of an Esquire magazine issue devoted entirely to "Yupper Classmen." Fittingly, one of the articles noted a poll showing that 60 percent of Americans could identify the word yuppie-almost twice the number that could identify the nation's secretary of state.
While yuppie certainly evoked supermodern feelings in the 1980s, the concept was etymologically rooted in a politicized past. The word made its public debut in a 1983 newspaper column about Jerry Rubin, the leader of the Youth International Party (yippies) who had abandoned his sixties radicalism for the 1980s world of business. His life story was a textbook yuppie parable of sixties rejection: He was a member of the "vanguard of the baby-boom generation," which had "march[ed] through the '60s" but was now "advancing on the 1980s in the back seat of a limousine," as Newsweek put it.
Every time one of these ex-hippies comes prancing in from yesteryear, we gotta get out the love beads and pretend we care about people. - Alex P. Keaton, 1986
For the past several days I've been noticing a steep rise in the number of hippies coming to town. . . . I know hippies. I've hated them all my life. I've kept this town free of hippies on my own since I was five and a half. But I can't contain them on my own anymore. We have to do something, fast! -Eric Cartman, 2005
In 1975, a Democratic Party emboldened by civil rights, environmental, antiwar, and post-Watergate electoral successes was on the verge of seizing the presidency and a filibuster-proof congressional majority. That year, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest were two of the three top-grossing films-the former a parody using the late-sixties sexual revolution to laugh at the puritanical fifties, the latter based on the novel by beat writer Ken Kesey. Meanwhile, three of the top-rated seven television shows were liberal-themed programs produced by progressive icon Norman Lear, including All in the Family-a show built around a hippie, Mike Stivic, poking fun at the ignorance of his traditionalist father-in-law, Archie Bunker.
A mere ten years later, Republican Ronald Reagan had just been reelected by one of the largest electoral landslides in American history, and his party had also gained control of the U.S. Senate. Two of the top three grossing films were Back to the Future, which eulogized the fifties, and Rambo: First Blood Part II, which blamed sixties antiwar activism for losing the Vietnam conflict. Most telling, All in the Family's formula of using sixties-motivated youth and progressivism to ridicule fifties-rooted parents and their traditionalism had been replaced atop the television charts by its antithesis: a Family Ties whose fifties-inspired youth ridicules his parents' sixties spirit.
The political and cultural trends these changes typified were neither coincidental nor unrelated, and their intertwined backstories explain why we're still scarred by the metamorphosis.
The late 1970s and early 1980s marked the birth of an entire industry organized around idealized nostalgia, and particularly midcentury, pre-1965 schmaltz. You likely know this industry well-it survives in everything from roadside Cracker Barrel restaurants to the Jersey shore's Old Time photo stands to Michael Chabon's novels to Band of Brothers-style miniseries glorifying the valor of World War II vets- and it first found traction in the 1980s creation of The Fifties(tm).
Turning a time period into a distinct brand seems common today, what with the all-pervasive references to generational subgroups (Gen X, Gen Y, etc.). But it was a new marketing innovation back in the 1980s. As Temple University professor Carolyn Kitch found in her 2003 study of mass-circulation magazines, generational labeling is "primarily a phenomena of the last quarter of the 20th century," and it began (as so many things have) as an early-1980s ad strategy aimed at selling products to Baby Boomers and their parents.
Like all sales pitches, fifties hawking employed subjectivity, oversimplification, and stereotypes. For eighties journalists, advertisers, screenwriters, and political operatives seeking a compelling shorthand to break through the modern media miasma, that meant making The Fifties into much more than the ten-year period between 1950 and 1959. It meant using pop culture and politics to convert the style, language, and memories of that decade into a larger reference to the entire first half of the twentieth century, all the way through the early 1960s of the New Frontier-those optimistic years "before President Kennedy was shot, before the Beatles came, when I couldn't wait to join the Peace Corps, and I thought I'd never find a guy as great as my dad," as Baby from the classic eighties film Dirty Dancing reminisced.
Why The Fifties, and not the 1930s or '40s, as the face of the entire pre-sixties epoch? Because that decade was fraught with far less (obvious) baggage (say, the Depression or global war) and hence was most easily marketed in the saccharine entertainment culture of the devil-may-care 1980s.
Indeed, as the Carter presidency started to crumble in 1978 and Reagan began delivering fiery speeches in preparation for his upcoming presidential run, the crew-cut-and-greaser escapades of Happy Days and the poodle skirts of Laverne & Shirley overtook the sixties- referencing urbanity, ethnicity, and strife of Norman Lear's grittier sitcoms. In movie theaters, Animal House and Grease hit classic status almost instantly. These successes encouraged the culture industry to make the eighties the launching point for a self-sustaining genre of wildly popular back-to-the-fifties productions.
There were retrospectives such as Diner, Stand By Me, and Peggy Sue Got Married and biopics of fifties icons such as The Right Stuff, La Bamba, and Great Balls of Fire! There was Hoosiers, with its bucolic small towns, its short shorts, and its nonbreakaway rims. There were Broadway plays such as Brighton Beach Memoirs and Biloxi Blues, commemorating the honor, frugality, and innocence of the World War II years. And there was a glut of new Eisenhower biographies.
Even 1980s productions not overtly focused on decade nostalgia were decidedly recollective of fifties atmospherics.
There was Witness, which used the story of a Philadelphia cop's voyage into lily-white Amish country to juxtapose the simplicity of America's pastoral heritage against the crime-ridden anarchy of the black inner city.
There was Superman and Superman II-films that reanimated a TV hero of the actual 1950s, idealized Clark Kent's midcentury youth, and depicted his adulthood as the trials of a fedora-wearing anachronism trying to save modern Metropolis from postfifties peril. And there were the endless rip-offs-the Jets-versus-Sharks rivalry of West Side Story ripened into the socs-versus-greasers carnage of The Outsiders, while the hand-holding of Grease became the ass-grabbing of Dirty Dancing.
Through it all, pop culture was manufacturing a Total Recall of the 1950s for a 1980s audience-an artificial memory of The Fifties that even came with its own canned soundtrack.
Though we tend to think of the late 1970s and early 1980s as the glory days of punk rock and the primordial soup of what would become rap, Wurlitzer-ready rockabilly and doo-wop were the rage. This was the heyday of the Stray Cats and their standing base, the moment when Adam Ant released the jukebox jam "Goody Two Shoes," and Queen's rockabilly hit "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" hit number one on the charts. As the Hard Rock Cafe and Johnny Rockets franchises created a mini-fad of fifties-flavored restaurants, the B-52s' surf rock was catching a new wave; Meat Loaf was channeling his Elvis-impersonation act into the absurdist 1950s tribute "Paradise by the Dashboard Light"; and ZZ Top was starring in music videos featuring a muscle car that Danny Zuko might have driven at Thunder Road. Even Billy Joel, until then a folksinger, was going all in with a blatant teenybopper tribute, "Uptown Girl."
This sonic trend wasn't happening in a vacuum-it was thrumming in the shadow of the chief missionary of 1950s triumphalism, Ronald Reagan.
The Gipper's connection to The Fifties wasn't just rooted in his success as a midcentury B-movie actor nor in his American Graffiti pompadour. The Fifties had long defined his persona, career, and message. Here was "the candidate of nostalgia, a political performer whose be-bop instrument dates from an antediluvian choir," as The Washington Post wrote in 1980. Here was a man campaigning for president in the late 1970s and early 1980s calling for the country to go back in time. And not just a few years back in time-way back in time to the dreamy days before what he called the "hard years" of the late 1960s.
"Not so long ago, we emerged from a world war," Reagan said in a national address during his 1980 presidential campaign. "Turning homeward at last, we built a grand prosperity and hopes, from our own success and plenty, to help others less fortunate. Our peace was a tense and bitter one, but in those days, the center seemed to hold."
Writing to a campaign contributor, Reagan said he wanted to bring forth a "spiritual revival to feel once again as [we] felt years ago about this nation of ours." And when he won the White House, his inauguration spelled out exactly what he meant by "years ago": The lavish celebration dusted off and promoted fifties stars such as Frank Sinatra and Charlton Heston.
This wasn't a secret message or a wink-and-nod-it was the public theme of Reagan's political formula. In a Doonesbury comic about the 1980 campaign, cartoonist Gary Trudeau sketched Reagan's mind as "a storehouse of images of an idyllic America, with 5 cent Cokes, Burma Shave signs, and hard-working White People." When naming him 1980 "Man of the Year," Time said, "Intellectually, emotionally, Reagan lives in the past." The article added that the new president specifically believes "the past"-i.e. the The Fifties-"is his future." And as both the magazine and America saw it, that was the highest form of praise- just as it is today.
This all might have gone the way of New Coke if the early-1980s celebration of The Fifties(tm) was happening in isolation. But those Bob Ross paintings of happy Levittown trees and Eisenhower-era blue skies only became salient because the eighties placed them in the American imagination right next to sensationalized images of Woodstock and the Kent State massacre.
Securing that prime psychological real estate meant simultaneously doing to the sixties what was being done to the fifties-only with one twist: Instead of an exercise in idealization, The Sixties(tm) brand that came out of the 1980s was fraught with value judgments downplaying the decade's positives and emphasizing its chaos.
Through politics and mass media, a 1960s of unprecedented social and economic progress was reremembered as a time of tie-dye, not thin ties; burning cities, not men on the moon; LBJ scowls, not JFK glamour; redistributionist War on Poverty "welfare," not universalist Medicare benefits; facial-haired Beatles tripping out to "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," not bowl-cut Beatles chirping out "I Want to Hold Your Hand."
Some of the sixties bashing in the 1980s came from a media that earnestly sought to help Baby Boomers forgive themselves for becoming the buttoned-down adults they had once rebelled against. Some of it was the inadvertent side effect of an accelerating twenty-four-hour news cycle that historian Daniel Marcus notes almost always coupled references to the sixties with quick "shots from Woodstock of young people cavorting in the mud, perhaps discarding various parts of their clothing or stumbling through a drug-induced haze."
And some of it was just the uncontrived laziness of screenwriters and directors.
"Getting a popular fix on the more elusive, more complicated, and far more common phenomena of the sixties is demanding because a lot of it isn't photogenic," says Columbia professor Todd Gitlin, the former leader of Students for a Democratic Society and author of The Sixties. "How easy it was to instead just make films about the wild people, because they are already an action movie, and their conception of themselves is already theatrical."
The revisionism and caricaturing revolved around three key themes, each of which denigrated the sixties as 100 percent awful.
The first was the most political of all-patriotism. Love of country, loyalty to America, national unity-these were memes that Reagan had been using to berate the sixties since his original jump from Hollywood to politics.
During his first campaign for California governor, he ran on a platform pledging to crush the "small minority of beatniks, radicals, and filthy speech advocates" at Berkeley who were protesting the Vietnam War. As president, he railed on nuclear-freeze protesters (like Steven and Elyse Keaton in that first season of Family Ties) as traitors "who would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority."
The media industry of the time followed with hypermilitarist films blaming antiwar activists for America's loss in Vietnam (more on that in the chapter "Operation Red Dawn"), and magazine retrospectives basically implying that sixties social movements were anti-American. As just one example, a 1988 Newsweek article entitled "Decade Shock" cited the fact that "patriotism is back in vogue" as proof that the country had rejected the sixties-the idea being that the sixties was wholly unpatriotic.
But while flag-waving can win elections and modify the political debate, it alone could not mutate the less consciously political, more reptilian lobes of the American cortex. So the 1980s contest for historical memory was also being waged with more refined and demographically targeted methods.
For teenagers, The Fifties(tm) were used to vandalize The Sixties(tm) through a competition between the Beatnik and the Greaser for the mantle of eighties cool. As historian Daniel Marcus recounts, the former became defined as "middle-class, left-wing, intellectual and centered in New York City and San Francisco"-that is, defined as the generic picture of weak, effete, snobbish coffeehouse liberalism first linked to names such as Hart and Dukakis, and now synonymous with Kerry, Streisand, and Soros. Meanwhile, the Greaser came to be known as an urbanized cowboy-a tough guy who "liked cars and girls and rock and roll, was working class, usually non-Jewish 'white ethnic' and decidedly unintellectual."
This hero, whose spirit we still worship in the form of Joe the Plumber and "Bring it on" foreign policy, first stomped the Beatnik through the youth-oriented iconography of the 1980s-think idols such as the Fonz, Bruce Springsteen, and Patrick Swayze; movies like Staying Alive, Rocky, and The Lords of Flatbush; bands such as Bon Jovi, Guns N' Roses, and Poison; and, not to be forgotten, the chintzy clothing fad of ripped jeans and tight white T-shirts.
For adults who experienced the real fifties and sixties, the propaganda had to be a bit less overt to be convincing. So their memories were more subtly shaped with the arrival of a life-form whose mission was to absolve the hippie generation for becoming the compromised and depoliticized elders they had once railed on and protested against.
This seductive species became known as yuppies-short for young urban professionals.
The invasion of the yuppies and all of their requisite tastes, styles, and linguistic inflections officially commenced when Newsweek declared 1984 the Year of the Yuppie, following the publication of The Yuppie Handbook and the presidential campaign of Gary Hart-a New Agey candidate who looked as if he carried a dog-eared copy of the tome around in his breast pocket. A few months later, Adweek quoted executives from the major television networks saying their goal in coming years would be to "chase yuppies with a vengeance"-a prediction that came true, according to Rolling Stone's 1987 report on a series of hit shows that the magazine called Yuppievision. By 1988, a suited Michael J. Fox eating sushi was on the cover of an Esquire magazine issue devoted entirely to "Yupper Classmen." Fittingly, one of the articles noted a poll showing that 60 percent of Americans could identify the word yuppie-almost twice the number that could identify the nation's secretary of state.
While yuppie certainly evoked supermodern feelings in the 1980s, the concept was etymologically rooted in a politicized past. The word made its public debut in a 1983 newspaper column about Jerry Rubin, the leader of the Youth International Party (yippies) who had abandoned his sixties radicalism for the 1980s world of business. His life story was a textbook yuppie parable of sixties rejection: He was a member of the "vanguard of the baby-boom generation," which had "march[ed] through the '60s" but was now "advancing on the 1980s in the back seat of a limousine," as Newsweek put it.
Product details
- Publisher : Ballantine Books; 58780th edition (March 15, 2011)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0345518780
- ISBN-13 : 978-0345518781
- Item Weight : 1.15 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.25 x 1 x 9.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,078,027 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,812 in Popular Culture in Social Sciences
- #23,810 in World History (Books)
- #36,728 in United States History (Books)
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David Sirota is a journalist, TV commentator and nationally syndicated weekly newspaper columnist. His weekly column is based at the San Francisco Chronicle, Portland Oregonian and The Seattle Times and now appears in newspapers with a combined daily circulation of more than 1.6 million readers. He has written three books, the latter of which became the basis for the National Geographic Channel's major miniseries on the 1980s. He has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, Harper's and The Nation. He appears regularly as a guest on MSNBC and Current TV and has been featured on The Colbert Report and NBC's Last Call with Carson Daly. Sirota received a degree in journalism and political science from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. He lives in Denver with his wife, Emily; his son Isaac; and his dog, Monty. Find his website at www.davidsirota.com.
You can schedule Sirota to appear at your book club, civic organization or local bookstore at his website at www.davidsirota.com
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 13, 2014
Full disclosure: I was born in 1991, but I'm obsessed with the culture of the 80s. From the music to the movies to the video games to the fashion, I can't get enough of it. I refer to the 80s as "the pinnacle of Western civilization" when I'm around my friends. So, I had heard about this book from a friend, and just generally was interested in a book that examined the popular culture of the 80s in an insightful way.
Boy, was I wrong. Because this book is the most hyper-liberal, hyper-cynical historical revisionism, anti-American, anti-popular-culture, white-guilt, fallacy ridden crap I have ever read in my life. If you, like me, were not alive in the 80s and want to read this book, DON'T! I can't think of a poorer excuse for cultural commentary than this fallacy-ridden, biased piece of garbage. Mr. Sirota is the modern-day equivalent of Frederic Wertham, the man who led the crusade against the American comic book industry back in the 50s. He is vindictive and bitter about popular culture, and rather than weighing everything both good and bad about the decade, his efforts to link various cultural issues to the political realities of the day are borderline paranoid conspiracy. Mr. Sirota is about as qualified to a write a book on 80s popular culture as he is to write the jokes on Popsicle sticks. Remember, Sirota is the man who wrote a Salon.com article in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing called "Let's hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American." In his writings for the website he constantly speaks of "white, male privilege" despite that he too is a white male. His headlines often feature accusatory, angry rhetoric like "Take that, D.C. gasbags!" and "Good riddance, plutocrats!" He is the worst type of liberal, the worst type of cultural analyst, and the worst type of American author.
What I thought were going to be fair, very open interpretations of my favorite decade and how it affects modern popular culture and society were very biased, hyper-liberal and giving the reader only the facts that suit the author's claims. I thought I was also going to get a "decade-in-recap" but what I got can be called unfair at best, anti-American and anti-popular culture at worst. It strikes me as something very judgmental, from a very "I'm-liberal-and-everyone-else-should-be-too" perspective, and only seeing the world through a very cynical keyhole instead of opening the door and examining everything.
For example, in my film class I took in college last year, we talked about movies like Commando, Rambo, Die Hard, etc. from the perspective of "hard bodies" (based on the book of the same name by Susan Jeffords), which is the idea that the Reagan era was about strong, masculine men (in the American military, business, etc.) defeating weaker men (nerds, geeks, yuppies, etc.) It's a pretty well established theory that's made its way into mainstream film criticism of the 80s, and one I think is worth analyzing (think about how we still, to a certain extent, demonize "weak bodies" like Mark Zuckerberg or Edward Snowden). The author of "Back to our Future" doesn't want to talk about that, but rather how someone who played Atari and watched Rambo in the 80s is a gun-toting, America-loving, beer-guzzling, Palin-electing redneck. I think it's a valid point to talk about things like GI Joe and Top Gun influencing military recruits, but I don't think the situation is as bad as soldiers in Afghanistan still carrying their GI Joes into battle, which is the way he makes it out to be.
Also, some of the points he makes are okay. In talking about the big government chapter, he mentions that the villain in Ghostbusters is the EPA agent Walter Peck. The anti-government aspects of Ghostbusters have been well noted by a lot of critics. But then he says that E.T. is also anti-government...? Umm, has he seen E.T....? Because the whole premise of the movie is that it's childhood vs. adulthood, a modern Peter Pan (E.T., like Peter, comes from the stars and can fly). Kids protect and love E.T., the adults want to experiment on him. I GUESS you could interpret that as anti-government, but he just treats it as the definitive interpretation and... it's just not. I guess that's my biggest problem: he treats all his interpretations as definitive. He goes on and on about the whitewashing of the politics of race in the 80s, how black icons like Michael Jordan and Bill Cosby were essentially neutered in not talking about race. But he doesn't give equal credence to the rise of hip-hop, or Spike Lee's films, or the comedy of Richard Pryer and Eddie Murphy, and how open and radical they were in talking about race, and how transformative that was for society. When your limited perspective wants to make bad guys out of conservatives instead of looking at all issues equally (and remember, this is supposed to be cultural, not political, commentary), it just comes off as biased, poorly researched, and wrong.
Also, his points at times contradict each other. For example, he says Top Gun is serious enough to influence a generation of young men apparently, but not serious enough so that he can easily dismiss it as "brainless entertainment" or "just a movie." Well, which is it!?!?
Moreover, he skips over very important cultural touchstones of the 80s because they don't validate the points he's trying to make. For example, he goes on and on and on about revisionism of the Vietnam War through movies like Rambo, but fails to mention that the Best Picture Oscar and the 3rd highest grossing movie of the year Top Gun came out was Platoon: a gritty Vietnam tale from someone (Oliver Stone) who actually fought in the conflict. This was followed up by Stanley Kubrick choosing to do another important Vietnam flick, "Full Metal Jacket." Sure, Rambo was trying to change was Vietnam was about, but there were plenty of other movies in the era (also Apocalypse Now, Deer Hunter, etc.) that tried to reflect on Vietnam and not revise history. He also talks a lot about violence in 80s movies, but the thing was that a lot of the time the violence was very self-aware. Take Robocop. It's supposed to be a satire of a lot of 80s culture (over-the-top violence, corporate culture, etc.), but if you just watch it on the surface, it's just another dumb action flick. I'm sure Sirota would point to Robocop as another example of the "rogue hero" or anti-government propaganda or what have you, but that's undermining what the film is really about, which is critiquing that type of culture, environment and society that enabled a character like Robocop.
Finally, a lot of his arguments are liberal fantasy conspiracies. This includes that corporate America is brainwashing our children to fight for America's future wars. While his points about the change in how the military is regarded post-Vietnam are pretty well researched and rationalized for the most part, all the major points of his book seem to lay blame at the liberals favorite targets: conservative culture, corporate America, and privileged white people. I view myself as center-left, but his perspectives are baffling to me personally as someone who studies and likes a lot of popular culture. The worst conspiracy he seems to imply is the chapter on the cultural ramifications of "The Cosby Show". He goes on his aloof, detached, snarky ivory tower know-it-all stance in proclaiming "The Cosby Show" to be some sort of white propaganda, but doesn't have the courage to ask one, every-day average black person that he claims to love so much about their own personal reaction and experience with the show and its immense popularity. That rings of hypocrisy to me. But honestly, anyone who will go so far as to compare the character of Lando Calrissian in "Star Wars" to a modern-day minstrel show has a lot of issues that need to be worked out...
I'm sure there's a lot more I could say. If you're a hyper-liberal and want a Rachel-Maddow-esque rant that fits your worldview about how everything liberals despise about the 2010s came about in the 80s, who am I to stop you from buying this book? But if you want an interesting cultural commentary about the 80s, this is not it. This is biased, fallacy ridden, accusatory, bitter, cynical, and just comes off as rather shallow. You can spend your hard-earned dollars on much better books than this.
Boy, was I wrong. Because this book is the most hyper-liberal, hyper-cynical historical revisionism, anti-American, anti-popular-culture, white-guilt, fallacy ridden crap I have ever read in my life. If you, like me, were not alive in the 80s and want to read this book, DON'T! I can't think of a poorer excuse for cultural commentary than this fallacy-ridden, biased piece of garbage. Mr. Sirota is the modern-day equivalent of Frederic Wertham, the man who led the crusade against the American comic book industry back in the 50s. He is vindictive and bitter about popular culture, and rather than weighing everything both good and bad about the decade, his efforts to link various cultural issues to the political realities of the day are borderline paranoid conspiracy. Mr. Sirota is about as qualified to a write a book on 80s popular culture as he is to write the jokes on Popsicle sticks. Remember, Sirota is the man who wrote a Salon.com article in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing called "Let's hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American." In his writings for the website he constantly speaks of "white, male privilege" despite that he too is a white male. His headlines often feature accusatory, angry rhetoric like "Take that, D.C. gasbags!" and "Good riddance, plutocrats!" He is the worst type of liberal, the worst type of cultural analyst, and the worst type of American author.
What I thought were going to be fair, very open interpretations of my favorite decade and how it affects modern popular culture and society were very biased, hyper-liberal and giving the reader only the facts that suit the author's claims. I thought I was also going to get a "decade-in-recap" but what I got can be called unfair at best, anti-American and anti-popular culture at worst. It strikes me as something very judgmental, from a very "I'm-liberal-and-everyone-else-should-be-too" perspective, and only seeing the world through a very cynical keyhole instead of opening the door and examining everything.
For example, in my film class I took in college last year, we talked about movies like Commando, Rambo, Die Hard, etc. from the perspective of "hard bodies" (based on the book of the same name by Susan Jeffords), which is the idea that the Reagan era was about strong, masculine men (in the American military, business, etc.) defeating weaker men (nerds, geeks, yuppies, etc.) It's a pretty well established theory that's made its way into mainstream film criticism of the 80s, and one I think is worth analyzing (think about how we still, to a certain extent, demonize "weak bodies" like Mark Zuckerberg or Edward Snowden). The author of "Back to our Future" doesn't want to talk about that, but rather how someone who played Atari and watched Rambo in the 80s is a gun-toting, America-loving, beer-guzzling, Palin-electing redneck. I think it's a valid point to talk about things like GI Joe and Top Gun influencing military recruits, but I don't think the situation is as bad as soldiers in Afghanistan still carrying their GI Joes into battle, which is the way he makes it out to be.
Also, some of the points he makes are okay. In talking about the big government chapter, he mentions that the villain in Ghostbusters is the EPA agent Walter Peck. The anti-government aspects of Ghostbusters have been well noted by a lot of critics. But then he says that E.T. is also anti-government...? Umm, has he seen E.T....? Because the whole premise of the movie is that it's childhood vs. adulthood, a modern Peter Pan (E.T., like Peter, comes from the stars and can fly). Kids protect and love E.T., the adults want to experiment on him. I GUESS you could interpret that as anti-government, but he just treats it as the definitive interpretation and... it's just not. I guess that's my biggest problem: he treats all his interpretations as definitive. He goes on and on about the whitewashing of the politics of race in the 80s, how black icons like Michael Jordan and Bill Cosby were essentially neutered in not talking about race. But he doesn't give equal credence to the rise of hip-hop, or Spike Lee's films, or the comedy of Richard Pryer and Eddie Murphy, and how open and radical they were in talking about race, and how transformative that was for society. When your limited perspective wants to make bad guys out of conservatives instead of looking at all issues equally (and remember, this is supposed to be cultural, not political, commentary), it just comes off as biased, poorly researched, and wrong.
Also, his points at times contradict each other. For example, he says Top Gun is serious enough to influence a generation of young men apparently, but not serious enough so that he can easily dismiss it as "brainless entertainment" or "just a movie." Well, which is it!?!?
Moreover, he skips over very important cultural touchstones of the 80s because they don't validate the points he's trying to make. For example, he goes on and on and on about revisionism of the Vietnam War through movies like Rambo, but fails to mention that the Best Picture Oscar and the 3rd highest grossing movie of the year Top Gun came out was Platoon: a gritty Vietnam tale from someone (Oliver Stone) who actually fought in the conflict. This was followed up by Stanley Kubrick choosing to do another important Vietnam flick, "Full Metal Jacket." Sure, Rambo was trying to change was Vietnam was about, but there were plenty of other movies in the era (also Apocalypse Now, Deer Hunter, etc.) that tried to reflect on Vietnam and not revise history. He also talks a lot about violence in 80s movies, but the thing was that a lot of the time the violence was very self-aware. Take Robocop. It's supposed to be a satire of a lot of 80s culture (over-the-top violence, corporate culture, etc.), but if you just watch it on the surface, it's just another dumb action flick. I'm sure Sirota would point to Robocop as another example of the "rogue hero" or anti-government propaganda or what have you, but that's undermining what the film is really about, which is critiquing that type of culture, environment and society that enabled a character like Robocop.
Finally, a lot of his arguments are liberal fantasy conspiracies. This includes that corporate America is brainwashing our children to fight for America's future wars. While his points about the change in how the military is regarded post-Vietnam are pretty well researched and rationalized for the most part, all the major points of his book seem to lay blame at the liberals favorite targets: conservative culture, corporate America, and privileged white people. I view myself as center-left, but his perspectives are baffling to me personally as someone who studies and likes a lot of popular culture. The worst conspiracy he seems to imply is the chapter on the cultural ramifications of "The Cosby Show". He goes on his aloof, detached, snarky ivory tower know-it-all stance in proclaiming "The Cosby Show" to be some sort of white propaganda, but doesn't have the courage to ask one, every-day average black person that he claims to love so much about their own personal reaction and experience with the show and its immense popularity. That rings of hypocrisy to me. But honestly, anyone who will go so far as to compare the character of Lando Calrissian in "Star Wars" to a modern-day minstrel show has a lot of issues that need to be worked out...
I'm sure there's a lot more I could say. If you're a hyper-liberal and want a Rachel-Maddow-esque rant that fits your worldview about how everything liberals despise about the 2010s came about in the 80s, who am I to stop you from buying this book? But if you want an interesting cultural commentary about the 80s, this is not it. This is biased, fallacy ridden, accusatory, bitter, cynical, and just comes off as rather shallow. You can spend your hard-earned dollars on much better books than this.
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Dan Murrell
4.0 out of 5 stars
Opens your eyes to many interesting concepts!
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on May 28, 2015
From your favorite movie, TV show etc. this book opens your eyes to many interesting comparisons from political and governmental areas to our everyday popular entertainment from the 50's to the present! Very enjoyable read!
