The ageing process may be gradual but the realisation that it is fully under way is like a large penny (or shilling, depending on your age) dropping with an unwelcome clang. One morning, there is simply a creased saddlebag staring back at you from the mirror where your vibrant youthful visage used to be.
A similar experience happens in the cinema when movies about events or eras that are still fresh in the mind begin to be packaged as history. To anyone in their 40s or 50s, seeing Richard Linklater’s new film Everybody Wants Some!!, set in Texas over three days in 1980, is likely to feel as though it was made yesterday. The film opens on a shot of an in-car tape deck; on the back seat there is a box of vinyl records. Behind the wheel is Jake (Blake Jenner), a wide-eyed college freshman. He and his team-mates wear too-short shorts and too-high knee-socks on the baseball field. They blow-dry their hair before hitting the disco in extravagantly patterned shirts that could induce a migraine at 40 paces.
Linklater knows how to travel back in time without either rose-tinted nostalgia or 21st-century superiority. His previous film, Boyhood, was shot piecemeal over more than a decade but it resisted at every point the urge to sentimentalise its young star, Ellar Coltrane, who aged on screen from six to 18.
So it’s no surprise that Everybody Wants Some!! contains little discernible sniggering at the way we were. It depicts the fashions, haircuts, lingo, iconography and music in forensic detail. It has been designed with the same degree of authenticity that might be expected from, say, a Regency costume drama. This will be striking to viewers who are just starting to realise that what they think of as adolescence now qualifies as a period piece. In a strange way, it might have been easier to bear if Linklater were laughing at the 1980s. Played entirely straight, without any insulating layer of irony, it is borderline eerie, like walking into a mock-up of your childhood bedroom.
When cinemagoers in 1977 saw second world war movies such as A Bridge Too Far or Cross of Iron, there was a smaller distance (30-odd years) between their lives and those of the characters on screen than there is between audiences now and the heroes of Everybody Wants Some!! Of course, time is not the only way to measure such a chasm and it would be disingenuous to suggest that life in 1977, a banner year for punk and disco, had much in common with the second world war.
It is also important to remember that pop culture now is part of a continuum that didn’t exist in the last century. No 1970s DJ would have been playing old 78s by Vera Lynn or George Formby, so the past felt that much further away. Today’s nostalgia market has smudged the divisions between the generations, so that every musical genre is now instantly available. Thanks to the rise of streaming services and nostalgic radio stations, it can be 1980 or 1975 or 1962 at any moment. If My Sharona by the Knack or Rapper’s Delight by the Sugarhill Gang don’t sound like blasts from the past when they pop up in Everybody Wants Some!!, that can only be because they can be routinely heard on radio stations such Heart or Magic, or reruns of Top of the Pops 2. The past isn’t what it used to be.
But it would be foolish to pretend that Everybody Wants Some!! won’t resemble an alien world to younger viewers. The question of what teenagers did before the internet and mobile phones is answered here. They played ping-pong and pinball, Space Invaders and Twister. They looked through one another’s record collections and had conversations. They made eye contact.
In Hot Tub Time Machine, a 2010 comedy about a group of friends who travel back to their 1980s adolescence, the young nephew of one of the middle-aged heroes asks how a boy in those pre-texting days would make contact with a girl to whom he was attracted. Well, it is explained, he could have sought her out and spoken to her. “That sounds exhausting,” he grimaces.
That film, which wrung easy laughs from feather-cuts and leg-warmers, was not the first example in modern cinema of the 1980s being sold as an exotic attraction. Some of the same cast and crew had already looked back fondly at the decade in Grosse Pointe Blank, a 1997 black comedy about a hitman attending his high-school reunion. It conjured up the 1980s by using cuts cool (the Jam, the Specials) or cheesy (Nena’s 99 Red Balloons).
It’s no coincidence that cinema began packaging the 1980s as entertainment in the late 1990s, around the time when thirtysomething writers, directors and studio executives who grew up in that decade were coming to prominence. A whole generation was ripe to have its nostalgia exploited, just as the dreams of idealistic 1960s babyboomers had been raked over in early-1980s films such as The Big Chill. Now it was the turn of the Yuppies and the Valley Girls and the moonwalkers in Romy and Michele’s High-School Reunion and The Wedding Singer. Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie about the porn industry, showed a darker side to the decade. At the story’s halfway point –a New Year’s Eve party marking the start of 1980 – there is a murder and a suicide that herald a shift of tone from the carefree to the cruel. To anyone raised in the 1980s under the threat of nuclear war, and in a world dominated by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan,, it would be hard to say that this feeling of dread wasn’t as integral to the decade as sweatbands and deely boppers.
When a British film-maker revisits the 1980s there tends to be some political component. Pride highlighted the unlikely alliance between striking Welsh miners and gay rights activists while Billy Elliot used the miners’ strike as a backdrop to its Cinderella story, though it confused matters by peppering the soundtrack with 1970s glam rock. Mike Leigh’s Career Girls moved between two parallel time-lines, one in the 1980s, the other in the late 1990s, which facilitated some acerbic commentary on how Britain had changed in the interim. Surveying London from the vantage point of a stockbroker’s Docklands flat, one character sighs: “I bet on a clear day you can see the class struggle from here.”
US cinema has gone fairly easy on the 1980s, preferring to mine the period for its comic gold than its sense of global dread. One exception is Andrew Bujalski’s creepily atmospheric 2013 comedy Computer Chess, which concerns the launch in the early 1980s of a computer program capable of beating a human competitor at the game. Bujalski shot the whole picture in black and white on the sort of video cameras that would have been available when the story took place. The Chilean director Pablo Larraín made No, about the 1988 plebiscite held to establish whether General Pinochet would remain in power, on the U-matic magnetic tape prevalent in the 1980s, giving the images a frazzled integrity.
It’s certainly one way of avoiding a common mistake in cinema. Whether the setting is the Vietnam war or the Age of Enlightenment, period movies tend to treat their characters as though they knew they were living in the past all along. But they didn’t. Or I should say, in light of Everybody Wants Some!!, that we didn’t. As far as we were concerned, we were living in the present. We still are – aren’t we?
Everybody Wants Some!! is released in Britain on 13 May
