World War Three was on everyone's mind back in 1983, and so it is that we've come full circle in forty years. No less a luminary than Pope Francis believes that the long-dreaded conflagration has already begun, and he's by no means alone.
The Day After was the most-watched TV movie in history and depicted a worldwide thermonuclear exchange, which everyone seemed to be worried about, right up until aired on November 20, 1983. I remember nuclear war being much less of a concern after it aired, as if the movie somehow broke the spell.
The Day After got all the attention, but this low-budget film worked the same vein with a more intimate focus. Meaning it was a lot grimmer and depressing because it felt a lot more real. Particularly if you're a parent.
Our current miserable excuses for elites - most of them - are too brainwashed and power-mad to remember that technological failures nearly emptied all the world's missile silos forty years ago, on more than one occasion.
The Dead Zone: I’ve written about this film before and don’t have a lot to add, other than it’s got a pre-cringe Stephen King story and its directed by the always-great-except-Existenz David Cronenberg. It stars a pre-meme Christopher Walken and boasts great performances by Brooke Adams and Martin Sheen.
World War Three is a major subplot - or maguffin, perhaps - so it all fits neatly into the late '83 zeitgeist.
The film seems to exist in a weird and timeless world of its own, and its depiction of a reluctant clairvoyant feels strangely evergreen. And Sheen’s Greg Stillson gives off major Gavin Newsom vibes which should chill the blood of any sentient being.
Brainstorm: Another Christopher Walken MKULTRAdjacent picture from 1983, this time directed by 2001 effects guru Douglas Trumbull. Like Dead Zone, it seems to exist in a numinous space outside its own reality. I reckon Natalie Wood’s suspicious drowning death has something to do with that, as does its ostensible anticipation of the perpetual white elephant men call “virtual reality.”
You know, the white elephant that's already drained 25 billion buckaroos from Facebook's coffers.
What Brainstorm actually presages is broken reality, as does Dead Zone. All the more so seeing that the Dead Zone TV series credits used a Jeff Buckley song in its opening credits. You see, once you start playing with these loaded themes, Fraseology is going to pop up somewhere. It’s as inevitable as the tides.
I should reiterate that Trumbull got involved with Esalen while making this movie, at the very same time the Institute was under the thumb (and cleavage) of Jenny O'Connor and the Council of Nine channeling cult.
Speaking of British Intelligence...
Never Say Never Again: No one remembers or cares about this movie anymore, but it was a pretty big deal at the time, seeing it had Sean Connery playing Bond for the first time in over a decade. The Roger Moore franchise was still running, so I’m still not sure what kind of maneuvering produced this film. But I do remembering seeing it at the theater with my boy Smutman (AKA the late David Aronson of Jerry's Kids fame) and both of us both growing rather bored and frustrated by what was a weirdly low-energy and overlong potboiler (2 hrs 15 mins).
Everyone just seemed to be going through the motions, aside from the radiant Barbara Carrera, who tore into her role with gleeful abandon. But it features early appearances by Kim Basinger and Rowan Atkinson, so it may be worth satisfying your curiosity.
Cold War dramas were on the wane at the time, paradoxically. That certainly took the bloom off of Bond's bush, and ensured the underperformance of flicks like...
The Osterman Weekend: My dad used to read Robert Ludlum novels, because that's what guys did with their spare time back then. I used to read some of the same stuff he read as well, but I hated Ludlum’s cringe-ass titles so intensely I refused to crack any of them open. Still, I saw this back in the 80s on HBO or something and didn’t hate it as much as I’d expected to. But it’s still pretty bleak. I think the only reason I watched it was because it had Rutger Hauer, and I was a pretty big Blade Runner fan at the time.
It was Sam Peckinpah’s last picture and it has all the gore and nastiness you’d expect. It left me feeling like I’d spent an hour and change struggling to free myself from a pricker bush, so I reckon Peckinpah would judge that a mission accomplished.
Scarface: This bloody Brian DePalma blowout was highly controversial back in the day, but it all seems quaint and nostalgic at a time when narco-terrorist gangs are given to livestreaming their human sacrifice rituals to Santa Muerte. But it should be noted that the need to launder drug money fired a lot of economy activity in the Eighties, not the least was Hollywood movies.
It should also be noted that Scarface marked the transition of Al Pacino from earnest actor into gleeful scenery chewer. He still could pull off a great performance when the spirit moved, but he seemed to be playing cartoon characters most of the time (Scent of a Woman, Devil's Advocate, Insomnia etc) thereafter.
Rumble Fish: Similarly, a lot of people have said Francis Ford Coppola lost his marbles after making Apocalypse Now and a study of his filmography since doesn’t exactly argue against that. 1983 saw Coppola directing S.E. Hinton’s classic YA novel The Outsiders and scoring a big hit, but then immediately erasing the box office mojo he'd garnered with this weird and arty take on Hinton’s Rumble Fish.
It’s not a bad film at all - it’s quite highly regarded in some cineaste circles - but it’s almost militantly anti-commercial with its black and white cinematography and weird Nuevo Wavo™ score by Stewart Copeland. But it has Matt Dillon, Dennis Hopper, Diana Scarwid, Nic Cage and a luscious, nubile Diane Lane, so how bad could it be?
Risky Business: Aside from Rumble Fish, there was a deluge of films in 1983 trying to capture the emerging GenX market and most of them were truly wretched.
I remember sneaking into this film with the boys (we hardly ever paid for anything, especially movies) expecting it to be as terrible as Class, My Tutor, Porky’s II and the rest of the mind-rotting trash trying to cash in on Fast Times at Ridgemont High’s success. I think we were all pretty shocked when it turned out to be a really good film, one that put Joey Pants, Curtis Armstrong and Bronson Pinchot on the radar, and Tom Cruise and Rebecca DeMornay on the road to stardom.
As to the soundtrack, Tangerine Dream didn’t score every film made in 1983, but it sure as heck felt like they did.
But don't get too comfortable, GenXers. The Empire was about to strike back -- and strike back hard -- with...
The Big Chill: This wasn’t just a movie, it was a declaration of total war. The Boomers were serving all us punkass GenXers notice that they had absolutely no intention of ever loosening their intractable death-grip on the culture, and the film’s golden oldie soundtrack unleashed a never-ending deluge of Boomer Über Alles nostalgia that is only now beginning to abate.
Not long after The Big Chill, MTV kicked off Closet Classics, which showed old videos and clips of Aquarian heroes like Donovan and Jefferson Airplane. And the Boomer revanchist counterstrike would see Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, George Harrison and The Grateful Dead put in extremely heavy rotation.
Millennials and Zoomers love to bust on Boomers, but they have no idea the pure, unvarnished contempt and dismissal that GenX had to put up with from their elders. And it wasn't on the Internet - it was every day, in the flesh.
Speaking of the yippies turned yuppies, nothing floats a Boomer's boat like "space travel" (sic), so let's get to our next entry...
The Right Stuff: This was based on the Tom Wolfe novel and featured a murderer's row of future superstars like Ed Harris, Barbara Hershey, Jeff Goldblum, Scott Wilson, Harry Shearer and Dennis Quaid. It was also the goddamn dullest, most tedious, most emotionless pile of Boomerbait I ever saw in my life, which is saying a lot.
I don't remember if I made through the whole picture, because absolutely nothing about it was remotely memorable in any way, shape or form.
That's not just me being cranky: it was a huge flop and actually bankrupted the company that produced it. Even all the praise heaped on it by critics -- almost certainly the byproduct of ma$$ive payola -- could save The Right Stuff from the dustbin of history.
Moreover, Tom Wolfe -- and even the astronauts themselves -- hated it. So I win.
Rear Window: A far more effective nostalgia blast came when this Hitchcock classic was re-released in the fall of 1983. I saw it with my boy Gregg at an old school theater called the Cameo, which was the perfect place to see it. We got high as fuck before seeing it, because it was a day ending in “let’s get high as fuck.”
It was an experience - you really felt like you were sitting in that wheelchair with Jimmy Stewart. Gregg and both gasped when Grace Kelly came on screen, and just 'cuz we were high as fuck. Definitely a movie best seen on the big screen.
Speaking of all-time screen sirens, there's also...
Possession: For some reason this flick totally escaped my attention back in the day. In fact, it escaped my attention totally until I started putting this piece together. Which makes me sad because I love Isabelle Adjani, whom I consider one of the greatest beauties of the silver screen. I need to see this, it may warrant further discussion. Definitely looks like my kind of jam.
Speaking of screen sirens, let's see what Barbi Benton was up to in the Month that Broke Reality..
Deathstalker: I somehow thought this was another Italian Conan knockoff but it’s actually an Argentinian Conan knockoff, which is the next best thing. Again, another movie that escaped my attention at the time, but not a movie I ever need to see. The trailer tells me the whole story.
I’m past the age of ironically watching Grade Z knockoff/schlock movies. I think the entire world is.
Don't forget to click on that Moon there to enroll for the fall semester at the SSI. For as little as three dollars a month you can join in the most immersive and elaborate database of Synchromysticism anywhere in the world. And it's growing by the day.
You know the old saying: Come for the scholarship, stay for the fellowship.
Don't forget that The Endless American Midnight is finally available on Kindle. A lot of folks have asked me to do so and I'm happy to say that their ship has finally come in.You can get it here in the US, here in the UK, here in Canada, here in Australia and here in Germany.
