Why we love the '80s

T

hough it takes a bit of sim­plification, most decades are fairly easy to charac­terize, especially since Americans often conform to the characterization and wind up turning decades into what they are supposed to be. However they began, the Roaring Twenties, with their flappers and Charlestons and Stutz Bearcats and Pro­hibition booze, really did roar (text continued on page 158)

EDWIN MEESE

As the 75th attorney gen­eral of the U.S., Ed Meese served as the Reagan admin­istration's moral paladin. The Meese Commission pur­ported to study the effects of pornography on Ameri­can society. Playing to the long-standing repressions of the religious right, the com­mission's report—published in 1986—revived previously discredited arguments that porn harmed the social fab­ric. Meese resigned from frfflro in iq««

AIDS

The first case of acquired immunodeficiency syn­drome was reported in 1981. What began as a plague among gay men and intravenous drug users went on to kill 25 million people. Sex became perilous, and lovers became wary.

HIP-HOP

The 1980s saw hip-hop move out of the South Bronx and into the mainstream. Grandmaster Flash's "The Message" hit the streets in 1982 and altered the course of music. Urban culture in the decade was defined by alienation and anomie, with the dual epi­demics of AIDS and crack cocaine contributing to an overwhelming sense of frustration. With its graffiti art, break dancing and rapping, hip-hop set forth a new Lindependence and defiance.

(continued Jrom page 132) until the crash. The soiiinaiiibulant 1950s were overtly dull. The 1960s were loose and loopy; the 1970s, narcissistic. But the 1980s? The 1980s defy that sort of thumb­nail description. It was the most schizoid of decades—both boom and bust, both liber­tine and churchy, both full of bluster and full of doubt—and in retrospect it seems less a distinct era than a 10-year exercise in willful obliviousness manifested largely as hyper­bolic rhetoric and gaudy exhibitionism. With all this posturing and profligacy, along with a heavy dose of prudery, one might as well say that what we most love about the 1980s is that, thank God, they finally ended.

Of course, to be fair, it wasn't all bad. There were Magic, Larry and Michael, the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, the gull-winged DeLorean, Ben & ferry's, young Christie Brinkley, Cindy Crawford, Kile Macpher-son, U2, Prince, Tom Petty, Blondie, Tom Cruise, Robert I)e Niro, Meryl Streep, David Lynch, Oliver Stone, Michael J. Fox, Rose-anne Barr, Sam Kinison and Hulk Ilogan and the reemergence of professional wres­tling, whose vaunting served as the perfect bleat for an age that was less a time of quiet navel-gazing than of noisy chest beating—a time when Americans, like wrestlers, needed to insist they were the best.

It is no great mystery why the 1980s seemed so aggressively, strenuously upbeat. They had begun in the demoralization of the late 1970s, with long lines at the gas station thanks to Middle East oil price manipula­tions, a faltering economy lacerated by high inflation and high unemployment (it was called "stagflation"), the Cold War reignited by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Americans held hostage in Iran. Confidence had crumbled. In July 1979 President Jimmy Carter retreated to Camp David and then emerged to declare what everyone already knew: Basically, America was fucked. So was he. Ronald Reagan, who Americans worried was too extreme for the country, galloped to victory in the 1980 presidential election, and thus began what some have called the age of Reagan—an era of optimism.

But the era of Reagan didn't open tri­umphantly either. Though he tried to boost sagging American confidence by giving national pep talks like a parent to a bullied child, the country promptly fell into the worst recession since the Great Depression, with unemployment rising to 9.7 percent. Gradu­ally America pulled out, but the reaction to the rebound was anything but gradual. After years of fecklessness, the country suddenly seemed giddy—one of the greatest cultural turnarounds in modern American history. The age of Reagan became a new gilded age that minted millionaires and billionaires and celebrated wealth as if it were a mat­ter of Calvinist selection. The new heroes were what Tom Wolfe, in The Bonfire of the Vanities, his incisive and best-selling novel that dissected the era, would famously call "masters of the universe"—investment bank­ers who accumulated untold millions. The new villains were the welfare queens whom Reagan decried for their Cadillacs bought,

so he said, on the government dole. Kven before the boom, two of the most popu­lar television programs were Dallas and Dynasty, which allowed Americans a peek at the abundance.

It was a decade of surfaces, of high aesthetics, of fashion over values, of stim­ulation rather than feeling. In some ways the decade's style was set by MTV. Its rapid-fire editing, sleek images, pulsing sound and teasing sexuality would all leach into the larger culture. Miami Vice, one of the most successful and easily the most stylish television program of the period, was alleg­edly sold on this simple pitch: "MTV and cops." The most acclaimed designer of the decade was Giorgio Armani with his clean power suits. The most popular musical art­ist was Michael Jackson with his tricked-out dance sound. The most successful film pro­ducers of the decade were Don Simpson and Jcny Bruckheimer, the team that specialized in such slick, fast-paced, high-octane sexy entertainment as Flashdance and Top Gun. And it was another marker of the age that the duo hired TV-commercial directors like Adrian Lyne and Tony Scott, thus certifying the convergence of the world of ads and the world of movies, of Pavlovian triggers and entertainment. Everything now seemed fast and loud and shiny. It was a world of ice, and there was no traction.

To some this was a partial restoration of the 1960s, since that decade also had its indulgences—its drugs and its easy sexuality—and since it also emphasized plea­sure and gratification. But the differences were more striking than the similarities and more instructive of what 1980s materialism really signified, which may have been a reac­tion against the 1960s, not a rehabilitation of them. It may even have been a reaction by the same people, now 20 years older. In the 1960s pleasure was a challenge to the

Establishment and to its free-market capi­talism. In the 1980s pleasure was a product of that Establishment and a testament to it. The 1960s were a decade of young people who had no desire to "make it"; the 1980s were a decade of adults who were enjoy­ing the fruits of having made it. The 1960s were a decade of introspection; the 1980s a decade of consumption. The 1960s were an expression of freedom; the 1980s were an expression of extravagance. In many ways, enjoying oneself in the 1980s was less important than showing everyone else that one had the wherewithal to enjoy oneself— the money and the power to do so. In the 1960s no one felt the need to show off. In the 1980s, everyone did.

But for all the gilded-age excess, for all the cold surfaces—perhaps even because of them—there was another competing force in the decade that underscored the cultural schizophrenia. That force was moralism. Indeed, the most materialistic of ages was also among the most moralistic. While Don­ald Trump occupied one extreme, a moral commissar like the fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority occu­pied the other. And if this was the era of Studio 54 and its cocaine-wasted nights, it was also the era of Liberty University and its fresh-faced assertion of family values. In short, it was a high time but a strident one, too—a time when the religious right attempted to commandeer the culture.

Yet as radically different as the self-indulgence and the religiosity were, each may have emanated from the same source and for the same reasons. They operated as a balm for and a protection against something else that lurked in the 1980s and couldn't quite be exorcised: a sense of threat. The masters of the universe lived big to inure themselves to it. The moral com­missars spoke big to challenge it. (Afew, like

the religious zealots Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, lived big and spoke big.) Neither side could deny that so much in the decade was malfunctioning, so much beneath the high times and high-blown moral rhetoric seemed dangerous, and as much as it was the beginning of a new era, it was the epi­taph for an old one that for all its shaggy chaos had seemed to be better.

The decade had scarcely begun when John Lcnnon, one of the leading avatars of the 1960s, was assassinated. It was a sym­bolic moment that closed the door on that decade once and for all and with it the rem­nants of 1960s idealism and hope. In politics it was, as Reagan put it in his 1984 reelec­tion campaign, "morning in America," a time of reawakening. But tensions ran deep, especially racial tensions, and the macho preening could be dangerous, as in Cen­tral America—where the U.S. government supported quasi-fascist movements—when it wasn't preposterous, as in the invasion of the tiny island of Grenada. The economy would roar, but it would create one of the largest disparities in the nation's history, between the richest Americans and eveiy-onc else. Drug use was rampant, but they weren't the happy stoner drugs of the 1960s and 1970s that made everyone mellower. The drugs of choice now were PCI' ecstasy and crack—drugs that made everyone edg­ier, more paranoid.

You could see it too in 1980s attitudes toward sexuality. Perhaps nothing since the advent of pi ay boy had as profound an effect on sex as the outbreak of AIDS did early in the decade—the first heightening the sense of sexual liberation, the second practically destroying it. Both explicitly and implicitly, AIDS changed everything. Michael Jack­son, who may have been the central male sex icon of the decade, introduced the idea of faux sexuality—sexuality without the hint of sex. And the female icons were not voluptuous, smart blondes like Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield in the 1950s, who betrayed that decade's squareness, or tough beauties like Raquel Welch and Eliza­beth Taylor in the 1960s, or disarming and unaffected kittens like Charlie's Angels in the 1970s. Rather they were surreptitious sirens like Kathleen Turner in Body Heal or Kim Basinger in The Natural or Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction—slinky femmes fatalcs who promised pleasure only to break the prom­ise. In the 1980s sex was often a killer.

Still, the preeminent sex symbol of the decade was almost certainly Madonna, who was no killer. If anything, she was a parody of the sexual temptress. She arrived on the New York club scene as a waif in dishabille, crooning half jokily that she wanted to feel "like a virgin" in a decade when virginity was obsolete. She rapidly transformed her­self into a golden-gowned "material girl," proclaiming her sex wasn't for free and it wasn't for fun. It was a commercial transac­tion just like everything else in the decade. It was Madonna's uncanny knack for using herself as a commodity—rather than let­ting anyone else use her—that made her in many ways the decade's muse. While always winking to let us in on her scheme, she demonstrated in her naked ambition that the decade's avalanche of money, its cold

calculations, its emotional detachment and its obsession with appearances and status were all comical. And though one doesn't usually think of her this way, it was also Madonna the moralist who underscored that the 1980s were a decade with plenty of show but not much heart.

Madonna wasn't the only one who under­stood that the decade's schizophrenia was as much a function of the culture's outward bravado and inner vacuity as of its money and moralism. These undercurrents of a society with a bold facade and not much but corruption underneath would surface as the major theme for some of the decade's most important artists and in some of its most important works of art. Bruce Springsteen began the decade with his long lament The Rixier and then released Born in the USA., with its title song's biting commentary on American patriotism (the irony of which many missed) and its account of the anger and sadness beneath the Reagan bromides. Then he moved on to Tunnel of Love and

its signature song, "Brilliant Disguise," in which he addresses the truth under the sur­face with the recurrent plaint "Is that you, baby, or just a brilliant disguise?" It was the question of the age.

In The Bonfire of the Vanities Tom Wolfe not only gives the decade's buccaneers a name but also examines its materialistic values and concludes that even his money-besotted pro­tagonist understands, if only vaguely, that something has gone wrong in America—-that money lust has perverted everything. Similarly, Bret Easton Ellis, in /.<;.« Than Zero, a novel that would serve as a kind of 1980s Creat Cabby, shows a generation lost and adrift in drugs and money and sex, but joylessly so, because nothing is connected to any emotional truth.

In movies, the decade's first best picture Oscar was awarded to Robert Redford's Ordinary People, the story of a seemingly perfect upper-middle-class family ultimately wrecked by its insistence on maintaining a phony surface and denying the disturbances

underneath. David Lynch's Blue Velvet is a surrealistic journey into the rot lx'low the crust of American complacency and piety. Oliver Stone's Wall Street, with iibercapital-ist Gordon Gekko's slogan "Greed is good," luxuriates in the wealth and power of invest­ment hanking only to turn against it by film's end in favor of more basic and tra­ditional values. I he master of the universe is undone. His young acolyte sees through him. Once again the 1980s are shown to be materially full but morally vapid.

But if all these purveyed rather typi­cal moralizing over the decade's decadent values, there is one movie that seemed to capture the 1980s ambivalent soul with neither approval nor disapprobation: Scar-face. In many respects Tony Montana is the 1980s man par excellence. He is an ambi­tious immigrant who rises from nothing, using his pluck, muscle and guile to become a master of the universe in drugs, with a mountain of cocaine, a mansion and an exquisite moll. In 1980s terms Tony has it all, and Brian De I'alma's film lets us vicari­ously ride to the top with Tony—its aesthetic is the 1980s' aesthetic. It is as shiny as a mir­ror. The film's slogan, a more apt motto for the age than Gekko's "Greed is good," is "Nothing exceeds like excess."

But as in so much of 1980s art as in so much of 1980s extravagance itself, there is no elation for Tony in his ascent. It is all for public consumption, an ego boost, and it is empty. Kven the sex is a letdown. In any case, success demands eternal vigilance. Tony cannot lower his guard because other aspiring masters are always ready to take him down. The descent is inevitable. By the end, a Gotterdammerung of wild material­ism, 'Ibny is unhinged—paranoid, coked up, violent. The perils of 1980s America have been loosed. Devoid of emotion or guilt, Tony is a man of surfaces. When the sur­face shatters there is nothing underneath on wliich to fall back—not even the trusty moral values of Wall Street.

By the time the decade glided to its con­clusion, with Reagan gone to his ranch and George II.W. Bush in the White House, the high times had moderated, the threats seemed less perilous, the surfaces were less glassy, the machismo seemed softer and less compulsory and the schizophrenia seemed to be abating because the extremes seemed less extreme. (Of course this was partly a result of the religious right having inte­grated itself more fully into the American mainstream.) It wasn't morning anymore in America, it was afternoon.

Then, just like that, the 1980s were gone, without lament over their passing or the likelihood of nostalgia or a possible '80s Show sitcom (what would it be, everyone snorting blow?) or a revival of 1980s fash­ion or any revisionism about the greatness of Generation X. The decade was lived large to ignore its anxieties and actively build morale. When it ended, when the morale seemed to have been rebuilt, the decade itself, like so much in it, simply evaporated, leaving a great gaping historical hole while America moved on.

See more retro girls at playboy.com/80s.