I’m guessing you never go on Buzzfeed or Pinterest. Or Tumblr. Or really half of the websites on the internet it seems. There’s huge nostalgia for the 80s online. I don’t know if anyone genuinely wants to go back and live in the 80s, I think most people would prefer to live in their own time, but people definitely miss certain things from back then.
Nostalgia today is different than it used to be, because you can revel in it so much more. People today nostalgic about the 80s can watch the old movies and cartoons easily online, and easily order the kitchy merchandise of the time, and find old-school outfits and wear them to 80s themed parties.
You can google 80s theme party and find millions of hits, with suggestions of what to do and buy, and pictures of the 80s theme parties people have had. And it’s not just adults having these parties, it’s college kids who don’t remember the 80s.
There are also cultural changes from between 1985 and today, especially with views on gay people. Also there’s a larger number or minorities and bi-racial people today. And the drug war is seen differently today, though I don’t know if Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign was really going in 1985. I don’t know if the differences between now and 1985 are greater than 1985 and 1955, but there are substantial changes.
I know one thing. These movies promised me that the Cubbies would win the World Series in 2015. I’m patiently waiting for the season to start and that promise to be fulfilled.
Much of the nostalgia about the 50’s involved a longing for a bygone way of life. Obviously, much of the population felt differently about that fairy tale. The upheavals of the 60’s are the fulcrum, and there isn’t an equivalent period between 1985 and 2015. Sure, people are sentimental about their lives in the 80’s, but I’ve never heard anyone say life was so much better then.
Nostalgia for the 1980s right now is huge and I’m loving every minute of it. Hell, BtfF II was making fun of the 80s and it was released in 1989.
The movie itself, which I recently watched all the way through for the first time in a long while, is incredibly tight and clean as a story. The clocks and gadgets in Doc’s house and Marty’s opening characterization, it’s all wonderfully efficient. And some really great camerawork. The time travel implications are not overly complicated, just a means to the story, not the story itself.
As far as the biggest 20-year disparity, you could definitely highlight huge differences from 2015 and 1985 in a movie. The Internet didn’t exist in any real sense*, video games are now 3D immersive experiences and the NES had just gotten onto American toy shelves, contemporary hip-hop driven by black musical artists compared to the early underground nature of rap, the always hilarious 80s cell phones.
In fact, just send 2015 Marty back with Siri and have her freak out, then save the day when she finally gets connected to an acoustic coupler to UseNet. (I know real modems were around, but they wouldn’t look so obviously old on screen.)
This. I said in the OP that 80s nostalgia is centered around pop culture, not for “a better world” or “a better country” or anything like that.
The 80s absolutely had distinctive, memorable pop culture, a lot of it good, a lot of it bad but still kitschy fun. It was before Big Irony struck in the 90s, so most of it is earnest in a way that’s hard to do today. It was also the last decade IMHO to have truly distinctive clothing and hair styles (I’d throw the early 90s in with 80s style).
Also, the differences in tech changes in the two periods are debatable, but BttF is not about tech changes. It’s about social and aesthetic changes.
Huh. The way some Young Republicans fantasize about Saint Ronnie, He Who Brought Down the Evil Empire ™, I’m not so sure. Mind you, they gloss over AIDS, rampant homelessness, drug war fascism, Iran-Contra, HUD, downsizing-for-profit and other side effects of the go-fer-it-Bud plutocracy of the Gimme Decade…
Put it this way, as someone born in 1980, I don’t hear anyone from my age bracket (mid 30s) talking about a return to the 1950s. Maybe in some really conservative areas this may occur, but the vast majority of people in their 30s and 20s today don’t want to go back to an era pre-sexual revolution, pre-Civil Rights Era.
I suspect a teenager now could (or maybe should) be more informed about 30 years ago than the standard teen in 1985 might have been about 30 years previous to that. It’s the age of ubiquitous information. Kids with an interest can look up '80s music, shows, movies etc. easier than anyone who lived through the era was able to and cultural artefacts of the 1950s would have been much harder to access in the 1980s. Of course if they landed in 1985 sans smart phone and prior interest in the '80s they might be S out of L. Remember too that when most half-informed people nowadays see a movie from the '30s there are some things that seems strange but it is not as if we can’t discern telephones, motorcars, radios, and buses and trains. I don’t think we’ve quite got to the stage where a modern teenager doesn’t know what a newspaper is, even if they’ve never bothered trying to read one.
I think the factors involved in nostalgia for the 1950s in the 1970s and 1980s was based on people perceiving life in the US as getting coarser and worse. You can see this clearly in BttF, in which the town square, mall, and high school are shown as being run down in 1985 but neat as a pin in 1955 (well, the mall is farmland). Marty comments about the high school, “They cleaned the place up.” Crime did indeed get worse during that period, and a lot of urban areas languished. Further, it easier to get a job and live a simple life in 1955 than in 1985 (arguably). I myself saw the later 80s and early 90s as a kind of wrong turn compared to the 70s, which I had experienced. My nostalgia lost its force when good new things like the Internet came along.
But nostalgia for that time period isn’t dead. Look at Mad Men, for example, which set off an early 60s fashion tidal wave. Although MM takes pains of course to show what was shitty about the period as well.
It was a time when America was proud and prosperous, political acrimony was much less, crime was low, belief in the purpose and direction of the country in the world was more solid, and life was much, much simpler than it is today. I think if you had a good job in NYC, for example, in the early 60s, you could have a pretty heavenly time. I for one would love to see “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” on Broadway in 1961.
Nostalgia is pining for something within your own experience. People your age would be longing for the good old days of a booming economy, white house blowjobs and dial-up modems.
True, it doesn’t really make sense. I object to any time travel story in which doing something big can eff up the future but doing something small cannot.
If I time traveled to the 1930s, I would recognize all of those things, but I wouldn’t know how to pay for a trolley fare or get on the proper train or bus. I could probably figure out the old radio (likely AM only) because I’ve played with them before. I almost certainly couldn’t make a pay phone call without looking like a fool. Do I crank the handle first or pay first? Don’t get me started on the whole POP-lar 9-2574 stuff. Or do I just ask Sarah to connect me to Doc Brown’s house?
And although I think a teen could read a newspaper, I doubt most would think to pick one out of the trashcan to check the current date. Many would also realize that 1985 was before cell phones, but they have a cell phone so they would think it should work and wouldn’t understand that there are no digital towers to allow theirs to work.
You think teenagers don’t know how cell phones work? You think they don’t see their phone constantly picking up different wi-fi signals and still don’t know how signals work? A teenager would immediately know why their phone isn’t working, and if they wanted to know the date they would of course pick up a newspaper, its crazy to think otherwise.
