Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies
Hadley Freeman brings us her personalised guide to American movies from the 1980s – why they are brilliant, what they meant to her, and how they influenced movie-making forever.For Hadley Freeman, American moves of the 1980s have simply got it all. Comedy in Three Men and a Baby, Hannah and Her Sisters, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future and Trading Places; all a teenager needs to know – in Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Say Anything, The Breakfast Club and Mystic Pizza; the ultimate in action – Top Gun, Die Hard, Young Sherlock Holmes, Beverly Hills Cop and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; love and sex – in 9 ½ Weeks, Splash, About Last Night, The Big Chill, Bull Durham; and family fun – in The Little Mermaid, ET, Big, Parenthood and Lean On Me.Born in the late 1970s, Hadley grew up on a well-rounded diet of these movies, her entire view of the world, adult relations and expectations of what her life might hold was forged by these cult classics.In this personalised guide, she puts her obsessive movie geekery to good use, detailing the decades key players, genres and tropes, and how exactly the friendship between Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi influenced the evolution of comedy. She looks back to a cinematic world in which bankers are invariably evil, despite this being the decade of Wall Street, where children are always wiser than adults, and science is embraced with an intense enthusiasm, and the future viewed with excitement. She considers how the changes between movies then and movies today say so much about pop culture’s and society’s changing expectations of women, young people and art, and explains why Pretty in Pink and Sixteen Candles should be put on school syllabuses immediately.
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4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by 4th Estate
This 4th Estate paperback edition first published 2016
Copyright © Hadley Freeman 2015
Hadley Freeman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007585618
Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780007585595
Version: 2016-05-20
For Andy, who is even better than Andrew McCarthy,
Michael J. Fox, Matthew Broderick, Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd.
Combined.
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Dirty Dancing: Abortions Happen and Thatâs Just Fine
The Princess Bride: True Love Isnât Just About the Kissing Parts
Pretty in Pink: Awkward Girls Should Never Have Makeovers
When Harry Met Sally: Romcoms Donât Have to Make You Feel Like Youâre Having a Lobotomy
Ghostbusters (with a Segue into Top Gun): How to be a Man
Ferris Buellerâs Day Off: The Impact of Social Class
Steel Magnolias: Women are Interesting
Back to the Future: Parents are Important
Batman: Superheroes Donât Have to be Such a Drag
Eddie Murphyâs Eighties Movies: Race can be Transcended
Epilogue
Footnotes
Notes
Index
Acknowledgements
By the same Author
About the Publisher
âWhatever happened to chivalry? Does it only happen in eighties movies? I want John Cusack holding a boombox outside my window. I wanna ride off on a lawnmower with Patrick Dempsey. I want Jake from Sixteen Candles waiting outside the church for me. I want Judd Nelson thrusting his fist into the air because he knows he just got me. Just once, I want my life to be like an eighties movie, preferably one with a really awesome musical number for no apparent reason. But no, no, John Hughes did not direct my life.â
I am not actually quoting myself here, though heaven knows I could be (except for the part about wanting the moronic Jake from Sixteen Candles for reasons that shall be explained soon enough). That monologue comes from the film Easy A, which was released in 2010, and is spoken by Olive, played by Emma Stone, an actress who was born years after most of the movies her character mentions came out. Two years after Easy A was released, Pitch Perfect arrived and, once again, a film made thirty years earlier was the inspiration and crucial plot point for a twenty-first-century teen film: âThe Breakfast Club, 1985, the greatest ending to any movie ever. [The Simple Mindsâ] song perfectly sums up the movie in that itâs equally beautiful and sad,â Jesse (Skyler Astin) tells a sceptical Beca (Anna Kendrick). But, of course, Becaâs scepticism is as misplaced as the assistant principalâs mistrust in Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson and the rest of the kids in the 1985 film, because it is only when she watches John Hughesâs The Breakfast Club that Beca learns to open up emotionally (moviespeak for âstop being such a frigid cow and snog some dudeâ) and, more importantly, win the a cappella competition. (Winning an a cappella competition. That is what teens have to live for today. To quote one of the greatest of all eighties teen films,>fn1 âI weep for the future.â) Every week, it seems, itâs announced that another eighties film is being remade, sequelised or turned into a stage musical, from Top Gun to The Goonies to Dirty Dancing, invariably starring actors who werenât even born when the originals came out. In 2013 the pop band The 1975 said of their newly released eponymous debut album, âWeâre massive fans of John Hughes. We wanted to make a record [that] was almost a soundtrack to our teenage years. If he made a movie about us, this would be the soundtrack.â>Their lead singer was born in the nineties.
I was born in New York City in 1978 meaning that, while I did exist in the eighties as more than a zygote, I wasnât yet a teenager either. Instead, actual teenagehood for myself felt as distant and desirable as the moon. I was a typical older child from a middle-class Jewish family: well-behaved, anxious, bookish, and therefore especially curious about the vaguely imagined freedoms I fancied being a teenager would bring. My little sister and I werenât allowed to watch television stations that showed commercials â yes, I come from one of those families â meaning that our viewing options were limited to
