The Hangover: Wrestling with the 80’s
posted in Word of Reason |
Last night I had the pleasure of going to the closing night film of the New York Film Festival which was Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler. The movie is about an aging professional wrestler, a guy who was a big star in the 80’s and is now grappling with the realities of what his life has become. The event itself was also something to behold; I’ve never been that close to paparazzo scumbags who chant “bullshit! bullshit!” at a star who wont pose for more than twenty minutes. It was a pretty interesting night and a pretty great movie, but don’t worry, since it isn’t being released for several months, I’m not gonna talk about it in any detail. But, there was one large piece of the overall picture that I found especially interesting and that is that, for people who engaged in it much more than myself, the 80’s are impossible to let go of.
It seems for people who thrived during them, like the main character in this film, that the 80’s were kind of like a war and there are people who are still shell-shocked from having lived through it all. I don’t know why a particular decade could affect the lives of so many people so substantially, but there is something about the 80’s that really sets it apart. Or maybe it’s that there’s nothing really there, except for pop culture. Maybe the country had been through far too much in the 70’s with the gas crisis and the Watergate scandal and consequentially made Debbie Gibson and Axl Rose the most important people in the country. Even Oliver North had to be seen through the prism of pop culture; for my money, he was the first figure transmuted from the political world to the pop culture one via television, leaving on the specter of import.
The 80’s were able to resist a seriousness that the 90’s never could, Magic Johnson announcing his HIV status and Kurt Cobain’s suicide made sure of that. Those things as well pointed out how trivial and stupid the 80’s really were; how little substance there was in pop shows at malls and leather pants-wearing, teased-hair metal dudes. What then becomes the question is: why would some people fight so hard to hang on to that time? Was there anything there worth maintaining? For some, I’m sure there was. But, as someone who was too young and too sheltered from pop culture to know it was happening, the answer is a resounding no. Like the film, I believe that the 80’s were both the substance-free ‘good ol’ days’ as much as they were a wrecking ball of delusion, though it is very easy for me to feel that way since I didn’t live it. But, in the end, it’s probably better to have missed the war than suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.
