misplaced nostalgia – Pathetic Fallacy

We hear the playback and it seems so long ago

I suppose I should mention here that this is a comic essay and I am exaggerating for, you know, effect. I grew up in a podunk town in the middle of bupkis, so that no doubt is reflected here. If you had a cool 80s childhood that was different, then good for you.

These days the popular conception is that the 1980’s were all pink and aqua, but they were actually surprisingly brown if you lived through them. The success of Stranger Things (at least before its las season), the rise in retro synth-pop as practiced by artists like Chapell Roan, the popularity of $30 vinyl versions of albums one can stream for free, a revival of shoulder pads and denim jackets, the number of YouTube reaction videos for the Goonies—all of these point to an interest in the decade of Reagan and Thatcher that goes far beyond the nostalgia of aging Gen-Xers, and speaks to the generation of kids out there longing for a time before smart phones ruined everything. This amuses me because I am old enough to remember the 1980’s revival of the 1950’s, and even the 1970’s revival of the 1900’s, which was a pretty darn weird thing if you think of it.

Of course, when you look at the 80’s through rose-tinted (and leopard-print-framed) nostalgia glasses when you weren’t even yet alive in the 20th century, you are going to get things wrong, especially if you’re being lied to by Netflix. Correcting perceived misconceptions of the time of my youth—when nobody asked—is the most old-man thing ever, but I just turned 58, so here I go.

'OK, boomer': la frase edadista que triunfa en las redes — actually I’m Gen-X, but no one under 40 knows the difference

I. The music wasn’t that cool

I am grateful, really, that Netflix has popularized Kate Bush for the TikTok set, but the truth is back in the 1980’s no one outside of the UK was listening to her (except me, I was cool)¹. I remember playing my copy of Hounds of Love for my long-suffering high school girlfriend and her declaring the record “strange” and me “weird.”

These days, when a movie or tv show is set in the 1980s, the soundtracks are all songs by Echo and the Bunnymen, Elvis Costello, etc. Likewise, Spotify playlists and Sirius radio stations would have you believe the decade’s music was entirely New Wave. But in reality, fm radio playlists were 60% Michael Jackson, 30% Madonna, and the rest was made up of Hair Bands, Yacht Rock, and Pop Country (Kenny Rodgers was very hot around 1982). College radio stations might play Punk or New Wave, but only college kids listened to college radio. Rap was still being invented at the time but it was strictly segregated.

So when a television show or movie tries to play it cool with a Post Punk/New Wave soundtrack (and yes, I’m looking at you, Stranger Things) remember that we all want to think we were cooler kids than we really were².

II. Design wasn’t totally radical

If you think of the eighties look, you probably are imagining some combination of pink, purple, aqua, and neon (“Miami Style”) or of angular floating shapes and zigzags atop backgrounds made up of repeating patterns of dot, lines, and squiggles (“Memphis Style³“). Or maybe you’re thinking of a mixture of both⁴. And if one is to go by the VH1 series I ♥ the 80’s, your conception would be true. But the truth is these styles were entirely the domain of MTV bumpers and overpriced boutiques that sold earrings made from shards of broken CDs⁵.

In reality, most design in the 80s was inherited from the 70s, which means a lot of browns and yellows, denim and tee shirts. It was the design of strip malls, K-marts, and ranch houses—but not cool mid-century ranch houses, cheap 70’s ranch houses with a lot of lucite. It was the age of particle board and the plastic shopping bag and those little springy doorstops that got all bent and never worked.

III. Punks weren’t everywhere

I was going to write a bit here about how in the 1980s it was de rigueur for crowd scenes in movies to feature a punk rocker with eyeliner and an enormous hairspray mohawk, or even violent gangs of these exotic creatures robbing convenience stores and fighting zombies, but it turns out that somebody else already wrote that better than I would.

I will add that punk culture was definitely a thing, but as a movement it was a lot less flashy, and more insular, and largely kept to itself. My wife had a punk era in her teens and she’s super cool. Real punk culture was rich in vernacular style and a DIY ethos. But mainstream America found punks to be scary and local news stories blamed them for everything that was wrong in society, and so fake, threatening punks were everywhere in movies and tv.

Also, valley-speak was entirely made up for that one Frank Zappa song.

IV. It was something of a hellscape

Look, I’m nostalgic for my childhood just like everyone else. I love my original 1980 Rubik’s Cube for which I still the original Ideal⁶-branded plastic case. But the 80s were not a good time to be alive if you were a woman, or black, or queer, or any combination of those. It was the decade when the Hippies made way for the Yuppies, and we elected a senile, jelly bean eating, horoscope believing B-movie actor who ruined everything. The myth of the Welfare Queen upset the squares so much that they tore apart the intricate support systems that fed starving children. Even as the Cold War was winding down, the U.S. couldn’t keep its imperialist hands out of Central America. Also, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was an objectively awful cartoon.

This all may sound like a lot of complaints from a cranky old dude, but my motives are pure. I am a pathologically nostalgic person (just look at my tag cloud), but I am also aware of the toxic nature of nostalgia. As kids, my generation were brought up being told about the wondrous world of Boomer culture, of how everything was peace and love and drugs and sexual liberation and how each and every one of them had attended both Woodstock and Altamont. And how much the music today sucked, and how lazy and cynical the kids were. And I was determined that when I was older I would never let my own nostalgia cloud my memory, and I would not think that my childhood was more special and magical because I grew up when I did.

Now let me tell you why Talking Heads was the greatest band ever.

She was huge in the UK, which is one way they’re better than us. ↩︎
Except, of course, for me with my Laurie Anderson and my wife with her Smiths. ↩︎
Which originated in Milan, Italy, although it was named after Memphis, Tennessee, by way of a Bob Dylan song. Look, the 80s didn’t really make sense. ↩︎
It’s a free country. ↩︎
CDs were actually everywhere in the 80s. ↩︎
R.I.P. ↩︎

Hang in there

Note: this is another companion essay to an episode of podcast, Sophomore Lit. Maybe listen to it before reading this?

Shortly after recording the most recent Sophomore Lit episode about Robert Westall’s young adult novel The Watch House (1977), guest host Ross Cleaver pointed me towards an online discussion about a magic lantern series called Our Life Boat Men. While most of the eight-slide series features scenes of rescues involving life boats, there is one slide that depicts a rescue using a rope line and pulley, the technique that Westall describes in his book.

“The Pulley.” Slide no. 7 from the series *Our Life-Boat Men*, W. Butcher & Sons, c. 1901.
Image from Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums.

Magic lanterns were a form of image projector popular in the 19th and early 20th century. The ability of curved glass to bend light was known from antiquity, with the earliest written reference appearing in Aristophanes’ The Clouds. Reading-stones (rounded glass magnifiers) and even spectacles were used in medieval times. But modern lenses as we know them started in the 17th and 18th century with the development of the telescope and the microscope. By the 19th century optics had become precise enough to sharply focus projected light. This development, along with increasingly bright light sources, such as gas and limelight, led to the commercial production and popularity of magic lanterns.

Butcher & Sons “Primus” magic lantern, c. 1890.

These projectors used glass slides that came in a variety of sizes upon which were the images to be projected. The first slides were hand-painted, but later, photographic techniques allowed for mass replication. At first, publishing companies mechanically transferred black line images to the slides, most commonly using decals; colors (if any) still had to be added by hand. But at the end of the 19th century chromolithography and semi-transparent inks made possible printing uniform editions of magic lantern slides, albeit with often imperfect registration of colors, as is evident from “The Pulley.”

The series Our Life-Boat Men was sold as a part of London-based W. Butcher & Son’s Junior Lecturer’s Series. While the slides themselves are undated, a 1901 advertisement lists Our Life-Boat Men as one of six “new” lithographic sets produced to be used with their Primus line of lanterns. Butcher & Sons aimed at a market of well-to-do home users, and their chromolithographic slides were relatively inexpensive when compared to ones designed for theatrical use—and yes, in the 19th century people did pay admission for the privilege of viewing still projections in darkened rooms.

Butcher and Sons — Advertisement for W. Butcher & Sons in *The Optical Magic Lantern Journal* and Photographic Enlarger, November 1901.

In Westall’s book, the book’s protagonist Anne is told of the techniques employed by the Victorian life-savers who used to work at the titular watch house. The port of the novel’s fictional town of Garmouth (based upon Westall’s hometown of Tynemouth) is bounded on its sides by shallows covered with mounds of rock, and in bad weather ships could beach themselves only a few hundred feet from shore. The watch house volunteers would shoot ropes to the ships using rockets and survivors could be drawn ashore using pulleys. As I mention on the podcast, when I read these passages—describing rescues carried out in the 1850’s—I was incredulous. It didn’t seem possible, especially with 19th-century rockets, to fire with such accuracy while dragging 20 pounds of rope (or more). But apparently this was a widely-used technique. The Shipwreck Centre & Maritime Museum of displays examples of the apparatuses that were employed.

RA Fig 2 — The Boxer rocket, developed in 1855, was a two-stage rescue rocket.
Image by Geni, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In the slide “The Pulley” the intrepid hero is riding in a lifebuoy that is hitched to a hoist trolley—if something goes wrong, at least he has a flotation device. In his arms he appears to be holding a child wrapped in a tattered red blanket. The rescuer is lightly dressed for such cold weather, although he wears a sou’wester oilskin hat, which is standard rough weather maritime gear. There are narrative details that make me wonder. Why is the man barefoot? Is that standard practice, or did he loose his boots in the operation? He appears to have a strand of kelp trailing from one foot. Does this mean he’s grazing the water? Is he in danger of submerging? Come to think of it, how can the rope be staying that taut? Wouldn’t it dip with the weight of the passengers?

But mostly: Why can’t I stop obsessing over random bits of forgotten culture?

Safe & non-toxic

Back in the days when Halloween was primarily a night for kids to knock on doors to get stray change and popcorn balls; back before the holiday morphed into an excuse for young adults to dress as sexy versions of 90’s cartoons and get their slutty drink on; that is, back in the 70s, store-bought costumes were crap. They consisted of thin vacuum-formed plastic masks and silkscreened bodysuits which were made of a mystery fabric that was not quite muslin, not quite plastic, but 100% flammable. Eventually even this material was deemed too costly to produce and the suits were made entirely from vinyl, lending them all the drape of a deflated beach ball. These were the ubiquitous licensed character costumes made by Ben Cooper, inc., which, defying all reason, are highly collectable today. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

Ben Cooper brand costumes: bring them up the next time a Gen-Xer complains about how everything was better back when.

Of course, there were kids and parents who wished to avoid paying a whopping three bucks for commercially-produced outfits that were only marginally recognizable (owing to the fact that they had the characters’ names emblazoned on their chests). For the non-conformists, costumes of hoboes, pirates, ghosts, and mummies were good options because you could make them out of last year’s ratty clothes and sheets and felt and other bits of stuff lying around (toilet paper was often involved). But for the true weirdos, those who aspired to be something scary or gross for Halloween, there was only one game in town, and that was the Imagineering line of makeup and prosthetics. They were cheep, funky, grungy, and surprisingly effective, especially when it came to making gaping wounds and the like, and I loved them so much.

Instead of selling full costumes of specific characters, the Imagineering line consisted of theatrical building blocks you could mix and match. There were evil teeth and fake fingers. There was fake blood and tooth blackout. And there were small pallets of ingenious stage makeup, such as Scar Stuf™, a mixture of beeswax and cotton fibers that seemed like it couldn’t possibly work but which did in fact produce startlingly realistic scars, wounds, and other abrasions.

For much of my childhood I was limited to the pointy teeth and fake blood. I was not particularly flush as a kid, and while most items in the Imagineering line ran 50-75 cents, that was still a lot for me. Until one October—maybe ’78 or ’79—when I finally had some income of my own from delivering The Peoria Journal Star (afternoon edition). That year I finally splurged on a pair of Evil Eyes, the prosthetic eyes that GLOWED IN THE DARK. In light they were just a couple of ovals of plastic but in complete darkness, they were Fire from the Very Depths of Hhell. To maximize the glow effect, I would hold the plastic eyes under my reading lamp—a gooseneck 75 watt lamp clipped to the headboard of my top-level bunk bed—for about five minutes. Then I would run to the darkest place in the house (mostly under a blanket in my closet) and stare in horror at the glowing orbs until they faded into blackness. Of course, like all glow-in-the-dark toys, the magic was over far too soon, and the best effect could only be achieved by holding the eyes a long time as close as I could to the incandescent bulb, which was blisteringly hot. To save my fingertips, I took to placing the eyes on my bed and bending the lamp down as close as I could. One day I decided I would get the best glow ever by bringing the lamp down so that the hood touched my quilt and the bulb pressed against the eyes, shutting the precious lumens in entirely. Pleased with this set-up, I went off to get a snack before I would take the eyes into the dark.

Two hours later, my mother came into the living room where I was sitting reading and asked if I smelled something funny. My father also was alarmed. We walked down the hall and it became apparent that thin black smoke was coming out of my bedroom door. When we entered there was a cloudy, oily plume coming from under my lamp, which was still directly on my quilt. My father grabbed a sock to push away the lamp, which had deformed from the heat. We were greeted with a massive billow of inky miasma; and underneath, a soupy, sticky mess of plastic making tendrils from the bulb to the quilt, which now had a smoldering hole in one block. My shocked parents asked me what on Earth I had been doing and I was at a loss to explain myself. Secretly, all I could think of was if there were a way to block out the windows because holy hell, those goopy, melted eyes would’ve glowed like the sun.