In his review of Super Dark Times, Kim Newman, the greatest critic of genre cinema remarked, “This bleak coming-of-age movie – set in the mid-90s – has little of the nostalgia of Stand By Me, and trades instead in a kind of numbed, frozen, adolescent angst which evokes River’s Edge or Over the Edge – fine films which, in turn, almost nobody is nostalgic about in the way more disposable artefacts like The Goonies or ET have been elevated lately to sacred text.” The closest The Goonies comes to “numbed, frozen, adolescent” angst is Chunk’s unmentioned but obvious eating disorder and his tearful confession to the heelish Fratelli family about provoking mass vomiting in a movie theater. It’s not quite Breakfast Clubian levels of lugubrious navel gazing, but weirdly affecting in a young-boy-fearing-imminent-murder kind of way. The Goonies does seem to occupy an exalted status among those of my age group, kindling fond memories of childhood trips to video rental stores – those Aladdin’s caves of tantalizing possibilities and The Strictly Forbidden – and Saturday mornings spent inches from the TV scarfing sugary cereal, a sensibility writ large in shows like Stranger Things, a sugary serial if nothing else.
The inherent problem with nostalgia is that you only get one side of the story. Misty-eyed reveries of boys on bikes reveling in their latchkey freedom from oblivious boomer parents to pursue adventure and undergo rites of passage crumple under the glare of scrutiny. Trust me, I was there. I had a bike – a green BMX with sexy white mag spokes – and I had male friends, well, a couple at least. And yes, so long as curfew was met we were indeed free to roam around town on our gaudy contraptions. However, seldom did we encounter booby-trapped caverns or benevolent alien life forms; rather the freedom granted to us usually resorted in acts of phone box terrorism, shoplifting, indecent exposure, gravestone tipping, vandalism, cruelty, arson and trespass. The latter crime The Goonies touches upon, granted, but it’s milk and cookies childhood as envisioned by Michael Jackson. All the time-killing cruelty of 80s childhood is jettisoned in favour of that most comestible trick in the carny’s armouy, the Sense of Wonder.
What did groups/pairs of boys actually do in the adventure playground of the 80s when free from the stifling rules of home and digital reigns? They did not listen to each other’s problems and form spontaneous safe spaces; rather they goaded each other into acts of wanton destruction under the influence of folie a deux, sometimes trois. Got a cigarette lighter and some spray on deodorant? C’mon, let’s go to the woods. There may well be a stash of sodden nudey magazines lying in wait for a bout of public masturbation, after the dead bird bonfire has dimmed. One of the most sought after objects for my peers was not the latest edition of Dungeon Master’s Guide, but a Black Widow catapult, capable of ruining any stranger’s greenhouse within seconds from an undetectable distance. Ludicrously, it was marketed as a vermin control device and sold largely in fishing tackle shops. Brattishness for boys of the 80s was at least partly chosen rather than foisted; we’ve all read Lord of the Flies, but the excuse of “there was nothing else to do” for unruliness doesn’t wash for 80s children, although pocket money would only get you so far. It is a fool’s errand to cast blame on the laissez faire decade of the 80s itself with its awful parents who when they weren’t missing were smacking us bitches up. That would be too easy, the accusatory finger of John Hughes pointing squarely at his forefathers and high school tormentors.
Really, the era I’m attempting to conjure with sufficient accuracy is the early 90s rather than the 80s – in truth I spent the 80s either at home, at school or being ferried to castles, museums, hills and better cities. Of course, the early 90s were very much still the 80s. People did not shear their mullets and burn their shellsuits on the stroke of midnight 1989. Nobody I knew ever had a mullet, anyway – the cool kids had something known as a “wedge” – shaved at the sides with a thatch atop, like a medieval lunatic, bonus points for tram lines. No, we still had some years to play with before Clinton, Friends, 64-bit consoles and Cobain’s dietary switch from Kraft mac n cheese to shotguns. Much like yowling grunge junkies, decades bleed into each other; they do not observe stringent boundaries. For all the twisted fire-starting and bus mooning, this was still a time, after all, when children could still amuse themselves by building model aircraft and swapping Panini stickers rather than just tall tales and racist jokes (the butt of which were often Ethiopians ie: Q/ What do you call an Ethiopian with his eyeball hanging out? A/ Swingball). A Saturday morning was just as likely to be spent at the local library as it was terrorizing bus passengers with tossed bangers bought from the joke shop. Limits there were, though. An invitation to skip first period Home Economics to take a microdot of acid with another 12 year old acquaintance was not one I accepted. Unsupervised and harmful we often were; utterly ensorcelled by peer pressure/financially motivated by “likes” we were not. There was always one line that wouldn’t be crossed, unless one had really terrible parents.
However, in a hauntological sense, anti-nostalgia, hostalgia as coined by Luke Haines, can also play tricks of the mind much like its equally seductive sister. Shun any fool who tries to tell you any decade was all bad, just as you would the starry-eyed past-dweller who can’t handle present responsibility and retreats into his own Xanadu. As I cast my mind back to those pre-Internet days, it occurs to me that BMX bikes (and sometimes skateboards) were more often than not used for their rightful purpose – my town even had a track – rather than being tools of the inchoate criminal. No, most of our devilry was committed on foot, bikes tending to be an encumbrance rather than a facilitator, the fear of theft looming large were they to be left unattended. Did all this bipedal freedom make us men, teach us independence and street smarts in an era when child molesters lured you directly from the pavement with promises of sweets and puppies, rather than sending friend requests followed by dick pics? Well, look at the current cohort of 40-somethings and you tell me. A generation of men who can DIY or overgrown children endlessly seeking a return, in the form of bingeable television, to a bogus halcyon era of easily monetized tropes? The gentle synth lilt of the Never Ending Story is sounding increasingly like a generational threnody. Some of the corpses are, however, amusing.
The Bottle Dungeon 