Thread by @MumbyatMovies

Okay... Let's talk about the decade in which I was born... [THREAD]

https://twitter.com/MumbyatMovies/status/1430917161409728512

Now, you may well claim right from the get-go that I'm not properly qualified to talk about the 1980s in great detail, since I only lived through a little over 18 months of it in person, and much of my experience of it was second-hand at best.

Naturally, I'm not going to claim to be an unqualified expert on the decade - I'm not a professional historian (cultural, political or otherwise), and while I can claim to be the last generation to remember the #Berlin Wall, I don't exactly remember where I was when it came down.

Instead, I'm going to share a few observations that I've built up about the decade from studying it and seeing it seep irreversibly into so much of our contemporary culture. If you want to school me afterwards for being an ignorant twit, feel free. I can take it.

I should also qualify that, as much as I may criticise significant aspect of the 1980s in general, I can't bring myself to completely write off the decade which produced my favourite film (#BladeRunner), some of my favourite music and other little things like that.

With the 20th anniversary of 9/11 this year, a lot of digital ink has been spilled about how much these events & the fallout has impacted my generation, and how different the world would have been without them. I've even speculated on this a little myself.

https://twitter.com/MumbyatMovies/status/1436729460133449735

But as much as my generation has been shaped by the war on terror - whether it's 9/11, #Iraq, 7/7 or anything after it - I feel like people my age and younger have been just as much in thrall to the 1980s and the changes which it wrought on our cultural landscape.

A lot of the decisions being taken in terms of which films see the light of day are based on the generation which came of age in the 1980s feeling nostalgic and wanting to relieve their youth vicariously through us, as this brilliant @BritishGQ points out:
gq.com/story/the-day-…

The way the 1980s nostalgia waves has, for want of a better word, infected our culture so much is frankly a little disturbing.

Sure, I like #TheGoldbergs, but I like it because of the characters' interplay rather than the references or parodies.

(and increasingly in the recent series, @hayleyorrantia's singing. Her version of Blondie's 'Heart Of Glass' from series 8 knocks the original into a cocked hat).

But even if we take the generational influence of the 1980s away, that doesn't explain why its stranglehold on our culture remains so overpowering.

I think part of the reason why we're drawn to it is comfort - the 1980s represent a time when things seemed simpler. We knew who our enemies were, gender roles were more fixed, access to certain media was still pretty restricted - it was like the 1950s on steroids.

The 1980s representd a pivot point where many of the technological innovations that we take for granted either started out or began to filter through. It was when digital technology slowly started to become dominant, but without completely leaving the old world in its wake.

Take film-making: ILM and #Tron were starting to show how the future would look, but because films were still made on celluloid, shown in cinemas and then purchased on video tape (itself a relatively recent innovation), the pace of change was slow enough for people to accept it.

Compare that to our generation, where everything is digital, change is constant and instantaneous, and many of the social institutions we have cherished for decades - the pub, the cinema, the church - seem obsolete in their own ways.

To qualify that - yes, you do get backlashes, with people buying vinyl because they want to physically own music again. And no, not all digital innovations are bad - I've really valued live-streamed church services during #lockdown.

My point is, the 1980s feels like the decade based around having one's cake and eating it - it was pushing the boundaries of what was possible and acceptable, but the change happened slow enough that it's still venerated as some kind of golden age.

On top of that, the 1980s feels like the point where Western society started to become much more individualistic, selfish and shallow. Sure, like many 1980s trends, you can see its roots in the 'lost generation' of the late-1970s, but few could have predicted how far it would go.

I'm not just talking about Margaret Thatcher's famous "no such thing as society" speech or other headline-grabbing sound-bytes like that - those are indicative of wider trends. If they weren't, the people who said them wouldn't have ended up being so damned re-electable.

When I did my thread in prog rock last year, I talked about my distaste for punk being rooted in its "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" - in trying to get rid of everything flawed with prog, it also got rid of a lot of more valuable stuff too.

https://twitter.com/MumbyatMovies/status/1312361064135352320

By going in all guns blazing and targeting all music that looked beyond the most political, down-to-earth or base subject matter, punk essentially hollowed out mainstream pop and created a vacuum which would end up being filled by the airhead offspring of Stock Aitken & Waterman.

That approach for me sums up the 1980s: in trying to achieve some much-needed change and pull up the weeds which were holding Britain back as an economic and political force, our leaders also hollowed out many of the institutions which served to hold back material excess.

"Greed is good" from #WallStreet resonated with people for all the wrong reasons: Oliver Stone set out to satirise the greed of unrestrained free-market capitalism, but many missed the irony and wanted the same kind of lifestyle enjoyed by Gordon Gecko.

However unrealistic the political and social aspirations of the post-war period may have seemed - whether it was Marxism, free love or something else entirely - the 1980s felt like the moment where everyone just gave up and said: "Who cares? Let's just get rich and have fun."

This clip of Reverend Lovejoy from The Simpsons has always resonated with me for that reason - whatever nobility characterised the previous decades, and however misplaced or misjudged it was, the 1980s swept it away in a wave of cynicism and cash.

And while there have been partial backlashes against that kind of materialism since the 1980s ended - grunge, the environmental movement, #OccupyWallStreet and so on - it feels like we're still living in the shadow of those decisions.

Think of the 1980s' move towards individualism as spending on a credit card, and our generation has the choice to either pay off the debt by rolling that back, or spending more by being able to get more things we think we want quicker than ever before. Which choice do most make?

This is especially frustrating for me as a Christian, since Christianity prides itself in the value of the individual and the role of individual free will (unless you're a Calvinist, of course). But individual freedom now seems utterly conflates with material self-love.

"To the materialist things like nations, classes, civilisations must be more important than individuals, because the individuals live only seventy odd years each and the group may last for centuries.

"But to the Christian, individuals are more important, for they live eternally; and races, civilisations and the like, are in comparison the creatures of a day."

Our old friend C. S. Lewis, as eloquent as ever. Wonder what he'd make of life in 2021?

.@JohnCleese and many others have observed that the American church in particular is closed tied to capitalism - different branches and denominations all promote the free market as some kind of God-given gift, in a manner which I find quite distasteful.

And that cuts both ways for me - I find it just as uncomfortable when people glibly state "Jesus was a socialist" as I do when @Jacob_Rees_Mogg attempts to justify Adam Smith's principals on purely Biblical grounds. Jesus was NOT primarily political.

https://twitter.com/MumbyatMovies/status/1314855308041359360

"There have been too many historical Jesuses - a liberal Jesus, a pneumatic Jesus, a Barthian Jesus, a Marxist Jesus. They are the cheap crop of each publisher’s list, like the new Napoleons & new Queen Victorias."

Lewis again, during a essay on pacifism:

When you combine these 1980s trends with the events of the end of the decade or just after it - the fall of the #Berlin Wall, the collapse of the USSR etc. - you end up with Western civilisation being a liberal mono-culture, where globalisation in the name of freedom rules all.

I'm not saying for a moment that I wish we were still living in the Cold War, or that the tyrannies perpetrated both in Eastern Europe and beyond should have continued. But the lack of any viable alternative created a smug triumphalism - cf. Francis Fukuyama's The End of History.

As a result of this and other related factors, the 1980s have become so entrenched in our cultural and psychological mindset that we find it almost impossible to escape the decades' influence - and all the negative consequences which that brings.

Again, there is a sense in which that process is repeated for each generation - our grandparents' lives may have always felt defined or overshadowed by WWII, just as many growing up today may feel permanently shaped and hampered by the #coronavirus.

But just as the ideas of the 1960s took hold in part because of the sheer volume of young people who could embrace and communicate them (the baby boom), so the 1980s will hold sway for as long as people either remember them hagiographically or embrace them without criticism.

I'm not saying the entire decade needs to be "cancelled" - but it shouldn't be held up as an unequivocal golden age, because those never exist. The only golden age of which we can be certain is the arrival of the New Heaven & Earth - the timing of which remains a mystery for all.

Instead of blithely celebrating the 1980s' successes and measuring contemporary efforts on that decades' terms, we need to be much more nuanced and selected about what we value from the past. Change is a part of life, but we can choose how we change and to some extent how fast.

We need to reverse the worst excesses of the decade before the hollowing-out process ("the abolition of man", perhaps?) reaches its absurd and devastating conclusion. Enjoy 1980s stuff, sure, but enjoy it in context and with an intelligent view.

Let's finish on some @pinkfloyd - 20 minutes of music from The Final Cut: [END]