aestivetic asked:

This is SORT of a fandom question, and sort of a history question, so I have decided to ask you:

Why is it that pop culture for the past decade or more has focused on some recreation or adoration of the 1980's? I don't hate the existence of it, I just don't necessarily find it my favorite. Plus, I missed the 1980's by about nine years.

vintagegeekculture answered:

There’s a twofold answer to this. The first is that, as a lot of social scientists have observed, nostalgia works in predictable 30-year cycles. One thing that is extremely interesting to note about the 1980s is that so much of the culture of that era was 50s nostalgia.

This was the era defined by cutesy 50s-throwback flying saucer movies (Strange Invaders, the entire filmography of Joe Dante), kitschy statues of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the revival of Leave it to Beaver that lasted 4 seasons, Happy Days, pinball, the Bettie Paige pinup revival, Swamp Thing, the revival of Famous Monsters of Filmland, and the Monster Squad.

Monster Squad is especially interesting in that it’s an 80s movie that’s trying to recapture 50s nostalgia, but the 50s-60s were defined by an irreverent and sarcastic look back at the pop culture juggernaut monster movies of the 1930s. Not all nostalgia cycles are reverential as ours is, the 50s laughed at monsters and paired them with Abbot and Costello. So that movie is a weird one because it’s nostalgia cycles “all the way down.”

One thing movies get wrong about the 80s is that they make it neon-bright and flashy, with neon piping and transparent glass. Wonder Woman 1984 looked all wrong to me. The reality is, the 80s were the most brown decade of the entire history of the world.

Everything was brown. Carpets were brown. Walls were brown. Furniture was wooden and brown. Every piece of electronics, from your microwave, to your absolutely Stonehenge block sized TV was brown, and had fake wood finishing to look classy and fit into your house.

Ever ask yourself why electronics were brown with fake wood paneling? Because everything else you had was brown, so they made them that way to blend in to your decor invisibly. If they made, say, bright pink TVs, it would probably clash with what most people have.

Every crockpot was brown.

Cars were regularly brown and beige, especially wood-paneled station wagons. People actually paid money for beige cars!

Clothes were every color, but ones that kept coming up were cream, brown, tan, and orange gold (essentially, the color scheme of the game Knights of the Old Republic, the most brown and orange game imaginable, deliberately using those colors to evoke the feeling of another nostalgic time and place in distant space).

The bestselling color of Member’s Only Jackets were also beige/tan. Because shirts were still more likely to be woolen and thick, they were harder to dye white, so they usually were a more brownish cream.

Even food was brown. For example, throughout the 80s, I never remembered eating a red or blue M&M. Instead of red, the brightest color to human eyes, I remember there were tan M&Ms (tan being a shade of light brown) because of the fear that Red 40 dye was a mutagen (it didn’t get safer, they just got rid of it for a bit when it was controversial, and brought it back when nobody noticed – you couldn’t get me to eat any junk food with red dye in it for anything). There were no blue M&Ms until the 90s, when adding them meant a coast to coast ad campaign. Instead of blue, they had dark brown M&Ms. In other words, in addition to yellow and orange (not brown, but brown adjacent and brown allied, certainly), it meant the majority of M&Ms were brown, tan, yellow, orange, with green as the only bright holdout (no wonder they made that the girl one, it was the odd one out). Of course! That makes sense! Brown M&Ms in the brownest age in history.

Now, that’s the first part of the answer, the predictable 30 year cycle of nostalgia. But it’s worth noting this particular nostalgia cycle is especially prolonged, so there’s more to it than just that. The other part, as I see it is is that, in the 80s, government, finance, and other institutions essentially assumed the form they do now, into the world order we see. In other words, we look back on the 80s as they were the “last decade,” and everything since then has simply been cycles of recurrence without strong identity.

Some years matter, and some years don’t. 1979 was the most important year in the entire 20th Century, more than 1917, 1945 or any of the other biggies. We will look back on the decade after that year as the first decade we had a recognizable modern world. That’s the reason that era is so interesting to us. 

1979 was a year that retrenchment and reactionaries really arose in a way that defined the decades since. Among other things, I’m talking about the Iranian Revolution by the Ayatollah, the seizure of the Grand Mosque at Mecca in 1979, and the total destruction of the US embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan in 1979. I cannot emphasize this enough, but in the 60s and 70s, Wahabism and so on were seen as picturesque and charming, something that would soon be wiped aside inevitably by modernism and the future. It was downright cute to us back then to see guys in Kuwait or North Yemen talk about how they would raise their swords for “the Emir and Allah.” Sounded like something out of a fantasy novel, right?

Everyone figured in the mid-east that the future was going to be a battle between either Socialism, or Nasser-style militarist Arab Nationalism. It seemed ludicrous that Feudal era relics and clan-based rulers like the House of Saud, Sabah, and Khalifah would continue to exist in any way. Instead, all the Arab socialists fell, all the right-wing Arab Nationalists and Baathists are nearly all gone (even Qaddafi), and instead, the Houses of Saud, Sabah, and Kalifah are all active partners with Western governments, squelching student movements with US aid (as happened, brutally, in Bahrain in 2011) and spreading Wahabist ideology with complete Western assistance, all the while pretending to be shocked people over there are “so traditional and backward.” Well, that didn’t need to happen, and 1979 was the turning point.

1979 was also the year that the dismantling of the Soviet Union began, not just because of the invasion of Afghanistan (which a healthy Soviet state could have survived), but because the first steps were taken to privatize Russian petroleum and energy. The single biggest factor in the fall of the Soviet Union was that Russian political elites wanted to make money on privatizing Russian natural resources, and they ultimately had their wildest dreams come true when, with World Bank and IMF assistance, they essentially turned the Soviet Union into a grubby petrostate. The kind of concessions that Boris Yeltsin later made to Western finance are the kinds that usually are made by countries that are militarily occupied by an enemy. To say this would breed blowback down the road is an understatement.

1979 was also the year China opened up to the Western world after being a closed society, and began being the center of manufacturing, a shift that drastically altered the economies of Western nations, who dismantled their internal production and industry and moved it there for cost reasons, turning Michigan and other places into bombed out moonscapes. I should point out that there’s no such thing as an “information economy.” I don’t know how to explain this to economists and I’ve never been able to get this through their heads (not through lack of trying), but but apps and IP don’t make money, twitter doesn’t make money, Silicon Valley startups don’t make money, a computer that bleeps and bloops with big numbers in it is not really money. The same things that are actual wealth in 1900 are the true basis of the economy now: grain in a barn, a factory that makes something people buy, a refinery that pulls oil in the ground. Anyone talking about a switch to an “information economy” is trying to rob you.

I haven’t even mentioned the West yet: 1979 was the election of Margaret Thatcher, who brutally cracked down on strikes and defined the ethos the West exists in since that year: “there is no alternative.” If you want to know exactly where futurism and a sense of the future died in the Western world, it was right here. Futurism is very much alive in China, where they are building space stations, where kids still want to grow up to be astronauts, and believe they’ll own their own robot in a few years….and considering the speed of Chinese gains in standard of living and technology, that isn’t necessarily unrealistic or delusional at all. In the West, though, futurism is gone, because it became hard to visualize anything more than just “more of this” in the West, which is why the 80s are so different, why this cycle of nostalgia is so prolonged and deep. The 80s were the last decade.

Again, 1979 was the most consequential year of the 20th Century and created the modern world. Of course we’d remember the time after it very clearly, it’s the first “modern” time.