Since the satellite hasn't been getting used much at all, and it's typically dvds that get played here, it was cancelled; but one of the last things I caught while flipping channels was a double Richard Dreyfuss feature of Stand By Me and Jaws. I caught the latter half of Stand By Me while watching all of Jaws. While Stand By Me wasn't my favourite growing up, I liked it back then; I found it fascinating; it seemed to express something I couldn't articulate, while the ending sort of depressed me. And I still like the film, more than I did before.
It's intriguing, isn't it, how many popular films in the 80's were about father/son issues.
The Empire Strikes Back, The Return of the Jedi, Field of Dreams, The Karate Kid, Back to the Future, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Stand By Me...(my mind is at a blank right now, so feel free to add any others in combox)
Even The Princess Bride is quite literally book-ended by the relationship of the grandfather and his grandson.
In all of them the father/son theme is quite different from the other, exploring different aspects, and different in the ways they go about it; some archetypal and dramatic, like the two latter Star Wars films, intimate and underplayed like in Field of Dreams. In The Karate Kid it's very subtle, almost invisible, but ultimately the film's unspoken backbone. In Ferris Bueller's Day Off it's more of an appendage near the end, but the film's most serious note. In Back to the Future the theme actually runs quite deep. The way the comedy suddenly lands one in the heart of the familial and its universal consequences is moving. When George McFly decks Biff, it has all the cathartic import of Darth Vader giving the Emperor the heave-ho.
And I think Stand By Me is about father/son issues sort of the way the ocean is about the water: there's a lot of other things in it, but don't overlook the water.
Oh, there's E.T. and Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade...
But then there's also a kind of subset of films to this; films not necessarily about father/son issues but extensions of, and therefore connected to, them. Movies about men - this is going to sound lame - finding the man inside them, like Innerspace: about a daring man literally inside of an unadventurous man who makes him brave and courageous. Top Gun and Iron Eagle (which one is worse? LOL) I know there's others here too, but I can't think of them now...
It just seems to me this was the general current of popular (and maybe not so popular) 80's movies. Was the 80's taking revenge on the 70's and 60's?
6 comments:
Yikes, I hope I didn't unconsciously plagiarize Enbrethiliel in any way in writing post...
Sleeper
Yes, it is/was a sleeper. I think The Karate Kid also was/is a sleeper.
+JMJ+
You didn't accidentally plagiarise me . . . but there goes that "Twelve Things about Stand by Me" draft . . . =P
Seriously, you can't possibly say you're plagiarising me without a single mention of The Terminator. (There's a father/son movie for you! Anti-abortion, too!)
I'm actually more anti-single mother than pro-father/son, but you can argue that they're two sides of the same coin.
A couple of weeks ago, I ran into another post that celebrated 80s movies. I won't link to it or even try to find it because it was on a White Nationalist site (I didn't know what it was when I clicked on a seemingly innocuous link to another analysis of 80s movies), but it made an interesting point about this decade being the last time it was mainstream for a white man to be the consistently celebrated hero. It seems that we can take out the "white" and still make a strong case for 80s movies being--although nobody knew it at the time--men's movies.
(Top Gun is enough of a woman's movie to be questionable. The same themes are there, but I think the filmmakers went full-on pretty with that one.)
Agree about Top Gun.
No! If you post Twelve Things About Stand By Me I'll delete this post if you want!
I was thinking of The Terminator when hashing this post...
+JMJ+
Don't delete this post! I was just kidding about the draft . . .
These days, I catch more Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns than any movies . . . even glorious ones from The Best Decade Ever.
Post a Comment