O-o-o-okay. Today's movie doubles links two films through the prism of John Cusack movies, skiing, and the 1980s. Since 'Hot Tub Time Machine' explicitly goes back to 1986, it started to ring bells in my head. The more obvious doubles partner for 'Hot Tub Time Machine' - 'HTTM' from here - would have been 'Back to the Future' which kicks off in 1985 and talked about 1980s teen mores in the present tense as it happened, as opposed to 'HTTM' which looks back and wonders in nostalgia. Not coincidentally, both films feature Crispin Glover, and in both films he is transformed by the adventure undertaken by the time travelers.
Still, the reason I dug up 'Better Off Dead' is because it too hails from 1985, also stars John Cusack and seems like a good point to understand just what it is that the 1980s were about in real time as opposed to nostalgia. In that sense I thought it might open up a more interesting vein of discussion than simply comparing two time-travel texts. The other thing is that 'HTTM' just isn't a good a film as 'BTTF' and I didn't want to get bogged down in the inferiority of 'HTTM' when I could be digging up some interesting ideas by comparing it to something in its own weight class.
Snow And Ski
The 1980s the 'HTTM' crew go back to is more a parody of the 1980s than an attempt to recreate a proper look. If you want a proper look, you get closer watching 'BOD'. It really is the snow and ski experience that links the film and in each instance the snow forms the test of character for John Cusack's characters.
'HTTM' is a little disappointing in that the test of snow is largely metaphorical whereas in BOD, his character has to conquer his fear and ski down a dangerous mountain. The physicality of the task actually comes off a lot better than the metaphor of John Cusack's character Adam's frozen emotions in 'HTTM'. By watching these two films together, you get the feeling that these John Cusack characters have lost a lot of dynamism in the intervening years, and it's a bit of a shame.
The Cold War And Reagan
I've written about this elsewhere but the quintessential Gen-X experience was the fear of Ronald Reagan pushing the button to turn the Cold War into a Hot War of Mutually Assured Destruction. Thus it is no surprise that in going back to the 1980s, the 'HTTM' characters end up in the cold. They are pretty explicit about this when they arrive in 1986 and the news on the TV screen shows Ronald Reagan.
The paranoia also informs the plot as the villain Blaine is motivated in stopping the 'HTTM' crew because he was inspired by 'Red Dawn' and suspects the 'HTTM' crew are Russian spies. What's remarkable is how much the villain character of Blaine - a garden variety alpha male jock bully - is just like the villain from 'BOD', Roy Stalin. Get that surname? Yes, the Cold War paranoia was rampant enough that the bully kid's surname being Stalin didn't strike anybody as weird.
It is thus a bit of an irony that the means by which the 'HTTM' crew can return to the present is by reacquiring a can of some weird Russian caffeine-boosted soft drink. It seems America is much less worried about Russia today because they've joined the consumerist system, but they are worried now about the competition they're getting from them.
If Gen-X is not too worried about the War on Terror, it's because they learned not to be too worried about the Cold War.
The Gen-X Conundrum
'BOD' features John Cusack's teen protagonist Lane Meyer with David Ogden Stier (Charles from the TV series of MASH) as his conservative father. They seem to be a well to do family living near a ski resort town. The central conflict between father and son centre around the broken down communication between the generations that was so common in the 1980s. After the tumultuous 1960s and chaotic 1970s, the narrative of the alienated teenager had set itself into a pattern, and in 'BOD' we see signs of formalising these relationships. Clearly it's an attempt to re-assemble the meaningful bits of society that make sense to his character but the comedy lies in the futility.
The film has one particular exchange where Lane's father attempts to talk to his son from cribbed notes on juvenile lingo. It's an excruciating scene even after all these years. What seems to be happening is not so much independence as an absence of adult supervision for kids which is refreshing as it is novel to watch.
The absence of adult supervision is a theme that is revisited in 'HTTM', but this time the characters are wondering how it is that their lives turned into such a mess. The mirroring of meaning is stark. The kids of the 1980s made themselves away from their parents, but in making themselves they have become stilted and unfinished. Yet, when looking back it is obvious the parents couldn't have been there when the world was changing so fast. Gen-X made itself into what it is - i.e. we made ourselves the way we are, that's why we're so fucked, but there wasn't much else choice about it.
Going Back In Time To Fix ...What Exactly?
There are 2 rough genres of time machine stories predicated on where they choose to go. If you choose to go to the far future, then it's all new and amazing but from a story-telling point of view you're better off making a film simply set in the future and remove the expediency of having to explain time machine in your story.
The alternative is go into the past and face the "grandmother dilemma". Invariably time travel stories to the past face the problematic of what happens if you change anything, and should you try to recreate the past or not. This is what connects 'HTTM' to 'BTTF' more than 'BOD', so I'll quickly talk about this point.
Needless to say both 'HTTM' and 'BTTF' go back into the past by a generation to effectively 'fix' things in the present, and return to the contemporary moment from whence their journey started. What's interesting in each instance is just how little America has changed between 1985 and 2010 in terms of what it thinks is 'fixed'.
What's particularly unchanged is how success is measured in material terms and then superficial, cosmetic terms after that. So for all the spiritual growth the characters go through in both films, the rewards for their growth are mainly material. This is pretty solidly bourgeois and one shouldn't be surprised that it is the case, but it is pretty stark how even in 2010 the only kind of success that is meaningful for the characters in a movie are material.
It's enough to make you wonder if there are any other ways of expressing this kind of thing in cinematic terms, or whether cinema is so fundamentally bourgeois that it can never escape the materialist position for anything. These are not necessarily faults of the films or film makers, but rather an observation about American cinema as a whole. We all know for instance that Australian cinema is decidedly tragic and anti-climactic out of ideological choice and so naturally flounders at the box office. I guess I am more impressed with how unflinching and unchanging the ideological position is between 1985 and 2010.
The Reconstruction Of Social Meaning
After the tumult of the previous decades, certain things were very matter of fact by 1985. Such as drugs and kids' inordinate interest in experimenting with them as well as dysfunctional families. Everybody growing up knew a whole bunch of kids at school whose parents had either split up or were splitting up. These kinds of things were old hat, so to speak, and thus you can see in 'BOD' an attempt to re-configure the family. The heterogenous interests of Lane's family members - his mother's cooking and his brothers' projects - represent the early attempt to re-imagine a nuclear family in spite of everybody's quirks. It's significant because it comes a good few years before 'the Simpsons' came along and institutionalised the tolerance. Compared to 'the Simpsons', the 'weird family' gags look lame today.
And so the 1986 in 'HTTM' is so exaggerated for comedy, it couches 1980s mores in an ironic manner. While both films remain loose comedies, the gap between the two films tells us quite a bit about how we have moved on. For a start in 'BOD', none of Lane's friends are black. There is a French exchange student, some Asian kids who have adapted to America, there is a freaky fat kid, but nobody is black. In 'HTTM', one of the friends is black. In the mythically recreated 1980s of 'HTTM' the racial divide has been overcome. This is underscored by the gag exchange:
"What colour is Michael Jackson?"
"He's black of course!"
"Aaaaaaaaghhhhh!!!!"
The certitude of Michael Jackson's colour is somehow meant to overshadow the certitude of the racial divide as it existed in 1980s America. It's a nice attempt to rewrite history, but it is what it is - an attempt to rewrite history. This sort of has odd flow on effects...
You Call That Heavy Metal?
I remember in the 1980s, people talking heatedly about music from the 1950s and 1960s and it was such a bore. This is going to be very boring for people born after 1985.
There's an animated sequence built around Van Halen's song 'Everybody Wants Some' in 'BOD'. The Heavy Metal band of choice in 'HTTM' is Poison. If you asked me the relative merits of the 2 bands I'll tell you Van Halen wins hands down. I mean really, if you played guitar it was Jimi Hendrix, then Eddie Van Halen, who truly revolutionised lead guitar playing.
Also if you check out the wikipedia entry on Poison you can see they were still a relatively minor act in 1985-1986. If you asked me, Poison really weren't on anybody's radar in that period unless you were a metal head. This average crowd of youths getting off on Poison just wasn't true in 1986.
The 'lie' so to speak in 'HTTM' is that when the band hits the stage in 1986, it's a multi-racial band with a black singer. In 'BOD', it's a blonde girl in a really short skirt fronting an all-white band. Even the music sounds 'wrong' in 'HTTM'. The 1980s don't sound so nuanced so much as having a sheen. Guitar tones are light, the voices are pitched tightly and high, the beat is almost bionically 'up'. The stage act in 'HTTM' would have gone down as lame in 1985.
Some contemporaneous 80s albums that were on high rotation on my Walkman in 1985-1986:
- '1984' by Van Halen
- 'Drama' & '90125' by Yes
- 'Ghost In The Machine' & 'Synchronicity' by The Police
- 'Beat' & 'Three of A Perfect Pair' by King Crimson
- 'PG4' & 'So' by Peter Gabriel
- 'Service' by Yellow Magic Orchestra
- 'Gone To Earth' by David Sylvian
- 'Invisible Touch' by Genesis
I was a prog geek. Still am, but that's another story.
Anyway, I mention all that in passing because none of the nostalgia invested in the music in 'HTTM' moved me in the least bit whereas listening to the music playing in 'BOD' actually felt like the 1980s I remembered. It's not music I liked, but it was music that was of its time.
The gap between the two positions is interesting in that it highlights the shift in perception as to what exactly was considered commercial then and how much of it can still be sustained. The music of the past is often not how you imagine it to have been contextualised.
The Camaro Was The Car
Oddly enough the two films are connected through Chevrolet Camaros. A 1967 Chevy Camaro is the featured sports car in 'BOD' while 'HTTM' shows the character of Lou attempting suicide in his up to date Chevy Camaro.
You can chalk it up to coincidence or have a think about what a Camaro is. The first Camaro went on sale in 1966. It's a Gen-X car.
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