0 Like Punk Never Happened: Culture Club and the New Pop (1986)

This treatment of the UK's early-'80s resurgence in pop music—known in the US as the "second British invasion"—encompasses so-called New Pop, focusing mostly on Culture Club, but also Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, and many others. It's written by Dave Rimmer, then of Smash Hits. Interesting trivia: another Smash Hits editor, Neil Tennant, served as agent in getting the book deal. I should explain my use of scare quotes and "so-called," because it largely explains my indifference to the book and its many insights. British pop of the early '80s wasn't that important to me. I loved (and still do) ABC, the Human League, and Culture Club, but have little use for Adam & the Ants, Duran Duran, and most of the others, with occasional exceptions for specific songs. I was convinced by my experience of it in the '70s (later confirmed in books such as Fredric Dannen's Hit Men) that pop radio had essentially become a fraud, controlled and manipulated by corporate interests. The "second British invasion" seems to me still little more than stuffing the charts in an attempt to recreate more lucrative times. The mass of "New Pop" does not stand up to the mass of the '60s British pop, nor are its highs comparable to the earlier highs. It doesn't mean there wasn't great music in the '80s too, and I was grateful Rimmer's focus was Culture Club when it could have been Duran Duran. At the same time Rimmer is explicitly constrained by his relationship with Boy George O'Dowd, Jon Moss, and the others, and altogether too focused on his "New Pop" thesis, supported by too much extraneous chart analysis, to get to the real story there, as I see it, which is the person and the persona of O'Dowd. O'Dowd's affair with Moss remains a tantalizing mystery and I get the feeling it's the best way in to the Culture Club story. There's no way Rimmer was going to write that story in 1986—not without a lot of unpleasant fallout likely—and it really was never what he intended. Just so, from my view, I think the title needs to be adjusted slightly: Like 1968 Never Happened.

In case it's not at the library.

Detail: Like Punk Never Happened: Culture Club and the New Pop (1986)

0 Timbuk3, "The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades" (1986)

Nov. 22, 1986, #19
(listen)

In retrospect, Chernobyl likely had everything to do with turning this into a hit for Timbuk3 toward the end of 1986—that and a wonderful turn of phrase, the kind of forehead-smacking verbal point you wonder no one ever thought of before. Timbuk3 was married couple Pat and Barbara MacDonald out of Madison, Wisconsin, folkies by inclination but with a lot of electronic gear in tow for the beats and such. This song is how they're known and leads off their debut album, Greetings From Timbuk3, with which I was briefly infatuated (notably for the song "I Love You in the Strangest Way," a haunting moaner that ended up on a disproportionate number of mixtapes). "Future's So Bright" is a funny blend of styles, a thumping rhythm section hard-rock attack with a soaring blues harp and wonderful country harmonies in the vocal, underpinning an '80s wiseass new wave puppy cynicism. You gotta wear shades for all the nuclear radiation, is of course the basic idea, though even that is approached in an odd way. The singer is kind of desperately normal, on an ordinary yuppie track, going to college and studying marketable skills. "I'm doing all right, getting good grades," the singer reassures himself. It's the nuclear science teacher who is worrisome, wearing dark glasses in the classroom. Presumably he knows something the rest us don't. The cheerful optimism never flags, nor the overburdened irony, and there is an admirable tension between them maintained to the end. Plus Chernobyl happened that year. Also: this wonderfully evocative note in Wikipedia: "The former members of Timbuk3 have refused to license the song for commercials, including a $900,000 offer from AT&T and offers from Ford, the U.S. Army, and Bausch & Lomb for their Ray-Ban sunglasses." Kudos, MacDonalds.

Detail: Timbuk3, "The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades" (1986)

0 Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)

USA, 83 minutes
Director: John McNaughton
Writers: Richard Fire, John McNaughton
Photography: Charlie Lieberman
Music: Ken Hale, Steven A. Jones, Robert McNaughton
Editor: Elena Maganini
Cast: Michael Rooker, Tom Towles, Tracy Arnold

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is based on the career of one of the more puzzling serial killers in the annals of crime, Henry Lee Lucas, who though he was a murderer eventually turned out to be more of a serial confessionalist than serial killer. At any rate, the picture is not any kind of documentary work, nor, according to director and co-writer John McNaughton, was it ever intended to be. Various crucial plot points, notably the presence of a camcorder, confirm that. Thus, whoever may ultimately be considered authors of this story—screenwriter Richard Fire and McNaughton, the corrupt Texas officials who brought their open cases to Lucas, or Lucas himself—it's more fiction than fact. But the story remains fascinating, and terrifying, for exactly that reason: because someone imagined it we somehow like to think a creature like him could exist. Because he could. Couldn't he?

With the possible exception of zombies, most of the monsters we associate with horror pictures find their sources in the 19th century, whether it's science gone dreadfully wrong (Frankenstein, 1818), dissociative personality disorders (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886), vampires (Dracula, 1897), or even the specific shapes of all those messes with ghosts and haunted houses (various entries from Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Edgar Allen Poe). This is true as well in the case of serial killers, with Jack the Ripper (and, somewhat less, Lizzie Borden). But I get the feeling that the serial killer subgenre is slightly more disreputable among horror aficionados, perhaps because the source is factual and historical rather than literary, involving much more real trauma than imagination.



It's all scary stuff to me, however, and whatever way you use to get there, Henry has to stand in as one of the best / scariest serial killer movies ever made, and one of the most unpleasant and purely unnerving horror pictures. As an admirer mentions in the DVD extras, "I saw it once and have never felt the need to look at it again." It's a sentiment easily understood. For me, when I saw it after it finally won its general release in 1990, it's the one time I've ever been so acutely aware that seeing a movie in public involves sitting in a dark room with people you don't know. More recently, it took me two weeks to bring myself to look at the DVD I bought.

Henry is just relentless about getting under your skin, with a nervy, beautiful, chilling soundtrack built on sickening sweet synthesizers, a sound design made out of the stuff of nightmares, a performance by Michael Rooker in the title role that is icy cold and pitch-perfect, and a narrative trafficking in perverse taboos that go well beyond simple murder. It shocks continually, in large and small ways. The opening shots are a series of tableaus of corpses, lovingly rendered and lingered over, mixed with scenes of Henry hunting. The killing is constant and indiscriminate. The picture rarely feels better than dank and gross. It is absolutely clinical about the way it proceeds. As Henry himself says about killing at one point, "It's always the same and it's always different."

Also found in the DVD extras, McNaughton talks about the producers who staked him to the $100,000 Henry was made on, telling how they gave him free rein to make a horror movie but then were disappointed with the result. McNaughton's ambition went well beyond the usual horror movie tropes and gestures of that post-slasher time, into areas more existential. All the usual horror-movie cheese has been extruded and scrubbed from Henry, leaving only the glittering-hard realization of human brutality, the ultimate horror. The element of Lucas that impressed investigators at the time when he was still believed to be the most prolific serial killer known was the way his crimes had little signature—he changed up his types of victims and his manner of murder continually, a detail that is played to very well here even if it is laughable about the case in retrospect.

It's also a nice representation of its times, set in Chicago in the '80s, with its synthesized soundtrack, largely undirected performances, and backstories in some cases provided by the performers themselves out of rehearsal exercises. It is uneven as so many low-budget productions tend to be, and with inclinations toward intellectualized postmodern distancing. At one point (never mind how, you can guess), Henry and his sidekick Otis acquire a camcorder, which they use to film their crimes and incidentally add some cheap (but extraordinarily effective) video texture to the picture. This is perhaps the movie's most fanciful conceit—if Lucas probably killed only a fraction of the people he confessed to killing, he certainly never did it with a video recording device on hand—but, for all that, it absolutely works.

The home invasion scene, for example—which is really a point where the film robs one of all faith in human beings, for its duration and for some time after—is actually viewed on a video on a TV screen, and we are watching with Henry and Otis as they raptly stare and relive the glories of the moment. It's also really a point, of course, where we are deeply and elaborately implicated. We may be sickened by it, but we watch it. And even if we turn off the TV or get up and leave the theater—which happened in the earliest screenings of this picture, at this point in it particularly—the genie is out of the bottle. The ideas, and the images, are in our head. Moreover, we know that the document exists. It can't be unthought or unimagined. Now you know it exists in the world. This is what comes of an interest in human experience. Have a nice life.

Detail: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)

0 Watchmen (1986-1987)

I found out about Watchmen in, of all places, a fanzine for mystery enthusiasts called The Armchair Detective, for which I briefly wrote book reviews in return for free books in the late '80s (such as Rock Critic Murders by Jesse Sublett, which they sent me but I never managed to finish, not because it isn't done well). The Watchmen review was buried in a column I read there regularly, "J'accuse!" by William L. DeAndrea. He was an interesting writer with wide-ranging interests, but it was unusual for anyone connected with the magazine to acknowledge a comic book, let alone discuss one, let alone rave enthusiastically about it. By the time I read the column the comic book run was over and it had been gathered into the graphic novel most of us know it by now, truly one of the great comic books (or graphic novels, if I must) we will have for a very long time. As promised by DeAndrea's review, Watchmen is a huge one. Writer Alan Moore (it somehow seems insufficient to call him just the writer, but there you go) takes the same psychological starting point as the book's virtual companion in comic book history, which preceded it by about seven months, Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns. But where Miller's Batman is a near-future tale, Moore sets Watchmen back in the "golden age" of comic books, to the very point of the original imagining, circa 1937, and reimagines it as if it all really happened, a fad of the transitional times from the Great Depression to World War II when real people dressed up in colorful costumes and "fought crime." As Miller did, Moore also wonders what kind of people they would be, and comes to essentially the same (obvious) conclusion: damaged human beings, revenge-driven psychopaths, and such. Only one character in Moore's pantheon here has super-powers, a Silver-Surfer-like figure produced as a matter of nuclear technology in the mid-'40s who is practically omnipotent. Otherwise they are well-meaning thugs or insecure but handy dweebs with maximum brain power. Moore's storytelling style is allusive and fastidiously detailed, supplying backstory via appendices to the early sections, staged as excerpts from an autobiography, published histories, odd critical exegeses, police files, and so forth. It may be a little awkward, in terms of comic-book storytelling, but it provides necessary context, and one welcomes it. I welcomed it. Also—and I think everybody talks about this sooner or later, but it's still remarkable—Dave Gibbons's illustrations are deceptively generic. By the midpoint the style becomes uncannily appropriate to the story, down to sizing and sequencing the panels. I understand that Moore has much to do with this, that he is obsessive about storyboarding every panel down to the tiniest detail. That may be so, but Gibbons is nonetheless a great choice. Watchmen is a little slow and confusing in the beginning—it's a very big story. But it doesn't take long to see it's in the hands of people who know what they're doing. Not many are better than Moore at exploiting the punctuated rhythms of comic book panels. Rhythms and visual puns are on practically every page, even as they advance the massive plot inexorably. A masterpiece for one and all. Essential.

In case it's not at the library.

Detail: Watchmen (1986-1987)

0 Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986)

It's more important than ever nowadays to keep your Dark Knights straight so here's a way to help you remember. This is the original and this is the best. No other comic book, let alone any movie, touches it. You don't have to think about anything else but this. When you have finished it, go ahead and try some of the others. If you start to feel confused again, return immediately to this one. It's really as simple as that. All those post-'60s-TV-show attempts to salvage Batman from the insipid pop culture mainstream that catapulted him to exactly the wrong renown (such attempts usually signaled by a heavy-handed insistence on the definite article, e.g. "Looks like trouble, we'd better get the Batman") came to naught—as worthy as they were, notably when Neal Adams started illustrating them—until Miller definitively reimagined the strangely enduring figure as a washed-up, middle-aged, has-been alcoholic, suffering the aches and pains of too many late-night fistfights, too many bone-crushing falls of failed acrobatics, and way too much boozing. The Robin in this adventure is a punk-rock chick with various problems. The Joker is a stone-cold psychopath. Superman is a contemptible do-gooder. And our old friend Bruce Wayne is slow, angry, thickened up in the middle, and not always thinking straight. At a stroke, Miller returned the Batman to everything people used to claim he should be. I was skeptical going in, I had heard this before, but this graphic novel is practically guaranteed to change the way people think, and it worked for me. Miller followed this up with Batman: Year One, which reimagined the origin story with equal potency and locked in the modern conception of our favorite superhero with no superpowers. Everybody since then has just been trying to keep up, whether that's Tim Burton or Christopher Nolan in the movies, or the rafts of writers and artists for the comic book and its rejuvenated potential for spinoffs. In this conception, likely best known now from the Nolan movie adaptations, Batman has become more of a psychopath himself, albeit one ostensibly for our side, a loner and vigilante who never recovered from the trauma of seeing his parents killed in a street stick-up, who comes most alive at night attacking prowlers and other bad guys. He's not fun, but he's often impressive, awe-inspiring even, which can get to be just about as good as fun. Miller's story and art (with inks by Klaus Janson, his future partner on the Daredevil franchise for Marvel) are never less than compelling, with their bleak, unified, and nearly perfectly realized vision of a media-saturated Gotham City in decline, and the scary grizzled drunk in cape and cowl who has appointed himself judge and jury of the place after nightfall.

In case it's not at the library.

Detail: Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986)

0 Strong Persuader (1986)

By consensus, by acclimation, by the rule of all that is obvious, Robert Cray's breakthrough fifth album (counting Showdown!) is his best. You can almost measure and compare the love Cray fans have for it by how many other albums by him they have had occasion to own (on that scale I am at about a 6). But I have never yet known anyone to claim another by him as better. The template for everything that makes him great is here in these 10 songs, where in retrospect he is clearly about the business of taking down low-hanging fruit. As a guitar player, he's perfectly adequate, even given to moments of brilliance; as a singer it's about the same, though closer to merely adequate. What's most interesting about Robert Cray to me is his songwriting, and more generally and broader than that, the way he builds songs, the story elements he uses. So many of these songs are practically literary, a voice carrying on with a story but somehow also conveying a broader context that often belies, or undercuts, or sometimes emphasizes what the singer is carrying on about. In "Guess I Showed Here," a guy is crowing to himself about all the pain he is causing his woman by leaving her, because he thinks she is having an affair. But he sounds less and less convinced, mulling in the last verse, "Now she can have the house / And she can keep the car / I'm just satisfied / Staying in this funky, little old motel / I'm so mad / Well I can't stand it." In "Right Next Door (Because of Me)," even more starkly, the singer hears the woman he has seduced fighting with her man in the apartment next door (more here). Another element of Cray's songwriting becomes evident comparing the two. He does not have just one persona, nor just a single story, to tell. There's a multiplicity to these songs—which may not have a single story to tell, but ultimately all tend to connect one way or another around deceit in matters of love—that reminds me of a parallel multiplicity to mid-'60s albums by the Beatles. In those songs it is puppy love whereas Cray's are sophisticated and cynical, but the same shifting viewpoints across horizons of experience within the stories of the songs is there. So one result for me is that, as I return to Strong Persuader now and then, I notice that different songs step out differently from the others, or rub against each other in new and different ways, and I identify with these narrators in different ways. It still can seem new when I come back to it. One constant always, of course, is that these songs are excellent blues jam workups within the verse-chorus-verse structure and a perfect pleasure to let just play.

Detail: Strong Persuader (1986)

0 Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

USA, 103 minutes
Director/writer: Woody Allen
Photography: Carlo Di Palma
Editor: Susan E. Morse
Cast: Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Dianne Wiest, Michael Caine, Carrie Fisher, Barbara Hershey, Maureen O'Sullivan, Lloyd Nolan, Max von Sydow, Daniel Stern, Sam Waterston, Tony Roberts, Julie Kavner, Lewis Black, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, John Turturro, Richard Jenkins, Joanna Gleason

One of the best formulations I know of the appeal of the Marx Brothers is found late in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters, his best movie of the '80s. In an implausible scene of suicide considered and averted (a Woody Allen staple even then), he makes the familiar case for Groucho and crew—inspired zaniness equated to life affirmation, that sort of thing. It is of a piece with the usual accolades for the Marx Brothers, and others such as Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, Martin and Lewis, all that comedy of bygone times lost on me beyond certain undeniable quaint charms (e.g., Laurel and Hardy music). What's interesting to me, perhaps because I can't appreciate the Marx Brothers the way Woody Allen and so many others do, is how well it stands in as approximation of the way I feel about Woody Allen movies, and nearly as much as ever.

Even the bad ones validate ideals I hold dear—may even have learned in part absorbing Woody Allen's '70s movies—an irresistible vision of an urban lifestyle constructed around cultural markers and cityscapes, and at deeper levels identity, and ultimately alienation. Life, this self-absorbed and conflicted Woody Allen view seems to tell us, is about emotional connections, the rejection of commerce, and privilege, in about equal proportions. Or, as he puts it in Annie Hall, the world can be divided into the horrible and the miserable, and the best any of us can hope for is to be among the miserable. Which, in turn, is itself eternally belied by the easygoing roll and tumble of Woody Allen's jokes and situations, second nature by the time of Hannah and Her Sisters, enabling him in fact to pull off the rather remarkable stunt that I think distinguishes it.


Certain elements, which we may as well characterize as "feel-good" because that's how I take them, are constants in most Woody Allen movies: the loose approach and playful inventiveness, the sense of being (or pretending to be) at home with great works of art, from Mozart to Louis Armstrong to Willie Mays, and the tone that alternates abruptly between self-deprecation and chiseling passive-aggressive vibe. The pungent presence itself of Woody Allen, his performances, voice, words—the very presence so many find so noxious (a view I have come to appreciate over the years)—nevertheless provides a touchstone, even a comforting figure, across the broad swaths of imagination and creative energy his movies represent collectively.

It is as immersive in its way as anything the movies give us, this Woody Allen universe, raised to a new level in Hannah and Her Sisters by the sly, calculated way he begins to truck with improbable happy endings. This was the first of three remarkable movies by Allen, followed by Radio Days and Another Woman—a comparable performance on its own terms, to reach for the sports metaphor, to Michael Jordan's latter three championships. There is no other movie in Allen's entire career so clearly aiming for the fine balance and the complexity and simplicity of the final scene in City Lights (even as Manhattan, seven years earlier, had made the bigger play for updating the Chaplin classic whole), and damn, he did get close with Hannah and Her Sisters. "How ya gonna top that?" Mickey (Woody Allen) says to his wife Holly (Dianne Wiest) in that final scene. And then she does, with a perfect fantasy moment that reverberates still across certain indie quarters (consider Sideways), an ending that ought to break down even the most callous at least a little.

Along the way the jumble of pieces is handled expertly, with surprisingly confident rhythms of storytelling. It's a Gordian knot of a mess of a situation with the three sisters of the title, and numerous affairs, multiple generations, and two shared assignations, an intricate dance of human foible. Nothing Woody Allen had done in years at that point indicated he could pull it off, but he does. It never once gets lost in the detail, but simply proceeds with clarity and sense of purpose. Its remarkable screenplay is beautifully symmetrical in structure, starting virtually at the point it begins, with similar musical cues and shots of characters and even the same holiday, Thanksgiving, a brilliant choice itself. This may be the best Thanksgiving movie I know, in fact.

I suspect I may be making myself out to be an uncritical admirer and in many ways that's fair enough. But I don't have unmixed feelings about Woody Allen, and many of my problems with him actually started to crystallize with Hannah and Her Sisters. I'll start with music because, in terms of taste, going back to at least Annie Hall, I have always differed a good bit with him there. By all rights, I should regard him as a soundtrack artist on par with Wes Anderson, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, and other artists of the form. He's certainly good at matching album tracks to personal emotional moments. But I am not convinced, as he most outspokenly is, that everything worth saying in popular music was finished by 1959, nor that jazz and classical standards, however exquisite, can say enough in the perversely isolated way Woody Allen insists on using them. On top of that, the proto-Fox News tone of his endless complaints about any form of rock 'n' roll are a wall of hostility against which I find it difficult not to respond in kind. Or, to be perfectly clear about it, fuck Woody Allen and his antiquated taste.

Hannah and Her Sisters was also the first Woody Allen movie I remember noticing how old for the role he seemed. I was willing to overlook it because someone just on the wrong side of 50 could, plausibly, be caught up in the TV producer shenanigans in New York shown here, but my tolerance would never again be so generous, and Woody Allen's presence in practically everything from this point forward has always been a net downer. Other tropes getting old: the arch vocabulary of the dialogue (who ever actually says "contemptuous"?), the painful tin-eared jokes about pedophilia ("Don't you read the papers?" his character says to a network censor here. "Half the country is doing it"), the modern secular who shocks his bourgeois Jewish parents, the privileged New Yorker who can afford to indulge purity impulses and quit jobs to write a book and other such. Yes, some envy here on my part, no doubt. But isn't that also on some level what it is intended to provoke? People don't just imagine Woody Allen's hostility. It is also a constant.

Nowadays, in fact, Hannah and Her Sisters has to work harder than ever to overcome a lot of my general impatience with Woody Allen movies, all the problems I see with them more clearly than ever, their insularity and preening narcissistic impulses, and worst of all their endless sameness (which of course is their virtue when I am inclined the other way). Hannah is remarkably well done and winning every step of the way, and it certainly belongs on the short list of his best. Even if I feel compelled to apologize for liking him, I can also say that I found surprising new pleasures last time through (in addition to the usual ones) playing spot-the-player with John Turturro, Julia Louis-Dreyfus (looking straight off the set of Desperately Seeking Susan), Richard Jenkins, and others.

Top 10 of 1986
Looks like 1986 might be behind only 1980 and 1982 for me as best movies years of the '80s, which I don't think I had realized until I put together this list. That's a pretty amazing top 5. After about #6, my top 19 bunches up pretty tight, so titles that could as easily have bobbed in as out include: Aliens, Down by Law, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Jean do Florette (with Manon of the Spring, which I think I'd argue as a one-fer, though really need to see them again), Manhunter, River's Edge, Smooth Talk, and Stand by Me. I almost wish I liked River's Edge a little bit more so I could see Dennis Hopper in three titles in my top 10. Maybe another time. I should also say that I had a very hard time again with the last two picks for things I didn't like, whatever that might mean. (And also that yes, for the record, Peggy Sue Got Married is my #5 Francis Ford Coppola.)
1. Hannah and Her Sisters
2. Blue Velvet
3. The Fly
4. Something Wild
5. Sherman's March
6. The Sacrifice
7. Platoon
8. Hoosiers
9. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
10. Peggy Sue Got Married

Didn't like so much: The Color of Money, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, She's Gotta Have It, Sid and Nancy, True Stories

Gaps: Big Trouble in Little China, The Green Ray, Melo, Mona Lisa, Tampopo

Other write-ups: River's Edge

Detail: Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)