I was born in New York City in 1978, meaning that, while I did exist in the 1980s as more than a zygote, I wasn’t yet a teenager. Instead, actual teenagehood felt as distant and desirable as the moon.
I was a typical older child from a middle-class Jewish family: well-behaved, anxious, bookish, and therefore especially curious about the freedoms I fancied being a teenager would bring. My little sister and I weren’t allowed to watch commercial television stations – yes, I come from one of those families – meaning we were limited to Sesame Street and whatever our mother allowed us to rent from East 86th Street Video.
When I was nine, she allowed me to rent something that featured neither animation nor Gene Kelly: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I couldn’t believe it. How on Earth could she – the dorkiest mother ever, who only ever gave us fruit for dessert – let me watch a film featuring real-life boys kissing girls – with their tongues! My mother had basically allowed me to rent hardcore porn.
Ferris proved to be a gateway drug, and I became such a heavy user of East 86th Street Video that for my 10th birthday my parents gave me my own membership card. I was soon mainlining the classics: Mannequin, Romancing The Stone, Good Morning Vietnam, The Breakfast Club, anything produced by Touchstone Pictures and absolutely everything featuring the two actors who I assured my sister were the real talents of our era: Steve Guttenberg and Rick Moranis. And thus my highbrow tastes were forged for life.
These movies, largely seen as junk when they came out, turned out to be deeply formative. They provided the lifelong template for what I think of as funny (Eddie Murphy), cool (Bill Murray) and sexy (Kathleen Turner). They taught me more about life than any library or teacher ever would.
But for a long time these films had a terrible reputation – and, of course, there were loads of things that were rubbish about 1980s movies. There was a weird tendency to treat rape as a comedic plot device. Tedious Jake in Sixteen Candles hoots about how his girlfriend, Caroline, is so drunk he “could violate her 10 ways if I wanted to”. (Did I mention this is the film’s romantic lead, the one we’re supposed to cheer on? I don’t think so, John Hughes.) Then there are the racist epithets, homophobic slurs (it is deeply depressing to see an actor as lovely as Michael J Fox using the word “fag” with gleeful abandon) and the forays into faintly deranged American patriotism. But, in the main, I’ll defend 1980s movies with the ferocity of Crocodile Dundee. This is a knife.
My 80s screen icon Rick Moranis once told me: “I still get stopped in the street by people who ask, ‘Why don’t they make movies like they did in the 80s?’ And I don’t really know the answer.” The reason it feels as if they don’t make fun movies like they did in the 1980s is because they don’t, and this is down to three things: economics, shifting social attitudes and (the following should be said in your deepest James Earl Jones voice, either as Darth Vader or the angry author in Field Of Dreams) the changing world order (more of which later).
I love the silliness of 1980s movies, their sweetness, the stirring anthems (the theme music for Back To The Future, Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop and Indiana Jones would be among my Desert Island Discs), the familiar formulae. But there is more to these movies than kitsch. Kitsch is fine, but it has no staying power. These films contain life lessons that you simply don’t see in movies today. Here are three of my all-time favourites and what they taught me.
Dirty Dancing: abortions happen and that’s just fine
Few movies have been as underrated and misunderstood as 1987’s Dirty Dancing. I first saw it when I was 10, and far from appreciating it as one of the great feminist films of all time, I was so excited to be watching a movie that had the word “dirty” in the title that I spent the whole film waiting for it to finish so I could call my friend Lauren and brag.
Adult audiences at the time were just as blind to Dirty Dancing’s feminism. Partly, this comes down to sexism. Partly, it’s a reflection of how times have changed. And mainly, it’s because the film’s writer, Eleanor Bergstein, rightly thought the best way to deliver a social message was “to present it in a pleasurable way so that the moral lessons would sneak up on people”. But for a long time I was so distracted by the pleasure – specifically, the soundtrack, the sex, the Swayze – that the moral lessons didn’t sneak up on me at all.
By 1987, Flashdance and Footloose had already been released, and studios were desperate for another teen movie that featured dancing and a great commercial soundtrack. But they didn’t want Dirty Dancing.
“I cannot be clear enough about this: everybody thought Dirty Dancing was just a piece of teenage junk,” the charmingly chatty Bergstein tells me. “Nobody wanted to make it. Nobody.”
Eventually, a small independent production company came on board for $4m, about a fifth of the average cost of a movie at the time. Bergstein and her producer, Linda Gottlieb, accepted. And so the story of a young woman known as Baby (Jennifer Grey), who goes to a holiday camp in the Catskills with her parents and sister in the summer of 1963 and falls in love with the dance instructor, Johnny (Patrick Swayze), was born.
Since then, Bergstein has become pretty hardened to critics dismissing her film, but there are two particular comments she hears that drive her crazy: “I hate it when people describe Baby as an ugly duckling, because Jennifer’s beautiful, obviously. I also can’t stand it when people describe it as a Cinderella story, because all Cinderella ever did was sit on her rump!”
Baby definitely does a lot more with her rump. When the film opens, she is reading a book about economic development, because she’s going to major in the economics of underdeveloped countries and join the Peace Corps. “Our Baby’s going to save the world!” her proud father, Dr Houseman (the delightfully eyebrowed Jerry Orbach), boasts to the folk at Kellerman’s, the (not very subtly Jewish) holiday camp. (Dirty Dancing is easily the most Jewish 80s teen film, which is probably another reason it is so close to my heart. As Bergstein says, “You just have to know how to spot the clues.”)
Until she can save the world, Baby sets about saving everyone else. Grey is perfect as a naive but likable teenager, determined to help the poor and downtrodden, and without any concept of what life is like for anyone who is not Jewish and middle class (another probable reason I relate to this film so much). She is repulsed by the disdainful manner with which the holiday camp’s bosses treat the (Catholic) working-class entertainment staff, and horrified when she realises her father is just as big a snob. When she learns that the dance instructor, Penny, is pregnant with the waiter Robbie’s baby, she tells him to pay for her abortion. When he refuses, she gets the money herself. When Johnny needs someone to stand in for Penny for the dance routine, Baby offers herself. When Penny’s abortion is botched, she gets her father to step in.
Baby is just as determined when it comes to getting what she wants, and what she wants is to have sex with Johnny – the film is very, very clear about that. Her dancing improves as she gains in sexual confidence, and before you can say “I’ll have what she’s having”, she’s writhing on the floor with him to Mickey & Sylvia. Love may be strange, but sex, Baby discovers, is awesome.
This basic truism – teenage girls enjoy sex – is a lesson gleaned far more rarely from films today. Now, a girl in a teen film who has sex – or even just wants sex – risks being ravaged by her boyfriend and eaten from within by a vampire baby (Bella in Twilight). At the very least, she is emotionally damaged (The Perks Of Being A Wallflower) and will be universally shamed (Easy A). Good, smart, sane girls don’t have sex, or are extremely reluctant and submit only under sufferance because the boys want it so badly (Dionne in Clueless, Vicky in American Pie). What you don’t see any more are tender depictions of teen sexuality, or realistic ones.
One woman in Dirty Dancing does get punished for having sex: Penny, who almost dies after an illegal abortion. I’m not sure what I thought was going on when I was a kid: maybe I thought she’d fallen down some steps and hurt herself; maybe I was so baffled that I simply ignored it. But when I came back to the film as a teenager, expecting to spend a happy 90 minutes wallowing in sexy dance sequences, familiar one-liners (“I carried a watermelon”) and Grey’s magnificent original nose (since tragically mutilated), it was something of a shock to realise that what Dirty Dancing is really about, at its heart, is the importance and necessity of legal abortion.
“When I wrote the film, abortion, like feminism, was one of those issues that people thought just wasn’t relevant any more,” Bergstein says. The film is set in 1963, but came out in 1987. “A lot of young women thought those battles were won, but I thought Roe v Wade was precarious.” No one – not the studio, not the critics – complained at the time. “The studio thought the script was stupid and bad for so many reasons, they scarcely noticed it.”
The first objection raised came from an acne cream company that wanted to sponsor the film, but backed away when they saw it. The studio suggested that the film be reshot, but Bergstein pointed out that the abortion is integral to the movie, as it’s how Johnny and Baby meet, so the studio backed down. “I knew that if I put in a social message, it had to be carefully plotted in,” Bergstein says. “A lot of movies have social messages that end up on the cutting room floor.”
Women still have abortions, but you wouldn’t know it from today’s mainstream movies, teen or otherwise. Even smart films that confront the issue dodge it awkwardly. In 2007’s Knocked Up, which focuses on a couple who conceive after an awkward one-night stand, the only two people who mention the word – her mother, his flatmate – are derided as heartless. In the 2007 film Juno, the eponymous teenager is dissuaded from having an abortion after a protester tells her that her unborn baby will already have fingernails.
Dirty Dancing continues to teach generations of women about the importance of choice. We came for the sex, but we stayed because it tells us something about ourselves and the world. And, as Baby learns, only the best kind of sex can do that.
Ghostbusters: how to be a man
Ghostbusters is the greatest movie ever made. For most of my life, I assumed this was a fact universally agreed. Sure, when asked to name their favourite film, people might say random words like “Citizen Kane” or “Vertigo”, but I thought they did this just as, when asked who they’d like to have at their dream dinner party, they might say, “Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela” – when, obviously, they’d actually want Madonna and Bill Murray.
I never thought of my Ghostbusters obsession as remarkable. If anything, I saw it as a perfectly natural response to a great work of art. Devoting an entire shelf to books and articles by or about the people involved in the making of this movie? Commendable intellectual curiosity. Refusing to go on a second date with someone because they failed to recognise an obscure (and not, to be honest, wildly relevant) Ghostbusters quote over dinner? Why waste time with losers? (Failure to recognise quotes from When Harry Met Sally and Indiana Jones were also date dealbreakers. It really is astounding I was basically single until I was 35.)
It wasn’t until I found myself awake at 2am, at the age of 33, scrolling through eBay in search of a copy of Bill Murray’s original Ghostbusters script, that I felt it might be time to look at what, precisely, was going on here and why, after all this time, Ghostbusters still feels so special to me.
There is sentimentality, for sure, not exactly for my childhood but for the city of my childhood. Ghostbusters is as much a love letter to New York as anything by Woody Allen, and a less self-conscious one at that. But I also love it for its depiction of how a man should be. Ever since I saw this movie at the age of six, sharing my fold-down seat in the cinema with my mother’s big bag for added weight (so the seat wouldn’t snap back and swallow me like the killer plant in Little Shop Of Horrors), the Ghostbusters have represented to me an ideal of masculinity.
This is not just because I fancy all of them, which I definitely do. (The Ghostbusters are total hotties, although this is rarely noted. Young Aykroyd is very much in my top five, maybe even my top three, and the only thing hotter than him greeting the crowds at the end of Ghostbusters with a cigarette in his mouth is him looking all sweet and forlorn in Trading Places. Anyway, I digress.)
It might seem odd, this idea that a bunch of dudes running around Manhattan wearing cartoon insignia on their uniforms represent all that is good about masculinity, and some people would disagree with me. In fact, some dark souls have accused the Ghostbusters of sexism, and to be fair to these people, it’s not wildly difficult to see why: the ghosts are all female (minus Slimer, of course) and are either trying to kill the Ghostbusters or give them oral sex; Venkman sexually harasses or patronises any woman in his path; there is a general air of male clubbiness. Read this way, the film sounds like a terrible precursor to a terrible Adam Sandler movie – and it could have been, had it starred and been written by anyone else.
But in my personal experience, there is a reason women love this film as much as men, and it is because Ghostbusters subverts the sexist tropes of male-led comedies. First, there’s the depiction of male friendship. The three primary Ghostbusters – Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) and Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) – are all friends. Good friends. They like each other, they’re amused by each other and they stick together when they’re fired from their university jobs. There’s nothing eroticised about their friendship, no overcompensation of macho-ness, no competitive banter. Nor is there any suggestion that male friendship is so special it must be protected from all outsiders who threaten it – namely, women. Compare this with the treatment meted out to the female love interests in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, or less broad bromance films such as Sideways, in which the male friends are all, without fail, horrible to the women (read: invaders).
The Ghostbusters never fall out with each other. In today’s male-led comedies, films like I Love You, Man and Anchorman, the male friends always fall out at some point, followed by an emotional reunion. That’s because, in those films, the friendship is a (barely) platonic romance and therefore the trajectory is that of a cliched love story: boy meets boy, boy loses boy, boy gets boy back. The Ghostbusters are friends – just friends – and they are grownups.
These men are neither patrician nor man-boys – they’re just funny, friendly guys whose funniness doesn’t depend on misogyny or insecurity. Is that really too much to ask for? They were enough like my father when I was a kid to feel reassured by them (Ramis); they were enough like me that I wanted them to be my friends (Murray); and they were handsome enough that I wanted to do things to them I was only starting to understand (Aykroyd, obviously). And those things still hold true, onscreen and, it turns out, off.
Last year, I covered the Oscars and its Vanity Fair party for this paper, and it so happened that Bill Murray had presented an award and made an impromptu tribute to Harold Ramis, who died last year. When I saw Murray at the party, I didn’t even stop to think or take the time to feel shy. I ran up to him in an unashamedly starstruck way. “Mr Murray, Ghostbusters is my favourite movie in the world. What is the secret of its everlasting appeal?” I burbled breathlessly.
He looked down at me (Murray is surprisingly tall), his hair now grey, but still as skewwhiff as Venkman’s after a ghost shootout. For a mortifying second, I thought he’d tell me to get lost. “Friendship,” he replied without a pause. And then he gave me a noogie.
Steel Magnolias: how to be a woman
Most people know about the Bechdel test, which ascertains how feminist a film is by posing the following criteria:
1 It has to have at least two women in it…
2 Who talk to each other…
3 About something besides a man.
Well, I’d like to coin the Magnolia test, which judges whether or not a movie is a proper women’s movie by asking whether:
1 The cast is largely, maybe even solely female…
2 And the female characters are kind to one another because they like one another, and they talk to each other about a million things other than men…
3 And the relationship between the women is far more important than any they have with a man. (Bonus points if any of the following are in the film: Shirley MacLaine, Dolly Parton, Bette Midler, Olympia Dukakis. Triple for Sally Field.)
In an ideal world, these films would be known as “movies”, rather than “women’s movies”, but as the ongoing success of Michael Bay proves, we do not live in an ideal world. Movies that focus on women’s stories are – now more than ever – dismissed as niche, even though women make up more than half the human race and (arguably more to the point) cinema audiences.
Classic women’s movies tell women that our daily lives are interesting. In these films, women exist in their own right, not as appendages, not as lonely spinsters, or idealised quarries, or someone’s wife or someone’s mother, but as funny, sad, angry, kind, supportive, independent human beings – and how many movies can claim that? 9 To 5 amply passes the Magnolia test, as do Terms Of Endearment and Beaches, two of the classic women’s weepies. These movies starred women, and were made for women, told distinctly women’s stories, involving breast cancer, straying husbands and motherhood.
But of all the great 1980s women’s movies, my favourite is Steel Magnolias. It still makes me laugh out loud (“I’m not crazy, M’Lynn – I’ve just been in a very bad mood for 40 years,” Shirley MacLaine’s character, Ouiser, says to Sally Field’s M’Lynn at one point, and that quote in particular has proven astonishingly useful in real life) and, yes, I cry, every time, at the end. “Laughter through tears is my favourite emotion,” says Dolly Parton’s character, Truvy, which could be the film’s motto. This film is still adored, 25 years on, so much so that it was remade (badly) in 2012 with an all-black cast.
“People still talk to me about Steel Magnolias today,” Olympia Dukakis tells me. “At benefits, I ask women to put their hands up if they’ve seen the film five times, 10 times, 15 times. The other day I got up to 27. What a draw that film has. It tells women that female friendship is profound, and women watch it together and cry together, still.” But even more important than weeping and hooting is the way it teaches audiences to expect more from movies when it comes to the representation of women. This movie stars six female characters and there is not a single bitch fight. Not once do they fight over a man. Imagine that! What next, a movie suggesting women can work together without throwing tampons at each other?
Where are the classic women’s films being made today? Geena Davis, an 80s star who went on to make the groundbreaking Thelma & Louise (1991) and A League Of Their Own (1992), became frustrated by the fact that, even after a woman’s film proves a huge hit, “nothing changes”. In 2004, while staying at home with her then toddler daughter, Davis noticed something odd about the movies and TV shows aimed at children: there were notably few female characters. She ended up sponsoring the largest amount of research ever done on gender depictions in entertainment media, covering a 20-year span, and in 2007 launched the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. The data uncovered appalled her: “In family films, crowd and group scenes contain only 17% female characters,” she says. “Why, in the 21st century, would we be training kids to see women as taking up far less space in the world than men?”
The problem isn’t limited to kids’ films. Kathleen Turner, who played an extraordinarily wide range of roles in the 80s, tells me she now sees fewer studio films for women and less variety in the roles. “The women are such cliches. Women today are encouraged to play the character that sells. That poor woman Jennifer Aniston has been playing the same role for 20 years. I’m like, come on, honey, aren’t you bored?”
The films of Paul Feig are probably the closest Hollywood comes to making classic women’s movies. In Bridesmaids, and especially The Heat, a female buddy cop movie, what’s at stake isn’t whether a woman will get a man, but rather the future of a female friendship. Neither of these films has the gentle domesticity of Terms Of Endearment or Steel Magnolias, but they were clearly made by someone who likes women, who respects them and finds them interesting. Feig might have to frontload his films with some gross-out gags (Bridesmaids), action (The Heat) and a few too many self-deprecating skits from Melissa McCarthy, but for now that feels like a trade-off worth making.
I ask Feig if he thinks things might change for the better. “Oh, yeah. It’s so obvious that [women starring in movies] draws people to theatres and makes money. Things just have to change. People won’t accept it any more.”
As it happens, Feig is writing and directing an all-female version of Ghostbusters, “because that sounds really fun to me!” Murray famously cited “cats and dogs living together” as the inevitable after-effect of the end of days. But the women’s movie and Ghostbusters finally coming together? That feels to me like the Promised Land.
Top five 80s montages
(Yes, I left out Rocky: too easy)
1 Baby learns to dance, Dirty Dancing
So sexy, so adorable. And set to Hungry Eyes by Eric Carmen. I just love the bit when her trainers suddenly morph into dancing shoes. I could watch this a million times, and I probably have.
2 The trip to the Chicago Institute of Art, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
John Hughes’s self-described “self-indulgent” scene, and the more moving for it. This is the scene that confirms Ferris Bueller to be the most poetic of all 80s teen films, and perhaps of all teen films, ever.
3 Alex practises dancing, Flashdance
She welds – and then she dances! Cue a thousand close-ups of her arse. This is pure Bruckheimer and Simpson, just as they were hitting their stride.
4 The Ghostbusters get successful, Ghostbusters
Classic montage, with newspaper front pages spinning across the screen, and a very cute photo of Aykroyd on the cover of Time magazine. The cameos from real 1980s DJs make me go a little weepy.
5 The volleyball game, Top Gun
Topless, sweaty men playing sport to a song called Playing With The Boys by Kenny Loggins – seriously, what more could you want?
This is an edited extract from Hadley Freeman’s Life Moves Pretty Fast, published on 21 May by Fourth Estate at £12.99. To order a copy for £9.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.
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