by Fiona Underhill, Contributor

The past can be a dangerous place – you can get lost there.

1980s nostalgia has been rife in popular culture for some time now, for both better and worse. A decade that you could argue was dominated by a Steven (Spielberg) and a Stephen (King) has become the playground of many middle-aged men seeking to recapture their youths. 2011’s Super 8, although set in 1979, was very much a sign of what was to come. Produced by Spielberg and directed by a man who undoubtedly sees himself as his successor, JJ Abrams, the film was infused with the rose-tinted glow of Close Encounters and ET.

However, two things (one movie, one TV show) have really taken the 80s nostalgia into overdrive. The first is obviously Stranger Things, which started in 2016, and the second is the new film version of Stephen King’s It which was split into two chapters and released in 2017 and 2019. The aesthetics and tone of these two have bled into so many areas of the media – just look at the trailer for the upcoming movie The Black Phone. And while Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) was set in the modern day, it was dripping in 80s nostalgia for obvious reasons, although it felt like it had more in common with Stranger Things/It than the original movies. 

We’ve also had James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), which was saturated with an 80s color palette, soundtrack and flashback scenes. Then there was Bumblebee (2018), the first of the modern Transformers franchise to take things back to the 80s, where the toys and cartoon originated. And the retro nostalgia perhaps reached its nadir in Ready Player One (2018) made by the actual Steven Spielberg.

Reboots and legacy sequels are now all the rage, with many based on 1980s properties. James Mangold’s Indiana Jones 5 is coming up in 2023, and on TV, we’ve had the successful show Cobra Kai (based on the Karate Kid movies), and the unfortunately cancelled reboot of The Babysitter’s Club. TV has embraced the 80s even more than movies, with Black Mirror: San Junipero (2016), Halt & Catch Fire (2014-2017), the criminally-underseen Red Oaks (2014-2017), the cancelled-before-its-time GLOW (2017-2019), Wet Hot American Summer (2015-2017), POSE (2018-2021), American Horror Story 84 (2019), and The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020).

The UK and Ireland have got in on the act too, with the phenomenal This is England TV series (2010-2015), Sing Street (2016), and while it’s a lot older I have to shout out 2007’s brilliant Son of Rambow. And some creatives tackled the tail end of the Cold War, such as in the TV shows Deutschland 83-89 (2015-2020) and The Americans (2013-2018), as well as the movie Atomic Blonde (2017).

So, the last 5-10 years have seen an awful lot of 80s nostalgia permeating movies and TV, but it’s easy to forget the 80s was a decade that also spent much time looking back, especially to the 50s and 60s, for obvious generational reasons. The most famous example is of course Back to the Future, but there’s also the highly-acclaimed classic Stand by Me which is set in 1959, and based on a short story by Stephen King. 

Three movies that were shown at TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood on the weekend of April 22-23 2022 featured looking back – two concern time travel (Jeannot Szwarc’s Somewhere in Time and Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married), and one is set during the limbo period between Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve in 1959 (Barry Levinson’s Diner).

Diner is a particularly fascinating example because two of the main characters (and a weird side character) have all of the qualities of the kind of toxic fandom that permeates some of the 80s nostalgia today (the reaction to the 2016 Ghostbusters being a prime example). Firstly, Eddie (Steve Guttenberg) makes his fiancée Elise take a super hard quiz with over a hundred questions on his favorite sports team before their wedding. Then, Shrevie (Daniel Stern) shouts at his wife Beth (Ellen Barkin) until she’s in tears, for not putting his records back in their correct order, according to genre. He also prides himself on knowing the B-sides of virtually any record. Then, there’s a random guy who the main characters keep bumping into, who can only speak in quotations from his favorite movie – Sweet Smell of Success (1957). All of the main characters treat women abominably, except Billy (Timothy Daly), who ironically is the one who has got a girl pregnant. 

So, all the way back in 1982, there’s an eviscerating depiction of what many consider a relatively new phenomenon. It’s extremely easy to imagine Eddie or Shrevie as the worst kind of online trolls now, shouting about Star Wars or Batman from their parents’ basements. While Diner does contain nostalgia for the late 50s - the cars and music, a hilarious scene where Billy takes Eddie to see The Seventh Seal – it also doesn’t have rose-tinted glasses, especially in how it examines the young men of the time and how they treated women. But TCMFF lends an even greater layer of nostalgia to films from the past, because often the cast are reuniting for the first time since making the movie. For the first time in probably 40 years, actors Paul Reiser, Steve Guttenberg, Timothy Daly and Kevin Bacon got together to reminisce about making the film. Guttenberg, in particular, was clearly emotional about getting to see his old friends again.

In Peggy Sue Got Married, Kathleen Turner attends her high school reunion in 1985, 25 years after graduation, and while there she faints and wakes up back in 1960. The film somehow manages to contain both Nic Cage (who was 21) and Jim Carrey (who was 23) sharing the screen without it combusting from the amount of energy generated by the two of them. Cage of course makes a series of unhinged decisions, given what should have been a typical heart-throb boyfriend role – with false extra-white teeth and a weird voice that was apparently based on a cartoon character.

It seems quaint that the characters’ disillusionments with life – that they’ve experienced divorce and not got to do their dream jobs (eg. a career in music) – are so petty compared with the generation who were say, born in 1985. The High School characters that surround Peggy Sue are fairly stock, as would be seen in John Hughes 80s High School movies such as The Breakfast Club. She is torn between Charlie (played by Cage - who she loves, but knows he will ultimately disappoint her), Barry (the school geek who she knows will become a millionaire), and Michael (the mysterious, cool poet who rides a motorcycle). The film is a lesson in trying to change your past being futile, as you will ultimately end up making the same decisions – mistakes and all.

Somewhere in Time does not reference the 50s or 60s, but rather a time further back. Christopher Reeve plays Richard, a successful playwright with a fabulous apartment in Chicago who becomes obsessed with a photograph of a beautiful actress named Elise McKenna (Jane Seymour) that he finds hanging in the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island. He manages to successful travel back in time to 1912 so he can meet her, and they obviously fall in love. While the film is saturated in even more nostalgia than Diner or Peggy Sue, it also portrays time travel as dangerous, and requiring a huge amount of effort and commitment that will be detrimental to the traveler.

Richard completely loses himself and his lovely life because he becomes so preoccupied with the past. The setting of Mackinac Island is itself suspended in time, with no cars and still to this day using horse-drawn carriages. The Grand Hotel now holds an annual convention for Somewhere in Time fans, so those still obsessed with a movie from 1980 (that is itself obsessed with 1912) can travel back in time. At TCMFF, Jane Seymour added an extra layer of tragedy to the film’s tragic ending by confessing that she and Reeve had fallen in love on set. However, on the day that they shot the scene where Richard is suddenly ripped out of 1912 and plunged back into 1980, Reeve (and Seymour) discovered that his ex-girlfriend was pregnant and she had already announced it to the world. 

So, while with our current preoccupation with all things 80s, and enjoying the comforting glow of nostalgia that comes with that, we could maybe learn a thing or two by watching 80s movies that themselves looked to the past. The lessons include; maybe the past isn’t as rose-tinted as you think, it’s pointless trying to change the past, and realizing the dangers of getting lost in the past. The urge to look back is entirely understandable – now more than ever – but our preoccupation with the past could lead to us ignoring our futures.