The world of my childhood existed as a place with three primary television networks, and movie theaters as a place to escape reality for a couple hours. I was surrounded by that environment, which had more or less been established decades earlier, as I came of age.
As I look back at the 1980s, I feel that movies had become a kind of social glue. Church life had already begun to erode its hold on American families, and the spectacular of motion pictures seemed to drive social trends.
In their purest definition, movies are a continuation of the human condition to tell stories. Instead of using firelight in caves to cast hand shadows that recounted mythic tales, we used arcs of electric light to project our imaginations on giant screens – in slightly more comfortable caves known as a Mega Cineplex.
Growing up without parental guidance, and no access to books, movies were both a companion and teacher for me. Everything I knew about life I learned from movies. While it felt helpful at the time, filling the void of my curiosity and desperation for knowledge, I was too young to understand how distorted movies were.
Of course, movies were not real life, especially when it came to fantasy stories. But they offered a refuge from the dystopian reality of my youth. Teen flicks like “The Breakfast Club” or “Pretty in Pink” helped guide my adolescence, and I was not alone. To this day I know people who think love and relationships should be like a 1980s John Hughes movie.
Because I lacked life experience in my youth, or parental direction for context, the only references for emotional expression came from the movies I had seen. That was also reinforced by a shared social habit with my peers, who could each identify with one of “The Breakfast Club” characters.
“You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain, and an athlete, and a basket case, a princess,…