Turn down that boom box and call all your friends on your Motorola DynaTAC cellular telephone: It's morning in the multiplex! Again! Reanimated Reagan-era pop culture is omnipresent. As Hollywood's bathysphere of originality plunges to exciting new depths, at least half a dozen twentysomething zeitgeist brands — The A-Team, Nightmare on Elm Street, The Karate Kid, Red Dawn, Tron — are being stop-lossed and redeployed as big-budget, big-screen diversions: 2009, which featured Transformers 2 and GI Joe, was a mere '80s McNugget compared to the massive '80s McDLT that is 2010. Of course, these flicks will be "updates," and as a guy who romanticizes that brief, bright, buffoonish age when the universe seemed mastered, girls just wanted to have fun, and hawks were all "mo" and no "faux," I'll miss the shoulder pads, the high-tops, the laissez-faire stereotyping and sexual harassment. But you know what I won't miss? The tech. It doesn't travel. It doesn't charm. It became kitsch the instant it hit the screen, and it's aged about as gracefully as Mickey Rourke.
Take Oliver Stone's 1987 polemic Wall Street, which gets a sequel in April (on the heels of last year's smash-hit sequel to the '87 banking crisis). The film isn't about tech; it's about money and manhood and the hazards of hair gel. Still, the image that sticks with me isn't corporate raider Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) holding forth on the goodness of greed; it's the briefcase-sized cell phones. Stone probably never imagined how distracting those bricks would be three decades on — he was, after all, just trying to be "current," and in the '80s gadgetry was currency.
It was a decade of Walkmans and Whiz Kids and WOPRs, of phone-home Speak & Spells and pulsating MIDI soundtracks courtesy of Vangelis. Suddenly, the consumer electronics sector went from spear-carrying extra to leading man, thanks mostly to the new and still-magical PC.
Of course, technology was making cameos in film before disco died and Dire met Straits: Humphrey Bogart's showy car phone in Sabrina (1954) comes to mind, as do the "electronic brains" Tracy and Hepburn squabble over in 1957's Desk Set. (And that's leaving aside the flagrantly fantastical doodads of Bond, Kirk, and company.) But the '80s brought something new to the soldering table: Faddishness and consumerism were ascendant, as the shiny microchip promised to deliver us from the grim medievalism of the 1970s. In the '80s, tech became fashion: image-fixated, time-stamped, and decidedly deciduous. Problem is, silicon's hipness half-life is even shorter than fashion's. Fashion can circle back (ironically or sincerely) and sample from its past. Art, architecture, music, and even automobile design can do the same. But not tech. Like the proverbial shark, it moves forward or it dies.
More than 20 years later, the cycle of obsolescence continues — in fact, it's accelerating. Hollywood is still losing a doomed Atalantan footrace with Moore's law. One has only to watch "computer expert" Harrison Ford fumblingly hack a pink iPod mini in 2006's Firewall or giggle at the terrifyingly low tech phones in 2008's One Missed Call to realize how poorly recent devices age onscreen. But what can directors do? It's a cyborg world; technology mediates nearly every human interaction, and filmmakers must reflect that, unless they're planning to set all of their tales on Pandora or in the 1890s. It's a paradox — one that only great pop storytelling and a talent for mythologizing the Right Now can resolve. I point to films as diverse as WarGames (1983), Jurassic Park (1993), and the criminally underseen byte-geist chiller Primer (2004), all of which boldly appropriated the technology of the moment, celebrated it, and then transmuted it into something timeless, as iconic as a Saturn V rocket or a '57 Chevy: signs of not just the times, but of where we've been and where we're going. So put that in your Droid and dial it, Gekko — quick now, before Droids go the way of the laser disc.
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