tag:theconversation.com,2011:/id/topics/1980s-10747/articles1980s – The Conversation2024-03-28T18:54:29Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2266642024-03-28T18:54:29Z2024-03-28T18:54:29ZThis Town: new drama charts the influence of ska on inner city kids during bleak Thatcher years<p>This Town, the new BBC drama from Peaky Blinders creator Stephen Knight, revisits the Midlands setting, also doubling as a somewhat backhanded tribute to the region and a paean to the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Two-Tone-Movement-1688309">two-tone music</a> – an amalgam of ska, punk and reggae – that emerged from it. </p>
<p>The backdrop for Knight’s heroes is the aftershocks of 1970s industrial strife – chiefly Margaret Thatcher’s uncompromising response to the way de-industrialisation drove up unemployment and cut off economic possibilities for working-class young people.</p>
<p>Deprivation, combined with a burgeoning right-wing movement stoking racial tensions and police stop-and-search practices, <a href="https://pasttense.co.uk/2021/07/03/this-week-in-uk-history-1981-uprisings-and-riots-all-over-the-country/">exploded into violence</a> as the Thatcher era gathered steam. The Troubles in Northern Ireland were also still raging, their effects felt via bombings in England.</p>
<p>Some of the more musically minded kicked against these divisions, <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-terry-hall-defined-the-sound-of-youth-and-disillusionment-in-margaret-thatchers-britain-196917">channelling their frustration</a> into the fusion of genres at the heart of this drama.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2023/this-town-first-look-picutures">Billed</a> as a “high-octane thriller and family saga of young people fighting to choose their own paths in life”, it opens with dramatic contrast as it means to go on – lines of poetry interrupted by a riot and an act of racist policy brutality.</p>
<p>Set mainly in Birmingham and Coventry, against the backdrop of 1981’s civil unrest, it uses the formation of a band as the hook for viewers and a potential escape mechanism for its young protagonists.</p>
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<h2>Family, music and violence</h2>
<p>Levi Brown plays Dante, a sheltered aspiring poet whose encounters lead him to reconsider his words as lyrics, reorientating him towards music. At odds with his surroundings, he wanders the urban backdrop with his head in the clouds. (It’s implied Dante’s what would be called neurodivergent today, though the language of his peers is blunter albeit affectionate.)</p>
<p>His cousin Bardon (Ben Rose) tries to complete college, and avoid the gravitational pull of the IRA through his father’s connections. Dante’s brother Gregory (Jordan Bolger), meanwhile, begins the series serving in Belfast with the British Army. Dante and Gregory are black, Bardon is white, but the more notable divide is the sectarian one.</p>
<p>For all this, the “thriller” label is something of a misnomer. Knight’s pacing is unhurried, and the band Dante pulls together emerges only gradually as the events unfold. While the story takes place against a background of violence – from casual to chillingly planned – the fights and eruptions are punctuations offsetting a more gradual set of revelations.</p>
<p>These include the slow journey of the band – comprising Dante, Bardon and their friend Jeannie (Eve Austin) – from stumbling hopefuls to focused professionals. Rather than the ups and downs of a rollercoaster ride, there is a building sense of unstoppability as the characters seek their path. This means negotiating the menacing coolness of IRA operatives and a gloriously over-the-top, finger-chopping psychopath of a nightclub owner. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, family travails and a background of addiction also pervade the grey, drizzly environment – there are a lot of plot strands. It’s a fine balance between giving the personalities space to develop and tightening the screws, which Knight mostly manages without either excessive slowness or by overcomplicating things, aided by some engaging and nuanced central performances.</p>
<h2>Lost in music</h2>
<p>Ultimately though, much of what drives This Town forward, and holds it together, is the music. Intimidating special branch officers, gangsters and IRA bombers aside, it wears its social commentary on the upheavals of the early 1980s comparatively lightly, filtering it through the youngsters’ aspirations to transcend their surroundings via their music. </p>
<p>Knight’s drama is to a large extent about identity, especially self-identity. As Gregory warns Dante: “If you don’t get away, you just become what everybody already thinks you are.” There’s also a telling exchange when Dante wavers as he dons the sharp suit and pork pie hat that came to define the image of two-tone music: “It doesn’t look like me.” “But it is you Dante,” his father assures him. “This is who we are.”</p>
<p>The characters’ identities are framed by their music – from ska, through rock and ballads, to Irish rebel songs. Even though Irish DJ and composer Kormac’s brooding underscore contains elements of dub and 1980s two-tone, the overall soundscape is broader. This focuses on the earlier music of the 1960s and 1970s that culminated in two-tone acts like The Specials as Thatcher’s Britain felt the social strain of her economic reforms.</p>
<p>Acts like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5T3UmvutR8k">Bob Marley</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd8aBtRe6mk">The Gaylettes</a> and Desmond Dekker carry the viewer through the narrative. They also speak to the characters’ inner lives. Alternating scenes featuring Dante and Brandon are bridged by the likes of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKacmwx9lvU">The Maytals</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zsnsu2tgpR0">UB40</a>.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.masterclass.com/articles/diegetic-sound-and-non-diegetic-sound-whats-the-difference">non-diegetic</a> soundtrack – the music outside the frame of the story, inaudible to those inside it – is rich in historical gems. This Town, though, also uses diegetic music, which is explicitly part of the action, to reveal its characters’ psyches, underscoring the themes of identity and escape, as well as the plot. </p>
<p>Central moments hinge on singing as a way to express the feelings of the emotionally blocked protagonists. There’s a showstopping rendition of Over the Rainbow, for example – Michelle Dockery is a trained singer, and it shows.</p>
<p>Elsewhere, there’s a vocal “duel” of sorts, where Brandon and his father sing across one another with Jimmy Cliff’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7dBMYUyRAQ">You Can Get It If You Really Want</a> and Pete St John’s Irish folk balled <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd7tr2eivcs">The Fields of Athenry</a>, emphasising the generational split. And all throughout, the departed matriarch – Dante, Bardon and Gregory’s grandmother – is felt and referenced via the birdsong with which she inspired them all as children.</p>
<p>The overall effect is one of deceptive simplicity. Neither quite a thriller nor a straightforward historical account of the emergence of two-tone, This Town echoes the ways in which music is forged by its social context, while shaping and defining the lives of the people who make it. </p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adam Behr has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the British Academy</span></em></p>This Town echoes the ways in which music is forged by its social context, while shaping and defining the lives of the people who make it.Adam Behr, Senior Lecturer in Popular and Contemporary Music, Newcastle UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2222842024-02-15T23:16:04Z2024-02-15T23:16:04ZKiss’s debut album at 50: how the rock legends went from ‘clowns’ to becoming immortalised<p>It has been 50 years since Rock & Roll <a href="https://www.rockhall.com/inductees/kiss">Hall of Famers</a> Kiss launched their thunderock-doused debut album into the pop culture stratosphere. The eponymous album, released on February 18 1974, became a platform-stacked foot in the music industry’s door. </p>
<p>What followed established Kiss as one of the most memorable hard-rock bands of the 1970s and ’80s, with a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac.37.1.19_1">globally recognised legacy</a>.</p>
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<h2>The early days</h2>
<p>In 1972, Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons shelved their first ever rock outfit following a short stint in a band called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_Lester">Wicked Lester</a>. The pair then <a href="https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/kiss-self-titled-debut-album/">hatched a plan</a> to form a far more aggressive and successful rock band. Drummer Peter Criss and guitarist Ace Frehley were recruited, and the new-generation Fab Four renamed themselves Kiss.</p>
<p>By late <a href="https://www.kissonline.com/history">November of 1973</a>, the band had developed their bombastic live performance style, perfected their makeup and signed a deal with <a href="https://ultimateclassicrock.com/kiss-first-record-contract/">Casablanca Records</a>. Yet they dealt with some rocky beginnings.</p>
<p>Armed with reworked songs from Wicked Lester, Kiss entered New York’s Bell Sound Studios to record their debut. A mere three weeks later the album was complete – but the band quickly realised the studio recordings didn’t capture the essence of their high-energy live shows. As vocalist Paul Stanley <a href="https://loudwire.com/kiss-self-titled-album-anniversary/">told Loudwire</a>:</p>
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<p>What was put down on tape was such a timid fraction of what we were in concert. I didn’t understand it because bands who were our contemporaries had much better-sounding albums.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>They took another blow while shooting the album cover with <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/31/obituaries/31brodsky.html">Joel Brodsky</a> when, after a mishap with Criss’s makeup, the band were allegedly handed balloons by the photographer since he thought they were clowns.</p>
<p>Then, soon before the album was released, Warner Brothers pulled its financial backing and <a href="https://www.loudersound.com/features/the-casablanca-records-story">distribution deal from Casablanca Records</a> after witnessing Kiss play a New Year’s eve show. Although it’s said the band’s makeup was the last straw for the label, the show in question also featured Simmons <a href="https://www.loudersound.com/features/kiss-early-years-history">setting his hair alight</a> shortly after throwing a fireball at a fan’s face. </p>
<p>Despite the blunders, the release of the first album set Kiss on a path to becoming immortalised. As Stanley says in his book <a href="https://www.paulstanley.com/face-the-music/">Face The Music</a>:</p>
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<p>For all the minuses I felt about the sound or the cover, we now had a finished album which was the prerequisite for all the other things we wanted to do. We were in the game now.</p>
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<h2>The Kiss sound</h2>
<p>I first heard Kiss as a teenager. I’d just thrift-scored a pair of ’80s-era roller-skates with the band’s logo scrawled on the heels in glitter glue. The salesperson, responsible for the glitter glue, enthusiastically recounted seeing Kiss play VFL Park (now <a href="https://footy.fandom.com/wiki/Waverley_Park">Waverley Park</a> stadium) in 1980 and made me promise I’d listen to them.</p>
<p>Overwhelmed by the band’s expansive discography, and the possibility that their name stood for <a href="https://www.loudersound.com/news/kiss-squash-long-standing-rumour-that-their-band-name-is-a-satanic-acronym-were-smart-but-were-not-that-smart">Knights In Satan’s Service</a>, I thought it best to begin from the start.</p>
<p>With their reputation of on-stage pyrotechnics and gore, I’d expected something more akin to Black Sabbath’s Paranoid than the jangly riffs of Let Me Know or Love Theme From Kiss. A 1978 review by <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/kiss-194584/">Gordon Fletcher</a> for the Rolling Stone also noted this rift. Despite calling the album exceptional, Fletcher described its sound as a cross between Deep Purple and the Doobie Brothers. </p>
<p>Stanley and Simmons have <a href="https://www.guitarworld.com/features/kiss-paul-stanley-gene-simmons-classic-tracks">spoken freely</a> about borrowing heavily from a number of mid-century legends, so it’s no surprise that sonically the album was nothing new. The Rolling Stones’ influence can be heard in the songs Deuce and Strutter, while Led Zeppelin and Neil Young are present in Black Diamond. </p>
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<p>The album initially hadn’t risen higher than #87 on <a href="https://ultimateclassicrock.com/kiss-kiss-debut-album/">Billboard’s album charts</a>. A studio cover of <a href="https://ultimateclassicrock.com/kiss-nothin-to-lose/?trackback=twitter_mobile">Bobby Rydell’s Kissin’ Time</a> was released next as the lead single, but the track only bumped them up to #83. This <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.A2262575">commercial unviability</a> loomed over Kiss until the release of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alive!_(Kiss_album)">Alive!</a> in 1975. </p>
<h2>Success and beyond</h2>
<p>As the band’s first live album, Alive! bridged the gap between the audacious intensity of Kiss’s performances and the timidness of their studio recordings. Their early tracks were repurposed to let listeners remotely experience the infamous Kiss live spectacle. </p>
<p>As <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFMD7Usflbg&ab_channel=KissVEVO">Rock and Roll All Nite</a> claimed #12 on the <a href="https://loudwire.com/kiss-alive-album-anniversary/">Billboard charts</a>, the platform-stacked foot burst through the door to mainstream success. </p>
<p>Fifty years after Kiss first stepped into Bell Sound Studios, the band played their final sold-out show at Madison Square Garden on December 2 2023. The performance served as a crowning jewel on their End of the Road world tour, a four-year effort with more than 250 live shows. </p>
<p>Promised to be their <a href="https://www.triplem.com.au/story/kiss-add-more-dates-to-their-end-of-the-road-australian-tour-172305">biggest and best shows ever</a>, the farewell became a colossal celebration of the band’s legacy. Theatrical pyrotechnics, fake blood and Stanley’s classic opening line – “you wanted the best, you got the best” – were featured at each performance. </p>
<p>While both Kiss’s anthemic numbers and earlier catalogue were performed in these final shows, the music came second to the celebration of the Kiss live spectacle.</p>
<p>From their carefully designed makeup, to bombastic theatrics and hoards of merchandise, it was Kiss’s <a href="https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac.37.1.19_1">brand building</a> that <a href="https://www.wiley.com/en-au/Brands+That+Rock%3A+What+Business+Leaders+Can+Learn+from+the+World+of+Rock+and+Roll-p-9780471455172">set them apart</a> and embedded them in the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2009.09.006">heritage bracket</a> of popular culture. </p>
<p>Despite the end of their live shows, Kiss endeavours to stay embedded in public memory. Referring to some of the band’s 2,500 licensed products, Simmons recently spoke on <a href="http://www.tommagazine.com.au/2022/08/19/kiss/">what’s next for Kiss</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Kiss the entity will continue; what’s happening now is a metamorphosis. The caterpillar is dying, but the butterfly will be born.</p>
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<p>With a <a href="https://www.billboard.com/music/rock/kiss-biopic-early-years-netflix-2024-1235291572/">Netflix biopic</a> and holographic <a href="https://www.stereogum.com/2246254/kiss-hologram-era-begins-in-2027/news/">avatars on the way</a>, Stanley and Simmons – the band’s two remaining members – <a href="https://www.nme.com/news/music/gene-simmons-says-kiss-farewell-tour-is-end-of-the-road-for-the-band-not-the-brand-3541117">have declared Kiss immortal</a>. </p>
<p>Stanley even suggests the Kiss look has become so iconic it’s now bigger than any band member. This means the torch could be passed on to new-generation Kiss members. </p>
<p>Kiss has (quite literally) breathed fire into live rock performance. Now, they’re breathing fire into our expectations of what rock royalty retirement looks like. I have to ask, who – or what – will wear the makeup next? </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-long-dead-soprano-has-taken-to-the-stage-with-the-melbourne-symphony-orchestra-are-holograms-the-future-219716">A long-dead soprano has taken to the stage with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Are holograms the future?</a>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Charlotte Markowitsch does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>As their debut album turns 50, we look back on Kiss’s larger-than-life career – and forward to what might come next.Charlotte Markowitsch, PhD candidate in popular music studies, RMIT UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2225302024-02-07T16:00:22Z2024-02-07T16:00:22ZAll of Us Strangers: coming to terms with the grief and trauma of being gay in the 1980s<p><em><strong>Warning: this article contains spoilers.</strong></em></p>
<p>A powerful film about intimacy, grief and gay identity, <a href="https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/reviews/all-us-strangers-andrew-haighs-glorious-magic-realist-meditation-grief">All of Us Strangers</a> – featuring outstanding performances by Andrew Scott as Adam and Paul Mescal as Harry – can only be properly appreciated in the context in which it was produced. </p>
<p>In a recent <a href="https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/49215/">article</a> I co-authored with the film studies academic <a href="https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/communication-and-media/staff/gary-needham/">Gary Needham</a> on post-millennial LGBTQ+ film-making in the UK, we argued that there is no collective movement or recognisable trend that can be called British queer cinema.</p>
<p>LGBTQ+ representations in British film-making manage to cross over different styles and genres. However, such wide visibility risks compromising the potential of LGBTQ+ films as a political force of collective dissent against homophobia and transphobia. In other words, mainstream representation may evade new agendas of LGBTQ+ activism. </p>
<p>Three areas have tended to dominate the past three decades of queer representation in British film.</p>
<p><strong>1.</strong> Reclaiming LGBT heritage and history – including films such as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/jul/04/vita-virginia-review-gemma-arterton-elizabeth-debicki-isabella-rossellini">Vita and Virginia</a> (2018), <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/dec/30/the-favourite-review-olivia-colman-emma-stone-rachel-weisz-yorgos-lanthimos">The Favourite</a> (2018), and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/sep/12/ammonite-review-kate-winslet-saoirse-ronan-mary-anning-fossils-lyme-regis-francis-lee">Ammonite</a> (2020).</p>
<p><strong>2.</strong> Reinterpreting British cinema’s legacy of social realism and <a href="https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780199587261.001.0001/acref-9780199587261-e-0533">poetic realism</a> – think of <a href="https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2426-weekend-the-space-between-two-people">Weekend</a> (2011), <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/jan/22/gods-own-country-review-a-dales-answer-to-brokeback-thats-a-very-british-love-story">God’s Own Country</a> (2017), and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/sep/14/pride-film-review-mark-kermode-power-in-unlikely-union">Pride</a> (2014).</p>
<p><strong>3.</strong> Making visible LGBTQ+ migrant identities, as seen in films such as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/nov/08/my-brother-the-devil-review">My Brother the Devil</a> (2012), <a href="https://wlwfilmreviews.com/ninas-heavenly-delights/">Nina’s Heavenly Delights</a> (2006), <a href="https://player.bfi.org.uk/rentals/film/watch-i-cant-think-straight-2009-online">I Can’t Think Straight</a> (2008), and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/sep/24/monsoon-review-henry-golding-vietnam-family-drama">Monsoon</a> (2019). </p>
<p>Rather than leading to a politically and aesthetically distinct trend or wave, these films relay queerness in significantly different ways. Film historian Robin Griffiths <a href="https://doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2016.0342">argues</a> that the “post-Thatcher” trajectory of British queer cinema is like “a journey without direction”, saying: “The struggles and oppressions that were so key to the radical currency of earlier iconic queer filmmakers such as <a href="https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/derek-jarman">Derek Jarman</a> seemingly no longer hold the same social and political charge.”</p>
<p>For Griffiths, the “post-Jarman” British queer film demonstrates a shift towards a different set of aesthetic and political concerns, which were shaped by aspirations for inclusion and visibility. Griffiths also argues that this shift in LGBTQ+ culture is a departure from the radically political energy of Derek Jarman and his generation of activists.</p>
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<h2>Ghosts of the past</h2>
<p>However, after I watched <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/28/all-of-us-strangers-review-andrew-haigh-andrew-scott-paul-mescal">All of Us Strangers</a> (2023), the trajectory of director <a href="https://www.andrewhaighfilm.com">Andrew Haigh’s</a> work – from <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/sep/04/greek-pete-film-review">Greek Pete</a> (2008) and <a href="https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2426-weekend-the-space-between-two-people">Weekend</a> (2011) to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/aug/30/45-years-charlotte-rampling-tom-courtenay-review-mark-kermode">45 Years</a> (2015) and the HBO series <a href="https://variety.com/2014/tv/reviews/tv-review-hbos-looking-1201050482/">Looking</a> (2014-5) – started making more sense.</p>
<p>I came to realise that Haigh’s latest film is telling us a complex story of love, grief and attachment that is a product of the director’s evolving yet consistent commitment to a cinema of intimacy – a form of authorship that I have been struggling to locate in contemporary British LGBTQ+ film culture. </p>
<p>Most characters in Haigh’s films yearn for connection and intimacy and drift in and out of relationships. While the couples of Weekend (Glen and Russell) and 45 Years (Kate and Geoff) question their faith in and longing for monogamous coupledom, All of Us Strangers expands this question of intimate attachment to a new, piercingly existential level.</p>
<p>The film starts with Adam (Andrew Scott) working in his flat, located in a near-empty tower block in London. Harry (Paul Mescal), a mysterious neighbour, knocks on Adam’s door and starts flirting with him. As their relationship develops, Adam is preoccupied with the memories of his past.</p>
<p>He starts visiting his childhood home in Croydon, where he meets his dead parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) who, as apparitions, appear to be living there just as they were on the day they died in a car crash 30 years ago. </p>
<p>From a near-empty tower block to a suburban house of ghosts, the unpopulated cityscape in the film feels like a parallel, dream-like universe that we are invited to experience through Adam’s navigation of loss and grief.</p>
<p>Two cryptic conversations reveal the film’s deliberate ambiguity of where we are. “How do you cope?” Harry asks, meaning not only the quietness of the apartments they live in but also the lonely realm of alternative reality Adam’s mental state creates through grief.</p>
<p>In another conversation, when Adam reveals he lost his parents in a car crash and tells Harry he shouldn’t be sorry because it happened 30 years ago, Harry says: “I don’t think that really matters.” Grief is a life-long process: the resolution (or redemption) is not in moving on but in walking with and acknowledging its manifestations. </p>
<p>As a gay man in his late 40s, carrying the generational trauma of the HIV/AIDS crisis, Adam talks to the ghosts of his “younger” parents about his childhood and his sexuality. Avoiding confrontation, Adam’s conversations with them evoke a different kind of wisdom, that of a deeply reflective, other-worldly older self, which ends up feeling a form of forgiving compassion for the now younger vulnerable selves of his lost parents.</p>
<p>With this, Haigh’s universe of apparitions does not expose a trauma-induced nightmare but offers a powerful remedy for an ageing generation of gay men and their coming to terms with grief and trauma. Without grief resolved, there is no love. And without love, there is no grief resolved.</p>
<p>The powerful ending of the film makes us wonder if everybody in the story was a ghost, or if that matters at all. As Haigh also <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=886382096547215">says</a>, “in the end, it’s all about love”. Haigh’s account of love in the film transcends life and death. We are invited to embrace not a closure but a loving opening, through the acknowledgement of our ultimate orphanhood. </p>
<p>Distinctly more mature and relevant than Weekend’s formula of gay romance shaped around the <a href="https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/37730/">monogamy v promiscuity divide</a>, the depiction of love and grief in All of Us Strangers offers a beautiful response to contemporary queer culture and its crisis of intimacy.</p>
<p>I watched it with a friend who afterwards said something that really resonated with me: “It felt like one of the truest depictions of growing up gay in the 1980s and 1990s.”</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Cüneyt Çakırlar does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Haigh’s ghostly, dream-like setting offers a powerful remedy for an ageing generation of gay men coming to terms with the grief that pervaded their young lives.Cüneyt Çakırlar, Associate Professor in Film and Visual Culture, Nottingham Trent UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2138092023-09-19T14:47:50Z2023-09-19T14:47:50ZI’ve rewatched 150 episodes of Brookside – here’s how the soap captured the nuances of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549062/original/file-20230919-27-u8ec9w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=44%2C35%2C1952%2C1299&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Grant family, some of Brookside's most famous characters. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lime Pictures / STV Player</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>If you want to understand how Margaret Thatcher shaped Britain, revisiting one particular 1980s soap opera is a great place to start. Brookside, a show set in a Liverpool cul-de-sac, ran for 21 years, airing just under 3,000 episodes between 1982 and 2003.</p>
<p>Brookside was therefore conceived amid the Thatcher administration’s first term, and a notable eight years of its broadcasting output coincided with her tenure.</p>
<p>The show is now being <a href="https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/soaps/brookside-episodes-stv-player-newsupdate/">rebroadcast in full on digital channel STV</a>. I’ve watched over 150 episodes so far, finding at the same time, a notable resource for social historians or indeed anyone interested in the contemporary impact and longer-term legacy of Thatcherism.</p>
<h2>A distinctive location</h2>
<p>Brookside Close, where the show was filmed, was not a TV set but part of a real private housing estate – at the time, Europe’s largest. To make Brookside, Mersey Television purchased a small corner of a flourishing development that saw around 1,000 new properties constructed over a seven year period in the 1980s. </p>
<p>The growing residential area typified the contemporary “new right” vision of <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13569317.2021.1979139?scroll=top&needAccess=true">aspirational home ownership</a>.</p>
<p>According to the Thatcherite ideology of economic liberalism, such emerging estates would ideally produce a new generation of homeowners and, ultimately, Conservative-inclined voters. UK <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/804446/property-tenure-distribution-in-the-united-kingdom/">home-ownership</a> increased during the 1980s and some areas with growing owner-occupation shifted towards the Conservatives at that time (particularly in the south east). </p>
<p>However, despite such private housing trends, there was a marked <a href="https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/3011128/">anti-Conservative swing</a> in Liverpool’s six parliamentary seats between 1983 and 1987, considerably above the national average.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A shot of Brookside Close." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549077/original/file-20230919-21-6k4jsd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549077/original/file-20230919-21-6k4jsd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549077/original/file-20230919-21-6k4jsd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549077/original/file-20230919-21-6k4jsd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549077/original/file-20230919-21-6k4jsd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549077/original/file-20230919-21-6k4jsd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549077/original/file-20230919-21-6k4jsd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Brookside was filmed in real houses on a real street rather than a TV set.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lime Pictures / STV Player</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>Riots had hit Liverpool’s Toxteth district in 1981 and were followed by allegations of government-driven managed decline. Meanwhile the city’s <a href="https://academic.oup.com/manchester-scholarship-online/book/15944/chapter-abstract/170868651?redirectedFrom=fulltext">“Militant” city council</a> was, by the mid-1980s, engaged in a high-profile ideological clash with Thatcher’s administration.</p>
<p>Brookside’s specific geographical location therefore provided a distinctive political edge and social barometer. It increasingly came to reflect the vibes of growing opposition to Thatcherism, which ultimately spread across the country <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-22073199">as the decade progressed</a>.</p>
<h2>Fluid social status</h2>
<p>Brookside featured class-based tensions that reflected the demographic change and social fluidity that emerged in the 1980s. Some recurring characters such as the Grant family represented the upwardly-mobile working classes – people who bought into housing developments like Brookside Close as part of the climb up the social ladder. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, families such as the Collins were part of a downwardly-mobile middle class. They represented the many people who had been forced to downsize and relocate as a result of money troubles brought on by the prolonged recession of the early 1980s. </p>
<p>There were also yuppies (the Huntingtons, who were younger and more affluent professional people with materialistic tendencies) and even characters from the very early computer technology generation (Alan Partridge, who worked from home before it was cool). The close also had black market wheeler dealers in Barry Grant and his associates, and houseproud neighbourhood busybodies (Harry Cross). </p>
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<img alt="A shot of a fictional family from 80s soap opera Brookside." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549078/original/file-20230919-25-hk2ay5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549078/original/file-20230919-25-hk2ay5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=409&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549078/original/file-20230919-25-hk2ay5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=409&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549078/original/file-20230919-25-hk2ay5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=409&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549078/original/file-20230919-25-hk2ay5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=514&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549078/original/file-20230919-25-hk2ay5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=514&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549078/original/file-20230919-25-hk2ay5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=514&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">The Corkhill family.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lime Pictures / STV Player</span></span>
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<p>These character categories can be seen as illustrative of the times, particularly the shifting class dynamics and changing employment patterns fuelled by Thatcher’s policies. Most of the original families on the close were adapting to changes in the employment market, one way or another.</p>
<h2>No such thing as society?</h2>
<p>During the 1980s, Brookside increasingly featured a narrative of resistance towards Thatcherism. It was an outlook that stemmed from the leftwing politics of Brookside’s creator Phil Redmond and emerging writers like Jimmy McGovern. </p>
<p>Leftwing actors such as Ricky Tomlinson (who played Bobby Grant) further reflected this aura. Redmond <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-59587764">lamented in 2021</a> that modern-day soap operas don’t “tackle the real social issues” in the same way they did in the 1980s.</p>
<p>The underlying anti-government sentiment could often be identified in Brookside’s dialogue. In mid-1983, for example, when Sheila Grant asked her husband Bobby “where would we be if we all thought about ourselves?”, he swiftly replied: “The Conservative party”.</p>
<p>But in their attempts to navigate their differences, the residents of Brookside Close challenged one of Thatcher’s <a href="http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689">most infamous assertions</a> – that there is “no such thing as society … there are individual men and women and there are families”.</p>
<p>The sense of society and community that developed in the show’s plotlines would be one of its most popular traits, making it a ratings success by the middle of the decade. </p>
<p>Yet by the mid to late 1990s, the show went into decline following a relatively golden period of television popularity during the second half of the 1980s. There was perhaps less to rail against during the New Labour era. It could be argued that Brookside flourished while Thatcherism thrived.</p>
<p>To watch Brookside again in 2023 is to see Thatcher’s premiership both implicitly and explicitly reflected in contemporary everyday life. Characters from multiple families faced unemployment and there were even plotlines about strikes. </p>
<p>The struggle of meeting mortgage payments was ever present for residents on the close and tensions between generations and classes played out in often spectacular fashion. </p>
<p>Brookside thereby provides a human angle by which to analyse the impact of some of Thatcherism’s most high-profile policies during a monumental decade of cataclysmic political and social change.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/213809/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ben Williams is a member of the UCU and Amnesty International</span></em></p>The show is being rebroadcast for a new generation and is more educational and political than it might have first appeared.Ben Williams, Lecturer in Politics and Political Theory, University of SalfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2022702023-03-24T09:35:26Z2023-03-24T09:35:26ZThe World Bank used to cause untold harm – but 30 years ago it started reforming. What went right<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/516958/original/file-20230322-1702-1ribfs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo by Celal Gunes/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Development projects can have profound impacts on their societies. There are many benefits that flow from building new roads and power plants, and from modernising agricultural practices. But they can also have permanent negative consequences. </p>
<p>For example, communities may be involuntarily relocated to make way for roads or power plants. These projects can change the way natural resources are used in a particular area, making it difficult or impossible for communities to continue their traditional agricultural practices. The job opportunities that they create can challenge traditional values and ways of living.</p>
<p>Historically, many of these projects have been owned or sponsored by governments, eager to bring the benefits of modernisation to their citizens. They have often been funded by multilateral institutions like the World Bank, <a href="https://www.worldbank.org/en/archive/history/exhibits/Bretton-Woods-and-the-Birth-of-the-World-Bank">which was established </a> in 1944 to fund the reconstruction and development of its member states. </p>
<p>These institutions were not unaware of the environmental and social impacts of the projects they funded. However, they maintained that each state had to decide for itself how it wished to manage these impacts. They would argue that they were merely the funders, and so should defer to the government on how to manage them. It would be an affront to the state’s sovereignty for them to interfere with the government’s decisions on these aspects of the project.</p>
<p>The World Bank’s confidence in its ability to avoid responsibility for its project related decisions and actions was bolstered by the fact that it was <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2963050">immune from being sued in any national court</a>.</p>
<p>The result was that the bank supported some projects that were environmentally and socially damaging. As a result, during the 1980s the World Bank was <a href="https://brucemrich.com/book/mortgaging-the-earth-the-world-bank-environmental-impoverishment-and-the-crisis-of-development">the target of sustained protests by affected communities and their allies</a> around the world.</p>
<p>To its credit, 30 years ago the bank, following an international campaign in which this author participated, recognised that its position was untenable. In <a href="https://www.inspectionpanel.org/sites/ip-ms8.extcc.com/files/documents/Resolution1993.pdf">1993 it established</a> the world’s first citizen driven independent accountability mechanism, the <a href="https://www.inspectionpanel.org/">World Bank Inspection Panel</a>.</p>
<p>This article argues that the panel’s 30th anniversary is a moment to celebrate its accomplishments. The panel has significant limitations. Nevertheless, its impact on development and the international development financing institutions has been profound. </p>
<h2>Accomplishments</h2>
<p>The three-member panel is independent of the World Bank’s management. It receives and investigates complaints from communities who allege that they have been harmed or threatened with harm because of the World Bank’s failure to comply with its own policies and procedures in funding a particular project. In other words, the panel’s focus is exclusively on the conduct and decisions of the Bank’s staff and management. </p>
<p>It sends its findings to the bank’s board. In cases of noncompliance, the bank’s management is expected to submit an action plan to the board that explains how it will correct the noncompliance and its consequences. Both the report and the action plan are made public.</p>
<p>Since it was established, the panel’s investigations have resulted in some relief for affected communities. For example, 70,000 people, previously ignored by the World Bank, received compensation for their losses <a href="https://www.inspectionpanel.org/panel-cases/jamuna-new-multipurpose-bridge-project">in a bridge project in Bangladesh</a>. In the <a href="https://www.inspectionpanel.org/panel-cases/transitional-support-economic-recovery-credit-and-emergency-economic-and-social">Democratic Republic of Congo</a>, a forestry project was revised to provide greater protection to indigenous communities who had not been adequately consulted about the project.</p>
<p>The panel has also succeeded in establishing the principle that international financial organisations must be accountable for their own actions to the communities whose lives are affected by the projects and policies they finance.</p>
<p>Since its establishment, over 25 multilateral and national development banks and institutions <a href="https://accountabilityconsole.com/iams/">have established</a> their own independent accountability mechanisms. In total, these mechanisms have received <a href="https://accountabilityconsole.com/complaints/">1,634 complaints</a>, of which about 330 have been from 27 countries in Africa. Forty-five of the African cases have resulted in findings on compliance or noncompliance. </p>
<p>All findings of noncompliance have led to management action plans intended to correct the noncompliance.</p>
<p>The reports of these mechanisms are used both by their own institutions to improve their performance in development projects and to reduce the risk that they repeat old mistakes. They can also help ensure that they are held accountable when they do repeat these mistakes.</p>
<p>Many of these mechanisms now offer dispute resolution services in addition to compliance reviews. Many of them now also publish reports documenting the lessons they have learned about specific aspects of development projects.</p>
<p>It is important to note that many of the issues that arise in these cases also arise in private sector projects. This means that the reports provide guidance and help develop good practice standards for all development projects. They are also used to develop best practice in regard to the human rights and environmental responsibilities of business.</p>
<h2>Challenges</h2>
<p>To be sure, independent accountability mechanisms face significant challenges. </p>
<p>The first is that bringing cases to the mechanisms is not simple. Many of the successful cases have required communities to obtain the assistance of technical experts. This means that the cases that are brought come from communities that have access to sophisticated NGOs and advisers rather than because they are the most urgent cases.</p>
<p>Second, they cannot make binding decisions or determine that the communities should be given a remedy. There have been cases in which those who have been harmed by the action of the banks have been compensated. But this is not the norm. In fact, there is only one case in Africa in which a panel investigation led to victims receiving monetary compensation. The panel’s report <a href="https://www.inspectionpanel.org/panel-cases/transport-sector-development-project-additional-financing">in a case in Uganda</a> resulted in the World Bank developing a new policy on gender-based violence and establishing a trust fund to compensate, and support the girls and women who were the victims of this violence. </p>
<p>Designing and funding remedies that can be used in all similarly situated cases is politically and technically complicated. But it is not acceptable that those who have been harmed by the Bank’s own failures do not receive an effective remedy that compensates them for their loss.</p>
<p>Third, the bravery required to bring complaints to these mechanisms must be noted. They require the complainants to go to an international forum in opposition to their own governments or powerful interests in their own countries who support the projects the banks are funding. It is therefore inevitable that in some cases, the supporters of the project will retaliate against the complainants. This suggests that the mechanisms and the banks have a responsibility to take action to protect the complainants. </p>
<p>To their credit, the banks and the mechanisms have foreseen this problem and do allow for confidential complaints. But the procedures that seek to protect the complainants from reprisals have not always been fully effective.</p>
<p>It is now standard practice for multilateral financing institutions like the World Bank to have an independent citizen driven accountability mechanism that focuses exclusively on the responsibilities of the institution. The only exception to this general rule is the International Monetary Fund.</p>
<p>The mechanisms have also demonstrated that they can evolve and adapt to new challenges. While their limitations have also become clear, we should celebrate the Inspection Panel’s <a href="https://www.inspectionpanel.org/node/4966">30th anniversary</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/202270/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Danny Bradlow receives funding from the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA) for an unrelated project. He is a Compliance Officer in the Social and Environmental Compliance Unit (SECU), the independent accountability mechanism for UNDP. He has also conducted invesitgations for the independent accountability mechanisms at the African Development Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and has been a consultant to the World Bank on independent accountability issues.</span></em></p>Thirty years ago the World Bank recognised that its position was untenable. It put in place mechanisms to make the bank more accountable to ordinary people.Danny Bradlow, Professor/Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancement of Scholarship, University of PretoriaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1898502022-10-26T12:29:48Z2022-10-26T12:29:48ZRap artists have penned plenty of lyrics about US presidents – this course examines what they say about Reagan and the 1980s<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489515/original/file-20221013-14-avelq0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=10%2C30%2C3421%2C2253&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Numerous rap songs criticize the Reagan administration for its complicity in the illicit drug trade.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/president-ronald-reagan-campaigning-for-a-second-term-of-news-photo/594771010?phrase=Ronald%20Reagan&adppopup=true">Wally McNamee/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Text saying: Uncommon Courses, from The Conversation" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/uncommon-courses-130908">Uncommon Courses</a> is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching.</em> </p>
<h2>Title of course:</h2>
<p>“Rap, Reagan and the 1980s”</p>
<h2>What prompted the idea for the course?</h2>
<p>Actually, it was Donald Trump’s <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-donald-trump-came-up-with-make-america-great-again/2017/01/17/fb6acf5e-dbf7-11e6-ad42-f3375f271c9c_story.html">Make America Great Again</a> movement. People seemed shocked by his campaign slogan. But it wasn’t the first time in the U.S. that an entertainer had acted as a populist politician to win the allegiance of working-class white voters who feared losing their socioeconomic status. That distinction more rightly belongs to Ronald Reagan, who used the phrase first in his 1980 campaign.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489513/original/file-20221013-24-kjid11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A campaign button emblazoned with the faces of two men is topped with the words 'Reagan-Bush in '80'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489513/original/file-20221013-24-kjid11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489513/original/file-20221013-24-kjid11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=554&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489513/original/file-20221013-24-kjid11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=554&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489513/original/file-20221013-24-kjid11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=554&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489513/original/file-20221013-24-kjid11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=697&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489513/original/file-20221013-24-kjid11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=697&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489513/original/file-20221013-24-kjid11.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=697&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A 1980 Ronald Reagan campaign button employed the use of the phrase ‘Let’s Make America Great Again.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_522618">Smithsonian Institution</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Many of my students, who came of age during the Obama administration, enjoyed the 2016 song by YG and Nipsey Hussle titled “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlIREcAu0PI">FDT</a>,” which is an acronym for “F— Donald Trump.” The song’s <a href="https://genius.com/Yg-fdt-lyrics">lyrics</a> criticize Trump for campaigning for the White House by trying to <a href="https://time.com/3923128/donald-trump-announcement-speech/">breed resentment against immigrants from Mexico</a>. I realized then that, just as today’s rappers are weighing in on politics, I could teach a course about how rap artists in the 1980s – and even afterward – dealt with the politicians from that era, chief among them President Reagan.</p>
<h2>What does the course explore?</h2>
<p>It uses hip-hop as a tool to understand the sociopolitical, economic and cultural factors that affected the lives of Black youths during the 1980s – the era of “<a href="https://www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/heres-why-reaganomics-is-so-controversial-video">Reaganomics</a>.” That’s the <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/reaganomics.asp">name given to Reagan’s economic policies</a>, which called for deregulation of the markets, widespread tax cuts, less spending on social programs and more spending on the military.</p>
<p>For instance, we use Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s classic 1982 hit “The Message” to examine the disappearance of middle-class factory jobs from American cities during a period of <a href="https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2002/03/bought.htm">globalization</a> and <a href="https://www.edweek.org/education/education-spending-declined-during-80s-report-says/1991/06">cuts to public school funding</a>.</p>
<p>The group rapped:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“<em>My son said, Daddy, I don’t wanna go to school<br>
‘Cause the teacher’s a jerk, he must think, I’m a fool<br>
And all the kids smoke reefer, I think it’d be cheaper<br>
If I just got a job, learned to be a street sweeper</em>”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Students also examine the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s through the lyrics of Too $hort’s “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ9ioPrZ6_c">Girl That’s Your Life</a>” from 1983, N.W.A’s “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ei_zhL_YTY">Dopeman</a>” from 1987, and Killer Mike’s 2012 song “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lIqNjC1RKU">Reagan</a>,” which holds the Reagan administration <a href="https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB2/index.html">complicit in creating the crack cocaine epidemic</a>.</p>
<p>Raps Killer Mike: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“<em>Just like Oliver North introduced us to cocaine / In the 80s when them bricks came on military planes</em>.”</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Why is this course relevant now?</h2>
<p>It allows students to see the effects of the loosely regulated market economy of Reagan’s America, which led to <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/45131666">profound wealth gaps</a>. </p>
<p>To get a sense of the implications of the Reagan 1980s, I also have students listen to Kendrick Lamar’s “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YARwQQntqp8">Ronald Reagan Era</a>,” which came out in 2011 and deals with the flow of drugs, crack cocaine in particular, into Lamar’s native Compton, California, and Los Angeles during the late 1980s. The song also illuminates how drugs negatively affected his neighborhood and childhood. Lamar was born in 1987.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/490105/original/file-20221017-19-6eidfe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Two men speak while holding microphones" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/490105/original/file-20221017-19-6eidfe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/490105/original/file-20221017-19-6eidfe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490105/original/file-20221017-19-6eidfe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490105/original/file-20221017-19-6eidfe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490105/original/file-20221017-19-6eidfe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490105/original/file-20221017-19-6eidfe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490105/original/file-20221017-19-6eidfe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Kendrick Lamar, right, and Killer Mike are among the rap artists who’ve made songs that mention Ronald Reagan in the title.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Andrew Chin and Matthew Baker Getty Images</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>What’s a critical lesson from the course?</h2>
<p>As various rap artists have pointed out, the violence that takes place in urban communities is directly connected to the world of politics.</p>
<p>As a group called Above the Law, part of a coalition of artists called the <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9892864/">West Coast Rap All-Stars</a>, stated in the 1990 song “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pmg6c0PASYk">We’re All in the Same Gang</a>”:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“<em>violence don’t only revolve from drugs and thugs and gangs that bang; most times it’s a political thang.</em>” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>A key lesson is that much of the praise for Reagan, a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/10511431.2019.1708602">revered figure</a> in the conservative movement, did not always match the effects of his policies. For instance, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/06/01/trump-is-giving-arthur-laffer-presidential-medal-freedom-economists-arent-laughing/">modern economists have questioned</a> the purported benefits of the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/06/01/trump-is-giving-arthur-laffer-presidential-medal-freedom-economists-arent-laughing/">Laffer curve</a>, which is an <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/laffercurve.asp">economic analysis</a> that shows the relationship between tax rates and tax revenue, and which was used to support the <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/taxnotes/2021/09/03/reagans-tax-cut">Reagan tax cuts</a>. Reagan also embraced <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/how-bad-is-inequality-trickle-down-economics-thomas-piketty-economists-2021-12">“trickle-down” economics</a>, a theory that tax breaks and other benefits for business will ultimately help everyone, but economists say these benefits rarely, if ever, reached the most marginalized. </p>
<h2>What materials does the course feature?</h2>
<p>• “<a href="https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9780230616196">Ronald Reagan and the 1980s: Perceptions, Policies, Legacies</a>,” edited by Cheryl Hudson and Gareth Davies</p>
<p>• “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/625232/reconsidering-reagan-by-daniel-s-lucks/">Reconsidering Reagan: Racism, Republicans, and the Road to Trump</a>,” by Daniel Lucks</p>
<p>• “<a href="https://kansaspress.ku.edu/9780700616510/hip-hop-revolution/">Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap</a>,” by Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar</p>
<p>• The 1985 movie “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089444/">Krush Groove</a>,” starring Sheila E. as well as Joseph Simmons and Daryl McDaniels of the pioneering rap group <a href="https://www.rundmc.com/">Run-DMC</a>.</p>
<h2>What will the course prepare students to do?</h2>
<p>The class prepares students to communicate their points of view to the public in creative and concise ways, much as rappers do in their songs. Specifically, they must write 16 bars. They also critically evaluate readings, songs and albums by doing a “5-Mic Review” <a href="https://www.hiphopnostalgia.com/2014/01/the-source-mic-system-for-album-reviews.html">in the way of the groundbreaking rap magazine The Source</a>. Finally, they do a group project that involves constructing a soundtrack for a movie or a hip-hop playlist.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/189850/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stefan M. Bradley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Ronald Reagan may have been known as ‘The Great Communicator,’ but rap artists don’t view his legacy through such rose-colored glasses. A professor of Black studies and history takes a closer look.Stefan M. Bradley, Professor of Black Studies and History, Amherst CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1871442022-07-25T18:21:46Z2022-07-25T18:21:46ZControlling monkeypox: The time for Canada to act is now<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475874/original/file-20220725-20-h1uyyr.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C22%2C4948%2C3642&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A health-care provider administers monkeypox vaccine at an outdoor walk-in clinic in Montréal, on July 23, 2022. It is crucial that people who have been exposed to monkeypox get vaccinated if they do not yet have symptoms, or isolate if they do have symptoms.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared monkeypox a <a href="https://www.who.int/news/item/23-07-2022-second-meeting-of-the-international-health-regulations-(2005)-(ihr)-emergency-committee-regarding-the-multi-country-outbreak-of-monkeypox">Public Health Emergency of International Concern</a>. It’s likely that until about two months ago, many Canadians had not even heard of this disease. </p>
<p>Since May, monkeypox has been in the news everywhere, including Canada, where the <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/diseases/monkeypox.html">number of infections has reached 681</a> as of July 22. It has started spreading from major cities such as Toronto and Montréal into regional centres such as Hamilton, where the <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/monkeypox-hamilton-1.6509823">first case</a> was publicly reported July 4.</p>
<p>The good news is this: monkeypox is still quite isolated relative to the total population. There is still time to knock it back, and there is already an <a href="https://www.health.gov.on.ca/en/pro/programs/emb/docs/Monkeypox_Vaccine_InfoSheet.pdf">effective vaccine</a> available, though <a href="https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/canada-s-top-doctor-says-talks-underway-to-obtain-more-vaccine-to-fight-monkeypox-1.5970030">supplies are limited</a>. </p>
<p>The bad news is that the window is short — a matter of weeks, not months — to vaccinate the most susceptible and to encourage and support self-isolation for those who have symptoms. After that, monkeypox may expand beyond our capacity to control it with the vaccine supply we now have available.</p>
<p>Spurring individuals and governments to act may be challenging, though, given the degree of COVID-19 fatigue that has set in and the <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/covid-misinformation-trust-public-health-1.6001767">erosion of trust in public health measures</a>, including vaccines, due to misinformation.</p>
<h2>Monkeypox</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/monkeypox?gclid=CjwKCAjwq5-WBhB7EiwAl-HEkkPOtlnAQsPLPVQqQjzWDx1lOrBzwD8o_r1ZQVbOUDlIcJ9VoGkGOxoCNLsQAvD_BwE">Monkeypox</a>, a close relative of smallpox, first jumped to humans in 1958. <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01686-z">It has become endemic to a group of countries in Central and West Africa</a>, but had been of little interest in other places until it also became a threat in North America and Europe. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A hand holding a vial of monkeypox vaccine with the other hand drawing the vaccine into a syringe." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475872/original/file-20220725-12-1zz5w9.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/475872/original/file-20220725-12-1zz5w9.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475872/original/file-20220725-12-1zz5w9.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475872/original/file-20220725-12-1zz5w9.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475872/original/file-20220725-12-1zz5w9.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=545&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475872/original/file-20220725-12-1zz5w9.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=545&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/475872/original/file-20220725-12-1zz5w9.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=545&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A health-care worker prepares a monkeypox vaccine in Montréal, on July 23, 2022.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>What we’re seeing right now in Canada is that monkeypox is primarily affecting <a href="https://www.who.int/news/item/25-05-2022-monkeypox--public-health-advice-for-gay--bisexual-and-other-men-who-have-sex-with-men">men who have sex with men</a>. It’s not yet time to advise everyone to rush out and get a vaccine, but it is certainly time to make sure that those who are in the most affected communities understand the risk of infection, recognize the symptoms and take steps to protect themselves and others. </p>
<p>Despite having so far affected mainly men in the 2SLGBTQ+ community, it is important to emphasize that monkeypox is not at all a “gay disease.” It is spread simply though <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/monkeypox/transmission.html">close personal contact</a>, which may or may not involve sexual contact. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/monkeypox-faq-how-is-it-transmitted-where-did-it-come-from-what-are-the-symptoms-does-smallpox-vaccine-prevent-it-184309">Monkeypox FAQ: How is it transmitted? Where did it come from? What are the symptoms? Does smallpox vaccine prevent it?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Given its current pattern of emergence in the 2SLGBTQ+ community, we must use the hard-earned lessons from the appearance of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s not to repeat the stigmatizing errors of that time, which were not only shameful in a social sense, but also detrimental to public health.</p>
<h2>Lessons from HIV</h2>
<p>In the 1980s and ‘90s, many people were afraid to get tested because of the <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/basics/hiv-stigma/index.html">stigma attached to HIV</a>, even within the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1001/virtualmentor.2009.11.12.oped1-0912">health-care system</a> itself. The world has progressed considerably since then, both in its attitude towards 2SLGBTQ+ people and in the broader understanding of infection. </p>
<p>Back then though, many people did not want to know their HIV status because of the stigma. We can’t let that happen with monkeypox, <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2044185667584">as 2SLGBTQ+ advocates have noted</a>.</p>
<p>Monkeypox is not as easy to transmit as COVID-19, but the fact is that all of us are equally susceptible, and all of us need to be aware and to prioritize measures that will extinguish this threat before it grows. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has proven the value of vaccination and the need for infected people to self-isolate to prevent spread, and we can apply those lessons to the monkeypox outbreaks.</p>
<p>Monkeypox symptoms <a href="https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/diseases/monkeypox/symptoms-management.html">are very rarely life-threatening</a>, and include fever, chills, fatigue and muscle pain, followed by a distinctive rash. They typically take about 10 days to emerge after exposure, but can happen anytime between five and 21 days. Infectiousness usually takes two to three weeks to subside after that. Infectiousness ends around the time the hallmark lesions of monkeypox finally scab over and recede.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Microscopic, colourized image of teal, oval-shaped monkeypox virus particles against an amber background" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/474744/original/file-20220719-91993-zmx8jk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=37%2C0%2C1751%2C1137&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/474744/original/file-20220719-91993-zmx8jk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/474744/original/file-20220719-91993-zmx8jk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/474744/original/file-20220719-91993-zmx8jk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=589&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/474744/original/file-20220719-91993-zmx8jk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=741&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/474744/original/file-20220719-91993-zmx8jk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=741&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/474744/original/file-20220719-91993-zmx8jk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=741&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">It’s important that anyone who has had close contact with someone who has monkeypox get vaccinated if symptoms have not appeared, and self-isolate if they have.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(NIAID, cropped from original)</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>During the window between exposure and the appearance of symptoms, there is a golden opportunity to stave off individual illness and halt the spread of infection overall by vaccinating exposed people as quickly as possible. In this way, we can build a wall around the outbreak.</p>
<h2>Mobilizing resources</h2>
<p>The HIV epidemic, tragic though it was, served to mobilize health resources for and by 2SLGBTQ+ communities, and today those existing networks are being activated to educate and assist those who are most at risk during this stage of the monkeypox outbreak. </p>
<p><a href="https://gmsh.ca/monkeypox/">The Gay Men’s Sexual Health Alliance</a>, for example, is proving to be a valuable hub for current and helpful information about monkeypox prevention, detection and vaccination, including information about vaccine clinics. </p>
<p>It is vitally important that anyone who has had close contact with someone who has monkeypox come forward to be vaccinated if symptoms have not appeared, and to isolate if they do have symptoms.</p>
<p>Isolating oneself, as we learned from COVID-19, is neither easy nor practical for a great many people. It is important that governments in Canada expedite financial supports that allow people with monkeypox to stay home and limit the spread of infection.</p>
<p>We have seen in both HIV and COVID-19 what happens when we don’t act in time. We know how to limit and end this outbreak, and we must take action now.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/187144/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kevin Woodward does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>To control monkeypox, there is a short window — weeks, not months — in which to vaccinate the most susceptible and to encourage and support self-isolation for those who have symptoms.Kevin Woodward, Infectious Diseases Physician, McMaster UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1863892022-07-10T20:27:27Z2022-07-10T20:27:27ZIt’s not nostalgia. Stranger Things is fuelling a pseudo-nostalgia of the 1980s<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/472932/original/file-20220707-23-7ba1ld.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=10%2C0%2C7018%2C3509&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Netflix</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The 1980s are back, and nowhere more so than in the nostalgia-filled season four of Stranger Things.</p>
<p>Kate Bush’s Running up that Hill is the current number-one hit <a href="https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZEVXbMDoHDwVN2tF?si=3e8172fa2d8f4ab7">on Spotify</a>. Since Stranger Things’ season finale, Metallica’s Master of Puppets has joined Bush at the top of the charts.</p>
<p>Mullets are making a comeback. Billy Hargrove (played by Perth’s Dacre Montgomery) has been rocking the hairstyle, as have Miley Cyrus and Little Mix’s Leigh-Anne Pinnock. The famed 1980s banana hair clip is back, as well as the perm(anent wave) which Nancy (Natalia Dyer) and Karen Wheeler (Cara Buono) sport this season.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/472927/original/file-20220707-22-2u31jt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/472927/original/file-20220707-22-2u31jt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/472927/original/file-20220707-22-2u31jt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/472927/original/file-20220707-22-2u31jt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/472927/original/file-20220707-22-2u31jt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/472927/original/file-20220707-22-2u31jt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=512&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/472927/original/file-20220707-22-2u31jt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=512&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/472927/original/file-20220707-22-2u31jt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=512&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dacre Montgomery as Billy in Stranger Things.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Netflix</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A key feature of contemporary marketing is the development of products and services that feature a new theme on an old idea. Called “<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/30040534">retromarketing</a>”, it is the relaunch or revival of a product or service from a historical period, which marketers usually update to ultramodern standards of functioning, performance or taste.</p>
<p>Sure, nostalgia sells – but what retromarketers really try to induce are feelings of “pseudo-nostalgia”. </p>
<p>We call it pseudo-nostalgia because younger consumers of these revived products and services have never experienced the original. Generation Z will not have been there, done that. </p>
<p>In fact, they are buying retrotastic products and services that sometimes have little relation to 1980s reality whatsoever.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ethereal-evocative-and-inventive-why-the-music-of-kate-bush-spans-generations-184571">Ethereal, evocative, and inventive: why the music of Kate Bush spans generations</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>More of the 1980s</h2>
<p>Stranger Things costume designer Amy Parris and her team have collaborated with Quiksilver on five apparel collections <a href="https://press.dxd.agency/188580-quiksilver-launches-apparel-collection-based-on-netflix-original-series-stranger-things-4">based on 1980s fashion</a>. Founded in Torquay, the surf-inspired clothing brand was an integral part of the eighties look. </p>
<p>It’s not only Stranger Things harking back to the 1980s. Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) not only brought back the much-loved movies, but also recreated the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man as “Mini-Pufts” for a new set of consumers.</p>
<p>Thor: Love and Thunder also has a distinct eighties-adventure vibe, taking the Beastmaster (1982), Conan the Barbarian (1982) and eighties Californian graffiti as visual inspiration to great effect and amusement.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/43CTgfwoa3Y?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<h2>Playing the part</h2>
<p>Of course, Generation Z, born after 1996, cannot actually be nostalgic for the 1980s.</p>
<p>As young consumers become pseudo-nostalgic for the 1980s, they look to evoke that decade through “compensatory reconsumption”: they immerse themselves in eighties pop culture to cope with their wistful affection and sentimental longing for this period of the past. Consuming 1980s-esque products and services allows them to pretend they were really a part of that historical period.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/satanic-worship-sodomy-and-even-murder-how-stranger-things-revived-the-american-satanic-panic-of-the-80s-186292">'Satanic worship, sodomy and even murder': how Stranger Things revived the American satanic panic of the 80s</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>For fans of Stranger Things, buying retrotastic products and services helps fans go to the 1980s in their mind’s eye and empathise with their beloved characters. </p>
<p>This recreation of the eighties leads to a transformation of the decade itself. </p>
<p>TV series and movies like Stranger Things, Ghostbusters and Thor transform consumers’ relationship with the historical time. As one person <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucac022">we interviewed</a> put it:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The original canon is not immune to what I have lived. It is no longer possible to distinguish between what you live […] from what you [see] in the original.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>To put it another way, when zoomers feel nostalgic for the 1980s, they play at being a part of that decade. They see themselves as experts with an authentic understanding of the historical period and its associations.</p>
<figure>
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</figure>
<h2>Painful memories or something new to love?</h2>
<p>It isn’t all mullets and pop songs.</p>
<p>The 1980s were also the height of the Trabant car, the national car of the German Democratic Republic in the days before the fall of the Berlin Wall.</p>
<p>The laughing stock of Europe, the “Trabi” was a small but sturdy car that could barely muster 100 kilometres per hour. Due to the communist planned economy, it could take more than ten years after ordering to finally take delivery of the car.</p>
<p>So, it may be a bit of a surprise that an electric Trabant nT or “<a href="http://www.trabant-nt.de/367/en/home.aspx">newTrabi</a>” has been unveiled as a concept car. Better equipped than the old Trabi, in true capitalist style it would come with all the mod cons. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473130/original/file-20220708-12-ma2sh0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A yellow Trabant" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473130/original/file-20220708-12-ma2sh0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/473130/original/file-20220708-12-ma2sh0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473130/original/file-20220708-12-ma2sh0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473130/original/file-20220708-12-ma2sh0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473130/original/file-20220708-12-ma2sh0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473130/original/file-20220708-12-ma2sh0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/473130/original/file-20220708-12-ma2sh0.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Is the Trabant really a car we want to bring back?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Is the association with the old Trabi too comic or painful? Or will drivers love the newTrabi as a symbol of where East Germany started and how far it has come?</p>
<p>If Quiksilver’s collections are any sign, drivers will love the newTrabi. Even just a year ago, it was hard to imagine neon or oversized clothing ever coming back into fashion – but now the Quiksilver/Stranger Things collaboration has seen a <a href="https://www.quiksilver.com.au/quiksilver-x-stranger-things-lenora-hills-strapback-hat-3613377975344.html">neon purple hat</a> and this pastel mishmash of a <a href="https://www.quiksilver.com.au/quiksilver-x-stranger-things-womens-lenora-windbreaker-jacket-EQWJK03077.html">nylon oversized windbreaker</a> sell out worldwide.</p>
<p>The 1980s are back – but it is worth remembering these are not the true 1980s. No matter how great the fashion faux pas, consumers who embrace the current 1980s revival will go to that time through pseudo-nostalgia and compensatory reconsumption.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/186389/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Mullets, perms and neon clothes are all back – but Gen Z can’t be nostalgic for an era they never experienced.Tom van Laer, Associate Professor of Narratology, University of SydneyDavide Christian Orazi, Senior lecturer, Monash UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1658762021-08-16T05:19:15Z2021-08-16T05:19:15ZSexism, big hair, contact books: The Newsreader gets a lot right about 80s TV journalism but the times were not so diverse<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416221/original/file-20210816-22-2co1k3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C138%2C2143%2C1049&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">ABC Publicity</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Review: The Newsreader, ABC TV</em></p>
<p>1986 was a very big news year: history-making moments captured by television. <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/feature/35-years-ago-remembering-challenger-and-her-crew">The Space Shuttle Challenger</a> exploded live on air. Who can forget the camera lingering on the horrified faces of Christa McAuliffe’s parents, the <a href="https://www.biography.com/astronaut/christa-mcauliffe">teacher-in-space</a> being incinerated before our eyes.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/03/radiation-high-over-europe-after-chernobyl-disaster-1986">Chernobyl’s number 4 reactor</a> gave us the world’s worst nuclear disaster. In Melbourne, a car bomb at the <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/remembering-the-day-russell-street-shook-20060325-ge209w.html">Russell Street Police Headquarters</a> extinguished the life of Angela Taylor, the first policewoman to be killed in the line of duty.</p>
<p>This is the era explored in the ABC’s new TV drama The Newsreader. Creator Michael Lucas and director Emma Freeman have made a program so accurate it gave me a jolting sense of déjà vu.</p>
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<p>In 1986, I had just left behind the “slow-news-day” world of Adelaide, packing up my power suit and transferring to the ABC newsroom in the Melbourne suburb of Elsternwick. It was the big smoke with bigger stories, and it was getting faster. </p>
<p>In Adelaide we might have replaced film with tape but we still typed on heavy, steel, manual typewriters and carbon copy paper. My first day was terrifying as I grappled with a huge, speedy electric typewriter. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-do-we-find-it-so-hard-to-move-on-from-the-80s-59445">Why do we find it so hard to move on from the 80s?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The Newsreader captures the changing nature of news-gathering. Stories came via telex, fax and AAP wire. Chiefs of staff eavesdropped on police scanners, communicating with crews on two-way car radios. And there was good old-fashioned “shoe leather reporting”: journalists walking out of the office, observing, meeting people and cultivating contacts.</p>
<p>News at Six, the fictional news program in the ABC series, depicts a typical commercial newsroom of the time. This was the golden age of TV when the rivers of advertising gold flowed freely and ratings made, or broke, careers. A reporter was only as good as their last story but if you delivered enough scoops you too could aspire to become a newsreader, a celebrity and a trusted public figure.</p>
<h2>Exaggeration and ambition</h2>
<p>In the series, Lindsay Cunningham (William McInnes) is the bullying, sexist news director playing staff off against each other with the promise of a career as a newsreader.</p>
<p>“Newsreading is the duck’s nuts,” he tells rookie reporter Dale Jennings (Sam Reid), “.. great pay and you get to waltz in here at midday.”</p>
<p>Except that the news cycle is starting to get faster — news breaks, which can interrupt the programming schedule at any time of day, have increased the pressure to be the first network with breaking news and updates.</p>
<p>Enter Helen Norville (Anna Torv) clever, very ambitious and highly telegenic. Helen (as I did) has big helmet hair, big earrings and even bigger shoulder pads. It was as if exaggeration could make us more visible. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416241/original/file-20210816-6624-19jfk55.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416241/original/file-20210816-6624-19jfk55.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/416241/original/file-20210816-6624-19jfk55.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416241/original/file-20210816-6624-19jfk55.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416241/original/file-20210816-6624-19jfk55.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416241/original/file-20210816-6624-19jfk55.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416241/original/file-20210816-6624-19jfk55.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/416241/original/file-20210816-6624-19jfk55.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=526&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Anna Torv (Helen) and Sam Reid (Dale) in The Newsreader.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">ABC Publicity</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Helen is an anchor woman in the new double header line up. Her co-host, veteran newsman Geoff Walters (Robert Taylor) has already sensed serious news is under threat. A former Vietnam War correspondent, Geoff has the “big G for Gravitas” in spades, but unfortunately that is no longer enough. Helen has the “big G for Glamour” and audiences now want eye candy with their bulletin.</p>
<p>How sexist was it back then? Men were in the majority and the decision makers, but women were moving in and up. ABC journalist <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/mary-delahunty/4757500">Mary Delahunty</a> won a Gold Walkley in 1983. Nine’s <a href="https://halloffame.melbournepressclub.com/article/jana-wendt">Jana Wendt</a> conquered 60 minutes, and went on to A Current Affair where she became known as “the perfumed steamroller”, eventually winning the Gold Logie.</p>
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</figure>
<p>I have never worked in commercial television. Still, it was common knowledge that female reporters were often judged on their <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-14/the-newsreader-womens-real-life-experiences/100376210">“f…ability quotient”</a>. In one episode of the show, Lindsay arrives at Helen’s house ostensibly to discuss her career. He manspreads on her couch in a very uncomfortable scene until she is saved by the doorbell.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/tv-presenters-sexism-and-the-attractiveness-double-standard-19802">TV presenters, sexism and the attractiveness double standard</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Helen is brilliant but highly strung; while her work days are fuelled by adrenalin she’ll crash and burn in tormented private moments. When Dale rescues her from one of these episodes they become partners in the pursuit of a breaking story. </p>
<p>When <a href="https://lindychamberlain.com/the-story/timeline-of-events/">Lindy Chamberlain is released from jail</a> in episode three of the series, we get a snapshot of the lengths ambitious reporters will go for an exclusive: stake outs, trespassing and chequebook journalism. Helen and Dale have no ethical problem with offering a quarter of a million dollars for an interview but Geoff’s outrage is such that he sabotages his own network by leaking the offer to rivals at Channel Nine. </p>
<p>In real life, Ray Martin got that interview with Chamberlain <a href="https://www.wsfm.com.au/lifestyle/ray-martin-reveals-the-truth-about-lindy-chamberlain/">and 60 minutes (along with The Women’s Weekly) paid up.
</a> </p>
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</figure>
<h2>Competition</h2>
<p>There are some great characters in The Newsreader and episodes of note. Noelene (Michelle Lim Davidson) is the smart and deserving production assistant who will never get a promotion. So good is she at her job, and making others look better, she has made herself indispensable.</p>
<p>(There is a hilarious scene where Dale is on the road and needs a fact checked. Noelene rummages through the files of newspaper clippings; Google now does this in an instant.)</p>
<p>Newsgathering in the 1980s was fuelled by adrenaline, competition, caffeine, cigarettes and alcohol. Yes, we drank and smoked in the newsroom. Competition was fierce. </p>
<p>A friend and colleague once diverted a crew away from me so he would have the exclusive. Crews were often in short supply and we all knew — no pictures, no story. Our intellectual property resided in our carefully cultivated and recorded contact books — mine was stolen from my desk sometime in ’86-87. We were motivated by bearing witness and we were trusted by the audience.</p>
<p>The Newsreader is a great piece of television drama but one thing doesn’t ring true. Commercial newsrooms in 1986 were not as diverse as the program pretends and definitely not so Asian. </p>
<p>Yes the ABC had journalist <a href="https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/thetimes-uk/obituary.aspx?n=prakash-mirchandani&pid=160270678">Prakash Mirchandani</a> and fourth-generation Chinese Australian <a href="https://helenechung.com/">Helene Chung</a> was the ABC’s Beijing correspondent. But they were working for the public broadcaster and they were one offs. <a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-diversity-in-the-media-is-vital-but-australia-has-a-long-way-to-go-116280">Some things take a long time to change.</a></p>
<p><em>The Newsreader airs on ABC TV on Sundays at 8.30pm, or is available to watch on iview.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/165876/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Helen Vatsikopoulos is affiliated with ABC Alumni</span></em></p>Helen Vatsikopoulos began her career as a TV journalist in the 1980s. Watching a new ABC drama set in this world brought her a sense of deja vu, with one caveat.Helen Vatsikopoulos, Lecturer in Journalism, University of Technology SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1608472021-05-14T12:46:06Z2021-05-14T12:46:06ZHalston: The glittering rise – and spectacular fall – of a fashion icon<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400633/original/file-20210513-14-q4ux54.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C8%2C2973%2C2124&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Halston with the Halstonettes – a group of models who were part of his entourage – at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in 1980.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/halston-and-halstonettes-during-diana-vreelands-costume-news-photo/105451563?adppopup=true">Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Walk into any department store, and you’ll get a sense of the powerful brands built by high-end American designers: <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-02-23-tm-4945-story.html">Calvin Klein</a>, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2014/02/04/michael-kors-is-fashions-newest-billionaire/">Michael Kors</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ralph-Lauren">Ralph Lauren</a>, <a href="https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/karan-donna">Donna Karan</a>. They created veritable fashion empires by leveraging their names to create lower-priced lines and sign profitable licensing agreements.</p>
<p>But before them all, there was <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/1991/09/halston-life-story">Roy Halston Frowick</a> – better known by the singular appellation Halston. </p>
<p>The subject of <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9569546/">an eponymous Netflix miniseries</a> starring Ewan McGregor, Halston became one of the earliest American designers to extend his brand to multiple price points. In doing so, he made designs that were normally out of reach for everyday Americans available to the masses.</p>
<p>But as <a href="https://scholar.google.nl/citations?user=Vzju6pwAAAAJ&hl=en">fashion</a> <a href="https://jfgordon.net/about.html">historians</a>, we’ll often tell Halston’s story as a cautionary one. Though he made style seem effortless, his relationship with the fashion industry was anything but uncomplicated.</p>
<h2>Attuned to the mood</h2>
<p>A born-and-bred Midwesterner, Halston found early success in hat design working as a custom milliner for <a href="https://style.time.com/2012/09/12/happy-111th-birthday-bergdorf-goodman-a-brief-history-in-numbers/">Bergdorf Goodman</a>. Halston soon became known as a trendsetter, and, in a notable triumph for the young designer, first lady Jacqueline Kennedy <a href="https://www.cnn.com/videos/fashion/2019/08/20/cnn-films-halston-jackie-kennedy-pillbox-hat-ron-3.cnn">wore one of Halston’s signature pillbox hats</a> at her husband’s inauguration. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Jackie Kennedy rides in a car alongside John F. Kennedy." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400402/original/file-20210512-24-1w3vonk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400402/original/file-20210512-24-1w3vonk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400402/original/file-20210512-24-1w3vonk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400402/original/file-20210512-24-1w3vonk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400402/original/file-20210512-24-1w3vonk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400402/original/file-20210512-24-1w3vonk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400402/original/file-20210512-24-1w3vonk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">First lady Jacqueline Kennedy donned one of Halston’s iconic pillbox hats on Inauguration Day in 1961.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/washington-dc-married-couple-us-president-john-f-kennedy-news-photo/514704760?adppopup=true">Bettmann/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Later in the 1960s, Halston made the foray into dress design. His success was equal parts talent and serendipity, and he once described his approach as “<a href="https://www.proquest.com/wwd/docview/1445680315/EC61F7898B0F45E9PQ/1?accountid=10906&imgSeq=1">editing the mood of what’s happening</a>.”</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400405/original/file-20210512-19-1jh3dfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A mannequin dressed in a tan Halston shirtdress." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400405/original/file-20210512-19-1jh3dfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400405/original/file-20210512-19-1jh3dfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400405/original/file-20210512-19-1jh3dfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400405/original/file-20210512-19-1jh3dfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400405/original/file-20210512-19-1jh3dfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1055&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400405/original/file-20210512-19-1jh3dfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1055&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400405/original/file-20210512-19-1jh3dfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1055&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A tan Ultrasuede Halston shirtdress from 1972.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Halston_shirt_dress.jpg">Museum at FIT/Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Although overt simplicity may seem incongruous with grandeur, Halston garments were both understated and luxurious.</p>
<p>Halston’s body-skimming <a href="https://www.1stdibs.com/fashion/clothing/evening-dresses/rare-halston-hand-painted-caftan/id-v_210060/">silk chiffon caftans</a>, <a href="http://d6vrtzdlbankn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/12-Halston-Original-Iman-jersey-dress-spring-1976-584x1024.jpeg">jersey wraparound dresses</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1971/12/09/archives/halstons-revival-of-sweater-girl.html">long cashmere sweaters</a> were often constructed using just one piece of fabric. They covered the body fully, but through careful manipulation of the fabric – wrapping, draping and twisting – Halston’s pieces were sensuous and flattering. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1977/02/26/archives/ultra-demand-for-versatile-ultrasuede.html">Halston was even able to turn Ultrasuede</a> – a soft, synthetic, machine-washable faux suede – into a status symbol, molding it into elegant shirtdresses and coats. These became popular despite – or maybe because of – their utter plainness. His garments were fitting for the 1970s, <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-09-16/how-1970s-oil-prices-stagflation-changed-the-u-s-economy">when a shaky economy</a> made flagrant displays of wealth unseemly.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400631/original/file-20210513-17-1pwngsf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A red dress on a mannequin." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400631/original/file-20210513-17-1pwngsf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400631/original/file-20210513-17-1pwngsf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400631/original/file-20210513-17-1pwngsf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400631/original/file-20210513-17-1pwngsf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400631/original/file-20210513-17-1pwngsf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1134&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400631/original/file-20210513-17-1pwngsf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1134&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400631/original/file-20210513-17-1pwngsf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1134&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A silk Halston evening dress, designed in the mid-1970s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/evening-dress-ca-1976-silk-jersey-by-halston-news-photo/150057792?adppopup=true">Chicago History Museum/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Yet the designer’s social life was the opposite of understated. In fact, the image of fashion design as a glamorous and exciting profession owes much to Halston. During his heyday, he was at “the top of the fashion show-biz heap,” as Women’s Wear Daily publisher John Fairchild <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Chic_Savages.html?id=qezxAAAAMAAJ">once wrote</a>. </p>
<p>At the legendary <a href="https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/studio-54">Studio 54</a>, he mingled with Bianca Jagger and Andy Warhol. The world-famous disco club became both a showroom for Halston’s designs and a stage for the man himself, and Halston was often accompanied by an entourage of beautiful women known as “<a href="https://exhibitions.fitnyc.edu/blog-ysl-halston/the-halstonettes/">the Halstonettes</a>.”</p>
<h2>Halston the businessman</h2>
<p>As his stature grew, Halston always looked for ways to expand his fashion empire.</p>
<p>Early in his career, he experimented with what’s known as “<a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057%2F9781137492265_5">brand diffusion</a>” – which is companies’ use of the same brand name on items at varying price points. </p>
<p>His high-end line was Halston Ltd., a made-to-order, ready-to-wear business. Located on New York City’s Madison Avenue, it catered to an exclusive list of private clientele that included film and television stars like Lauren Bacall, Greta Garbo, Liza Minelli and Elizabeth Taylor. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, the Halston Originals boutique sold dresses to department stores across the country, <a href="https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/383974238/">with prices ranging from US$150 to over $1,000</a>. And with Halston International, the designer created “component” knit pieces – not outfits, but singular garments, turtlenecks, sweater sets, shirts and coats – that consumers could mix and match to their delight.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Halston kisses Bianca Jagger on the cheek behind her birthday cake." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400630/original/file-20210513-13-15t5sum.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400630/original/file-20210513-13-15t5sum.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=454&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400630/original/file-20210513-13-15t5sum.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=454&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400630/original/file-20210513-13-15t5sum.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=454&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400630/original/file-20210513-13-15t5sum.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=570&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400630/original/file-20210513-13-15t5sum.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=570&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400630/original/file-20210513-13-15t5sum.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=570&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bianca Jagger and Halston during Jagger’s birthday party at Studio 54.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/bianca-jagger-and-designer-halston-attend-the-birthday-news-photo/156188908?adppopup=true">Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>After the business conglomerate Norton Simon Inc. acquired the Halston businesses in 1973, Halston remained lead designer of his many collections. He worked at a frenetic pace, creating all of the uniforms for the winter and summer 1976 U.S. Olympic athletes and making costumes for Martha Graham’s ballet production “<a href="https://www.gettyimages.ie/detail/news-photo/ballet-dancer-rudolph-nureyev-welcomes-choreographer-martha-news-photo/583900365?adppopup=true">Lucifer</a>.” Products bearing his name included perfumes, luggage, home linens, coats, rainwear and even wigs. By 1983, Halston Enterprises was generating an estimated <a href="https://www.proquest.com/wwd/docview/1445680315/EC61F7898B0F45E9PQ/1">$150 million in annual sales</a>.</p>
<p>Perhaps emboldened by his success or motivated by his heartland roots, Halston signed with JCPenney in 1983 for the creation of an exclusive line that was, as he put it, “<a href="https://www.proquest.com/wwd/docview/1445680315/EC61F7898B0F45E9PQ/1">for the American people</a>.” </p>
<p>With items priced from $24 to $200, the “III line” marked a new era in fashion and retailing. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="A man looks at two stylishly dressed women walking by." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400611/original/file-20210513-19-1ikpmp9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400611/original/file-20210513-19-1ikpmp9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=887&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400611/original/file-20210513-19-1ikpmp9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=887&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400611/original/file-20210513-19-1ikpmp9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=887&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400611/original/file-20210513-19-1ikpmp9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1115&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400611/original/file-20210513-19-1ikpmp9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1115&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400611/original/file-20210513-19-1ikpmp9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1115&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Halston III line for JCPenney was the first by a high-end American fashion designer licensing his name.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/barbiescanner/38453218924/in/photostream/">barbiescanner/flickr</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>While high-end fashion designer <a href="https://www.latimes.com/obituaries/story/2020-12-29/pierre-cardin-dead">Pierre Cardin</a> pioneered this form of licensing in Europe, the project of pairing a high-fashion designer with a mass merchandiser best known for selling Levi’s, hardware and household goods was unusual in the United States. While Halston contended it was <a href="https://www.proquest.com/wwd/docview/1445680315/EC61F7898B0F45E9PQ/1">immensely successful</a>, claiming it generated $1 billion in sales, JCPenney’s executives were less enthusiastic. By the mid-1980s, industry insiders were suggesting that <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1985/09/05/business/a-slow-start-for-an-upscale-penney-s.html">the garments were not selling as well as expected</a>. </p>
<p>The JCPenney’s deal ultimately proved to be damaging for Halston. Wary high-end retailers, including his early employer, Bergdorf Goodman, were fearful that the prestige of the Halston name was sullied by its presence on the racks of a mass-market merchandiser. Bergdorf Goodman eventually dropped his line altogether. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, Halston’s growing reputation of excessive spending and erratic behavior increasingly left his brand to the decisions of businessmen and creative control to other parties. Halston was relegated to the sidelines, and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/15/magazine/no-headline-650887.html">his corporate deals effectively cost him the right to his own name</a>. </p>
<p>In 1988, Halston was diagnosed with AIDS. He lived out of the public eye until his death in 1990.</p>
<h2>Others follow Halston’s lead</h2>
<p>Despite its eventual failure, Halston’s pairing with JCPenney was truly ahead of its time. </p>
<p>Citing the importance of creating practical, easy-care leisurewear for working women and young mothers, Halston tried to offer a fashionable wardrobe at reasonable prices that nearly everyone could afford.</p>
<p>Contemporaries such as <a href="https://www.harpersbazaar.com/fashion/trends/a23741794/anne-klein-shopbazaar-50-years-exhibit/">Anne Klein</a>, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/style/Kenzo-Auction.html">Kenzo Takada</a> would immediately try out similar diffusion lines. All pulled it off without suffering the extraordinary professional cost that Halston endured. </p>
<p>These designers’ corporate and creative decisions were arguably more tightly controlled than Halston’s devil-may-care diffusion. Acquisitions of these companies by larger conglomerates occurred much later than Halston’s, often decades into the brand’s existence. Perhaps this gave additional time for these brands to arrive at a more singular vision. </p>
<p>Maintaining a consistent direction over such a diverse array of lines proved unfeasible for Halston, and something was lost along the way: the cachet and the allure that made a Halston a Halston. </p>
<p>Halston’s successes and ultimate downfall have provided a cautious inspiration. Isaac Mizrahi’s 2003 <a href="https://www.racked.com/2016/3/10/11183334/isaac-mizrahi-target-qvc">collaboration with Target</a> – 20 years after Halston’s pairing with JCPenney – became a boon for both parties.</p>
<p>It was not, however, without trepidation. In 2019, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/style/youve-heard-of-the-drop-target-had-it-first.html">Mizrahi reminisced that the partnership</a> “was a very scary thing. Halston was my idol … and he had failed.” </p>
<p>[<em>Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/weekly-highlights-61?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=weeklybest">Sign up for our weekly newsletter</a>.]</p>
<p>Relationships between designers and retailers are now commonplace in a climate where the most fashionable and visible of women freely mix and match mass market and luxury items, and designers <a href="https://www.eonline.com/photos/17507/best-designer-collaborations-of-all-time">deftly jump between discount retail and the runway</a>. </p>
<p>Halston’s brand lives on, but resuscitating it has been a long process. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/fashion/the-men-and-women-who-would-be-halston.html">Fashion heavyweights</a> Kevan Hall and Marios Schwab, as well as style figures Rachel Zoe and Sarah Jessica Parker, have lent their creativity and business acumen to the brand, with limited success.</p>
<p>With the release of Netflix’s “Halston,” a new revival is at hand: not of the line, but of the personality that for a comparatively brief – but glittering – moment, ruled the fashion world with devastating simplicity.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/160847/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The subject of a new Netflix miniseries, Halston once ruled over New York’s fashion world. But the designer with a devil-may-care approach to his business dealings attempted too much, too quickly.Jennifer Gordon, Lecturer of Apparel, Events and Hospitality Management, Iowa State UniversitySara Marcketti, Professor of Apparel, Events, and Hospitality Management, Iowa State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1487722020-10-27T21:12:37Z2020-10-27T21:12:37ZGiant ‘toothed’ birds flew over Antarctica 40 million to 50 million years ago<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/365550/original/file-20201026-21-t2z6hk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=9%2C14%2C3249%2C2013&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Fossil remains indicate these birds had a wingspan of over 20 feet.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Brian Choo</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Picture Antarctica today and what comes to mind? Large ice floes bobbing in the Southern Ocean? Maybe a remote outpost populated with scientists from around the world? Or perhaps colonies of penguins puttering amid vast open tracts of snow?</p>
<p>Fossils from Seymour Island, just off the Antarctic Peninsula, are painting a very different picture of what Antarctica looked like 40 to 50 million years ago – a time when the ecosystem was lusher and more diverse. Fossils of <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-61973-5">frogs</a> and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/03115518.2011.565214">plants</a> such as ferns and conifers indicate Seymour Island was much warmer and less icy, while fossil remains from <a href="https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.8268">marsupials and distant relatives of armadillos and anteaters</a> hint at the previous connections between Antarctica and other continents in the Southern Hemisphere.</p>
<p>There were also birds. Penguins were present then, as they are now, but fossil relatives of <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.13679/j.advps.2019.0014">ducks, falcons and albatrosses</a> have also been found in Antarctica. My <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=5CGShQUAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">colleagues</a> and <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=XlyfD9QAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">I</a> published an <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-75248-6">article in 2020</a> revealing new information about the fossil group that would have dwarfed all the other birds on Seymour Island: the pelagornithids, or “bony-toothed” birds. </p>
<h2>Giants of the sky</h2>
<p>As their name suggests, these ancient birds had sharp, bony spikes protruding from sawlike jaws. Resembling teeth, these spikes would have helped them catch squid or fish. We also studied another remarkable feature of the pelagornithids – their imposing size.</p>
<p>The largest flying bird alive today is the <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/birds/group/albatrosses/">wandering albatross</a>, which has a wingspan that reaches 11 ½ feet. The Antarctic pelagornithids fossils we studied have a wingspan nearly double that – about 21 feet across. If you tipped a two-story building on its side, that’s about 20 feet.</p>
<p>Across Earth’s history, very few groups of vertebrates have achieved powered flight – and only two reached truly giant sizes: birds and a group of <a href="https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/pterosaurs-flight-in-the-age-of-dinosaurs/what-is-a-pterosaur">reptiles called pterosaurs</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/365561/original/file-20201026-23-p2l76b.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A model of an enormous prehistoric bird is mounted outdoor in the middle of a river. The wingspan reaches from bank to bank." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/365561/original/file-20201026-23-p2l76b.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/365561/original/file-20201026-23-p2l76b.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365561/original/file-20201026-23-p2l76b.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365561/original/file-20201026-23-p2l76b.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365561/original/file-20201026-23-p2l76b.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365561/original/file-20201026-23-p2l76b.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365561/original/file-20201026-23-p2l76b.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Full-size model of a Quetzalcoatlus on display at JuraPark in Baltow, Poland.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/Kecalkoatl_%28Quetzalcoatlus%29_-_Baltow_%281%29.JPG">Aneta Leszkiewicz/Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Pterosaurs ruled the skies during the Mesozoic Era (252 million to 66 million years ago), the same period that dinosaurs roamed the planet, and they reached hard-to-believe dimensions. <a href="https://www.wired.com/2013/11/absurd-creature-of-the-week-quetz/">Quetzalcoatlus</a> stood 16 feet tall and had a colossal 33-foot wingspan.</p>
<h2>Birds get their opportunity</h2>
<p>Birds originated while dinosaurs and pterosaurs were still roaming the planet. But when an <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dinosaur-killing-asteroid-impact-chicxulub-crater-timeline-destruction-180973075/">asteroid struck the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago</a>, dinosaurs and pterosaurs both perished. Some <a href="https://www.audubon.org/news/how-birds-survived-asteroid-impact-wiped-out-dinosaurs">select birds survived</a>, though. These survivors diversified into the thousands of bird species alive today. Pelagornithids evolved in the period right after dinosaur and pterosaur extinction, when competition for food was lessened. </p>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/spp2.1284">The earliest pelagornithid remains</a>, recovered from 62-million-year-old sediments in New Zealand, were about the size of modern gulls. The first giant pelagornithids, the ones in our study, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-75248-6">took flight over Antarctica about 10 million years later</a>, in a period called the Eocene Epoch (56 million to 33.9 million years ago). In addition to these specimens, fossilized remains from other pelagornithids have been found on every continent. </p>
<p>Pelagornithids lasted for about 60 million years before going extinct just before the Pleistocene Epoch (2.5 million to 11,700 years ago). No one knows exactly why, though, because few fossil records have been recovered from the period at the end of their reign. Some paleontologists cite <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/02724634.2011.562268">climate change as a possible factor</a>.</p>
<h2>Piecing it together</h2>
<p>The fossils we studied are fragments of whole bones collected by paleontologists from the University of California at Riverside in the 1980s. In 2003, the specimens were transferred to Berkeley, where they now reside in the <a href="https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/">University of California Museum of Paleontology</a>. </p>
<p>There isn’t enough material from Antarctica to rebuild an entire skeleton, but by comparing the fossil fragments with similar elements from more complete individuals, we were able to assess their size. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/365552/original/file-20201026-17-1koc1h3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Photo of a fossil fragment of a jawbone section that has worn toothlike projections. Line drawing around it illustrates where in the jaw it would have fit." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/365552/original/file-20201026-17-1koc1h3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/365552/original/file-20201026-17-1koc1h3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365552/original/file-20201026-17-1koc1h3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365552/original/file-20201026-17-1koc1h3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365552/original/file-20201026-17-1koc1h3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=720&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365552/original/file-20201026-17-1koc1h3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=720&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365552/original/file-20201026-17-1koc1h3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=720&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In life, the pelagornithid would have had numerous ‘teeth,’ making it a formidable predator.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Peter Kloess</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We estimate the pelagornithid’s skull would have been about 2 feet long. A fragment of one bird’s lower jaw preserves some of the “pseudoteeth” that would have each measured up to an inch tall. The spacing of those “teeth” and other measurements of the jaw show this fragment came from an individual as big as, if not bigger than, the largest known pelagornithids. </p>
<p>[<em>Deep knowledge, daily.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=deepknowledge">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter</a>.]</p>
<p>Further evidence of the size of these Antarctic birds comes from a second pelagornithid fossil, from a different location on Seymour Island. A section of a foot bone, called a tarsometatarsus, is the largest specimen known for the entire extinct group. </p>
<p>These pelagornithid fossil findings emphasize the importance of natural history collections. Successful field expeditions result in a wealth of material brought back to a museum or repository – but the time required to prepare, study and publish on fossils means these institutions typically <a href="https://theconversation.com/digitizing-the-vast-dark-data-in-museum-fossil-collections-102833">hold many more specimens than they can display</a>. Important discoveries can be made by collecting specimens on expeditions in remote locations, no doubt. But equally important discoveries can be made by simply processing the backlog of specimens already on hand.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/148772/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter A. Kloess does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Paleontologists have discovered fossil remains belonging to an enormous ‘toothed’ bird that lived for a period of about 60 million years after dinosaurs.Peter A. Kloess, Doctoral Candidate, Integrative Biology, University of California, BerkeleyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1400812020-06-19T01:55:22Z2020-06-19T01:55:22ZHow 80s TV show MacGyver is inspiring doctors during the coronavirus pandemic<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342596/original/file-20200618-41238-117o09y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C1433%2C849&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/124561666@N02/14218019828/in/photolist-nEp4WU-6PvWDW-2wyZ-D7KDpu-2iH4ymj-oKaRXp-23wdwTV-qWyW4Q-21o3L9f-e2wonA-pY81dU-brPdUR-26BZ9zb-21o3Lfs-bNvwfX-44h23d-Fehu4F-23wdwLa-21o3KXy-8cDKYW-23wdwuZ-23wdwE8-J5G2X-21o3Lk7-21o3L5h-Czc7B7-Czc7SN-ZQK7nL-21o3Lqh-ZCwtQu-22tiz7p-ZQK7cW-ZCwtWb-21o3LmE-ZCwtnA-YQN6tS-ZCwtuE-Czc7aA-ZCwtis-YQN62Q-23eDAUC-YQN6Dm-ZB2wEL-ZB2wJJ-ZCwu9q-Z93FdW-21o3LwE-ZQK7ro-23wdwAR-CPqRKS">TNS Sofres/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, health workers globally have been concerned about <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/20/survey-finds-87-of-americas-nurses-are-forced-to-reuse-protective-equipment">inadequate supplies</a> of personal protective equipment, ventilators and other essential items of medical care. </p>
<p>So many have created workarounds to fill the perceived gap between what they have and what they need.</p>
<p>Those of us who grew up in the 1980s remember the fictional crime-fighting hero <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGyver">Angus “Mac” MacGyver</a>. He could seemingly <a href="https://www.metv.com/lists/the-12-coolest-craziest-contraptions-macgyver-ever-made">create anything</a> to get him out of a sticky situation using common household objects such as a magnifying glass and some duct tape.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OhYX2YU8Doo?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">MacGyver saves the day with a paper clip, a wing mirror and a pair of binoculars.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Now, we use the verb “to <a href="https://www.lexico.com/definition/macgyver">MacGyver</a>”, to make or repair something, using whatever items are at hand.</p>
<p>MacGyvering in health care was rife before the pandemic. But according to images of homemade gizmos on social media, COVID-19 has spurred health workers to make even more equipment using an array of small, common, <a href="https://bjanaesthesia.org/article/S0007-0912(17)33766-2/fulltext">interlocking devices at their disposal</a>.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/we-love-reliving-the-1980s-but-only-as-farce-27435">We love reliving the 1980s, but only as farce</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<h2>Curbing the ‘MacGyver bias’</h2>
<p>But there are risks as well as potential benefits of this approach.</p>
<p>Last year, my colleagues and I wrote about the “<a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12630-019-01361-4">MacGyver bias</a>”. This cognitive bias means that people who create and use homemade devices are likely to have an emotional connection to their inventions. </p>
<p>It’s related to the better-known “<a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1016/j.jcps.2011.08.002">IKEA effect</a>” related to the extra connection we have with flatpack furniture we’ve put together ourselves. </p>
<p>With the MacGyver bias, clinician-inventors might not see the pitfalls and dangers in using their creations. They may downplay the risks and overestimate the benefits. Many of these inventions have also been created and introduced with little or no proof they work or are safe.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-ikea-effect-how-we-value-the-fruits-of-our-labour-over-instant-gratification-113647">The IKEA effect: how we value the fruits of our labour over instant gratification</a>
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<h2>Intubation boxes and gadgets for ventilators</h2>
<p>One such example during the current pandemic is the <a href="https://litfl.com/should-we-use-an-aerosol-box-for-intubation/">intubation box</a>, a clear perspex box that covers a patient’s head during an invasive procedure. </p>
<p>The aim is to better protect health workers from exhaled aerosols containing coronavirus emitted when placing tubes into patients’ lungs to help them breathe.</p>
<p>In the past few months, <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMc2007589">high-profile</a> <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00268-020-05542-x">journals</a> have published somewhat sketchy, preliminary reports of these devices. </p>
<p>Some of these reports are on actual patients, some under laboratory conditions, giving them an air of legitimacy.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1246593151743283200"}"></div></p>
<p>However, more <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/anae.15115">detailed studies</a>, carried out by researchers not involved in making or designing the boxes, show significant potential harms from using them. Intubations may take longer, risking patient safety, and the boxes can damage health workers’ personal protective equipment, risking theirs.</p>
<p>Another example involves using 3D-printed components called splitters <a href="https://twitter.com/iwashyna/status/1243881755230253056?s=20">to modify ventilators</a>, allowing patients to share machines.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1243881755230253056"}"></div></p>
<p>On face value, connecting two critically ill patients to the same life-saving machine seems sensible if ventilators are in short supply.</p>
<p>But a <a href="https://www.sccm.org/Disaster/Joint-Statement-on-Multiple-Patients-Per-Ventilato">strong consensus statement</a> issued earlier this year by several professional organisations advised against using ventilator splitters because of concerns these patients would be receiving poorer care. </p>
<p>This didn’t stop some clinicians from going ahead, saying “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/health/coronavirus-ventilator-sharing.html">the other option is death</a>”.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/millions-of-products-have-been-3d-printed-for-the-coronavirus-pandemic-but-they-bring-risks-137486">Millions of products have been 3D printed for the coronavirus pandemic – but they bring risks</a>
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</em>
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<h2>Stifling innovation?</h2>
<p>Many great breakthroughs in medicine have been a result of happenstance and self-experimentation rather than a deliberate program of research. </p>
<p>For example, common surgical instruments and devices have been derived from <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3488887/">thumbtacks</a>, <a href="https://thejns.org/focus/view/journals/neurosurg-focus/36/4/article-pE8.xml?body=pdf-10653">spoons</a> and <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0310057X0603401S03">engine carburettors</a>.</p>
<p>Today, it takes a long time to navigate the processes required by medical device regulators, such as the <a href="https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices">US Food and Drug Administration</a> and Australia’s <a href="https://www.tga.gov.au/medical-devices-overview">Therapeutic Goods Administration</a>.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1241779113293217792"}"></div></p>
<p>Regulators need to see evidence of rigorous testing to see these devices not only work but are safe.</p>
<p>So, while these novel, MacGyvered devices might indeed save lives, the evidence for their use is often non-existent and raises serious ethical questions about when and how they are introduced. </p>
<h2>How could we find a balance?</h2>
<p>If regulatory requirements stifle innovation, lives might be lost from a lack of potential new inventions. </p>
<p>Clearly a compromise is needed that doesn’t involve the full and lengthy regulatory process, yet still maintains a rigorous, independent assessment. </p>
<p>This could be a stopgap on the way to full approval, particularly in time-pressured situations such as a pandemic, when even imperfect solutions might be needed.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1254787628970340356"}"></div></p>
<p>So what would <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/anae.15152">this process</a> look like?</p>
<p>We commonly use mock-ups of equipment or clinical spaces when educating health professionals. These simulation labs are now finding a new purpose, to <a href="https://stel.bmj.com/content/early/2019/10/08/bmjstel-2019-000519">test devices and processes</a> before implementing them.</p>
<p>This means we can anticipate many problems before the new device comes close to a patient. By using a structured process, we can find solutions and test them objectively, away from the patient, without harm. This way, we can <a href="https://www.revelx.co/blog/fail-fast-fail-often/">fail frequently, rapidly and safely</a> to find the ideas (and devices) we might want to actually use.</p>
<p>The COVID-19 pandemic poses difficult questions about how we might deal with innovation in medicine. However, it also provides us with a catalyst to improve safety and implement change.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/140081/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stuart Marshall is a Councillor for the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists and receives funding from the NHMRC as an Early Career Fellow.</span></em></p>During a pandemic, what would MacGyver do? He’d cobble together masks and ventilators from the things around him. Now health-care workers are doing the same. But there are risks.Stuart Marshall, Senior Research Fellow, Anaesthesia Teaching & Research, Monash UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1208902019-09-19T03:37:06Z2019-09-19T03:37:06ZIt’s hot in here: the evolution of Goth subculture in sub-tropical Brisbane<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/291665/original/file-20190910-109931-1jqtkbr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=52%2C19%2C331%2C412&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Siouxsie Sioux in Edinburgh in 1980: a Goth pioneer she was a big influence on the tribe known as Goth in steamy Brisbane.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org">Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The crashing chords of punk echoed through the end of the 70s, heralding the arrival of a diverse bunch of subcultures. In Brisbane, none was more notable than the tribe known as Goth.</p>
<p>Just like the punks before them, they had a deep commitment to visual style – black clothes, big hair, whiteface with the streak of red, young eyes peering from lakes of kohl. No visible skin. They were as close to vampiric as we had yet seen - that they might dissolve with a whispered howl in our sub-tropical summer seemed quite likely.</p>
<p>Inspired by the Sex Pistols, British Goth pioneers <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jxGcQJJl7w">Siouxsie Sioux</a> and Steve Severin had started The Banshees in 1976, on the way borrowing from contemporaries like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCk8tEOcwqU">The Slits</a>, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p58kCYsiwt0">Magazine</a>. By the time the 80s arrived, they had developed a unique musical persona. </p>
<p>The songs were dancy, literate, smart and funny, with psychedelic guitars and skittering tom-toms, influenced by The Velvet Underground and The Doors, Rimbaud and Shelley, Poe and Wilde - mood was everything. After touring with The Banshees in 1979, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXgN-7A1MXM">The Cure</a>’s Robert Smith changed not only his band’s sound but his <a href="http://www.picturesofyou.us/photos/83-84/83-RS-bigpostcard.htm">look</a>. With <a href="https://shadowofadreamblog.wordpress.com/2017/06/10/the-black-chat-abbo-on-the-roots-of-goth/">UK DECAY</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EdUjlawLJM">Joy Division</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skXn7jhXc5w">Bauhaus</a>, a dark army was rising. </p>
<p>There were Australian bands dropping in to Brisbane in the 80s that can be included under the <a href="https://theconversation.com/australian-gothic-from-hanging-rock-to-nick-cave-and-kylie-this-genre-explores-our-dark-side-111742">cowl</a> of <a href="http://theessential.com.au/features/essential-down-under/the-monster-within-australian-gothic-emphasises-the-terror-of-the-familiar">Australian Gothic</a>, though they disavow any connection to the scene. The Birthday Party’s Nick Cave was <a href="https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/nick-cave-favourite-books-authors-list/">inspired</a> by quintessential goth poets like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Fleurs_du_mal">Baudelaire</a>, while gloomy Melbourne also produced Dead Can Dance, whose drum-driven, howling sound and dark album art was described as <a href="https://www.allmusic.com/album/dead-can-dance-mw0000821472">“Goth as it gets”</a>.</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/australian-gothic-from-hanging-rock-to-nick-cave-and-kylie-this-genre-explores-our-dark-side-111742">Australian Gothic: from Hanging Rock to Nick Cave and Kylie, this genre explores our dark side</a>
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<p>As the subculture bloomed in Britain in the early 1980s, Brisbane was in sync, thanks to import record stores like <a href="https://scenestr.com.au/music/celebrate-rocking-horse-records-40th-birthday">Rocking Horse Records</a>, and music/pop culture press like NME, Melody Maker and The Face. Brisbanites Karen Litzow and Stephen Crowther started fashion label Salon Dada to make clothes as darkly original as the music.</p>
<p>The imported vinyl was played on community radio station 4ZZZ by DJs who were also instrumental in the growing the city’s <a href="https://remix.org.au/aris-djs-clubs-aris-ephemera/">club scene</a>, which formed the spine of Goth subculture in the 80s.</p>
<h2>Swampies and Morticia’s</h2>
<p>DJs Jane Grigg and Peter Mogg both spun 12" tracks on 4ZZZ, treating disparate, desperate suburban youth to new releases from bands like The Fall, Sisters of Mercy and The Cult. They started Club Vortex d'Junk in 1985, screaming that punk was “DEAD and BURIED.” It was unique and vital, and short-lived.</p>
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<span class="caption">Morticia’s flyer designed by Stephen Crowther. Courtesy of Phillipa Berry.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Stephen Crowther</span></span>
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<p>Around the same time, Ian Whittred and Jonny Griffin were building their own audience. First with the club Hades, and then Morticia’s in 1987, they created a home for the Goths and “swampies” - a peculiarly Australian variant who dolled up the black with a touch of paisley and loved The Church, The Scientists, Wall of Voodoo and The Gun Club.</p>
<p>Morticia’s became the Goth mainstay in the Brisbane club scene, moving from venue to venue through the late 80s and 90s as landlord greed or room size forced their hand. From Warhols to the Canberra Hotel (a teetotalling Country Party throwback) to the Brisbane Music Hall, the crowd danced and smoked and loved one another. </p>
<p>Morticia’s gave way to new clubs and new venues, like Junkyard, Midian, and Industry, with a lineage that leads to the current day. </p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/my-favourite-album-the-cures-kiss-me-kiss-me-kiss-me-82913">My favourite album: The Cure's Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me</a>
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<p>On Sunday nights today on 4ZZZ, DJ Doom presents <a href="http://4zzzfm.org.au/program/brizzzbane-batcave">Batcave</a>, where she keeps the songs of Siouxsie and The Cure alive but also plays contemporary Goth bands such as Melbourne’s <a href="https://nosister.bandcamp.com/">No Sister</a> or Brisbane’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I8y7-OjPrQ">Pleasure Symbols</a>. Global warming has not deterred these gentle folk; age has not wearied them. </p>
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<h2>Goth now</h2>
<p>Although the airwaves carry the message, alternative Goth bands in Australia struggle to attract an audience. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sfev9m6n-F0">IKON</a> from Melbourne has built a strong European following with frequent appearances at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave-Gotik-Treffen">Wave Gothik Festival</a>, but in Australia they are lucky to fill a room. The story of <a href="https://vowwsband.com/">Vowws</a> a Sydney Band that moved to LA, has played with Gary Numan and is now opening for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cult">The Cult</a> shows that Australia might not be big enough for new Goth bands. </p>
<p>Australian born <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7Tc5Nk_n4M">Zoe Zanias</a> is a thriving <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_body_music">Electronic Body Music</a> artist but lives in Berlin where she co-founded the Fleisch collective and the record label of the same name.</p>
<p>Electronic Body Music springs from Industrial but it is more dance-oriented. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1cRGVaJF7Y">Front 242</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qIXIHAmcKU">Covenant</a> are good examples of this genre.</p>
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<p>The community continues to have a presence due to the passion of people like Rachael Blackemore, who moderates a Goth Facebook group. Originally from Adelaide, she ran the original <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pg/Club1334/about/?ref=page_internal">1334 Club</a> dedicated to Deathrock and Trad Goth music in Melbourne from 2007. </p>
<p>Now based in Brisbane, the growth of the subculture online has allowed her to collaborate on interstate events like Bat Attack, where DJs from different states play similar genres like Death Rock and Trad Goth on the same night. It is evidence that the Australian Goth subculture has a strong national identity.</p>
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<span class="caption">Goth DJs from Melbourne and Sydney get together for a night of Death Rock and Trad Goth.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Artwork by Xerstorkitte</span></span>
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<p>Although places to gather are still rare in Brisbane, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/faithnightclub.brisbane/?rf=225848564169970">Faithnightclub</a> run by Richard Warman for nearly 20 years helps to feed the city’s Goth subculture. In the early 2000’s, Brisbane was the only city in the country with a weekly Goth club, a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCOSPtyZAPA">sanctuary</a>, if you will, still running today.</p>
<p>Here’s a glimmer from the past: Brisbane in the 90s. Summer. The Goths drift through the heat haze; insults and disapproval hang in the air. But they only have eyes and ears for one another. The tribe is everything. </p>
<p>On the days when those tight black pants were unbearable, with the sun bleaching the sky and the humidity closing in, the boys would discuss it, and the shorts would make a rare appearance. Still black, of course. A colour you can wear for days without washing. Friendly, familiar, black.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/120890/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sebastien Darchen receives funding from the Myer Foundation "Placemaking and tactical urbanism program" </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Willsteed does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Lakes of kohl in danger of smudging in the humidity. Black clothes soaking up the sun. It took commitment to be a Goth in 80s Brisbane - here are some of the influences that shaped the scene.Sebastien Darchen, Senior Lecturer in Planning, The University of QueenslandJohn Willsteed, Senior lecturer, Queensland University of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1124542019-02-27T10:04:46Z2019-02-27T10:04:46ZOnly Fools and Horses, Charles Dickens and the precariat, then and now<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260991/original/file-20190226-150698-1uxtpgo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=9%2C14%2C1588%2C1049&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Publicity still for Only Fools and Horses.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">www.onlyfoolsmusical.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It’s taken them 30 years, but Del Boy and Rodders have made it from Peckham to the West End. After three decades of ducking and weaving – getting by, making a fortune then losing it – the Trotter brothers from the late John Sullivan’s enduringly popular TV sitcom can now be seen in a musical version of Only Fools and Horses at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Based on Sullivan’s writing, his son has adapted the show along with one of its stars, the comedian Paul Whitehouse.</p>
<p>Journalists have had a great time, rediscovering the Derek Trotter lexicon for evaluating the world – the prospect of the show is, of course, “lovely jubbly”, or even “cushty”. There has been praise for the lovingly recreated stage sets of the flat in Nelson Mandela House, Peckham and the Nag’s Head where the brothers and their crew habitually used to drink. </p>
<p>Where the new show seems to score highly is in the mood of nostalgia that it serves, taking audiences back to the decade that both defined and thwarted Del Boy’s leisured millionaire desires: the 1980s – because (as mere “dipsticks” fail to grasp) only fools and horses work. Since the 1980s – and the first major deregulation of the British economy – we’ve developed a new vocabulary for describing the people who end up living in disadvantage: the “precariat”.</p>
<p>The most negative reaction to the new show involves the music: critics have tended to see some of the show’s songs as poor, bolt-on additions. This raises a question: will a musical adaptation dilute the topical edge explored by the original comedy? </p>
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<p>Is it in danger of doing for the 21st-century precariat what Lionel Bart’s Oliver! (1960) did for the orphan pickpocket gangs of the mid-19th century on which Charles Dickens had based Oliver Twist (1837-8) – perhaps trivialising the very real problems they face?</p>
<p>The key figure for exploring this is Charles Dickens. When <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8469698/Only-Fools-and-Horses-creator-John-Sullivan-dies.html">John Sullivan died</a> in 2011, the head of BBC comedy, Mark Freeland, commented that “he was the Dickens of our generation”. Freeland was referring to Sullivan’s undoubted comic genius: it was on display when Del Boy famously fell through the bar, but also in countless instances of superb dialogue. </p>
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<h2>Serious about comedy</h2>
<p>When it comes to Dickens, who is now thought of as a serious writer, we forget the extent to which, when he first came to prominence, he was a master comedy writer. Mr Pickwick and Sam Weller were the leading characters in Pickwick Papers (1836-37), Dickens’s first, breakthrough novel. But they were, in effect, a comic double act – getting into numerous scrapes and escapades as the Pickwick Club travelled around London and southern England (in stage coach rather than a yellow Robin Reliant). </p>
<p>The comparison is valid. In his second novel, Oliver Twist (1837-38), Dickens commented that his art was melodramatic, <a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/oliver-twist-a-patchwork-of-genres">like layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon</a>, alternating comedy and tragedy. Then think of the way Sullivan’s could manage transitions of tone in Only Fools and Horses: in one episode, Grandad can have us in fits of laughter as a chandelier crashes to the floor (“A Touch of Glass”). In another, Grandad’s funeral (“Strained Relations”) can be an occasion for reflecting movingly on the complex emotional bonds of family life that shape love and loyalty while constraining opportunities.</p>
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<p>Sullivan strongly identified with Dickens – as Graham McCann has shown in <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8877163/Only-Fools-and-Horses-by-Graham-McCann-review.html">his book on the sources of Sullivan’s hit comedy</a>, the author-to-be was introduced to Dickens as a demotivated secondary modern pupil who was being reared as “factory fodder”. </p>
<p>The attachment to Dickens was further emphasised in Sullivan’s creation (in 2000) of a comedy drama around the character of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2002/mar/20/broadcasting">Wilkins Micawber</a>, an unlikely hero of Dickens’ masterpiece David Copperfield – and a founding member of the precariat, predated only by Dickens’s debtor father and Dickens himself. </p>
<p>Debt in the early 19th century meant prison and the removal of social opportunity. Dickens’s own experience, being taken out of school and put to work in a blacking factory – recorded for the first time in <a href="http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1206733/1/1206733_redacted.pdf">John Forster’s posthumous biography</a> (1872-74) – connects Dickens to precariats across the generations.</p>
<h2>Only fools and writers</h2>
<p>We are accustomed to seeing him as a powerful figure of status – but the early Victorian Dickens was struggling to make his way in a cut-throat world of the rapidly developing culture industries through a mixture of collaboration and intense individual competitiveness. </p>
<p>We think about Lionel Bart’s Oliver! as the leading musical adaptation of Oliver Twist but overlook the fact that when the novel first adapted for the stage in 1838, it was as a melodrama – <a href="https://athomeonthestage.wordpress.com/2013/09/26/playbill-oliver-twist-or-the-parish-boys-progress-davidges-royal-surrey-theatre/">Oliver Twist: Or, The Parish Boy’s Progress</a> – at the Royal Surrey Theatre.</p>
<p>This melodrama, which mixed music with drama, enabled the controversial subject matter – pickpocket gangs, violent crime, prostitution – to get around the <a href="https://blogs.bl.uk/english-and-drama/2016/10/the-lord-chamberlain-regrets-.html">strict codes of theatre regulation</a> that had been in place since the middle of the 18th century. In her brilliant fictional recreation of the event in her neo-Victorian novel, Fingersmith (2002), Sarah Waters portrays little Sue Trinder, a new member of Mrs Sucksby’s pickpocket gang, being taken along to view the lurid performance. And so the spectacle of Oliver Twist is returned to, among others, those precariously positioned communities whose experiences Dickens had written about.</p>
<p>In a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/feb/18/only-fools-and-horses-musical-plonker-lovely-jubbly">recent piece for The Guardian</a>, Stuart Jeffries reflected on the way in which the original TV Only Fools and Horses has become a surprising hit among BAME viewers, for the way in which it resonated closely with their experiences of communal laughter amidst precarious economic living. The challenge for Only Fools and Horses the Musical will be to open its West End doors to these communities to avoid it merely becoming a post-Brexit nostalgia trip – now that would hardly be cushty.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/112454/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Amigoni does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>John Sullivan, who created Del Boy and Rodney, has been called a modern Dickens – now both their most famous works have been made into musicals.David Amigoni, Professor of Victorian Literature, Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research and Enterprise, Keele UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1041822018-10-02T10:06:07Z2018-10-02T10:06:07ZBrett Kavanaugh goes to the movies<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/238808/original/file-20181001-195269-6vaebr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Scenes from 'Grease 2' that may have garnered laughs in the 1980s are cringe-worthy by today's standards.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://filmlimbocom.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/grease-2-leather-e1518393792295.png?w=614">Paramount Pictures</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>I’m a film studies professor, so when I first saw an image of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/26/politics/brett-kavanaugh-1982-calendar/index.html">June 1982 calendar</a>, I immediately noticed his movie plans.</p>
<p>In between exams, a beach trip, basketball camp and workouts, Kavanaugh, like millions of other Americans that year, went to the movies. In fact, 1982 was, at the time, Hollywood’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1983/01/25/movies/1982-a-bonanza-year-at-movie-box-offices.html">most lucrative year at the box office</a>.</p>
<p>In June alone, Kavanaugh scheduled three trips to the movies: “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084602/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Rocky III</a>” on June 13, “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084021/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Grease 2</a>” on June 16 and, on June 26, “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084516/">Poltergeist</a>.”</p>
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<span class="caption">In June 1982, Brett Kavanuagh had three movies penciled into his calendar: ‘Rocky III,’ ‘Grease 2’ and ‘Poltergeist.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2018/images/09/26/kavanaugh.summer.1982.calendar.pages.pdf">Provided by Brett Kavanaugh to the Senate Judiciary Committee</a></span>
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<p>Kavanaugh’s teenage moviegoing may not have been particularly noteworthy had he not invoked three films during his Sept. 27 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. </p>
<p>Asked to decipher some cryptic allusions on his yearbook page, Kavanaugh referenced the popular comedies as a form of justification. </p>
<p>“For one thing, our yearbook was a disaster,” <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2018/09/27/kavanaugh-hearing-transcript/?utm_term=.124591a2a045">he said</a>. “I think some editors and students wanted the yearbook to be some combination of ‘Animal House,’ Caddyshack’ and ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High,’ which were all recent movies at that time. Many of us went along in the yearbook to the point of absurdity. This past week, my friends and I have cringed when we read about it and talked to each other.”</p>
<p>Could the young men Kavanaugh encountered on screen, many of whom behaved badly but were also relatable – even popular – help us to understand the male culture of his adolescence?</p>
<h2>It’s all about the ‘score’</h2>
<p>I’m not the only one asking these questions about the role 1980s movies played in Kavanaugh’s high school years. </p>
<p>Writing for The New York Times, Ginia Bellafante <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/27/nyregion/brett-kavanaugh-high-school-drinking-assault.html">recently explored</a> Tom Cruise’s 1983 hit, “Risky Business,” as a film that celebrates male mediocrity at the expense of female weakness. Vox’s Constance Grady has written about the way that <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/9/27/17906644/sixteen-candles-rape-culture-1980s-brett-kavanaugh">date rape is innocuously and humorously depicted</a> in John Hughes’ hugely popular “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088128/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Sixteen Candles</a>.” </p>
<p>In the 1980s, the teen coming-of-age flick was almost a genre of its own. “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” “Back to the Future,” “Risky Business,” “Sixteen Candles,” “Pretty in Pink” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” are probably the most well known today. </p>
<p>But there were many others, including “Valley Girl,” “Some Kind of Wonderful,” “Weird Science,” “Better Off Dead,” “Class,” “The Last American Virgin,” “Three O’Clock High,” “Zapped!” and “Say Anything.”</p>
<p>There was also “Grease 2,” which makes an appearance on Kavanaugh’s calendar.</p>
<p>Capitalizing on the success of its tremendously popular predecessor, 1978’s “Grease,” “Grease 2” takes place at Rydell High School in 1961.</p>
<p>Although “Grease 2” was nowhere near the box office success of the films Kavanaugh mentioned during his testimony, it’s worth exploring precisely because it is so typical, especially in the way it depicts the sort of male high school behavior that’s being scrutinized today.</p>
<p>The movie focuses on the two most popular social cliques at Rydell: the T-Birds, who are leather jacket-clad, preening greasers, and their satin-jacket-wearing female counterparts, the Pink Ladies, who, per their rules, are only allowed to date T-Birds. </p>
<p>Like so many teen boys of other 1980s movies, the T-Birds seem to be able to get away with anything. They make brazen innuendos in front of their hypersexualized teacher, Miss Mason; bully their way into winning the talent show; and pay for the new kid at school to write their papers.</p>
<p>The musical numbers that weave through “Grease 2” are laden with sexual innuendo. With its bowling alley setting, the T-Bird’s number “Score Tonight” lays out the most obvious of the film’s relentless double entendres. </p>
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<p>Other songs imagine girls failing to give guys what they want, with the poor guys having to endure these sexual refusals. When Mr. Stuart’s biology class sings and dances their way through “Reproduction,” some guys wonder, “When a warm-blooded mammal in a tight little sweater starts pullin’ that stuff, is she sayin’ that she wants to do it?” </p>
<p>Some of the others reply, “Can’t prove it by me, cause they change their tune when you got ‘em in the back seat.”</p>
<p>Like “Reproduction,” “Prowlin” is all about girls who refuse sex: The best strategy, according to the tune, is to find “a chick who’ll give you more” at “a spot that I’ve discovered where a guy’s guaranteed to score.” </p>
<h2>Boys will be boys – or something more sinister?</h2>
<p>The most telling musical set piece is “Do It for Our Country.” In the scene, a T-Bird named Louis brings Sharon, one of the Pink Ladies, into a fallout shelter, where he tries to have sex with her. </p>
<p>After closing and bolting the door, Louis starts narrating a nuclear attack as his friends outside the shelter crank an air raid siren.</p>
<p>“The Russians are attacking – get down!” Louis proclaims, as he pushes Sharon onto a bed, gets on top of her and starts to sing, “Let’s do it for our country.” </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">‘Do It For Our Country.’</span></figcaption>
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<p>At first Sharon resists; Louis continues to try to persuade her, and she starts to warm to the idea. But just as it seems that Louis is going to have his way, she leaps up and opens the shelter door. Two eavesdropping T-Birds fall into the room, one of them cackling with laughter.</p>
<p>Sure, these are all silly scenes in a silly movie. </p>
<p>But as I rewatched “Do It For Our Country,” it was impossible to not think about Christine Blasey Ford <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2018/09/27/kavanaugh-hearing-transcript/?utm_term=.6f7fb071f0b8">describing her alleged assault</a> – and the way “the laughter, the uproarious laughter” was seared into her memory.</p>
<p>For the T-Birds in this scene, this is fun and games, from the bowling alley to the bomb shelter, all in the name of getting laid.</p>
<p>Reviewing “Grease 2” for the Los Angeles Times in 1982, film critic Kevin Thomas described the shelter scene as “a funny misfired seduction scene.” Yet as Vox’s Grady notes in her essay about “Sixteen Candles,” today it’s hard to imagine even forcing a chuckle during scenes like this.</p>
<p>In the Journal of Popular Culture, film scholar Lesley Speed <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1540-5931.2010.00772.x">wrote about</a> how 1980s teen comedies often depict “young, middle-class men’s presumed right to behave hedonistically on other people’s territory.” </p>
<p>In films like “Grease 2,” this territory also extended to teenage girls’ bodies. The T-Birds in “Grease 2” are convinced they deserve unrestricted access to the Pink Ladies, and while usually they don’t manage to get it, their relentless attempts are notable: Such predatory behavior, often without consequences, is one of the overarching characteristics of the 1980s teen movie. </p>
<p>As the coach in “Grease 2” advises the T-Birds on the practice field, “Football is like life. You gotta push. You gotta push your way through life.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/104182/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marsha Gordon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>‘Grease 2’ – which, according to Kavanaugh’s calendar, he saw on June 16, 1982 – is an example of the brand of entitled masculinity that appeared in the era’s teen flicks.Marsha Gordon, Professor of Film Studies, North Carolina State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/964722018-07-12T04:33:56Z2018-07-12T04:33:56ZDreams in an Empty City: a strikingly prescient morality tale about banking<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/226849/original/file-20180710-122247-1kr05hq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"> Jacqy Phillps as Karen and Russell Kiefel as Chris in the State Theatre Company of South Australia's 1986 production of Dreams in an Empty City.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">David Wilson</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In our Great Australian Plays series, we nominate the best of Australian drama.</em></p>
<p>There is no single event foreshadowing the darker mood of the 1980s, as the election of the Whitlam Labor government presaged the expansive atmosphere of the 1970s. <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Margaret-Thatcher">Margaret Thatcher</a>, “the Iron Lady”, became UK Prime Minister in 1979. The neo-conservative <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ronald-Reagan">Ronald Reagan</a> was elected US President in 1981. Thereafter came a firestorm of social and economic changes: the deregulation of financial markets; the rise of Islamic fundamentalism; the dismantling of trade barriers; the collapse of Eastern bloc communism; the re-opening of China to the West; Fukuyama’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man">End of History</a>.</p>
<p>No one could accuse 1970s Australian drama of being simplistic or trouble-free. But its spirit is rambunctious. Its love affair with the popular theatre of the past ensures that even its most serious offerings have a bright and breezy feel. This quality disappears entirely in the 1980s, to be replaced by a grim preoccupation, a tonal umbra flecked with fury, phantasmagoria and perturbation. Realism and anti-realism – the two stalwarts of our play classification system thus far – writhe in their genre categories, as if possessed by an alien intelligence. Individual plays of the period are neither one style nor the other, or both simultaneously, or a new, disturbing mutation.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/when-the-cultural-cringe-abated-australian-drama-in-the-1970s-95855">When the cultural cringe abated: Australian drama in the 1970s</a>
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<p>In the 1980s, people held their breath, waiting to see if nuclear conflict would reduce the planet to atomic dust. There is a similar feel to its drama, a muted despair and a latent fear. </p>
<p>Stephen Sewell’s <a href="https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/event/81055">Dreams in an Empty City (1986)</a> was written in the middle of the decade and exemplifies these traits. It is apocalyptic in feel, epic in scope and unforgiving in length. A so-called “state of the nation” play, it is eager to tackle big ideas and problems, and unapologetic about the resulting speechifying. It is political drama at its most thrilling and perilous. Hence it’s now-to-us obvious topic: international banking.</p>
<h2>How little has changed</h2>
<p>When I selected Sewell’s play for this series, in December last year, <a href="http://www.afr.com/business/banking-and-finance/financial-services/asic-says-westpacs-bbsw-manipulation-was-like-a-virus-20171212-h03bwo">Australian banks were in the media spotlight for manipulation of the benchmark bill swap rate</a>. Now their immoral behaviour is the focus of a full-blown Royal Commission. Dreams in an Empty City was thus a drama ahead of its time. In 1986, the banks had not yet achieved the general repugnance and distrust they now lay claim to. Or perhaps Sewell recognized the age we have been living in all the while. It points to how little has really changed in 32 years that the play might have been written last week.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/evidence-from-the-banking-royal-commission-looks-like-history-repeating-itself-97090">Evidence from the banking royal commission looks like history repeating itself</a>
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<p>Its complicated plot defies detailed summary. Three main storylines can be identified, which wind in and out of each other like a knot garden. The first is a high-stakes feud between Simon Wilson, an ageing, silver-tail financier, and Derek Wiesland, an uncouth, criminal billionaire of the sort Australia regularly produces. This narrative, which has a number of subplots to it, is one in which two men attempt to destroy each other for strictly business reasons, thus demonstrating, in Wilson’s words, “moral death, the capacity for passionless violence, the terror of meaningless”. (Dreams is exceedingly existential in some of its dialogue).</p>
<p>The second storyline revolves around an ex-priest-turned-actor, Chris O’Brian, who discovers there is a contract out on his life. Chris is the emotional heart of the action. Renouncing pre-emptive violence, yet refusing to run, he has no choice but to await his fate and try to find out the reason for it. He lives with Karen, a one-time socialist, and many of their conversations involve a lugubrious thrashing-through of ethical questions, both personal and political. Chris is starring in a play where he is a South American priest caught up in a scenario of self-sacrifice and redemption. (Dreams eschews light irony in favour of full-strength symbolism).</p>
<p>As it turns out, Chris himself is also looking for redemption: for a murder he committed years previously in Thailand. The skeletal hand of the past is felt everywhere in Sewell’s play, reminding audiences of Karl Marx’s famous saying that “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”. (You can watch part of a major speech by Chris performed by a young actor <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc9-yPzKN-I">here</a>).</p>
<p>The third and final storyline is about banking itself. At its centre is Interbank Australia, a subsidiary of an American investment firm so large that if were to fail, it would crash the banking system and the economy around it (sound familiar?). Interbank’s biggest debtor is Derek Wiesland, who it discovers has been inflating the value of his property portfolio in order to borrow more money, in order to buy more property, in order to borrow more money… etc.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/226850/original/file-20180710-122253-1j5vvkp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/226850/original/file-20180710-122253-1j5vvkp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/226850/original/file-20180710-122253-1j5vvkp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/226850/original/file-20180710-122253-1j5vvkp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/226850/original/file-20180710-122253-1j5vvkp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/226850/original/file-20180710-122253-1j5vvkp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=520&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/226850/original/file-20180710-122253-1j5vvkp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=520&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/226850/original/file-20180710-122253-1j5vvkp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=520&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">John Gaden as Wilson and Warwick Moss as Wiesland in the 1986 production.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">David Wilson</span></span>
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<p>Instead of being contrite, Wiesland, a potty-mouthed thug with no time for bankers’ hypocrisies, insists his debt is Interbank’s problem, and it should buy back his buildings on terms favourable to him. As it turns out, Interbank has no choice but to do this, because the US company who own them is going down the gurgler thanks to their own poor loan strategy (familiar again?).</p>
<p>Thus a foul and insolvent entrepreneur is propped up by a duplicitous bank. Between them, they decide there is only one way out of their dilemma – to heat up the Australian property market, attract mums-and-dads investors, and pass on their losses to them.</p>
<p>What brings these three storylines to the point of convergence is a decision by Chris’s brother, Mark, who ran the O’Brian family building company before it was taken over by Wiesland, to reveal to Wilson the extent of Wiesland’s debts. The three men are thus feloniously linked. Some months previously, Wilson set up an offshore tax fraud scheme for Wiesland – Caracalla Ltd – which Mark abetted, secretly putting Chris’s name on company deeds.</p>
<p>Chris’s murder is necessary to either hush him up, lest the tax fraud scheme be exposed, or revenge Mark’s betrayal of an unforgiving employer. Whichever way, Chris is a dead man, and for no other reason, ultimately, than the people around him are totally corrupt. The name <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caracalla">Caracalla</a>, it is revealed, is taken from the Roman Emperor who killed his brother to gain power, and then destroyed all images of him, to hide his crime.</p>
<h2>Money and morality</h2>
<p>The dialogue of Dreams in an Empty City is as layered as its narrative, and deftly switches between different registers. The two most important are talk about money, and talk about morality. In respect of the first, Sewell shows an astounding ability to parse the language of banking and present it to audiences in such a way that its complexity is acknowledged, even as its consequences are rendered accessible.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/223685/original/file-20180618-85840-1d4f74i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/223685/original/file-20180618-85840-1d4f74i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/223685/original/file-20180618-85840-1d4f74i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/223685/original/file-20180618-85840-1d4f74i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/223685/original/file-20180618-85840-1d4f74i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/223685/original/file-20180618-85840-1d4f74i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/223685/original/file-20180618-85840-1d4f74i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/223685/original/file-20180618-85840-1d4f74i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Stephen Sewell has an astounding ability to parse the language of banking.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Maja Baska NIDA</span></span>
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<p>Here, for example, is Interbank Australia’s floor manager, Harry (a good American) chatting to a friend he runs into at an Embassy dinner. It’s early in the play, before trouble starts:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>George: What kind of loan policy you got?</p>
<p>Harry: I’m not in loans but I think it’s the same policy as back home: energy and real estate.</p>
<p>George: So what sent Continental to the wall?</p>
<p>Harry: They were cowboys. You could tell ‘em you had an oil well in your wisdom tooth and they’d give you a loan.</p>
<p>George: Al reckons International was up to the same thing.</p>
<p>Harry: No. I don’t believe it. There was something else.</p>
<p>George: What?</p>
<p>Harry: (after a slight pause) The bastards were into tax avoidance – the same thing Chase was up to.</p>
<p>George: What Cayman Islands?</p>
<p>Harry: Yeah, the works.</p>
<p>George: You blow the whistle on them?</p>
<p>Harry: I took it as far as I could.</p>
<p>George: So you end up here.</p>
<p>Harry: In a word, yes.</p>
<p>George: Tax avoidance – everyone’s in to it. You’d be a dope not to.</p>
<p>Harry: It’s wrong.</p>
<p>George: Why?</p>
<p>Harry: You and I end up paying for it – the ordinary people. When the government can’t afford to fix the roads, it’s not because we’re cheating on our tax.</p>
<p>George: For the roads – the bastards are paying defence contractors six hundred bucks for an ashtray. Don’t make me laugh, Harry: it’s crooked from the top down.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sewell is a playwright who loves words. For state of the nation drama, less is not more. More is more. Dreams in an Empty City exudes verbal superfluity, a compulsion to give audiences in excess of what they paid for. This prolixity is not gratuitous, however, but is motivated by an obsessive desire to communicate. The play wears its heart on its sleeve, even as its story traverses strange intellectual and emotional pathways.</p>
<p>An example of the dialogue around morality comes at the end, when Wilson, who has engineered Chris’s death, offers to save him if he will agree to become his heir. Wilson is dying of cancer, and lost his only son years before. During the course of the play he befriends Chris, attracted to the ex-priest’s agonized integrity as necessary to a fully human existence. Being who he is, however, Wilson tries to lure Chris to his own debased view of life:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Wilson: Let me show you what I know! (He begins to pull the curtain aside)
Let me show you the power of evil! The city, Chris; one of the most beautiful cities in the world. A city sprung from greed and ambition, built from human flesh, every building the grave of a labourer whose life was less important than the profit its construction meant. The city, Chris, thrown up by finance and speculation, conceived in bribery, corruption and murder. A sparkling, empty edifice of dreams and nightmares. Listen to it, Chris, listen to it sigh: listen to its misery, its glory, its hunger. Feel the hum as power flows through it, organizing it, animating it, connecting every part of it from the magnate in his penthouse to the single mother in her room. The city, Chris, the city of death glistening in the light of its own conceit…</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If audiences discern echoes of Satan’s temptation of Jesus in the desert, they’d be correct. Dreams in an Empty City is saturated in Christian eschatological imagery; of blood, guilt, sacrifice, the beauty of innocence, the horror of sin and, ultimately and most importantly, the rejection of violence. </p>
<p>The dramatic use of religious symbolism is reminiscent of <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-great-australian-plays-the-cake-man-and-the-indigenous-mission-experience-88854">The Cake Man</a> ten years prior. But whereas Robert Merritt blends Christianity and Dreamtime story, Sewell blends Christianity and modern economic and political theory.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-great-australian-plays-the-cake-man-and-the-indigenous-mission-experience-88854">The great Australian plays: The Cake Man and the Indigenous mission experience</a>
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<p>The discombobulation is similar, but the dramatic results strikingly contrast. In mood and mode, The Cake Man is warm, elegiac and bittersweet. Dreams in an Empty City is as cold and bare as bones in a crypt. As Interbank’s manager Nat Boas (a bad American), admits at the end of the play, when asked why she has unscrupulously precipitated global financial collapse, “because banking’s the only industry that runs on trust, and bankers are the last people you should”.</p>
<p>A provocative statement in 1986. Today, more like the unvarnished truth.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/96472/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julian Meyrick does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Stephen Sewell’s 1986 exemplifies the traits of the decade: apocalyptic in feel, epic in scope and unforgiving in lengthJulian Meyrick, Professor of Creative Arts, Flinders UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/924482018-03-09T13:01:46Z2018-03-09T13:01:46Z‘We are women, we are strong’: celebrating the unsung heroines of the miners’ strike<p>The miners’ strike of the 1980s is often depicted as a bitter clash between Ian MacGregor and Margaret Thatcher on one side, and Arthur Scargill and the National Union of Mineworkers on the other. The battle lines were drawn up and down the country as flying pickets and the police went head to head. The strike was the closest the UK has come to civil war in recent times. Not even the 1980s or <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/london-riots-1173">2011 riots</a> can compare to the year-long confrontation.</p>
<p>Much has been written about this strike, but what is often missing from this story of rage and dissent are the voices of the women involved. This was a pivotal moment in Britain and the women, often absent from the media’s gaze and the public’s memory, were there fighting alongside with the men. Their presence on the picket lines has been <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0950017008089108">acknowledged</a> but their story of defiance, their skill in raising funds, promoting the cause and standing in battle with the men is generally overlooked. </p>
<p>“Coal not dole” stickers covered the plastic buckets that were used to collect donations from the public. The women travelled beyond their pit villages and around the country to raise funds. They spoke at rallies in London and abroad, talking about the struggle and the hardships that the miners’ and their families faced. The result was allegiance from people and places they least expected, and when it was most needed – Russia sent lorries to the UK providing food and Christmas presents for the miners’ children.</p>
<p>In her book “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/nov/06/queen-coal-review-miners-strike-yorkshire-margaret-thatcher">Queen Coal</a>” Triona Holden tells how the women in Yorkshire experienced opposition to setting up a soup kitchen from the local NUM representatives who wanted the kitchen to serve the striking men only. Determined that a soup kitchen would also serve the families, the women organised cutlery, crockery and the necessary permissions. They raised money by knocking on doors and asked people if they could spare a bit of food. This and funding from “Women Against Pit Closure” meant that they were able to feed the the striking community. </p>
<p>But women were not resigned to domestic duties alone, they were also at the coalface of the strike, they were on the front line – not shouting from the sidelines but in battle, along with the men, against the police. Some were arrested, some went to court and some were even strip-searched.</p>
<h2>Defying the times</h2>
<p>The 1980s was a different time socially, economically and politically for women. Despite having a woman prime minister, women were discouraged from working and an arrogant, male culture pervaded. But the women who took part in the strike were strong working-class activists whose actions undermined the narcissistic culture of the time. Their livelihoods, their families, their communities and their way of life was under threat and this fuelled their anger. In many cases, these women never returned to domestic life after the strikes. Some even took up careers in politics.</p>
<p>The women’s welfare clinics ensured the strikers’ families received the benefits to which they were entitled. The National Union of Miners encouraged strikers to claim benefits, but the number of members who actually made claims had been low in previous strikes. In 1984, when the welfare clinics were up and running, the benefit take-up rate was <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1410129.pdf?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">nearly 80%</a>. This record high was a result of the women being able to successfully advise striking miners and their families about welfare claims and benefit applications, preventing them from going hungry. These actions, it might be argued, helped give the strike longevity. </p>
<p>Many of the women surprised even themselves with their tenacity during the strike. For them this was a working-class fight and they demonstrated a camaraderie and a skill that rivalled that of the men working down the pits. They even had their own campaign song:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We are women, we are strong,<br>
We are fighting for our lives<br>
Side by side with our men<br>
Who work the nation’s mines,<br>
United by the past,<br>
And it’s - Here we go! Here we go!<br>
For the women of the working class.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Today retail parks and new roads have been built over the ground upon which communities once thrived and fierce battles took place. However what cannot be erased from history is how this group of men and women, led by Scargill, defied class and gender boundaries and went head-to-head with the government.</p>
<p>Now, 20 years on, society is in a different place. The topless Page 3 model has disappeared and <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/metoo-45316">#MeToo</a> is holding men to account. The miners’ wives maintained they were not feminists and perhaps their collective description “miners’ wives” is evidence of that position. But ironically Thatcher and the strike helped to liberalise gender relationships. The women’s collective voices occupied a space not occupied by other feminist groups. They had created their own working-class feminism that spoke of protecting the family and their husbands while also claiming a place in the workspace.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/92448/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Patricia Francis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Women played and integral role in the year-long struggle – despite a culture that expected them to stay at home.Patricia Francis, Postgraduate Researcher, Nottingham Trent UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/866142017-10-31T05:42:41Z2017-10-31T05:42:41ZStranger Things 2 is darker and weirder, tempered with grief<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/192572/original/file-20171031-18735-1hyny0d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The thing in Stranger Things 2 </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Netflix</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>This week, in the run-up to Halloween, Netflix released season two of Stranger Things, a sequel to last year’s runaway success. Like the previous season, Stranger Things 2 enjoys a visual style crafted from period-specific horror films first released in the early and mid-1980s. Part of the joy is in collecting these citations and echoes. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083907/">The Evil Dead</a> (1981), <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087800/">A Nightmare on Elm Street</a> (1984), and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087262/">Firestarter</a> (1984) are all very much present for this season, shaping the look and feel no less than explicit content. So too is the greatest of all seasonally appropriate films, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085636/">Halloween III: Season of the Witch</a> (1982), about which it is impossible not to think upon sights of rotted, worm-infested pumpkins.</p>
<p>Though I want to avoid dropping too many spoilers, there are some welcome differences at the level of narrative content: an expanded universe, new characters, and more Dustin (a charming <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089218/">Goonies</a> throwback from the central teen gang) all make for seriously addictive viewing. There are new mysteries to unravel and new threats to vanquish, as well as a healthy dose of urban revolt as manifest through telekinetic rage.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Further reading: <a href="https://theconversation.com/nostalgia-vhs-and-stranger-things-homage-to-80s-horror-63055">Nostalgia, VHS and Stranger Things’ homage to 80s horror</a></em></p>
<hr>
<p>But it’s also a much darker season. The previous year’s events have metastasized into psychic scars. The mood, this time around, is tempered by grief and trauma.</p>
<h2>New horror</h2>
<p>The most significant change, however, is in the type of horror now menacing the township of Hawkins. While the previous season established a sci-fi shtick worthy of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000631/">Ridley Scott</a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000118/">John Carpenter</a>, Stranger Things 2 modulates away from that and into a related type of horror that is, perhaps, more literary than cinematic.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/192573/original/file-20171031-18700-12f54f2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/192573/original/file-20171031-18700-12f54f2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/192573/original/file-20171031-18700-12f54f2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192573/original/file-20171031-18700-12f54f2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192573/original/file-20171031-18700-12f54f2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192573/original/file-20171031-18700-12f54f2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192573/original/file-20171031-18700-12f54f2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192573/original/file-20171031-18700-12f54f2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The gang in Stranger Things 2, in their Ghostbusters Halloween tribute.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Netflix</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This centres on a figure that features in trailers, on posters, and which appears in the very first episode. A gargantuan being made up of coiling smoke and darkness, a towering force all tenebrous and sublime, a strange thing that is both arachnoid and cephalopod and so thoroughly anterior to anything even remotely human – whatever it is, it looms over everything in a storm of red, and it wants to kill.</p>
<p>The struggle to find a meaningful noun for this entity – which the Stranger Things wiki describes as both Shadow Monster and Mind Flayer – is revealing of its textual origin. This is the kind of “indescribable” monstrosity familiar to many from the weird fiction of <a href="http://www.hplovecraft.com/">H. P. Lovecraft</a>. </p>
<p>The creators of Stranger Things have acknowledged precisely this influence on the new season: “There’s an H.P. Lovecraft sort of approach,” <a href="https://screenrant.com/stranger-things-season-2-monster-influences-lovecraft/">confirms Matt Duffer</a>, “this inter-dimensional being that is sort of beyond human comprehension. We purposely don’t want to go too much into what it is or what it wants.”</p>
<p>Moreover, it is in a Lovecraft story, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/872713.The_Shadow_Out_of_Time">The Shadow Out of Time</a> (1935), that we find an origin for the series’ title: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>As I have said, it was not immediately that these wild visions began to hold their terrifying quality. Certainly, many persons have dreamed intrinsically stranger things – things compounded of unrelated scraps of daily life, pictures, and reading, and arranged in fantastically novel forms by the unchecked caprices of sleep. For some time I accepted the visions as natural, even though I had never before been an extravagant dreamer.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Visually, however, the inter-dimensional being that haunts Stranger Things 2 owes just as much to what might be the single most effective adaptation of Lovecraft onto screen. </p>
<p>The 2015 videogame, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodborne">Bloodborne</a>, was marketed as traditional gothic horror. Its first acts are set in an isolated city, Yarnham, gone to hell in a lycanthropic scourge of beasts. It is only later revealed that the Yarnhamites had been worshiping an ancient, eldritch race whose reality overlays our own. In other words, the Great Ones had been there all along, we just lacked the insight to see them. </p>
<p>That’s the point of both Lovecraft and Stranger Things. Horror is everywhere and immanent but it’s not necessarily visible. And, once you glimpse it – in Bloodborne, clinging to the roof of a heretofore familiar chapel – it can’t be unseen. Lovecraft’s defining affect is not so much fear or revulsion as it is a kind of haunted fascination. We can say much the same for Stranger Things. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/192581/original/file-20171031-18689-zpmop3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/192581/original/file-20171031-18689-zpmop3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/192581/original/file-20171031-18689-zpmop3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192581/original/file-20171031-18689-zpmop3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192581/original/file-20171031-18689-zpmop3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192581/original/file-20171031-18689-zpmop3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192581/original/file-20171031-18689-zpmop3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192581/original/file-20171031-18689-zpmop3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The monster revealed in Bloodborne.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Bloodborne</span></span>
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<h2>The horror of capitalism</h2>
<p>How do we make sense of this apparent commitment to Lovecraftian horror? </p>
<p>The first season of Stranger Things was an affirmation of collective identities, the bonds of childhood friendship that cut across race, class, and gender. It is, I have suggested, a visual narrative whose nostalgia is not just for 1980s culture, but also a profound longing for the old conflict between communal vitality and capitalist alienation. </p>
<p>This longing is informed by history, and especially by the antagonism between American capitalism and Soviet communism. Stranger Things 2 retains this historical backdrop, with its endemic fear of communists, and supplements it with a tour of urban blight in the American Midwest. Chicago – in which a late side-plot episode takes place – is all roving gangs and trashcan fires. </p>
<p>Horror, in Stranger Things, emanates from the underside of North America in the 1980s. The unleashing of that monster, whatever it might be, results from the repressive gestures taken by capitalism to secure victory over its opposition, both local and global. </p>
<p>It was, of course, during the 1980s that Ronald Reagan dismantled unions and deregulated the market, therefore obliterating any sort of collective identity that might sustain revolutionary unity and pose a threat to American capitalism. This obliteration is what Stranger Things pits its heroes against – and that is why Stranger Things 2 is required viewing for socialists this Halloween.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/86614/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mark Steven does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Stranger Things 2 finds its monsters in Reagan-era capitalism. It is required viewing for socialists this Halloween.Mark Steven, Research Fellow, UNSW SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/843402017-10-25T11:23:59Z2017-10-25T11:23:59ZStranger Things: inventiveness in the age of the Netflix original<p>The Netflix series <a href="https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80057281">Stranger Things</a>, which shortly returns for a second season, was the surprise TV hit of summer 2016. Fans and critics revelled in its allusions to Hollywood hits from the American 1980s in which it is set. Every haircut, every rippling synth pattern, BMX chase and adolescent gesture of friendship seemed to come from an 80s movie. Its young protagonists communicated through references to Star Wars and Dungeons and Dragons and the first trailer for season 2 shows them trick-or-treating as the <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087332/">Ghostbusters</a>. </p>
<p>So what made Stranger Things feel fresh and new? Was it somehow innovative in its referencing? It certainly wasn’t because of a new kind of aesthetic recycling, as JJ Abrams had already done an 80s Steven Spielberg pastiche with <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1650062/">Super 8</a>, and borrowing or referencing has long been prevalent in American cinema. From Film Noir’s adoption of German expressionist techniques in films like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maltese_Falcon_(1941_film)">The Maltese Falcon</a> or Touch of Evil to the postmodern genre-mashing of Pulp Fiction, Hollywood storytelling has a rich history of pastiche, allusion and homage. </p>
<p>But what happens when serial TV does this? Stranger Things featured eight hour-long episodes developing characters who inevitably cannot exist solely in the stylistic shoes of Spielberg or <a href="http://stephenking.com/">Stephen King</a>. And though the referencing is there, the immediate pleasures of its clever nods to <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083866/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">E.T.</a> or <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089218/">The Goonies</a> evolve into a more sophisticated meditation on the processes of allusion. </p>
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<h2>Nostalgia and trauma</h2>
<p>The achievement of Stranger Things is twofold. It is not just highly referential – it is actually about referencing. The series explores the way people – especially young people – communicate through patterns of reference or allusion. The programme’s retro register is also paired with an ongoing discussion of what we can see as the opposite of nostalgia – traumatic memory.</p>
<p>The casting of <a href="http://time.com/4380330/winona-ryder-comeback-stranger-things-netflix/">Winona Ryder</a> is integral to this convergence of nostalgia and trauma. Ryder’s star power was born in the 1980s, when she was a teenager, through films like Heathers and Beetlejuice. In the 1990s her screen successes were accompanied by extreme tabloid scrutiny of her personal life. This included high-profile coverage of her struggles with drugs and anxiety. Because of this public history, the casting of Ryder was itself referential, as is the casting of any “star”. </p>
<p>As Keith Reader argued in <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Intertextuality.html?id=2xcNAQAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">Intertextualty: Theories and Practice</a>: “The concept of the film star is an intertextual one, relying as it does on correspondences of similarity and difference from one film to the next and on supposed resemblances between on and off-screen personae.” So while Stranger Things’ teen drama story, centring on Nancy Wheeler, evokes the high school world of Heathers, Ryder’s performance as Joyce Byers, draws on her real life experiences. Joyce is a loving, thoughtful, single mother and a sufferer of anxiety. This is exacerbated by the disappearance of her youngest son and for much of the first series she is upset and hysterical.</p>
<p>Ryder’s performance was widely acclaimed – including by Rolling Stone journalist, Noel Murray, who <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/news/how-stranger-things-brought-back-the-iconic-winona-ryder-w433355">suggested</a> Stranger Things “brought her back”. Murray notes that the performance is powerful because the show takes advantage of what we already know about Ryder: that she is a “likeable celebrity who’s fallen on hard times”. Joyce’s hysteria certainly carries the power and authenticity of experience and it sharply juxtaposes the nostalgic innocence of <a href="http://strangerthings.wikia.com/wiki/Eggos">Eggo waffles</a> and BMX chases.</p>
<p>Joyce’s experiences are also echoed by other strands of the story. We learn that Chief Hopper is still struggling with the traumatic loss of his daughter and it is inferred that mystery child Eleven, who is the subject of sinister experiments, was taken as an infant from her now-institutionalised mother. Ultimately, Stranger Things’ nostalgic frame magnifies the intensity of its traumatic realism and stories of loss and psychosis. </p>
<h2>Navigating an ‘upside down’ world</h2>
<p>But Stranger Things is also invested in how its characters communicate through allusion. The boys, Dustin Henderson, Mike Wheeler, Lucas Sinclair and the missing Will Byers use these references to map out and understand their world – and that of The Upside Down (a dark alternate dimension existing in parallel to the human world). In the first episode we learn that they have renamed the streets of their small Indiana town using references to The Hobbit and in episode three, puzzling over the mysterious Eleven, Dustin asks his friends: “I wonder if she was born with her powers like the X-Men or if she acquired them like Green Lantern?” </p>
<p>Sometimes references serve as a code that adults and other kids won’t know – which is important as the boys are outsiders (geeks before geeks were cool). Sometimes references are charged with imaginative and emotional meaning. For example, Mike cites his missing friend’s boldness and bravery in a Dungeon’s and Dragons “campaign” as a reason for him and his friends to be brave in trying to find him in real life. </p>
<p>Literature academic and blogger <a href="https://thenewinquiry.com/author/aaron-bady/">Aaron Bady</a> has <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/stranger-things-season-one/">pointed out</a> that what makes Stranger Things’ allusions unique is that it has no “anxiety” over its gratuitous borrowing. This subverts the need “to play authenticity detective.” This is undoubtedly the case and it is striking in the world of “Netflix originals” where everything seems to be an adaptation or re-imagining, like House of Cards or Daredevil. But I believe what sets the show apart is its clever use of allusion to amplify the impact of its depictions of anxiety, trauma and loss and its exploration of allusion as a mode of communication.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/84340/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Arin Keeble does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Stranger Things is re-writing the ‘reference’ book on homage and intertextuality.Arin Keeble, Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Culture, Edinburgh Napier UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/837502017-10-05T11:08:30Z2017-10-05T11:08:30ZWhy pop needs its eccentric characters<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/186200/original/file-20170915-8065-27zlu2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Paddy McAlloon, in his more recent guise as a pop eccentric in dress as well as attitude.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">PR handout</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/por-que-los-personajes-excentricos-son-una-bendicion-para-la-musica-99996">Leer en español</a></em>.</p>
<p>“Eccentricity exists particularly in the English,” the <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/biographyandmemoirreviews/8373893/Edith-Sitwell-eccentric-genius.html">famously eccentric</a> poet Edith Sitwell once wrote – and she should know. Sitwell in her later years required visitors to fill in a form that included the question: “Has any relative of yours ever been confined in a mental home?”, followed by the supplementary question “If not, why not?”</p>
<p>Tales of eccentricity in the world of music are equally common: the French avant-garde composer Erik Satie was known as much for his <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jul/01/erik-satie-a-life-less-ordinary">odd behaviour</a> as he was for his remarkable chamber scores, and is credited with inventing <a href="https://www.academia.edu/166786/Erik_Satie_s_Musique_d_Ameublement_some_ninety_years_later">“musique d’ameublement”</a>, the forerunner to ambient music. Satie wore a white suit every day and upon his death his friends discovered multiple identical outfits in his wardrobe. Satie’s daily ritual was to saunter from his suburban home to the centre of Paris carrying an attaché case containing nothing but manuscript paper and a hammer.</p>
<p>In recent times, it is not the avant garde but pop musicians who have tested the boundaries of what is considered normal. Producer Phil Spector was known to <a href="http://mentalfloss.com/article/28392/5-artists-reportedly-held-gunpoint-phil-spector">wield a pistol in the studio</a>, while Joe Meek, who wrote the groundbreaking record <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxpZ5rOMH4U">Telstar</a>, recorded his hits <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/artists/joe-meek-and-the-tragic-demise-of-the-maverick-who-revolutionise/">in a converted bathroom above a shop</a> in north London, using the sound of toilet flushes as special effects. Louis Thomas Hardin, AKA <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2014/06/moondog-viking-of-6th-avenue">Moondog</a>, dressed in robes and a horned helmet and was known as The Viking of 6th Avenue. </p>
<p>Brian Wilson, genius behind the success of the Beach Boys, suffered drug abuse and nervous breakdowns leading to over-elaborate recording sessions and erratic demands such as having his piano room filled with sand so that he could feel the beach under his feet. The unreleased Beach Boys LP Smile became a legendary symbol of Wilson’s malaise. </p>
<p>Dub Reggae producer Lee Scratch Perry <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/lee-scratch-perrys-secret-laboratory-studio-burns-down-20151205">burned his Black Ark studio to the ground</a> in a fit of rage. To top it all, while definitely not pop, avant-Jazz orchestral composer Sun Ra is officially listed as being <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/jun/15/sun-ra-jazz-interstellar-voyager">born on Saturn</a>.</p>
<p>What we are discussing here is not the traditional bad behaviour of spoilt and egotistical celebrities. True pop eccentrics are either born that way and find an outlet in music, or are “turned crazy” by the destructive nature of the music business itself. Record companies tolerate oddballs while they are playing the game, but when artists tire of being puppets and want to deviate from the formula they are cast aside. The most infamous example of this is cult killer Charles Manson, who was wooed as a potential acid folk singer by the Beach Boys and their producer Terry Melcher (son of Doris Day) and then hastily dropped, leaving Manson wounded and resentful. He went on to murder five people.</p>
<h2>Kings of rock and roll</h2>
<p>One of the most fascinating modern-day pop eccentrics is <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2017/mar/06/paddy-mcaloon-america-prefab-sprout-frontman-returns">Paddy McAloon</a>, mastermind behind the music of 1980s pop band <a href="http://www.sproutology.co.uk/">Prefab Sprout</a>, whose work is recounted in a new <a href="http://www.theprefabsproutproject.com/john-birch.html">three-volume study by John Birch</a>. </p>
<p>The first volume, The Early Years, explains how the band emerged from the unpromising location of Witton Gilbert, a village in rural County Durham in the northeast of England. Prefab Sprout found success in the mid-1980s with hits such as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeZkLV3ZjeI">When Love Breaks Down</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEJdfDD4dVg">Cars and Girls</a>, and most famously <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4T6e3GJCjow">The King of Rock’n’Roll</a> during an epoch that saw its own share of mavericks. Music moguls with singular visions such as Tony Wilson of Factory Records or Alan McGhee of Creation Records, or Keith Armstrong of Prefab Sprout’s label Kitchenware were all larger than life characters, with <a href="http://www.tangents.co.uk/tangents/main/2006/april/reason18.html">Alan Horne</a>, founder of Postcard Records in Glasgow that launched the careers of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESy-Z8vqMrE">Orange Juice</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4pWcVPUybE">Aztec Camera</a>, and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/oct/10/4ad-label-behind-pixies-cocteau-twins">founder of 4AD Records Ivo Watts-Russell</a> being the high priests of post-punk lunacy. </p>
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<p>McAloon brought his own strange and diverse combination of influences to bear on his songs, mixing up US songwriter <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wnet/broadway/stars/irving-berlin/">Irving Berlin</a>, contemporary classical composer <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2013/may/07/contemporary-music-guide-karlheinz-stockhausen">Karlheinz Stockhausen</a> and The Beatles. He was also inspired by eccentrics from an earlier generation, in particular songwriter Jimmy Webb and jazz-rock group Steely Dan. Webb composed expansive songs about the <a href="http://americansongwriter.com/2012/01/behind-the-song-wichita-lineman/">real and imaginary landscape of North America</a> such as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCoUqU4gg3Q">By the Time I Get to Phoenix</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qoymGCDYzU">Wichita Lineman</a>, memorably sung by the late Glen Campbell. </p>
<p>From these examples McAloon learned that a pop composer could evoke occult place and time instantly, transporting a listener to a world that is alien but familiar. McAloon pays tribute to the “sorcerer of Wichita” in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DVE9Hxk2pA">one of his own songs</a> with the lines: “In words he paints a vivid scene/ Of places you have never been/ But listen and you are moved to swear/ I know that house, I’ve climbed that stair.” McAloon once told me in an interview: “I was interested in losing yourself in someone else’s world … to be enchanted. Just to be enchanted was enough.” Music like poetry becomes an expression of the unknown.</p>
<p>The eccentric nature of Steely Dan – core members Donald Fagen and Water Becker, who <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/walter-becker-steely-dan-co-founder-dead-at-67-w500956">died recently</a> – is evidenced in their obsessive, perfectionist recording techniques, auditioning eight guitarists for a solo on one of their songs (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI7NDDQLvbo">Peg</a>), and on occasion replacing an entire backing band with another to get the right vibe. They also conjured up complex exotic visions with a cool “west coast sound” despite hailing from New Jersey and Queens, New York.</p>
<p>It’s clear that the pop outsider divines the world differently, regardless of their origins. Perhaps because of his humdrum background, McAloon’s songs evoke places and people from different domains – different planets, even. In an essay included with Prefab Sprout’s own lost LP <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/bv4h/">Let’s Change the World with Music</a>, McAloon reflects on this search for the “yawning caves of blue”, the fragility of pop perfection and “transcendence through music”. </p>
<p>“When you hear Mozart or Bach or Brian Wilson, whoever your God would be in that world, there is something beyond the flesh and blood thing, something spooky going on,” he told me (a subject I also explore in my <a href="http://www.headpress.com/ShowProduct.aspx?ID=122">book</a>, Gathering of the Tribe: music and heavy conscious creation).</p>
<p>In the music business today, eccentricity is sorely lacking, or is manufactured through social media where posing naked or filming a moment of psychological distress becomes another tool for selling more units. Prefab Sprout had their success and the music business moved on, as it does. Now Paddy McAloon has a beard as white and long as Moondog’s. And like all eccentric masters, he continues to make music in a language constructed from its own inner rules.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/83750/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mark Goodall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The great eccentric characters of the past have given us great art, literature and music – and they should be welcomed today.Mark Goodall, Head of Film and Media, University of BradfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/709172017-01-12T13:19:23Z2017-01-12T13:19:23ZMusic has the power to rock the state, but youth movements will find the state always bites back<p>Among records recently released to the National Archives is a file from the 1980s entitled “<a href="https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2016/12/31/policing-acid-house-parties-in-1989-what-the-new-thatcher-government-papers-reveal/">Acid house parties</a>” which details the government’s disquiet over the growing phenomenon of raves, the large, open-air dance events in which thousands of young people, guided by organisers using new technologies such as pagers and mobile phones, descended upon fields to party. </p>
<p>The response was a series of laws imposing strict conditions and harsh penalties, with the <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/33/part/V/crossheading/powers-in-relation-to-raves">Criminal Justice Act 1994</a> infamously outlawing music “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/jul/21/criminal-justice-bill-protests">characterised by a series of repetitive beats</a>”. While many at the time may have felt immediate action was required to prevent the collapse of civilisation as we knew it, in fact this was merely the latest in a long line of moral panics over popular music through the 20th century. </p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.jerryjazzmusician.com/2014/01/unspeakable-jazz-must-go-strong-opinions-impact-jazz-american-culture-1921/">cultural mixing pot of jazz</a>, and even traditional music and ballads or bawdy songs in music halls had at some point caused anxiety among the powers that be. But it was during the rock’n’roll era that this process of music putting the fear into the state was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xgx4k83zzc">turned up to 11</a>.</p>
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<h2>Slash the seats</h2>
<p>Even before the arrival of Elvis Presley’s gyrating pelvis, fears about rock’n’roll were brewing from the transgressive collision of Afro-American rhythm and blues, white youths, and sex – all during the fraught racial politics of 1950s America. Crossing cultural boundaries and national borders, rock’n’roll became a global phenomenon, with fears for the youth of the day gripping almost every nation. The United Nations even <a href="https://www.unodc.org/congress/en/previous/previous-02.html">convened a special conference</a> in London in 1960 to discuss the problem of juvenile delinquency.</p>
<p>In Britain, the arrival of rock’n’roll in 1955 collided with a pre-existing panic over the Teddy Boy youth movement, sparked by a notorious gang-related murder in Clapham in 1953. The Teds embraced the new music and the press was filled with reports of Teds slashing cinema seats while dancing to Bill Haley and the Comets’ “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgdufzXvjqw">Rock Around the Clock</a>” from the closing credits of Blackboard Jungle – an American movie about, ironically, juvenile delinquents.</p>
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<p>But rock’n’roll cleaned up – Elvis joined the army, and squeaky clean crooners and apostate rockers like Cliff Richard took the edge off pop music. The next moral panic came with the <a href="http://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1125&context=libraries_facpub">British Beat boom</a> in 1964, when <a href="http://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_real_quadrophenia_mods_vs._rockers_fight_on_the_beaches">running battles broke out between mods and rockers</a> in seaside towns. Rockers were the descendants of the Teds, who had abandoned Edwardian frock coats for leather jackets. The mods were associated with bands like The Who, The Yardbirds and the Small Faces, with a sharp dress sense favouring suits, a clear collective identity, and an often undeserved reputation for misbehaviour. </p>
<p>The out-of-touch Conservative government under Alec Douglas-Home passed in 1964 The Malicious Damages Act and The Misuse of Drugs Act, banning the amphetamines that it was claimed fuelled the mod scene. This was the first time an explicit association was made between narcotics and pop music subcultures. From now on, the two would regularly be grouped together. </p>
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<h2>Busted</h2>
<p>Fifty years ago this year, <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/may/10/newsid_2522000/2522735.stm">police raided the home</a> of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards and arrested him, singer Mick Jagger and gallery owner Robert “Groovy Bob” Fraser. The trial was a global media event, not least for the behaviour of the judge at the trial who constantly chided and condemned the “petty morals” of the band before jailing them.</p>
<p>The response to the convictions was extraordinary. As well as the expected vocal protests of Rolling Stones fans, the editor of The Times – an “establishment” newspaper – published an incendiary editorial, <a href="https://www.iorr.org/talk/read.php?1,1755802,1756208">Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?</a>, attacking the judge for seeking to make examples of the two bandmates. Ultimately Jagger and Richards successfully appealed against their sentences, although clearing his name was a Pyrrhic victory for Richards, in the light of his subsequent life dogged by heroin addiction and many brushes with the law. </p>
<p>A cascade of music celebrity raids followed, and by 1967 a backlash had emerged against youth counter-cultures on both sides of the Atlantic, with the likes of <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/763998.stm">Mary Whitehouse campaigning for a return to “traditional values”</a>. Medical and psychiatric professionals added their voices to those of the reactionaries, as there were legitimate concerns about the proliferation of drugs: 1967 was the first “<a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/07/lsd-drugs-summer-of-love-sixties">Summer of Love</a>”, when the music and art of the era was laced with LSD. Although not all favoured prohibition there was clear evidence of harm that had to be addressed.</p>
<p>Questions linger over the establishment’s targeting of groups such as the Beatles and the Stones, and others such as Jimi Hendrix. The press almost certainly tipped off the police over drug use at Richards’ home, and there is evidence of <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1323236/The-Acid-King-confesses-Rolling-Stones-drug-bust-set-MI5-FBI.html">police collusion with the media</a>. And the establishment itself was not innocent: the Metropolitan Police’s drugs squad later had to be gutted of corrupt policemen after it was discovered that <a href="https://cathyfox.wordpress.com/2016/02/05/the-fall-of-scotland-yard/">senior officers had committed perjury</a> to defend a known drugs dealer. Were pop stars targeted to deflect attention from serious criminals who had the police in their back pocket?</p>
<h2>The moral minority</h2>
<p>Sometimes the problem was not drugs but obscenity. Even if it seems absurd today, The Beatles song <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19sAewJH22I">I am the Walrus</a> was struck from BBC playlists due to the lyric: “Boy you have been a naughty girl and let your knickers down”, while The Sex Pistols were forced to argue the precise meaning of the word “<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/vb8c/">bollocks</a>” in court. Elsewhere, anarcho-punks The Anti-Nowhere League and Crass also <a href="http://www.nme.com/photos/the-songs-they-tried-to-ban-1413829">found themselves in the dock for the use of obscene language</a>. </p>
<p>The most notorious attacks on popular music on grounds of obscenity was undoubtedly the <a href="http://europe.newsweek.com/oral-history-tipper-gores-war-explicit-rock-lyrics-dee-snider-333304?rm=eu">Parents Music Resource Center</a> in the US during the 1980s, who demanded warnings on record sleeves alerting parents to explicit lyrical content. Their list of what they regarded as the most egregious examples of obscenity, known as the “<a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/pmrcs-filthy-15-where-are-they-now-20150917">filthy fifteen</a>”, contains both heavy rockers and comparatively tame pop acts.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152250/original/image-20170110-29003-c7lxn9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/152250/original/image-20170110-29003-c7lxn9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=381&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152250/original/image-20170110-29003-c7lxn9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=381&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152250/original/image-20170110-29003-c7lxn9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=381&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152250/original/image-20170110-29003-c7lxn9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152250/original/image-20170110-29003-c7lxn9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/152250/original/image-20170110-29003-c7lxn9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>The result of a congressional enquiry was an agreement by the Recording Industry Association of America and manufacturers to add the now iconic “Parental Discretion Advised” sticker on certain records. Not only did this often act as an incentive to adolescent purchasers rather than a warning, but there is significant evidence that the industry agreed not as a sop to the moral lobby but <a href="http://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1039&context=younghistorians">in return for a levy on blank cassette tapes</a>, ensuring the industry could profit from the practice of home taping records. </p>
<h2>Folk devils</h2>
<p>Sometimes it was not the musicians but their fans that worried the authorities. The skinhead, punk, rasta and raver scenes have all been viewed as, <a href="http://www.underground-england.co.uk/news/mods-v-rockers-traditional-english-seaside-entertainment-2/">in the words of the sociologist Stanley Cohen</a>, “<a href="https://infodocks.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/stanley_cohen_folk_devils_and_moral_panics.pdf">folk devils</a>”: those who seemed to champion disorder. Authorities struggled with the question of whether bands are responsible for the actions of their fans. </p>
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<p>Two famous cases from the 1980s saw heavy metal legends Ozzy Osbourne and Judas Priest blamed for the suicides of several fans. It was claimed that Judas Priest had inserted a subliminal message into the track <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqAPVB4u9Zs">Better you than me</a>, and that Ozzy’s track <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UoPYv0Kq-0">Suicide solution</a> was an incitement to suicide – something Osbourne denied. Both court cases failed, but raised important questions about the relationship between fans and bands. Even after the end of the conservative-dominated 1980s, the 1997 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6moDcEkSnY">blamed on Marilyn Manson’s music</a> in much the same way.</p>
<p>The last decades of the 20th century were the high tide of moral panics over popular music, with almost every development in musical subcultures generating unease and outright hostility from the authorities, morality campaigners, and opportunistic newspapers editors looking for the next trend to decry and sensationalise. </p>
<p>In recent years the potential for music to shock or generate controversy seems to have lessened. Even members of boyband <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2637722/ONE-DIRECTION-EXCLUSIVE-Joint-lit-Happy-days-Watch-Zayn-Malik-Louis-Tomlinson-smoke-roll-cigarette-joke-marijuana-way-tour-concert.html">One Direction escaped largely unscathed</a> from tabloid exposure about recreational drug use, which a generation earlier had <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/friday_review/story/0,3605,461173,00.html">ended the careers of the likes of East 17</a>. </p>
<p>Certainly, there is greater toleration or acceptance of the harder edges of musical cultures. But the passing of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-did-the-mind-boggling-new-drugs-bill-make-it-through-parliament-53612">Psychoactive Substances Act 2016</a> shows that anxieties about youth culture and behaviour are still part of the political landscape. And it takes only a fraught atmosphere, the search for a scapegoat, and ill-judged responses from popstars to turn a headline into the next moral panic.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/70917/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Clifford Williamson works for Bath Spa University.</span></em></p>The 20th century saw battle lines drawn between music-driven youth movements and the state like none before.Clifford Williamson, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary British and American History, Bath Spa UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/496412015-10-27T04:14:39Z2015-10-27T04:14:39ZHow Hollywood saved a futuristic car from obscurity<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/99487/original/image-20151023-27601-1e49fxy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">There was no joy for the creator of the DeLorean – the car was a failure. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters/Andrew Kelly</span></span></figcaption></figure><blockquote>
<p>Marty McFly: Wait a minute, Doc. Are you telling me that you built a time machine… out of a DeLorean?</p>
<p>Dr. Emmett Brown: The way I see it, if you’re gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?</p>
<p>– Back To The Future, 1985.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Thirty years after <a href="http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/back-to-the-future-released-features-1981-delorean-dmc-12">Back to The Future</a> was released, the story of how former General Motors executive <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1359338/bio">John Z. DeLorean</a> failed in his ambition to make a commercial success of his futuristic car still revs at the heart-strings. </p>
<p>The iconic DeLorean car was written off as a failure after its release in the 1980. But Hollywood saved it.</p>
<p>Today, the iconic DeLorean sports car is probably better known as the fictional time machine from the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLRk4xG-JCI">Back to the Future</a> movies than for its motoring prowess. Few people would remember that the car with iconic <a href="http://gullwingdoors.net/">gullwing doors</a> but no time travel capability went on general sale in the early 1980s. Out of the 9000 made, only <a href="http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/back-to-the-future-released-features-1981-delorean-dmc-12">6500</a> are still around. </p>
<p>A few exist even in Cape Town, and are available to rent for the wealthy or for hire to use in <a href="http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/stories/is-cape-town-the-hollywood-of-africa">movies</a> shot in the city. It is among the classic car collection available to rent for US$38,481 a year at an exclusive <a href="http://crossley-webb.com/the-iconic-delorean-at-crossley-webb-for-88mph-event/">dealership</a> in Cape Town.</p>
<h2>A business failure</h2>
<p>But the true story of the DeLorean is how the company became one of the biggest-ever business disasters, even with a generous <a href="http://www.esquire.co.uk/gear/cars/7159/delorean-dmc-12-back-to-the-future/">subsidy</a> from British taxpayers. </p>
<p>It failed despite the involvement of DeLorean, successful car designer <a href="http://www.carmagazine.co.uk/car-news/motoring-issues/2015/design-legend-giorgetto-giugiaro-quits-his-own-company-as-audi-takes-over/">Giorgetto Giugiaro</a>, and Formula One engineering expert <a href="http://en.espn.co.uk/f1/motorsport/driver/704.html">Colin Chapman</a> of Lotus. </p>
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<span class="caption">Big screen success but a failure on the road.</span>
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<p>After almost 20 years in the automotive industry as a designer and after becoming the youngest vice-president of General Motors at the age of 40, DeLorean resigned from his position in 1973 to pursue his own venture.</p>
<p>The DeLorean Motor Company was established to produce his “dream-car”, with an eye on the US market. The DeLorean DMC-12 was unusual. It had lift-up gullwing doors, which had been applied to date only to a few other sports cars with modest commercial results. To cast his car’s style in history, DeLorean commissioned the design from Giugiaro. </p>
<p>The first prototype was unveiled in 1977 in New Orleans to raise interest and attract investors. DeLorean managed to raise around US$10 million by selling part of the company’s shares to 343 dealers, and US$1 million from individual investors. </p>
<p>Almost US$100 million was raised from the British government via the Northern Ireland Development Agency and the Department of Commerce. This was given under the promise to create 2500 new jobs in Dunmurry, Belfast. The aim was to reach a production of 30,000 cars a year.</p>
<p>DeLorean hired Chapman from Lotus to come up with an engineering solution for the car in 18 months. Lotus’ involvement in Formula 1 had given DeLorean hope of a quick development time and innovative engineering that would come from sharing the same “father”. As a result, Lotus Esprit and DMC-12 could enjoy similar technological solutions. </p>
<p>DeLorean made it to market in 1981. But despite looking similar to the original 1976 prototype, it compromised on many technological solutions. For example, the composite plastic monocoque and the mid-engine were substituted with a steel backbone chassis-frame and a rear-engine. </p>
<p>Critics complained that the car under-delivered, handled poorly, and performance was not great – especially considering the high US$25,000 price tag. </p>
<p>The negative rumours escalated to even claiming false considerations, such as that gullwing doors were impossible to open in tight spaces when it was proven that they actually needed less space than regular doors to open. </p>
<h2>Dreams bust</h2>
<p>In 1982, DeLorean filed for bankruptcy. </p>
<p>Things were going to get worse. In October 1982 DeLorean was arrested for cocaine smuggling.</p>
<p>Investigations into his firm’s finances revealed that US$17.5 million of money from the British investment had disappeared, allegedly to pay Lotus via “GDP”, a Swiss Panama-based firm. </p>
<p>Still, Lotus claimed to have never received that money. But Chapman, one of the few people who would have been able to explain what happened with GDP, died before being interviewed. </p>
<p>Against all expectations, and despite the many shadows still unresolved in his cases, DeLorean was found not guilty on both drug and fraud charges. A life of personal and professional highs and lows followed until his death from a stroke in 2005. </p>
<h2>Finally revved up</h2>
<p>That the car starred in the Back to the Future trilogy was fortuitous for DeLorean. In the original screenplay the time machine was going to resemble a refrigerator until director Robert Zemeckis abandoned the idea because he was afraid children would have locked themselves in their home fridge.</p>
<p>Funnily enough, the DeLorean DMC-12 was picked ahead of other cars despite being the disgraced product of a failing company. Ironically, the weirdly futuristic look of its stainless steel panels and gullwing doors, and the unusual and perhaps unreasonable characteristics that made it a market failure, created the basis to make it a movie icon. </p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.delorean.com/">DeLorean Motor Company</a> has reappeared as a second-hand dealer which provides spare parts and after-sale service, as well as the possibility to rent time machine replicas. </p>
<p>Also, the huge renewal of interest for exclusive gadgets inspired by Back to the Future – such as the <a href="http://news.nike.com/news/nike-mag-2015">Nike Air Mag</a> and the geeky attempt to invent flying technologies such as the <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-does-the-lexus-hoverboard-actually-work-a-scientist-explains-46570">Lexus Hoverboard</a> – might provide the market conditions for a launch of a DMC-12 restyling. </p>
<p>But similar to all the other famous predictions seen in the movie, to really know whether a new DeLorean might possibly “fly” with tomorrow’s <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/road-and-rail-transport/11916393/DeLoreans-could-come-Back-to-the-Future-after-time-machine-parts-found.html">consumers</a>, we might need to ask “Doc” to bring us back to the future once again.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/49641/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paolo Aversa does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Few would remember this fantasy car as a model of motoring excellence. It owes its success instead to a fantasy film that has turned 30.Paolo Aversa, Lecturer in Strategy, Cass Business School, City, University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/274352014-06-02T20:20:49Z2014-06-02T20:20:49ZWe love reliving the 1980s, but only as farce<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49939/original/j9ch647d-1401674882.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">We were promised hoverboards by 2015 – ain't gonna happen. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">dangerismycat</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>History is generally made of things that happen. This truth often prejudices us to ignore the importance of the things that don’t. In this spirit, I would like to bring attention to the significance of something that won’t be happening before the close of this year: we will not be getting hoverboards. </p>
<p>Many of us of course realise this is a reference to <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096874/">Back to the Future II</a> (1989) which imagined that, by 2015, young people would be gliding across urban streets, sidewalks and parks (but not ponds) on boards floating six or so inches above the earth. </p>
<p>This is a seemingly banal technological disappointment but for those who lusted after such a toy in childhood after seeing BTTF II, it holds greater meaning than at first blush. </p>
<p>As children, although we still felt the disappointment at each bump in the sidewalk that came from skating on boards bound by gravity and supported by wheels; we thought that one day, by the then unbelievably old age of between 30 and 40, we would be able to coast across the world without the lubrication of snow or the evenness of smooth concrete. </p>
<p>Is this simply a small instance of experiencing the bruising realisation that much of the future never arrived? In <a href="http://thebaffler.com/past/of_flying_cars">a recent Baffler essay</a> about technological advancement in the second half of the 20th century, the anthropologist David Graeber argued that such technological breakthroughs have failed to match expectations generated at the middle of the century. </p>
<p>Moreover, the majority of advancements have come only in the form of data processing and transmission and not the transformation of actual matter and physical processes. So now we are left with only the hollow enjoyment of the artifice of special effects about a future in which we very obviously do not live.</p>
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</figure>
<p>In the context of more serious aspirations about the future in films of the preceding decades, such as enlightenment and discovery through the peripatetic experience of space travel as presented in both the West’s <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">2001: A Space Odyssey </a> (1968) and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0307479/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Solaris </a> (1972), the Soviet’s response to it, the absence of hoverboards may seem like not that big a deal. </p>
<p>But it’s worth noting that instead of hoverboarding by 2015, the exact opposite has happened – we now see Marty McFly’s 1980s-style skateboard everywhere in the hands of youth. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49951/original/ww2y2tjp-1401676746.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49951/original/ww2y2tjp-1401676746.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49951/original/ww2y2tjp-1401676746.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=356&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49951/original/ww2y2tjp-1401676746.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=356&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49951/original/ww2y2tjp-1401676746.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=356&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49951/original/ww2y2tjp-1401676746.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49951/original/ww2y2tjp-1401676746.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49951/original/ww2y2tjp-1401676746.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kick Photo</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These retro skateboards with large neon wheels, tapered triangular heads and rear foot-guards are a regression in many ways. They bear no marks of the developments of skate technology or aesthetics that took place in the 1990s and 2000s. </p>
<p>How or why did such a thing happen? It seems part of a stylistic return to cultural forms of the 1980s but a return that can only understand that period cynically. </p>
<p>The present always had some combination of the past in it so the return of the 80s should not be a big surprise. Is this simply one generation playing with the cultural forms of the epoch just before their birth? </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49950/original/qfrpfdnz-1401676265.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49950/original/qfrpfdnz-1401676265.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49950/original/qfrpfdnz-1401676265.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49950/original/qfrpfdnz-1401676265.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49950/original/qfrpfdnz-1401676265.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49950/original/qfrpfdnz-1401676265.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49950/original/qfrpfdnz-1401676265.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49950/original/qfrpfdnz-1401676265.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">alenka_getman</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Much of the 1990s looked like the 1960s, with unkempt granola hair in a style that we call grunge. The 2000s had similar aesthetic qualities to the 1970s, seen in the hip-hugging jeans, large lapels and men’s poor choices in facial hair. Perhaps it’s just the 1980s turn to be recycled as a cultural assemblage. </p>
<p>I don’t think the story is that straightforward. The way in which we insist on reviving it tells us a great deal about our frustrations at the chafed borders of our imagination and reality. </p>
<p>The evidence for this is found throughout the numerous remakes of 80s’ movies and television that are popular today. Before the recent proliferation of such films, there were two antecedents for such a genre. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0165598/">That 70s Show</a> (1998-2006) ostensibly parodied the culture of a particular decade. But this pretext quickly wore out and it became an inane teen sit-com and soap opera. </p>
<p>Ten years ago, a complete prototype for the film version of this drama set its gaze on <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072567/">Starsky and Hutch</a> (1974-79), a TV crime drama. In the 2004 film by the same name, Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller play caricatures of the detective tandem with the backdrop of a time and place only used to heighten the absurdity of the narrative. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49949/original/k574qf4y-1401675984.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49949/original/k574qf4y-1401675984.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49949/original/k574qf4y-1401675984.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49949/original/k574qf4y-1401675984.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49949/original/k574qf4y-1401675984.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49949/original/k574qf4y-1401675984.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49949/original/k574qf4y-1401675984.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49949/original/k574qf4y-1401675984.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">S.Tore</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the recent genre of remakes, or what would be better described as parodies, turning drama into comedy, the most commercially successful iteration was another crime drama series, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092312/">21 Jump Street</a> (1987-91). Today, the idea that two young cops would infiltrate a high school to prevent crimes can no longer be taken seriously although the rise in school shootings overlaps with the increase in narcotics in schools of the 80s. </p>
<p>In its <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1232829/">2012 reboot</a>, the cops, their detective skills and the motivation to seriously protect young people become little more than objects of derision. </p>
<p>Even films not based on the 1980s, have parodied themes about the decade. In <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1570728/">Crazy, Stupid, Love</a> (2011), after he bares his emotional emptiness through deconstructing his own pick-up moves, Ryan Gosling’s character admits to Emma Stone’s that he does <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRcKrkhOYUo">“the lift”</a> from <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092890/">Dirty Dancing</a> (1987) as the final act of his disingenuous seductions.</p>
<p>The “lift” scene in Crazy, Stupid, Love is self-consciously contrived and effective only through the characters performing an empty ritualised “lift” in which they are protected by the shield of parody so that they can feel comfortable enough for actual authentic romantic connection. </p>
<p>Although the scene mimics the music, movement and sexiness of Johnny and Baby in Dirty Dancing, the hesitance and cynicism are the exact opposite of the vital energy that gave the original its spontaneous joy.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49947/original/yqmy4dng-1401675831.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49947/original/yqmy4dng-1401675831.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49947/original/yqmy4dng-1401675831.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49947/original/yqmy4dng-1401675831.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49947/original/yqmy4dng-1401675831.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49947/original/yqmy4dng-1401675831.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49947/original/yqmy4dng-1401675831.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49947/original/yqmy4dng-1401675831.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pierre Willscheck</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The most extreme parody of our revision of the 80s was the creation of an alter ego for one of the decade’s quintessential heroes. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0021343/">Angus MacGyver</a> (Richard Dean Anderson) personified a technological and moral capacity of the late Cold War period (also the basis of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086662/">Airwolf</a>, 1984-86, and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083437/">Knight Rider</a>, 1982-1986). It is a position we are no longer confident enough in to reproduce other than through farce. </p>
<p>As the titular character in the series, MacGyver combined ordinary objects to create and do extraordinary things – a set of skills governed by an innocently unambiguous moral centre. In 2007, Will Forte’s first sketch of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPNZv8J94uA">MacGruber</a> ran on Saturday Night Live, and for several years we watched as MacGruber’s flaws, vanity, homophobia, racism, insecurity, and more, humorously prevented him from disarming explosive devices. </p>
<p>In the 2010 film of the same name, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1470023/">MacGruber</a> is completely ineffectual. The guiding morality directing his behaviour is now based on petty insecurities, in his best moments, and cowardice in the rest. His most technically effective device involves placing a celery stick in his buttocks and prancing around naked to distract guards at an arms deal: </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-25VXew-OV8?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">MacGruber models a celery stick.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There are a few exceptions to viewing the 80s solely within the guise of parody. The 2010 remake of the <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0429493/">A-Team</a> is perhaps the mildest version of farce in the renaissance of this period. The <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084967/">original series</a> (1983-1987) contained the same formula as MacGyver but the technical and social skills needed to bring about righteous action were formed by an aggregate of several individuals. </p>
<p>In the film, the characters with the most technical skills, Murdock and Baracus, are more often employed in comic relief than given actual potency in the mission’s objectives. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49952/original/gz8rygqv-1401677172.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49952/original/gz8rygqv-1401677172.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49952/original/gz8rygqv-1401677172.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=657&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49952/original/gz8rygqv-1401677172.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=657&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49952/original/gz8rygqv-1401677172.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=657&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49952/original/gz8rygqv-1401677172.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=825&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49952/original/gz8rygqv-1401677172.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=825&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49952/original/gz8rygqv-1401677172.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=825&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Rakka</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The only attempt to remake an 80s series without farce was a total failure. The new <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1213404/">Knight Rider</a> (2008) ran for one season while the <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083437/">original</a> ran for four, and was in syndication for decades. </p>
<p>Currently, the only serious drama set in the 1980s is <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2149175/">The Americans</a> (2013-Present). The straightforwardness of the title hints only vaguely at the crux of the show, that the protagonists are two KGB spies operating in Northern Virginia. The inversion of the decade’s ethos is rather breathtaking. </p>
<p>Could we imagine a greater refutation of our values than the production of an American TV series from the perspective of an al-Qaida cell set in the 2000s? Such examples demonstrate the variety of our inability to take the 80s at face value.</p>
<p>And yet, in the era of 80s parodies, we seem to be at the height of imagining drama without farce in other 20th century decades. The 1960s provides a backdrop for reflecting on contemporary and dated issues in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0804503/">Mad Men</a> (2007-Present). Other popular period pieces such as <a href="http://www.imdb.com/media/rm53334528/tt1606375?ref_=tt_ov_i">Downton Abbey</a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094582/">The Wonder Years (1988-93)</a> (2010-Present) have taken chunks of the 20th century seriously as resources for expressing and understanding the human experience and its variations. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49953/original/yfcyt329-1401679607.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49953/original/yfcyt329-1401679607.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49953/original/yfcyt329-1401679607.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49953/original/yfcyt329-1401679607.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49953/original/yfcyt329-1401679607.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49953/original/yfcyt329-1401679607.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49953/original/yfcyt329-1401679607.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49953/original/yfcyt329-1401679607.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">newpn2000</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>So why revive the ethos of the 80s only to terminate it through farce? </p>
<p>The answer, I think, lies in the demographics of the disappointed and desperately anxious. The groups who watch, create and drive this genre are largely between the ages of 20 and 40, which is a rather broad range of generations and communal experiences to be lassoed together. </p>
<p>The older members of this group can be easily understood as a brood seeking nostalgia laced with disappointment. Living in an unexciting future that feels pretty much like the past with the singular addition of being perpetually let down by the lack of hoverboards and technological efficacy has turned them against the heroes of their formative years. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49954/original/dkyf7vwh-1401679726.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49954/original/dkyf7vwh-1401679726.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/49954/original/dkyf7vwh-1401679726.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=713&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49954/original/dkyf7vwh-1401679726.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=713&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49954/original/dkyf7vwh-1401679726.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=713&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49954/original/dkyf7vwh-1401679726.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49954/original/dkyf7vwh-1401679726.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/49954/original/dkyf7vwh-1401679726.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Charles Williams</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Those too young to have directly experienced the 80s, but able to reproduce them ironically, are stepchildren of the same skewed technological development but their avenue to farce is slightly detoured. </p>
<p>The novelty of their formative years was a technological medium that allowed them to explore the intricacies of comments, likes/dislikes or what could be called the discernment of and by others (Facebook) and things (Pinterest). </p>
<p>Exploration of cyberspace has not yet yielded the refreshing humanism that Space Odyssey and Solaris connected to voyages of actual discovery in outer space. Instead, social media has realised a generation of what philosopher <a href="http://mixedmediapressence.blogspot.com.au/2013/09/conceptual-personae-exploring-peculiar.html">Marshall Mcluhan</a> called “mass man” who experiences life as something “related to all other men simultaneously”. </p>
<p>Such a condition gives rise to an atmosphere of anxiety and a humanity only willing to self-consciously and tepidly relate to anything. Instead of a clash of generations, we witness two successive ones synthesise their start-of-the-century ennui in their parody of 80s’ culture. </p>
<p>The most famous quote about farce and history, often used by culture theorists who are themselves leading intellectual farces, comes to us <a href="http://trenchantobserver.com/2012/07/09/kofi-annan-meets-al-assad-in-damascus-repeating-history-again-now-as-farceas-farce/">from Marx</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The insincere recycling of 80s cultural forms may better be described as a history that repeats itself when it has nowhere else to go. </p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/27435/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Yancey Orr does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>History is generally made of things that happen. This truth often prejudices us to ignore the importance of the things that don’t. In this spirit, I would like to bring attention to the significance of…Yancey Orr, Lecturer of Anthropology, The University of QueenslandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.