11:22:24
About Last Night, 1986
I always come back to this movie. It has some great montages, a falling in love montage and a one night stand montage of Danny (a young Rob Lowe) sleeping around after losing Debbie (a young Demi Moore), a montage of Danny opening his 1950-style dream diner. About Last Night is a deep-dumb 1980s movie, written by David Mamet but with the baroque levity of Edward Zwick, who is famous for the yuppie couple TV drama, 30something, which ran from 1987-1991. About Last Night charts very well what many men do in relationships with women when they fall in love and get spooked by the intensity of their feelings. They run. 1980s Hollywood movies were very good on this subject. Now all the Toxic Masculines are Boss Bitch women. It’s all been flipped. 1980s Hollywood movies were also very focused on and good at depicting what I would call the social blocks to love, an 1980s obsession. In 80s American movies everything was a social hierarchy problem: the way the false matrix prevents people from being happy, from being true to themselves, from knowing themselves, from following their heart. The distractions, seductions, the relationship cliches, the social interferences, the bad advice, the sabotage, the envy and competition, jealousy and cynicism, the friends who get in your way and get in your ear and get in your head, the battle between social approval, popularity, shallow success, 3D comforts and the quest for autonomy and integrity. And the courage to be who one must be in order to have true love. That is the arc of these old movies. I’ve always said that’s what the 90 minutes are for—to figure out who one truly loves and what one must do about it if one is to be self-actualized. If one is to be real. In the movies, unless maybe it’s a period film set in Victorian England, no one fucking stays with the rube. Because no one wants to watch that story. And rightly so. What would that teach us? That is the story of life. To be conformists and cowards. To waste chances and to waste love. That’s what all the 1980s teen popularity movies were all about too. That battle to stand up for who you are and what you truly want and believe in and not give a fuck what anyone thinks. Somehow we forgot those are things worth fighting for, the lessons worth learning. We forgot the fights. We forgot what’s true. We forgot about true love. Now we just comply and accept the norms or bend them in self-serving, shallow, obfuscating ways that result in fake rebellion and egoism (In The Swarm: Digital Prospects, Byung-Chul Han writes,“And so, today, the chains of love have given way to the hell of freedom.”). It always boils down to the basics. A lot of these movies back then were basic. They understood the problem with friends (or the wrong friends) and peer pressure and hierarchies and how destructive the influence of the group and the norm can be. Most things are the norm no matter how they’re dressed up, updated, or spun. Today the norm is total corruption and degradation presented as normal. These movies also understood the sin of male weakness and betraying your own heart due to fear, not to mention the hearts of others.
But in the movies, people fix things.
Men fix things.
You can’t make good movies about love unless you believe in the power of love.
