A Life in Film is a project where I’m writing about a movie from every year I’ve been alive.

1988: You’re a true vulgarian!

A FISH CALLED WANDA (dir. Charles Crichton and John Cleese)

Maybe this isn’t universal, but I think it’s pretty close, at least among musicheads: when we’re young, we think and expect that the bands we love are all best friends and communal life partners. Maybe they all live in a big house together, or at least wish they did. That’s the way it worked on The Monkees, right? So it must be real. And then, of course, to get a little older and start more serious learning about music is to come to understand that this pretty much is never how it works.

Monty Python weren’t a band, of course, but everyone I knew back in the 80s mapped the same sort of belief onto them. I have to assume that the culture has shifted significantly in the years since then, but when I was a kid it was just a given that a sizable minority of us were going to get exposed to Monty Python and the Holy Grail at a birthday party or sleepover and then have our minds totally colonized by the Pythons, leading to a feverish walk through their filmography (difficult but possible in the 80s, given VCRs and cable tv) and a general belief that they were the Most Important Thing Ever. And then we’d all realize that the Most Important Thing Ever didn’t seem to be putting out any movies after Meaning of Life, and we’d all wonder: what was wrong? Did they not love each other anymore? Had the band broken up? Oh shit, the band must have broken up!*

*For this to make any sense at all, of course, you have to remember that in 1986 there wasn’t an internet that you could pop open to look at a Wiki page. I don’t think anyone I knew would have had any idea back then how to figure out what the actual status of Monty Python was, beyond maybe asking our parents, who—remember, this is rural Nebraska here—wouldn’t have had a fucking clue.

All of which is to say: when I was in junior high and A Fish Called Wanda started creeping into my friends’ collective consciousness through the twin media of cable tv and video rentals, it was a big deal. New Python-ish stuff! Sure, it didn’t have all of them (and was it true that maybe one of them was dead?), but it had Cleese and Palin, and those were two of the bigs, and right fuckin’ on!

A Life in Film is a project where I’m writing about a movie from every year I’ve been alive.

1987: I’ll be taking these Huggies and whatever cash you got.

RAISING ARIZONA (dir. Joel Coen, officially, but come on)

I never want to lean too hard on the autobio side of this project, but in this case it’s really hard not to, at least a little. More than any other movie I’ve talked about, and on a couple of different axes, Raising Arizona was a movie that served as a gateway to other places and ideas. If you weren’t around in the 1980s, I don’t know that you can really appreciate what it was like to encounter Raising Arizona for the first time. I’ve probably said this sort of thing before, but it’s like 50 times as true for Arizona than it is for anything else.

There’s this body of discourse that floats around Bluesky pretty frequently about how the 80s weren’t the cool neon vaporwave retrofuturescape that gets held up with some frequency as a stand-in for the era, that it was actually a whole lot more beige than people try to pretend it was; and, as usually with a discussion like that, I sort of simultaneously agree and think it’s more complicated than that. But I think there’s a parallel argument to be had about 80s culture; we remember the good and the notably bad, but that memory of extremes really obscures the fact that most of what we watched, listened to, and read in the 80s was pretty boring, mid, and, well, culturally beige.

And I can promise you that in the cultural landscape of the Reagan era, damn few people were making unhinged live-action Looney Tunes cartoons that piled off-kilter dialogue, surreal action, and a lot of banjo-and-yodelling songs around a resonant emotional core. “What on Earth is this?” was the vibe the first time I saw Arizona. “I don’t entirely know what the hell’s going on, and I didn’t know you could do stuff like this in a movie, but I am into it.”