1994: Omipresence Means Radio Ads and Mall Bookstores

PULP FICTION (dir. Quentin Tarantino)

I was hesitant to write about Pulp Fiction. For one thing, what else is left to say? And any sort of even half-serious engagement with the movie necessarily means wading into a couple of other bodies of discourse that are about as appealing as lighting myself on fire.

But if part of the brief of this project is to talk about movies from a given year that have some salience into my life, well, I can’t not talk about Pulp Fiction. But I’m going to take it for granted that you know the movie and, for the most part, look at it as an artifact in the wider culture. The omnipresence and massive cultural shadow of Pulp Fiction is both the interesting thing to talk about and the reason it’s more or less mandatory to talk about it. Because here’s another one of those you-had-to-be-there cultural/historical-moment things: this fucking thing smashed through the culture like a cannonball in 1994. It was massive and omnipresent! I’m pretty sure this is the last movie I remember hearing ads for on the radio!

RC and I have been talking a lot about how some rare works of art surprise you (maybe through formal properties, maybe through subject matter, maybe other dimension that you never even considered) and lodge in your brain for a while.* That’s what Pulp Fiction, which was certainly unique formally and at least unique in intensity on the subject matter side, was like in ’94, except instead of at the personal level, it was at a good-percentage-of-the-moviegoing-public level. You can argue that Tarantino doesn’t do original things, that all of his work is pastiche, and that’s pretty true. But for the public at large—certainly for me—in 1994, Pulp Fiction represented pastiche in a form most of us hadn’t encountered anything remotely like before, and I think something like that turns into the affirmative argument you can make for most of his career over the long haul.

*For what it’s worth, I think this factor of surprise is a big part of why I’m so bonkers about Andor; it was and remains a massively pleasant surprise that something so tight, relevant, and well-executed could exist; It’s almost inconceivable that it could come in the form of a Star Wars tv show, a medium whose usual payoff is “hey, remember that guy who was onscreen in Empire Strikes Back for 90 seconds? Well, here he is again.”

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

1993: Buddhism and Also the Murray Problem

GROUNDHOG DAY (dir. Harold Ramis)

TRACK 1: BUDDHISM, SORT OF

They say that as you get older, you think about religion more. And maybe that’s true, or at least sort of true. I’m definitely older (why, I’m two years older than the last time I posted to this project), and I know that as time goes on, my thoughts get more and more existential. Not religious, really, because I have a hard time with supernatural beliefs. But definitely with an eye on to the bigger picture of existence and where I (/we) fit in and what’s going to happen when I’m not here anymore (mostly, I want to make sure my musical gear goes to somewhere it’ll get plenty of use).

I was raised Catholic, more or less, but it didn’t take; part of that was that my parents’ hearts weren’t really in it (which is fine). I was pretty much done with it, and Christianity, by the time I was driving. But I had a weird childhood, and in a very real sense I was raised in two households. And that second household was heavily influenced by a professor of comparative religion with a particular interest in India who had an active if idiosyncratic personal religious practice that sort of mixed Buddhist thought and practice with American Midwestern Lutheran culture.

I guess what I’m saying is that, while I can’t at all claim to have raised as a Buddhist (or, to be clear, to have any real sense of what a personal Buddhist practice is like outside of some very unusual conditions), I was at least out on the right end of the bell curve in terms of exposure to Buddhist concepts among teens in rural Nebraska in 1993. Cycles of rebirth and improvement within them, sure, yeah, weren’t we talking about that at dinner the other night?

So, Groundhog Day landed pretty well in that second household of mine. Bill Murray’s asshole weatherman relives a day over and over and over, passing through waves of hedonism and nihilism until he improves himself and learns to accept his feelings in the moment, and is released from the cycle.* The resonance is right there out in the open (the lore about the script is a little muddled, with stories both crediting Harold Ramis for strengthening the Buddhist parallels, and faulting him for downplaying them, to the detriment of his relationship with Murray; in the end, it matters less how they got there than that they’re there).  

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

1992: Let’s not even talk about the weird Xavier McDaniel joke

SINGLES (dir. Cameron Crowe)

I don’t know what it’s like to grow up as part of any generation other than X. Maybe the oldest Millennials, since I often find my cultural sympathies lining up with those a little bit younger than me. But that’s it. Like all of us, I’m a product of my time.

Which, in my case, means that I was starting to assemble the first draft of my adult self during the stretch when Singles had its weird little supernova interlude. I don’t know that it was a movie that meant much to, say, 40-year-old lawyers or even 17-year-olds who were thinking of joining the Air Force after they graduated; but among the nerdy, music-centered college-bound youth cohort that I was part of, this thing blew up like a firecracker. Out of nowhere, and for a little while, this movie exerted a bizarre cultural gravity. Not nearly as widespread as Batman, but very intense in its niche. The only album I’ve ever experienced peer pressure around “when are you gonna get it, you lameass?” was the Singles soundtrack, which went on to spend a few years as a member of the 90s De Rigeur Dorm CDs Starter Pack.

And that soundtrack album is tightly tied into the whole thing. The interplay between music and movie was a knot you couldn’t cut. They were conjoined*. The movie was noteworthy because of the soundtrack, which was noteworthy because it was so Seattle-heavy, which of course it was because this was a movie about music-loving folks in Seattle, which hey did you hear that Seattle is where things are happening right now? Anyway, Pearl Jam and Chris Cornell figure somewhat prominently in both movie and album.

*Consider the fact that the title of the movie itself is a triple entendre: singles as in single people, singles as in one-bedroom apartments, and—of course—singles as in music.

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

1991: I’ve an arse here you can kiss.

THE COMMITMENTS (dir. Alan Parker)

To repeat a sentiment I’ve used a lot in this space: The Commitments is not a capital-letter Great Movie, but in its low-key way it is a great little movie about music. It’s about the joy inherent to making music with other people, one of the great collaborative pleasures of life. And, equally, about the bullshit that can come along with it. Maybe bullshit’s too strong a word; friction’s better. Interpersonal disputes, technical problems, trouble booking shows, miscommunications, you name it—all the stuff that I spent years talking about (at roughly Commitments-level stakes) in Nowhere Band.

And the level of the stakes is important there. This Is Spinal Tap covered a lot of the same ground, but at a different level. For all that Spinal Tap’s career problems are central to whatever plot that movie has, they’re still big enough to play arenas (when they’re not opening for puppet shows) and release albums on major labels. The Commitments, on the other hand, are at ground level and they’re going to stay there. The Commitments’ world isn’t that different from the one the Awesome Boys navigate in Nowhere Band, or—not coincidentally—the real one my bands the Creekside Ruffians and Derailleur have moved through. It’s the world of bands that are never going to make anything more than beer money. And if that’s less glamorous than the world of pro musicians, it’s accessible and relatable, since it’s where most of us who own instruments are going to spend all of our time. It’s the reality of what making music is like for the vast majority of people making music. And it’s even still pretty aspirational, because, as the movie illustrates, it’s just a shitload of fun to play instruments and yell with other people.

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

1990: Dudes Rock Under the Sea

THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER (dir. John McTiernan)

To lean again on the autobio part of this project: The Hunt for Red October is another one that I’m not about to claim is great cinema (although as a really well-executed-more-or-less-based-in-something-resembling-the-real-world thriller, it’s maybe a great example of a type of cinema that I’d love to see more of in the modern era). But it’s a movie that appealed to a bunch of my interests when it came out, and maybe helped cement them as things that would stay on my mind for the long haul. And it’s also a ton of fun, which is nothing to sneeze at.

But those interests. This was, of course, the first film adaptation of a Tom Clancy book (FWIW, I feel like it’s by far the best Clancy movie, adapting his best book). I was at the time going through the kind of Tom Clancy megafan phase that only makes sense when you remember that it was before the internet and I was living in deeply conservative rural Nebraska and the pipeline for new-author discovery was, uh, limited. I’ve written at length about my difficult mental relationship with the works of Thomas Clancy, but at the time I thought he was better than Hormel chili and any movie adaptation was something I had to see.

Clancy’s books, including Red October, often center on the CIA, which was another major interest at the time. Of course, nerdy adolescent boys often get interested in spying; that’s nothing unusual. What made me different was that I damn well did something about it, going through a process that came pretty close to getting me a job at the CIA *and* getting me a very unfortunate hat from Structure (and yeah, this is a thing I mention at the end of the linked comic, but it’s worth mentioning here: given where my mind and politics went as the 90s progressed, I think it was best for both me and the CIA that the thing didn’t work out).

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

1989: Look. I’m sorry.

BATMAN (dir. Tim Burton)

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty tired of superheroes on film.

But the thing is (*looks around*), this is all my fault. Well, mine and the fault of thousands of other people who had opinions about who the best writer for Superman was or what we’re supposed to take from the ending of Watchmen. We all thought “god, superhero comics can be cheesy, but they can also be so much fun, so resonant, and such fertile ground for metaphors that can really take you to interesting places looking at the real world! Wouldn’t it be great if everyone would wake up to this and get on board?” And then a monkey’s paw twitched, and a long fuse started burning, eventually leading to a world where everything at the multiplex was competing examples of CGI punchfest dogshit where all the life and humanity had been purged by a corporate assembly line filmmaking process.

This isn’t true, of course; or at least it’s not true in the sense that there weren’t actually any cursed monkey’s paws involved. But I do think that there’s probably some truth to the idea that the critical mass of comicsheads in the early 00s who all went and bought tickets to the first Nolan Batman movie, and to the Raimi Spider-Man movies, and the Singer X-Men movies, we were the accelerant that gave Hollywood in general and Disney in particular the idea that there was endless money to be made by quadrupling down on this superhero thing. It’s not just a thing that we let happen; it’s a thing that we cheered on at the time. And I don’t feel great about that.

Tracing definitive cause and effect in stuff like this is rarely possible, of course. But I feel like it’s reasonable to say that a lot of my cohort of 2000s-era young nerds with disposable income were all put onto this track just by living through the hype cycle for Burton’s Batman.*

*Purists will no doubt argue that the Donner-Reeves Superman movie was there laying groundwork a decade earlier, and that Superman and Batman had been showing up in movies since the 40s. And this is all true, of course! But subjectively, at the time, the Batman ’89 hype cycle felt different and more lasting, even if I’m just saying that from the center of the marketing-push blast zone.

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.”

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

1986: A Ton of Bricks

THE TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE (dir. Nelson Shin)

And here’s another one that I’m not really about to call a great movie, or even a good movie.* ** But, to me at least, there are some ways that The Transformers: The Movie is an interesting movie. And if I’m reading my own concept for this project to indicate that I should be talking about movies that were important to me in their year (and I don’t always read it this way, but I definitely do sometimes), well this one couldn’t be more relevant; I think Return of the Jedi is the only other movie that came out within the timeframe covered so far that Young Me was as hyped about in advance as this one.

*And even if Transformers ’86 isn’t really a good movie, it’s far, far better than the Bay Transformers movies, or even its peer in late-80s animated toy commercialdom, the GI Joe movie.

**OK, but also: how hard must Jack Kirby have sighed whenever he heard that the big bad in this new movie was a godlike planet-eating space monster? Like, I know the Transformers movie and the comics were completely different things (and Kirby of course had no direct connection with either of them), but still, it’s all adjacent enough that he had to have heard about it at some point.

And I don’t think I’m alone in that; in fact, I think part of what does give Transformers ’86 a little bit of interesting heft in 2024 is that this fucker hit a lot of Gen X like a ton of bricks, and this was the cohort that would go on a few years later to start early-adopting the internet. One of my very first online experiences—aside from endlessly looking up people’s guesses at R.E.M. lyrics—was reading an extended, heartfelt post on some message board about how Optimus Prime and Megatron were archetypal figures while Rodimus Prime and Galvatron were flawed and “realistic” and this shift indicated a move from DC-style storytelling to Marvel-style and, well, I’m not saying this particular line of analysis is one that I’ve spent a lot of time on, but this type of analysis is going on more or less constantly in my head all the time and I think this goddamned post on Usenet or wherever is what kicked it all off. A bunch of us spent the 90s using this cool new interconnected web toy thing-o teaching ourselves to collaboratively dig through the semiotics of pop culture.

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

1985: Things Have Turned Out Just Fine

BACK TO THE FUTURE (dir. Robert Zemeckis)

Let’s start by acknowledging something: I don’t know that there’s a ton I can say about Back to the Future as a standalone movie that hasn’t already been said. The discourse is pretty well-developed: it’s a beloved classic for a reason; it’s a great use of the talents of Michael J. Fox, Lea Thompson, Christopher Lloyd, and Tom Wilson; the bit about Marty teaching Chuck Berry about rock and roll is pretty problematic; one joke does lean a little too hard on the idea of Huey Lewis being a super loud rock and roller; and the timing of the climactic power-the-car-with-a-lightning-bolt scene makes no damn sense, no matter how exciting the scene is.

Oh, and the collected Freudians of the world must have collectively shit their pants when this movie came out and was a hit.

Anyway, rather than focus on the specifics of Back to the Future, I wanted to use the movie to pull back and talk more widely about a commonality I’ve noticed in a whole bunch of time travel movies. This, after all, is one of the most famous of the genre, and it’s probably the one that I’ve spent the most time thinking about.

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

1984: Just a Bunch of Working Stiffs

THIS IS SPINAL TAP (dir. Rob Reiner)

Moving into double digits with this project, I can see a few patterns emerging. One of these is that there are a couple of situations where I’m nervous to do the writeup. If it’s a widely-loved movie that I’m not so crazy about, I get nervous, because I feel like I really have to make my case if I’m going to be critical, or I’m going to piss people off or look like an idiot. Conversely, if it’s a movie that I absolutely love, I get nervous because I don’t want to just gush, because I can’t be objective. I might piss people off or look like an idiot.

Because yeah. I love This Is Spinal Tap. I love it more than most other movies that I’d say I love. It’s an absolute pantheon movie, one of those handful where I feel like it makes some sense to view my life through a before-I-saw-this/after-I-saw-this lens. I love music so much that sometimes it makes me wonder about my own sanity; I think I first saw This Is Spinal Tap at about the time this truth about my brain was making itself known to me. This Is Spinal Tap is magical because it manages to simultaneously be insanely funny while also encompassing a world of truth about music, especially rock music, double especially the world of rock music in the late 20^th century as that artistic era started to move into its baroque phase.

Let’s not kid ourselves: music is a little absurd on several levels, if you step back and look; and so is our love for it. What is music, really? It’s air vibrating in specific patterns. That’s it. To love music is to have really strong opinions about how you want the air around you to vibrate. That, I submit, is a pretty absurd foundation on which to build.

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

1983: The Perils of Adaptation

THE RIGHT STUFF (dir. Philip Kaufman)

With some of these, I get very nervous about doing the actual writeup. And this is very much one of those. Because no matter how much I want to—and I want to pretty badly—I just don’t like this movie very much. And I know it’s a (partial) consensus classic, and it feels weird to go against the consensus. But I can’t help it! No matter how much other people like it, no matter how much it involves people I like, concepts I like, and adapts a book I like, I just can’t really get with The Right Stuff. I don’t hate it, but, except for some individual sequences (and maybe one of the ongoing storylines), I can’t get better than lukewarm about it.

For me, what hobbles The Right Stuff is that the movie doesn’t know what it wants to be. Kaufman and William Goldman famously fought over the screenplay, with Goldman eventually leaving and washing his hands of the matter. And that unresolved fight is still present on the screen, giving us a long movie that meanders, bounces wildly in tone, and lacks focus. Goldman wanted to focus on the Mercury 7 and the patriotic hoopla around them; Kaufman wanted to focus on Chuck Yeager and the cult of tough-guy pilot machismo around him. In practice, even though Goldman bailed, we get an undercooked Mercury 7 movie stuffed inside a pretty good, tight dramatic short about Chuck Yeager. I talked a minute ago about feeling like I’m swimming against the current on this one, but I’m not completely alone; my understanding is that all of the surviving Mercury astronauts who saw the movie hated it (except for Scott Carpenter, who honestly seems like such a chill guy that he just liked everything). Conversely, Chuck Yeager supposedly loved it, but of course he would; the thing the movie most clearly succeeds at is making him look like the coolest guy who ever lived.

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

1980: On a Mission from God

THE BLUES BROTHERS (dir. John Landis)

In general, I’m a little nervous about doing these writeups about movies I love, because if someone’s going to take the time to read one of these, I don’t want to waste their time with endless “OMG IT RULES!!!!” 1980 poses a tough challenge, though, because the obvious movie to talk about is The Blues Brothers, and it happens to be not just a movie that I love, but one that I love so much that I think some of its themes are implanted into the wiring of my head.

Luckily, I do think there’s some interesting bigger-picture stuff to talk about here. Theology, cultural identity, that kind of fun stuff.

There’s probably no need to do a close rehash of The Blues Brothers; if you’re reading this, I assume you’ve seen it (and if you haven’t: you should!). But there are a lot of top-level things to note about it! For instance, it’s the first (and by far best) case of a Saturday Night Live bit becoming a movie. It features John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd doing maybe the best work either of them ever did. It’s about a couple of white weirdos* who love Black music, and believe they’re on a divine mission to use the power of music to save the orphanage where they were raised. It is itself a musical!

*It’s never made clear, as far as I can tell, if we’re supposed to consider them biological brothers or if they just have a sort of spiritual/musical brotherhood; maybe that doesn’t matter, and maybe that’s another point the movie’s making, intentionally or otherwise. And, of course, a couple of white guys who are trafficking so heavily in Black-coded culture referring to themselves as “brothers” is certainly a loose thread to be tugged at endlessly.