I was writing a thumbnail sketch of the 80s yesterday, and I found myself thinking how weirdly resonant it is with today. Look…
Big engineering is back. We’re talking about scramjets and space travel again. The idea of traveling at Mach 9 doesn’t really thrill me, and the notion that you can travel around the globe in four hours is… interesting, certainly, but if in order to do so you have to get on a vehicle which has an actual rocket booster on it and go into space… doesn’t that seem sort of overkill-ish?
And then there’s Solar Thermal… unarguably the most phallic of the new power sources…
They’re building it in Australia.
I am saying nothing.
But it’s… big scale, gung ho engineering. It’s about massive power and enormous wallops of technology. Like, say…
The Large Hadron Super Collider.
The thing is, this obsession with bigger, faster, more powerful is (well, aside from being, y’know, a wee bit Freudian) the defining characteristic of Futurism:
→→An immense pride was buoying us up, because we felt ourselves alone at that hour, alone, awake, and on our feet, like proud beacons or forward sentries against an army of hostile stars glaring down at us from their celestial encampments. Alone with stokers feeding the hellish fires of great ships, alone with the black spectres who grope in the red-hot bellies of locomotives launched on their crazy courses, alone with drunkards reeling like wounded birds along the city walls.
→→Suddenly we jumped, hearing the mighty noise of the huge double-decker trams that rumbled by outside, ablaze with colored lights, like villages on holiday suddenly struck and uprooted by the flooding Po and dragged over falls and through gourges to the sea.
→→Then the silence deepened. But, as we listened to the old canal muttering its feeble prayers and the creaking bones of sickly palaces above their damp green beards, under the windows we suddenly heard the famished roar of automobiles.
[Futurist Manifesto - Marinetti]
All right, so fine – they were into their masculine idiom and their technology. Alas, they went a wee bit further…
We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.
We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.
Yah. Nice.
But the mood of it – and the reaction which spawned it, against the perceived smallness of what has gone before – feels familiar now for some reason. And you know what else makes me think of the 80s? (And yes, this is just another opportunity to post it and watch it?)
Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus.
Deborah Gibson actually calls it the Thriller in Manilla – a reference to the 1975 boxing match between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali. (Folks, she’s MY AGE. She doesn’t remember that fight! She was five years old at most! Okay, I was two. But still. The point is, that’s a reference you’d expect to see in a 1987 movie, not a 2009 movie.)
And tassled shoes are back, too.