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American Culture in the 1980s (Twentieth Century American Culture) Review by Kevin M. Flanagan Graham Thompson
Manchester, UK: Manchester UP, 2007
$29.50/Trade Paperback

The 1980s are a difficult decade to write about, particularly for anyone (re: myself) who lived through them but was too young to fully comprehend the ins- and outs- of what was going on.  With that in mind, people of my age are lucky that the buffer decade of the 1990s has given historians enough hindsight to begin writing nuanced, flexible assessments of the time.  For the current twentysomething, the 1980s are remembered by way of the transitions of the early 1990s, whether we like it or not.  That is, our experience during that time—as pre-literate kids unconcerned with grand historical narratives, cultural technology, or any of the other great preoccupations of adulthood—is by way of the dented hand-me-downs of older brothers and sisters; through television re-runs; because of faded VHS boxes at the video store; contained in nightly news soundbites that remind older viewers of the political events of five years previous; or, simply, through the firmed, negotiated opinions of older family members, friends of family, or teachers.

It is not too much of a digression to bluntly state that I am only now beginning to satisfyingly sift through my own hazy visions of that time.  Though ten years ago, my interest in the 80s was tied to the commercial snakeskins found in dusty corners (those kitschy, taped-on-video pop promos that made the MTV of 1984 so exciting, or any number of long-neglected, though still undervalued Nintendo Entertainment System cartridges), books like Graham Thompson's academic, concise, and hopefully foundational American Culture in the 1980s will arm people of my age with the tools necessary to understand the decade more fully.  Though some will be resistant to the historicizing of their fair youth in roughly 200 pages, virtually anyone who lived the decade in a somnambulistic trance—whether as a too-young-to-comprehend child, victim of the decade's commercial seductions, or as someone living their life as normal, too busy to notice the really interesting trends of the world around them—will find plenty to mull over.

Given the format and intended audience of the "Twentieth-Century American Culture" Series, Thompson had to make a number of selections that are likely to divide any potential audience.  On the one hand, the book excels at short, though widely important case studies, yet these specific selections are at the expense of anything like an encyclopedic chronicle of the time. Thompson is more concerned with providing avenues of entrance that typify the major cultural and intellectual debates of the time, namely the persistent "culture wars" between left academics and religious conservatives; the surfacing and spread of AIDs; the whole of the Eighties art-world through the lens of Jean-Michel Basquiat, a young meteor whose abstract, graffiti aesthetic defined several subcultures, and whose death at the hands of heroin marked the dark-edge of his rise to fame; or, the varied discourse surrounding Madonna, a pop-icon who continuously redefined female agency while pushing boundaries of censorship and taste.  This is not to suggest that Thompson avoids survey altogether: his discussion of postmodern currents in fiction and poetry (37-62) is immensely useful for understanding the literary trends in an age supposedly informed by oblique pluralism.

Thompson's chapter on film and television was probably the most useful to me (ironic biographical note: this should not be surprising, except that I did not initially approach the book because it included a summary of the film culture of the era, but rather because it primarily focused on culture that was not tied to the film and television industries), in part because it refuted one of the foundation myths of Eighties media analysis.  Though Thompson mentions Michael Rogin's famous idea of "Ronald Reagan: The Movie," which constructs the ultimate emptiness of the decade's mediascape by way of the notion that Reagan, a minor movie star, actually merged his roles as actor-icon and politician, becoming a master of public deception, American Culture in the 1980s actually ends up arguing against this understanding that the specter Reagan hovered over everything done during the period (4).  As such, he argues against Andrew Britton's "Blissing Out: The Politics of Reaganite Entertainment," which describes mainstream film production as having taken an unmistakable shift toward conservatism (98-99).1 

Thompson's point is sound: he does a good job of establishing the wide variety of films made during the time, finds Britton's assessment to be too pointedly ideological, and ultimately wants to show that early understandings of the decade are often formulated in the relative heat of the moment, with blinders to the wider trends that will emerge over time.  But, nonetheless, Britton's essay has the virtue of addressing a period of crisis in the moment.  In addition to being massive (nearly 60 pages in its original publication in the journal Cineaction!), it is theoretically sophisticated and—in a rare turn for such a seriously intentioned piece—funny.  "Blissing Out" is a primary document for a period when the left began to see the real dangers of Reagan and Thatcher, the grim under the gloss.  My point is that, in this instance, Thompson's reading of the contemporary thought on a subject (the political slant of Hollywood from about Star Wars [1977] to Rambo: First Blood Part II [1985] ) allows him to write a more fair-minded historical text, but at the same time makes his prose seem a but dismissive of the fervent intellectual work that provided the counter-texts of the period.

That said, Thompson's book will be extremely useful for courses on the American Eighties, or for introducing students who (gasp) might not been alive at all during the decade or know of its particular charms.  Thompson writes out of the University of Nottingham, and as someone doing work in the context of European American Studies (as opposed to American American Studies—but hear me out, there is a distinction) brings a practiced "outsiders" eye to the proceedings.  I very much appreciated that he did not have the same nostalgic ghosts that I did, that he was able to talk about the period in a controlled, sometime schematic way.  Unclouded by the full-forces of the native-born patriotic zeal of Reagan's tenure, he can sift through the annals judiciously. American Culture in the 1980s is not VH1's I Love the Eighties, though it might work even better if paired with that type of sensationalism.  The book is a great window onto the hair, designer drugs, outrageously priced art, reflective buildings, and blockbuster action films that seemingly fell with the Berlin Wall.