Actor Ryan Reynolds is drawing some criticism for his negative characterizations of the 1980s.
The remarks came Tuesday night, September 1, at the New York premiere of Mayday, his new Cold War comedy set in 1987. Reynolds was criticizing the tendency to romanticize the 1980s. Speaking to journalists, the Canadian-American actor said:
“When you get far enough away from a time period that’s quite distinct, there’s always a lovely feeling associated with it, almost like you pave over all the trauma with puppy dogs and ice cream.”
“The 80s was a brutal, brutal time for people. It was a fucking mess and people forget that.”
“It was a tremendous strife. Sociopolitical tensions everywhere. We were still pretty fresh off the Cuban missile crisis, which was only 15–20 years before. It’s a tumultuous period, but you look back at it now and you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah. Top Gun. Cocaine!’ Like, ‘No!’ It was really scary.”
Regular readers will know that I’m an unabashed fan of the 1980s. I’d take that decade back in a heartbeat. So Reynolds and I definitely disagree here.
But we were also in different life stages and different places then. In 1986, I was an 18-year-old living in Cincinnati, Ohio. Reynolds was an 9-year-old living in Canada. We did not have the same experience of the decade. My enthusiasm for the 1980s is at least partly influenced by my positive personal memories of that time. Perhaps things were not so good for the future movie star in 1986.
No era, moreover, is a monolith. Bad things happened in the 1980s. Good things happened in the 1930s—an era usually associated with the rise of fascism and the Great Depression. In recent years, there has been a spate of books reassessing the so-called “Dark Ages”.
Nor would I want to see Ryan Reynolds be “cancelled” over something this innocuous. (Some of the online reactions to his remarks have been rather severe.) In the big scheme of things, this is small potatoes. And most of us half learned to take celebrity opinions with healthy doses of salt.
-ET
Since I was there: No Sure Thing, my Gen X novel set in 1988
My above post about Ryan Reynolds and the 1980s got me thinking about the inevitable problem of nostalgia.
Was the 1980s really a great decade? Or do those of us who remember it fondly simply associate it with being young?
Probably a little of both.
But unlike Ryan Reynolds, I wasn’t a child during the latter half of the decade. I graduated from high school in 1986, and I spent the late 1980s attending college in Cincinnati. I remember that world firsthand.
And since we’re talking about the 1980s, I’ll take this opportunity to recommend one of my novels: No Sure Thing, a Gen X coming-of-age story set in Cincinnati in 1988.
No Sure Thing isn’t an attempt to argue that everything was better in the 1980s. Nor is it simply a parade of Rubik’s Cubes, Walkmans, and other familiar nostalgia props.
It’s a story about what it was like to be young at that particular moment in time—when the Cold War was still going on, Ronald Reagan was still president, almost no one had a cell phone, and the Internet as we know it did not exist.
The protagonist, Paul Nelson, is nineteen years old and studying economics at the University of Cincinnati. He thinks he has his future more or less figured out: finish college, get a respectable job, and move into adulthood.
Naturally, things don’t work out that way.
A breakup, a new romantic interest, an older woman with secrets, an encounter with the Cincinnati police, and some increasingly dangerous complications send Paul’s carefully planned life in directions he never anticipated.
The result is a fast-moving coming-of-age story with romance, suspense, humor, and plenty of period atmosphere.
If you remember 1988, you’ll probably recognize some of the world depicted in No Sure Thing. And if you weren’t there, the novel might give you an idea of why some of us remember the decade more fondly than Ryan Reynolds apparently does.
The year is 1988. Anything can happen, but nothing is guaranteed.