A trail of Reese's Pieces. The decapitation of a giant snake. The noble face of Mr. Spock, his skin peeling off like bark from a tree. Police cars that hover above the streets. Skeletons in a swimming pool. Blood in a petri dish, which squeaks and leaps if you touch it with a hot wire. One guy who is sent into virtual existence by the zap of a laser. Another guy who eats dog food from a can. These foolish things remind me of 1982.
Other people, with higher minds, will recall the hefty happenings of that year. Israel invaded Lebanon. Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. Yuri Andropov succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. One barrel of laughs after another. Unaccountably, events of such magnitude hold no appeal for the author Chris Nashawaty, despite the fact that his new book, "The Future Was Now" (Flatiron), is devoted to 1982. He doesn't even mention that the Man of the Year, as decreed by Time, was "The Computer," although that shift of emphasis is germane to his task. His focus is on movies—specifically, on eight movies that came out in the summer of 1982, and the stuff of which they were made. And what stuff it was! The "five-gallon buckets of K-Y jelly" that were, Nashawaty informs us, required to lubricate the special effects in John Carpenter's "The Thing," Or the pink silk pants that were sported by the actor Rutger Hauer, together with "a fox fur draped over his shoulder,"when he went to meet Ridley Scott, the director of "Blade Runner." History isnt all power grabs. It can be a bundle of details that you stroke.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der July 22, 2024-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der July 22, 2024-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
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ART OF STONE
\"The Brutalist.\"
MOMMA MIA
Audra McDonald triumphs in \"Gypsy\" on Broadway.
INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
\"Black Doves,\" on Netflix.
NATURE STUDIES
Kyle Abraham's “Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful.”
WHAT GOOD IS MORALITY?
Ask not just where it came from but what it does for us
THE SPOTIFY SYNDROME
What is the world's largest music-streaming platform really costing us?
THE LEPER - LEE CHANGDONG
. . . to survive, to hang on, waiting for the new world to dawn, what can you do but become a leper nobody in the world would deign to touch? - From \"Windy Evening,\" by Kim Seong-dong.
YOU WON'T GET FREE OF IT
Alice Munro's partner sexually abused her daughter. The harm ran through the work and the family.
TALK SENSE
How much sway does our language have over our thinking?
TO THE DETECTIVE INVESTIGATING MY MURDER
Dear Detective, I'm not dead, but a lot of people can't stand me. What I mean is that breathing is not an activity they want me to keep doing. What I mean is, they want to knock me off. My days are numbered.