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.
Denne historien er fra July 22, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra July 22, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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LIFE ADVICE WITH ANIMAL ANALOGIES
Go with the flow like a dead fish.
CONNOISSEUR OF CHAOS
The masterly musical as mblages of Charles Ives
BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS
How the Brothers Grimm sought to awaken a nation.
THE ARTIFICIAL STATE
A different kind of machine politics.
THE HONEST ISLAND GREG JACKSON
Craint did not know when he had come to the island or why he had come.
THE SHIPWRECK DETECTIVE
Nigel Pickford has spent a lifetime searching for sunken treasure-without leaving dry land.
THE HOME FRONT
Some Americans are preparing for a second civil war.
PRESIDENT FOR SALE
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll.
SYRIA'S EMPIRE OF SPEED
Bashar al-Assad's regime is now a narco-state reliant on sales of amphetamines.
TUCKER EVERLASTING
Trump's favorite pundit takes his show on the road.