Next Best Thing to an Angel

It seems to be my own personal 1980s night on Sky. Streets of Fire, Rumble Fish, Repo Man and Body Double are all on the slate, albeit side by side. I'm not that fussed about Body Double, one of the cheesier Hitchcock rips of Brian de Palma's cheesy-Hitchcock-rip career; mildly amusing, but rubbish. The other three, though, are an alarmingly significant part of who I am. (Which isn't to suggest that they aren't also rubbish.)

Of the three, the one I chose to watch in its entirety was Streets of Fire. (Well, I have Repo Man on DVD and Rumble Fish on VHS.) It must be fifteen years since I last saw this film, but every line, every shot, every grinding, tearing, Ry Cooder-scored edit is engraved on my memory. It's probably the third most eighties movie ever made -- even including those not actually made in the eighties. (Tonight I'll put Michael Mann's Manhunter at #2 and Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva at #1, but ask me tomorrow and you'll get a completely different account of things.)

Streets of Fire is a pretty dreadful film, but it's also a masterpiece. It's the pinnacle of 1980s 1950s-retro twaddle. Forget Nick Kamen taking his jeans off in the laundromat, this film does the 80s/50s collision thing like it's going out of style (which, of course, it was). I remember reading an interview with Walter Hill in which he said he put into Streets of Fire everything he wanted to see as a teenager (the only checklist item I can remember is "kissing in the rain"), and that's exactly what it looks like: grownup action movie director let loose on his adolescent fantasies.

And the result is great. Dumber than a sack full of hammers, but great. Motorbikes, leather, fire, neon, guns, rain-slick streets, elevated railways, terrible rock music, a female sidekick who can punch any man's lights out, a climactic duel with sledgehammers. All style, no substance, transient as a mayfly. What more could a 17 year old boy want?

Repo Man is a very different kettle of worms, and yet... This shoestring punky trash from Britbrat troublemaker Alex Cox somehow appeals to a similar (if perhaps more paranoid) post-pubescent æsthetic. Hill's MTV slickfest is glossy; Cox's post-suburban trashorama is rough; but both say 1984 to me, loud and clear.

And then there's Rumble Fish. Twenty years later I can, perhaps, approach this film with something like objectivity, and I can't honestly claim it's the masterpiece I thought at the time. God knows what possessed Francis Ford Coppola to turn S E Hinton's adolescent fiction into a movie its readers wouldn't be permitted to watch (cf. The Outsiders), but the result, even after all these years -- and doing my best to account for the pernicious influence of nostalgia -- still has a fair bit going for it.

The lovely, mostly monochrome, self-consciously expressionist photography, the percussive Stewart Copeland score, the ticking clocks, the relentless angst. John Hughes can go fuck himself -- this is the teen flick of the 80s, or at least it was until Heathers came along.

Body Double is on at the moment. I had forgotten a lot of it, but I'd especially forgotten the Frankie Goes To Hollywood Relax sequence. Oh. My. God. Also, along with Cecil B Demented, it does make you see Melanie Griffith in a rather different light.

I may have something more intelligent to say in the morning, but don't count on it.
Posted by matt at June 19, 2004 03:08 AM