The '80s: The Decade That Made Us

The 1980s through the eyes of Americans. Events that America (or rather the American media) experienced but which were of minimal significance to the rest of the world (televangelists, the kid that got trapped in a well) are thus given too much importance. The value-based themes of this series are also purely American, even at the cost of outrageously reducing history down to bold deeds of strong individuals (did Lynne Cox's swim across the Bering Strait really help to improve relations between the West and the East?). According to the series’ logic, the negative aspects of the American lifestyle (drugs, greed) are rooted in the excess enabled by the government administration and it is definitely better to have a lot than to have nothing, like the people suffering under the yoke of the Soviet Union and communist China. These hasty conclusions, which were defensible in historiography maybe thirty years ago, unfortunately overshadow the case studies that really epitomise the ’80s (Coke vs. Pepsi and the rise of brand ideology; Ben, Jerry and the commercialisation of hippie ideals). Formalistically, The ’80s is standard television (talking heads comprising celebrities and, to a lesser extent, experts; TV news footage and clips from movies and series), but it goes by quickly thanks to its segmentation into numerous mini-stories with their own developmental arcs. Despite its ambitious length, it is not in any case a representative treatise on a single decade, but merely an entertaining reminder of: a) some of the fetishes of the time, and b) the possible roots of the thought patterns that not only American society, but western society as a whole is still governed by today (though we could argue that, for example, the origins of consumerism extend much farther into the past). (07/12/2014)