THE ‘80s A Special Report : Putting the ‘80s Behind Us : Why has a decade that for a few moments was so buoyant ended in such seething mean-spiritedness?

The phrase has a nice sound, iambic and alliterative, a door softly clicking shut: The end of the ‘80s.

But no divorce is truly final. One of the paradoxes of American life is how deeply the phrase “put it behind us” is rooted in our cultural lexicon--implying how often we find ourselves having to “heal” from one form or another of lacerating violence and betrayal. Yet we love our nostalgic, picture-book essays, our trivial pursuit into the torrential imagery of the past.

The ‘80s, for a few moments so buoyant, now seem so shallow that their after-image is already fading before our eyes, like the memory of those prominent paintings spirited out of sight by nouveau riche zillionaires.

Everyone knows it was a time in which everything of value was tinged with the color of money, a period of the blockbuster deal and postponed moral debt. The takeover artist, whether entrepreneurial or corporate, became the cultural mover as business rumbled the arts. Our growingly sophisticated media technology blitzed us with unprecedented media hype. Our insatiable thirst for entertainment required an ever-widening pool of empty celebrity to satisfy us. The image became our lingua franca.

And what has this meant to the American culture?

Paul Simon may have been kidding-in-earnest when in “Graceland” he sang, “This is an age of miracles and wonder.” The end of the ‘80s will be noted as the time when the American Century posted its closing notice early, when the Cold War ‘40s rolled to their end at last with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and Europe felt young again while America seemed suddenly to grow fussy and old.

“No one ever dreamed that the West’s vision of utopia would turn out to be American,” said author-journalist Tom Wolfe. “You talk to the young intellectuals in Europe; they’re looking to America. What has happened in this great battle of ideas--democracy versus Marxism--can only be an enormous victory to the country. Unless the colossal Matterhorn of debt collapses on us.”

If the Reagan Revolution represents both the climax of America’s postwar attempt to maintain a free world and an unprecedented domestic wealth, why is it that life on our cultural front isn’t correspondingly jubilant?

Why has the decade ended in such seething mean-spiritedness, where Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas savage each other in “The War of the Roses” with infinitely greater malice than the Bickersons or even George and Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”; where Andrew Dice Clay’s sneering depiction of women as submissive sexual pigs whips his audiences into brute, misogynistic glee; where Spike Lee’s Mookie in “Do the Right Thing” (one of the few movies of the decade to carry the charge of a gut concern) touches off a race riot and then demands payment from the man whose life he’s virtually destroyed?

A sullen mood of betrayal hangs over the culture. Where once TV cop shows contented themselves with tracking pimps, murderers and drug-dealers and then cutting to the chase that gets evil into the slammer by 10 o’clock, the Byzantine plot of “Wise Guy” unfolds over a common theme--the good guy is being sold out by his superiors, who are involved in a cover-up. The corruption of authority is a given now in our prime-time consciousness.

If you’re going back to the future again, you’ll discover that your Mom looks like a novice hooker. If you’re coming back from the future, it will be with the report that John Rambo has metamorphosed into a cyborgenic terminator with an Austrian accent who, even after all his skin has been seared off and his body dismembered, will still try to strangle the object of his obsessive hunt--an innocent woman.

The over-technologized, post-apocalyptic future itself looks to be broken down into smoky pockets of warring barbaric tribes, surly Hulk Hogans brandishing Uzis and chains. In Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner,” Rutger Hauer’s poignant message about the sanctity of life is uttered from dying lips in a world that resembles an overturned incinerator. Emerson observed of America, “All has an onward, a prospective look.” Not anymore.

The technology of our age of miracles and wonder included the CD, PC, microwave oven, computer workplace, fax, cellular phone, aerodynamic auto design, computerized ticket sales, satellite communications, the hand-held videotape recorder, the Panther movie camera, colorization, the lithium-based battery, ethanol and the Mavica camera. (Polavision, the disc camera, RCA’s $250-million investment in the video disc and the Betamax were ideas whose time came and went).

All these modes of communication with so little to communicate. If, as Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner tells us, “Music mirrors the structure and the range of our emotions: it has the same kind of flow as our emotional life,” what does the industrial screech of heavy metal tell us about psychic structure and range, or the relentless pile-driver rhythm of rap that makes no allowance for melodic possibility? Which may be the point: The rapper’s world is not a melodic place. Is the rise of MTV a tacit confession that the bulk of our pop music is aesthetically insupportable without a series of mannered and pretentious visual images to lend it appeal? How much of that stuff can we sing in the shower?

True, the ‘80s didn’t get off to a great start. The national mood was sour from the murky spillover of the ‘70s, which saw the fall of Saigon and the resignation of a disgraced President. OPEC’s control of the world’s oil pipelines, American embassy officials still held hostage in Tehran, and a threatened 18% inflation rate gave credence to the portents of minimalism: American power was on the wane.

Summing up, Lance Morrow wrote in Time magazine, “Mostly the air in the ‘70s was thick with the sense of aftermath, of public passions spent and consciences bewildered. The American gaze turned inward. It distracted itself with diversions, trivial or squalid; primal screaming, disaster movies, jogging, disco, Perrier water. The U.S. had lost a President and a war. . . . Many of the themes were woven around diminution. Paul Volker, head of the Federal Reserve Board, said last fall that in his view the American standard of living would have to decline--a serious crack in traditional capitalist optimism. . . . The ‘70s were given over to building private, not public, morale. Est, Arica, Esalen, transactional analysis, set about fumigating the American psyche.” The odd thing is that, materially speaking, the country had never had it so good.

The ‘70s spillage into the ‘80s were characterized by what seemed a spate of death and dying plays such as “Whose Life Is It Anyway?” and, later, “ ‘night, Mother,” which were gloomy not because of their subject but because they seemed false, spiritually hollow. They were really plays about capitulation. Our bookshelves bulged with paranoid fantasies of urban guerrilla terrorism, such as Robert Ludlum’s “The Bourne Identity” and Bill Michaels and Lewis Orde’s “The Night They Stole Manhattan.” Movie attendance slumped. Some blamed inflation, but more to the point, it seemed, nobody wanted to go out anymore. It was the start of the “cocooning” phenomenon that later led to the technology of the home entertainment center.

But slowly, as the decade settled in, the national mood began to lift. After an economic nose-dive in ‘82, the Reagan revolution began to take hold, led by a President who seemed buoyant, ageless and invincible, who could crack jokes on the gurney after he’d been shot in the street.

This was really our kind of guy, a warm, mediagenic, patriotic, congenial, can-do figure, flush with optimism and faith in homespun America. He was 20th-Century America’s home movie. The Tampico of his infancy lies in close spiritual proximity to the Hannibal, Mo., of Mark Twain--and he kept retooling it to fit the popular images of the American Century. He may have been, as Tom Wolfe reminds us, “the most issue-oriented President since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a real conservative who forced other politicians to take a stand on issues.” But what we liked most of all was that he never turned us down for a hit of what George Will called “his narcotic cheerfulness.”

In 1984, George Orwell’s spectral vision of civilization as penal society failed to materialize. On the contrary, the nation seemed to burst out of the winter of its discontent to splurge on the opulence and splendor of the summer Olympics, where the world came to Los Angeles and the city put on its best party manners to insure that the traffic kept flowing and that there would be no riff-raff, ideological or plain troublesome, to spoil the fun.

An international arts festival gave us the momentary feel of global centrality (even if it did expose the shabbiness of a lot of our local product, such as Equity Waiver theater), so that when the improbable Rocketman flew into the Coliseum to begin the ceremonies, and David Wolper’s opening musical production flash-flooded us with a magnificent seraphic high, everything for once seemed to fall into place. An immaculate powder-blue sky stretched over the Games and everyone warmed to the sensual nuzzling of the Santa Ana breezes as the best hope of the new world--its young--began their trials on the field below.

It hardly mattered that the Soviet bloc was a no-show; the gold medal this year went to capitalism--after a lot of prognostications of disaster, the privatization of the Games made them the most profitable in history. What a movie! For a couple of weeks we were Randy Newman tooling a big Buick convertible through balmy sun-drenched afternoons, arm around that big nasty redhead, hearing “We love it!” from nearly every conceivable ethnic and age group around town--even the winos smiled and waved hello.

On a deeper level, the country turned to the Games in a big way not only because sport beyond its quick-fix excitement is suspenseful and unambiguous, but because these athletes’ one-time efforts couldn’t be faked, or edited, or canned, or even repeated.

But of course they were just games, a distraction. Earlier in the year, before they got under way, we had already begun to pick up on the new acedia. After the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon, the President told the country, “If there is to be blame, it properly rests here, in this office and with this President. And I accept responsibility for the bad as well as the good”--and did nothing.

By now we knew we were seeing the divorce between word and meaning acted out at the highest level; that was nothing really new. But now the deregulation of content began turning up everywhere as the ‘60s and ‘70s cult of narcissism hooked up with the ‘80s cult of money and a new generation of young Babbits flocked to their BMW showrooms and nouvelle cuisine restaurants, and heard their empty souls’ lament exquisitely calibrated in “thirtysomething’s” sodden Angst . If pot was the drug of choice in the ‘60s and paranoia its emotional byproduct, coke, crack and ice came along in the ‘80s to feed its penchant for megalomania.

“Greed is good, greed is healthy” trumpeted Ivan Boesky, one of the princes of the new wealth, some time before he was nabbed as a central figure in the biggest insider-trading scam in history. Nearly everyone, it seemed, was on the take. Ranking Republican officials looked on public office as an extension of their business careers. Stock traders and corporate raiders grabbed companies by the heels in leveraged buyouts and shook out all the loose change they could before cutting them up, or forcing them to borrow against their future. Plunder was certainly nothing new in American history, but none of our New Age robber barons were building universities and museums.

The art of the ‘80s became, as Donald Trump put it, “The Art of the Deal.” David Mamet caught the hustler’s tone perfectly in “Glengarry Glen Ross,” in which a real estate con artist dazzles his prey in a restaurant banquette with a series of magnificent, hypnotically empty verbal glissandi, before he relieves him of his check for a parcel of Florida swampland. Oliver Stone caught it too in “Wall Street,” where Charlie Sheen’s moral opprobrium seemed petulant and schoolmarmish in the face of Michael Douglas’ buccaneer panache.

In art and entertainment, the atmosphere of deregulation further obscured any standards of critical measure regarding talent and achievement. Celebrity became the new commodity as earnest reportage of the hot and the new took up more and more air and tabloid space in the afflatus of ‘80s entertainment reportage. Nobody seemed to mind that there wasn’t much to report--for weeks, it seemed, America breathlessly awaited the latest details on Oprah’s diet. Baby Jessica’s confinement made good copy; the 25% of American children born into poverty didn’t.

If greed was good, scandal could lead to a payoff too as any number of disgraced public officials, white-collar ex-cons and fading movie and rock stars with a substance dependency confessed their wicked, wicked ways in best-selling autobiographies. There was nothing hallowed about the nation’s capitol steps for Rita Jenrette, who thought they’d be a kicky place to make it with her congressman husband. Donna Rice climbed like a coquette into Gary Hart’s lap and his political career collapsed. After Jessica Hahn exposed Jim Bakker’s clammy depredations, she exposed herself as well in a Playboy centerfold and defended her exhibitionism by saying she was proud of the body God had given her. Then she decided to improve on the job by having it completely made over.

The business of America had become business once again (Wall Street reports took up a heftier share of our news programming, and even carved a niche in Los Angeles’ only local commercial jazz station). And it liked what it saw in the worlds of culture and entertainment. Tens of millions of dollars--much more money than any museum save the Getty could hope to afford--went towards the acquisition of Van Goghs and Picassos, which then disappeared from public view. Corporate conglomerates made further incursions into Hollywood studios, TV networks and newspapers, which meant that the bulk of movie makers, network programmers and magazine and news editors felt more answerable to marketing experts than to the public. Good ratings became more of an imperative than ever. Demographics became the euphemism for the lowest common denominator.

While network anchors successfully courted stardom, John Hart--one of our best--left NBC to anchor “World Monitor” on cable’s Discovery channel. “It was disheartening over the last several years,” he said. “Almost all the decisions about what to air were made on the basis of ratings instead of editorial content. It was all artifice, the glib taking the place of the articulate. Art connects. Artifice diverts. I worry about our system of news and entertainment becoming an exploitation of fantasy. America made the crass choice in the ‘80s. I think there’s a hunger for human size, for trustworthy content that’s communicated in a way that’s simple. The central values, like freedom, are simple.

“I worry that we’ve lost our sense of context in our schools and pop culture. We’ve come to believe that we can really act out our fantasies. We’re a people with a strong sense of justice. We crave romantic love, peace. We want the homeless, poverty and AIDS to go away. But nothing is real on the tube. We have all this information, but we don’t feel we have a grasp on our lives. Most of the trouble you can base on advertising, which is based on the residue of rejection and betrayal, not being loved. It exploits those feelings. Advertising has become a storm of accusation. How can you break through?”

It may be that with the information revolution exploding in sparks under the channel-chasing fingers of the viewing public, the potential for overload has become so great that we’ve come to prefer the diversions of incessant novelty over the sometime discomfort of innovation, with its implicit requirement of change. Or that the modern classic antagonism between the artist and society in America has become too one-sided. What else could explain the pusillanimity and poverty of ideas in so much of the culture of the ‘80s, the decade of the retread.

In both ends of ‘80s, when Broadway wanted to commemorate the dance, it couldn’t think of anything to do except revive Jerome Robbins’ choreography. The theater blockbuster has been thoroughly redefined by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s gaudy musical dirigibles. Even Stephen Sondheim is plagiarizing himself. The gadgetry of ‘50s spy thrillers has resurfaced in Tom Clancy’s techno-pop best-sellers. If we can’t have Marilyn anymore, Madonna will do. Instead of Jackie Gleason, we have Roseanne. Mary Richards has left the news office; Murphy Brown is the new hire.

Scratch Arsenio Hall’s veneer of hip to find celebrity sycophant Merv Griffin. Maybe that’s unfair to Merv--he could sing. And what is it with all these talk shows all over again, with Donahue, Geraldo, Oprah, Sally Jessy, Johnny, Pat, Byron, Fritz and David?

If you can’t get on the air, you can yak it up all day and all night on talk radio. David Reisman called us “The Lonely Society” in the ‘50s. Nothing’s changed, except we’re noisier now with eager confession and aggressive self-absorption, which translates into public rudeness and incivility. We can’t seem to distinguish between honesty and tactlessness, blunt opinions and considered ideas. Yet nobody seems to have the moral or aesthetic authority to challenge sleaze and the push of attention-grabbing incompetents. In the ‘50s, young intellectuals talked their dates out of their leotards with mournful soliloquies on existential emptiness. Now the deconstructivist tells us: trust me, it’s all sign language. You give it the meaning. You and the night and the music.

As the decade began to wear down, the culture became more and more overrun by show-biz values. Shirley MacLaine charged us $300 a head to hear of her extraterrestrial adventures. Jerry Falwell plummeted down a waterslide on TV in his suit and tie to benefit Heritage USA, and Oral Roberts climbed into his office tower in a well-publicized attempt to extort $8 million from God. No corporate head honcho had really arrived until he’d made his own TV commercial.

When Oliver North made his appearance in the lineup of new dirty tricksters in the Iran-Contra hearings, the nation sat up and rubbed its eyes. Here was an authentic hero, not one of the Sheen family play-acting war. Look at all that salad on this proud young Marine’s chest! See the earnest patriotic gleam in his eye and hear the catch of noble cause in his throat as he volunteered the truth, good bad and ugly. Mister Smith had come to Washington at last! But then we saw the equivocation, his lawyer’s contempt for our elected representatives. They pegged the colonel for a liar and self-promoter and we slumped back into our funk.

We looked for plausible earnestness elsewhere. For a while, the comedy boom gave us the sense of actual as opposed to prepackaged human exchange, a chance to hear rare social criticism live. But the top comedians kicked themselves upstairs into movies and television and we were left with a generally sorry foul-mouthed group of show-biz acolytes who cannibalized each other’s skimpy material and bored us with attitude. Even the luster of sports began to dim. Magic and the Lakers were still good for show time, and wouldn’t we miss the baleful Kareem after all. But Robert Irsay whisked the NFL’s Colts to Indianapolis under cover of darkness and broke the heart of working-class Baltimore, and America’s team gave its innovative coach a pink slip instead of a gold watch. Hey, that’s show biz.

By decade’s end, half the nation was in a swoon over “Field of Dreams,” which the other half viewed as a dewy crock of ersatz nostalgia, sure proof that cloud-cuckooland had become a prime entertainment option. “When Harry Met Sally . . .” ostensibly posed the question “Can friendship between a man and a woman exist without sex?,” but on a deeper unconscious level touched on a uniquely contemporary dilemma. For now every cell in the human body was shadowed with the foreknowledge that sex was no longer the most primal human repudiation of death. AIDS was spreading through the culture. Sex and death were one.

It’s amazing how certain themes keep cropping up in American history. Well over a century ago, Emerson warned of “the tensions that threaten to turn the dream into a nightmare,” citing among them the destruction of individuality and the difficulty of really experiencing the world.

As the ‘80s wound down, it seems our experience of the world was less direct than ever. “My friends,” George Bush told us in the presidential campaign of ‘88, “flag sales are doing well. America is doing well.” More than ever our candidates’ entourages, the PR consultants, pollsters, speechwriters, handlers, coaches and spin doctors, kept their clients from spontaneous view. The art of politics became the choreography of the image. News pundits and reporters wound up interviewing each other to assess the quality of sound bites and photo opportunities, and to tell us what to conclude about the speech we’d just heard. “We thought of ourselves as producers,” Reagan staffer Michael Deaver told PBS’ Bill Moyers, who in turn worried about “spectacle overcoming analysis.”

“The country has cut off its vocal cords,” says art critic and historian Robert Hughes. “The only real drama left is the drama of the market. The rest of America is mired in emptiness because its leaders can’t issue a statement that hasn’t been pawed over by their handlers. The sense of public discourse is dying under the weight of euphemism, which is the tool of the mass media. ‘Have a nice day.’ If language doesn’t live up to its responsibilities, it dies. I love this country. It’s a great place. But it’s running out of ideas, a conception of itself. It’s unable to maintain its priorities and an authoritative show of cultural elan.”

David Puttnam came and went through Columbia’s presidential executive suite in record time. His failure as a studio head didn’t invalidate his hard view of what had become one of the great American dream machines--the film industry--and he summed up the decade as well as anyone when he told PBS, “The cinema was developing an ethos in young people in the ‘50s, but by the ‘70s it showed an America that had become nihilistic, self-loathing, violent and antagonistic within itself. The image it’s projecting is not an honest one. The thing I loathe more than anything has become fashionable: cynicism. The audience is viewed as a kind of lumpenproletariat, totally ill-considered.”

Mort Sahl has been both a political and media watcher for over 30 years, and underscores Puttnam’s view. “There’s a 9 to 5 amorality which the industry calls for, having prostrated itself on the altar of materialism,” he said. “The media aristocrats make fun of America. Look at all that cheering when Jim Bakker got 45 years. They’re still angry at their mothers and fathers. What’s the spirit of the movies? ‘The Burbs’? ‘The War of the Roses’? It’s the rage of cowards, not a rage at the devil.”

Usually we don’t feel the end of a decade until two or three years into the following decade. But by the time Ronald Reagan made his last hurrah and picked up his $2 million for a day’s work in Tokyo, we had begun to feel our sense of aftermath early.

Somehow the idea of big bucks had not only lost its allure, but money-grubbing and ostentation were becoming objects of scorn (even if our moneyed industry types reverted to traditional Hollywood vulgarity in their architectural tear-down monstrosities). Look at Leona Helmsley.

The adjuration towards “a kinder gentler nation” implied that we’d been otherwise. The money hadn’t trickled down after all. Patriotism’s evil stepchildren, xenophobia and intolerance, showed up in Howard Beach and Brooklyn, and led to the resurgence of the Klan and anti-Japanese sentiment. We hadn’t moved very fast to ward off the lethal incursion of AIDS. After all, wasn’t it the disease of gays and junkies? Who needed a literate nation? We can get everything we need to know from TV.

For as long as the media are used to exploit us as consumers instead of citizens, our kinder, gentler nation won’t be a safer, more knowledgeable place. Our cities are running out of doorways for the homeless to sleep in. The deficit looms like an aneurysm. The earth is darkening with the toxemia of accumulating poisons, many of them made in the U.S.A.

There are plenty of fine artists, writers, composers and musicians who had a productive decade, and the burgeoning magazine industry, as well as cable TV, are good signs that the diversity of our cultural appetite is being addressed. And if the NEA/Mapplethorpe flap struck an ominous note about the government’s support of the arts, at least it’s brought the relationship into focus and mobilized real--not stage-managed--debate.

Even our sharpest critics rarely fail to observe our native sense of humor and fair play, and our generous impulse to help out, whether in South Carolina after a hurricane, San Francisco after an earthquake, Chernobyl after a nuclear accident or Eritrea during a famine. But we’ve always been a troubled, restless people, with a long history of violence. If it’s the truth that sets us free, it doesn’t look as though a lot of the arts and entertainment of the ‘90s will be doing the job of telling it, of reminding us that there’s a difference between freedom and escape.

WHAT A DIFFERENCE A DECADE MAKES

A statistical overview of the decade in television.

CATEGORY 1980 1989 Percentage of U.S. households with a VCR 1.43 (1979) 64 Average price of VCR $1,100 $400 No. of U.S. stores carrying video N/A 70,000 Percentage of U.S. homes with cable 22 56 Percentage of prime-time audience held by networks 85 67 Percentage of U.S. homes with color TV 83 97 Percentage of U.S. homes with two or more TVs 50 63 Compact disc sales volume 0 $2.1 billion Vinyl LP sales volume $2.3 billion .53 billion

Compiled by Paul Grein