The Sci-Fi Fantasy of 80s High School Flicks
A society before all of thes mass shootings.
Movies have been a part of my life since as long as I can remember. Star Wars was the very first science fiction epic that I ever watched. It was amazing. It looked so real, and the characters were bold and imitable. As I grew older, I became infatuated with Amy Heckerling and John Hughes films. They were charming of course, but they were a stitch in time so unique that I don’t think its authenticity can ever be emulated. Try as I might, though, I couldn’t relate to them. The 1970’s or 1980’s were hard for me to understand. It wasn’t until quarantine that I realized I had forced the genre of science fiction upon them. Allow me the time to explain, dear Mediums.
High school is no walk in the park, but I would contend that, based on Heckerling’s and Hughes’s work, it must have been heaven by comparison. Their hallways weren’t covered in racially superior abbreviations “AP, BP, WP” which stood for Asian, Brown, and White Pride respectively. The Breakfast Club had gotten itself into trouble instead of being dragged into Saturday school. I couldn’t imagine such a place. A school funded well enough to operate on a weekend would have to be grounded in a world where sunshine and rainbows fuel the economy. This all changed on a fateful Tuesday some 22 years ago.
I was 14 the day I brought the school’s multimedia learning tool (a TV and VCR strapped to the top of a 3-foot stand with wheels) inside our history class. Plugging in this behemoth gave life to the announcement, “shooting at Columbine.” It was April 20, 1999, the period following lunch was history, with Mr. Rosenthal. We had been studying the aftermath of WW2 and were set to watch a film on Europe’s reconstruction. Instead, we all watched in silence as a blood-soaked Patrick Ireland threw himself from the shattered windows of the Columbine library into the arms of two SWAT team members below.
My parents had very little to offer in terms of why something like this could happen even though any kid who had been bullied or witnessed bullying knew the answer. How they amassed an arsenal without anyone knowing was and still is a better question to ask. Young adults deal with stress in different ways, but Columbine added a different layer. All of a sudden, our adolescent potentiality included mass murder. It was as if an entire generation was now suspect, possible carriers of mental anguish whose timed fuses were set to go off at the sign of any frustration or hormonal angst.
Public schools finally went from being funded like prisons to looking like them. Campus psychologists probed the student body for minds that seemed fertile for violence. Guidance counselors, for the first time, were actually incentivized to do something outside of making and drinking coffee.
The school delivered countless PSA pamphlets regarding stress and how to relieve it and what to do when a fellow student pledges genocide. A few on self-identity and stress management were shoved into our hands. I placed the FBI hotline number atop these materials and threw them in the trash outside my classroom. I knew what I needed; the sweet embrace of spectacular set designs and unearthly characters. I watched Fast Times at Ridgemont High three times that night.
80’s films…oh, devil opiate. They grabbed hold of me, post-Columbine, like a meth addict looking for a teenth at the bottom of well-worn Jansport. There were high school kids with their own cars, their own jobs, and lockers that actually held books. All the doors on our lockers back in my high school were removed because school officials concluded it was possible to store weapons and ammunition alongside textbooks and toiletries. The halls were filled with children encumbered by hulking, book-filled backpacks. Chopsticks were not allowed because they could be sharpened to a point. Even as a teenager, I could read the writing on the wall, and it was clear that the adults of the country were handling the issue of school shootings as well as they handled the emergence of the Internet.
Things are different these days. My daughters still go to school on Zoom, and, like nearly everyone else in this upside-down country, they do it from the safety of their homes. I have no problem with it; I feel it should become the new normal. There had not been a single school shooting during the pandemic. Older generations have condemned this educational transformation as they did video games and music with harsh language. They claim future generations will be incapable of participating adequately in a productive society; that somehow this displaced form of education will doom them to a life of civil discourse.
The Boomers never had to fear a school shooting. Let’s consider the action of Nancy Pelosi’s staff during the Insurrection of January 6th. They crammed themselves into an office, barricaded the door, turned off the lights, and stayed quiet. The “protesters” (racist hillbilly morons) eventually left. This was a brilliant move on their part and you won’t find this maneuver in the U.S. Capitol Employee Handbook. Nancy Pelosi’s staff are young men and women who have been doing mass shooting and lockdown drills since they were 5 years old. God bless America indeed.
Sweet respite, tonight is movie night with my eldest daughter. Last week, she had the courage to watch Alien with me (I covered her eyes for the chest-bursting scene). She loved it. She asked tons of questions about how they made the face-hugger and was genuinely amazed that movie sets and miniatures could be made so well. She loves playing with modeling clay and churning out little Among Us characters in various states of…investigation. True joy and curiosity enveloped her as she watched a movie that was basically made from the ground up by some of the industry’s most talented artists. I could see she had a soft spot for the extraordinary and spectacularly unfamiliar. She loves stories that can’t possibly be grounded in modern reality, so I surprised her with a sci-fi classic, The Sandlot. She celebrated every light-hearted moment while I smiled and silently mourned them as modern impossibilities.
