Tech Noir Sex

Sexuality as the mediated, oppressive, conscious contagion attacking personal agency, biology and ontology. Subject to deception, technology, ideology and social stratification (The Law being as un/dead as Bela Lugosi). Subcultural neuroses that would eventually become common parlance, and then repackaged accordingly. AIDS was beginning to be diagnosed around the same time, but wasn't a mainstream panic until the middle of the decade. If sci-fi/horror's nightmares don't exist at its time of writing, it may be necessary to invent them shortly after.

All the above are cult classics, highly influential in their respective (sub)genres. 'Sleeper' hits that took years to grow an audience (or canonization for Blade Runner), their motifs moving across fashion, adverts, pop videos, and product design, ie. everywhere. A virus of the pleasure principle. Away from the peer pressures of cinema viewing, the lonely - guilty? - space of home video gave these films room to gestate. The lifestyles, behaviour and economic conditions of their characters now appear far less alien than they did in 1982/83. We may be more alienated than these doom-mongers could forecast. Consider the shape Cafe Videodrome has taken since, and your statistical likelihood of surveying either (a) a corporate-led social network, or (b) pornography shortly after looking at this blog. All those immaterial encounters... like tears in the rain...

So Much for the Good News...

I have to admit that I don't know firsthand what it was like over in the U.K. at the time -- how it was precisely that the 1980s got underway, if there was any sense of a decisive lurch in a certain direction being taken. Here in the U.S., the decade more or less started with a bang. A bang that was ironically accompanied by a whimper, a whimper (or maybe it was more like a groan) that some folks had labeled a "mandate"...






A fair amount of elementary arithmetic, there. Everything easily quantifiable. Throughout the prior decade, you could rely on Gil Scott-Heron to know the score; to call the action as he saw it, size it up for what it was. Wry knowing looks all around. "Back to a time when movies were in black and white, and so was everything else." Heads nod in agreement. "...And common sense is at an all-time low, with heavy trading." Indeed. Sometimes, before even the opening credits unfurl, you can sense that a movie's going to deeply and thoroughly suck.

By the time the decade had half run its course, many of those same black-and-white Hollywood films were being systematically "colorized" by Turner Broadcasting networks, Reagan had won a second term in office, and Gil Scott-Heron's recording career was on the wane. Scott-Heron would soon slip from the public eye for a long stretch; drifting off the grid somewhere in New York City, eventually (we would learn only years later) to be swallowed by the crack cocaine epidemic that was sweeping the country's inner cities.

May 79, and after a suffocating gestatation, the beast of state-subsidised aggressive capitalism is unleashed on an unwitting public. Welcome to the new decade...