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Back to the ’80s
Last night, I watched Broadcast News for the first time in nearly 30 years. What a trip down memory lane! Those clothes! That hair! VHS tapes! Brought me right back to high school.
The movie lacks a plot line, but the characters are likable and believable. The dialog was honest and engaging. The thing as a whole was funny and touching and sweet. But the main thing that stood out to me was its shocking moral innocence—naiveté, almost.
I was about 20 when it appeared and very religious in the Catholic-evangelical mode. So, to me, then, morality was all about no sex, no drugs, no drinking, no swearing. The rest—things like kindness and honesty and integrity—I took completely for granted. I don’t think “innocent” would have been my prime impression of the movie in 1987. The female lead is clearly “sexually active.” She drinks. She swears. I wouldn’t have approved at all.
Now what stands out is how kind she is, how considerate toward her friends and colleagues. She’s ambitious for success, but she’s completely principled—utterly dedicated to the integrity of journalism. She’s brainy and gutsy and tough, but totally feminine at the same time. All the characters come across as incredibly decent and well-meaning.
That kind of moral goodness seems to me to have practically disappeared from our common life in the decades since. A broadcast news station full of sincere, kind, mutually considerate and respectful people committed to journalistic integrity is almost unthinkable today, isn’t it?
Image Credit: “Broadcast News“. Via Wikipedia.
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It was a fantasy then. They just made more effort to keep up the front.
Growing up during the ’80s, who’d have thought thirty years later we’d look back upon them as years of relative innocence?
All of those things you list were taken for granted and it seemed like many parents had a common idea for “morality” and taught their children likewise. Then children grew up and passed on those morals, then somewhere along the way something changed.
I think there is more morality than we see, but like Tuck says,
Now it seems like the media does its best to promote anti-moral behavior and celebrity faces to match. Our media culture make it seem like no one is moral; that being moral is an ancient backward-caveman philosophy that is a mockery to being a free-thinking “modern” human.
Great to see you posting, Katie!
To your point, you might still find some of that in a small local market. But only in the coverage of local interest topics vs. political. I cringe every time local stations try to cover national stories. But having met a few out and about in the community, there are still some good, decent folks bringing good values to their jobs.
“I say it here, it comes out there” is one of my favorite lines from any movie. And I have used the line during many a podcast.
Another sign of how much things have changed: the scene where Holly Hunter’s character, embarrassed, leaves the entrance line to a fancy reception because purses are being security checked, and she doesn’t want them to see a condom she’s hoping to use later. I’m not making a careful judgment here, but doesn’t that feel like a charming, poignant memory of another world? 27 years later, can you see that as a plot point at a Washington reception?
ha ha, that’s funny. By the standards promoted in mainstream culture these days, they probably wouldn’t let you in to a fancy DC party without a condom.
I guess what was fascinating to me was to see captured in a film a moment in time when traditional moral norms (like keeping sex in marriage) had been thrown out the window, but before total end-justifies-the-means licentiousness had taken over.
I think few imagined we were ushering in what we were in fact ushering in when we (as a society) abandoned religion and morality.
On the other hand, that’s not all I want to say. I was also glad to be reminded that when it comes to concrete individuals, some who are immoral in some aspects are admirable in others.
“Tax collectors and prostitutes will enter the Kingdom” before people like me, I have no doubt.
Gary, you remind me of a talk I once heard on Humanae Vitae by a Catholic woman professor. She started it with a joke illustrating how far we’ve fallen.
Two seven year old boys are playing together.
One says to the other, “I found a condom on the patio.”
The other replies, “What’s a patio?”
Katievs, just nice to have you back.
The thing that strikes me about 80s movies is that Arabs have been the bad guys for decades. They weren’t ‘muslims’ back then, but Arabs or “terrorists”. Those jerks have been making trouble since before I was born.
Katievs, if I were God, you can be damn sure I’d let you in before the tax collectors and prostitutes! If Judgment Day isn’t to make these kind of obvious judgments, what good is it?
Alas, as egomaniacal as some arts majors can be, I’ve always known I wasn’t going to get the Big Promotion. If only some of my classmates had absorbed the same lesson…or most certainly, they were their own gods.
Katie, it’s been so long since I heard witty, warm Catholic jokes. Please keep it up.
Indeed, nearly a quarter century later, the seeds planted by social liberals have matured into trees bearing ill fruit. Oddly enough, the following scene from Clint Eastwood’s 1988 film – The Dead Pool – prefigured the end result of such licentiousness:
As with the circle, all things return.
Nice to see you, Miss Katie. Personally, I think I’m about ready for the next Great Awakening.
Sign me up, Arahant!
Gary, you nail the essence with the term “egomaniacal”. That’s it. Like the Pharisees of Jesus’ day, even sincerely religious Christians can be all off track without knowing it. We may be correct in our adherence to the law, but we miss the deeper call of the moral and religious life—the call to transcend Self. And also the need to throw ourselves on God’s mercy.
I think, if we’re going to see that greatly-to-be-desired New Awakening, we’d do well to turn our attention to our own deeper conversion. Anyway, that’s my goal for myself: stop worrying about all those specks in other people’s eyes.
Anymore, a movie with a moral character in it is not complete until said character is revealed to be a hypocrite.
Katie, I join with the sentiments of Jim, Limestone Cowboy, and Arahant. Glad to see you here!
I learned a couple of things in the film that stuck with me. I’ve used William Hurt’s jacket tucking tip ever since.
The scene in the film when the Holly Hunter character realizes that the William Hurt character faked a news story, because there was only one camera on scene and there are reaction shots in the footage. It made me watch news more carefully through the years, and frequently spotting fake footage.
And the Albert Brooks flop sweat is one of the funniest scenes ever.
It’s both funny and excruciating.
I practically broke out in a flop sweat just watching it.
Say, Scrubb, do you identify with the post or pre-dragon Eustace?
Given his avatar, I’d guess during-dragon Eustace. :D
I’ve actually done it during a broadcast. The IFB is a modern miracle. Or as we say, “Announcers are in the booth, talent is in the truck!”
I hadn’t noticed the avatar. You’re right.
Although I would like to see Jack Nicholson moderate Meet the Press …
ha ha, that makes me think of “You can’t handle the truth.” [that was Jack, right?]
I was just telling my Dad a few days ago, after watching a music video on Youtube*, that I have noticed in watching movies or music videos from that era I sometimes feel a momentary streak of melancholy, even when it is before I can actually remember/or something I wasn’t old enough to have participated in (having been born in ’81).
* The fact that I can do such a thing now adds to my regret of so many hours wasted on MTV, something I first saw with my teenage babysitter back then.
And she paid for that condom herself too.
It’s streaming on NF, I assume you saw it there. I’ll have to watch it sometime this week.
kylez
And she paid for that condom herself too.
Times were different, Kylez. Back then phones had wires, and TVs had antennas.
I always enjoy reading what you have to say, katievs. Glad to see you here!