I moved to Melbourne halfway through the eighties. A friend from Uni, Margot, got a job with the La Trobe Uni SRC and I got out of Brisbane and moved in with her. I was new in town and had a mild depression which made me lethargic and clingy. So my social life for the first year was mainly hers (we weren't intimately involved, by the way) and that meant a lot of other people who worked in student admin.
In the north the various campus unions did all that but down here it was the Student Representative Councils, roses by another name. The movement was under threat at the time and fragmenting into ever softer factions and subparties. So when I tagged along with Margot to Party/party central there was a lot of talk I, using a complete lack of interest, only vaguely understood.
Otherwise these folk were good enough eggs. I knew by then that people who work in the same higher-purpose-heavy area tend to ditch their sense of humour in favour of laughing acknowledgement of cynical comments about their co-workers or common foes (same thing). They are not humourless as such but when they are handed a joke delivered for its own sake, an absurdist throwaway, you might find them rewarding it with a surprised laugh as though they were recalling something they once liked.
One night I went round to watch The Big Chill. One of them had his own copy of the VHS (unusual at the time but I got the idea that it was an unreturned rental). There was a group of them assembled and as the film got under way I felt a rising sense that everyone but I had seen the film many, many times. They were anticipating the gags and murmuring along to the dialogue. This film, a comedy which in its own way confronts baby boomers' nostalgia for the hippy era including its activism, was important to them. In its sadness about the loss of a friend (who, through very little stretching, stood for the idealism of the era) they took a sobering message visible through the feelgood comedy sheen of the surface. They were punk era but the theme applied across the gap. But there was something else.
The film uses period pop music, wall to wall, but it's not from the eighties, it's from the sixties, the era of the characters' nostalgia. The opening credits play out over Heard it Through the Grapevine. The funeral cortege progresses to the strains of the Stones' You Can't Always Get What You Want. A gag is given the equivalent of a snare drum hit with the opening riff to Credence's Bad Moon Rising. And at one point one of the characters is shown lowering the needle on to a record that blasts out the Temptations' Ain't Too Proud to Beg. The scene this plays over is iconic - the ol' gang clean up after the big meal while grooving to the soul - and made its effortless way into a few tv ad campaigns.
This borrowed nostalgia performed the same function as the chemicals in cigarettes, it was a delivery device. By nostalgia, I'm not talking about the hits 'n' memories music of the film but the political naivete that it served up as worldly maturity. The songs were the gravy that sold the meal. But maybe it was the other way around. The Big Chill soundtrack album, bursting with hits 'n' memories appealed to fans of the film and fans of the sixties who were in epidemic in the eighties.
I saw the film again not long after. Same. The next time Margot invited me to go and see it yet again I declined. Two things about this: a mainstream movie had become a genuine cult item within a very few years of its release but it was also the backdrop for more politicking. Centre but backdrop. Function, not art or entertainment.
This didn't surprise me so much. As with almost everyone heavily involved in something like politics; be they ever so hard-liningly radical in their politics they are usually naive when it comes to culture, as though the two things had no business with each other. I think I would have been a doomed Trotskyite in the Russian Revolution (actually, I would have been fleeing for my life like my grandparents but that's neither here nor there). It's the big roosterish humourless alphas who call culture in this environment and it always seems to end up with something like Stalin's social realism (ie I understand it at first sight or you, Mr Filmmaker, explain it from your hut in the gulag). It's the same with all political colours, this is just being told from my experience.
Still, it makes me smile to this day how when I pointed out how naff Midnight Oil were with their big loud yobbo sledgehammer choruses I got a stoney silence in response. The idea that the independent music scene had more anti-establishment qualities by rejecting the conventional market as well as aesthetics. Ok, I had my own naivete, but at least I understood that just changing the muscle only changed the muscle and if you wanted permanent dynamic change you had to change the playground too.
But whether it's Midnight Oil's bumper sticker rock or The Big Chill's ersatz nostalgia, using borrowed cultural moments to carry messages tends to allow those messages to be flimsy. All you have in the end is a cultural stock cube in a sealed package on a shelf. The Big Chill was nowhere near the first film to wallpaper its soundtrack with sourced music but it was the significant first to do so with such cynicism and its many, many, many imitators helped to make the eighties the most gormlessly bumfaced decade of modern mainstream cinema. But then in the nineties Tarantino and his entourage shifted the nostalgia effect to a further abstraction by appealing to audiences' understanding of vintage cinema, allowing them at the same time to believe they were into something new: the post-modern boogie. There's been a return to sorts lately with things like Mad Men using period pop music for irony as much as authenticity. Honourable mention should also go to Underbelly Razor for dressing classic oz rock tunes in jazz age arrangements digetically (ie performed as part of the scenes), a weak dramatic effort with a strong musical idea. Anyway...
While I've been at comics for about fifteen years my first point of call when conceiving of a story is cinema. The Monsoons began with just such a sourced score, however imaginary. I even put a cd together with late seventies hits 'n' memories to help me envisage it. My intention (still might do it) was to replace that with a soundtrack album of my own music as I went. What has happened is that I remembered things like the story this post began with and how repellent I find this lazy shortcut to atmosphere which was dumped the more I developed the story that has become the comic. There is one reference to a contemporary pop song, KC's Please Don't Go. It's in there because Meg uses it as a lifeline and because everybody, hip new wavers like Marty, self-pleasing alphas like Joshua, severely sensible types like Ruth and embittered, anti-sentimental, recently dumped people like Gail all love it. It was the More Than a Feeling of the end of the seventies (ie anyone who said they didn't like it was lying). Apart from that the music I hear when I draw or write these characters sounds like the nearby surf or, at worst, a tinny radio in another room.
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