Despite the sporadically hot weather, somehow the summer has really crept up on my me. But then, time moves very quickly anymore. I spoke with my college-age nephew on Tuesday and he had just completed the last of his final exams. I’d forgotten how long college summers were! And then yesterday, while scrolling on Facebook, I saw that somebody noted that it was 40 years to the day since the release of “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” I don’t know why this hit me with such force. I am a nostalgic person by nature, so I am very much aware of the passage of time. But I guess since 1984 was really my last summer of uncomplicated freedom, it carries a little more significance than usual.
Looking back, movie-wise, that summer turned out to be the last and least of our high school summers, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t go to the movies all the time and that I wasn’t entertained.
Funny, looking at a list of the releases now, I realize what a weak summer it was, next to those of the earlier ’80s. Indy will always be closest to my heart, of course, although this one was the shakiest of the ’80s trio. It’s still like “Citizen Kane” next to “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” proving that even the disappointing movies back then were better than anything being made now! And John Williams’ music, as it so often was, was the soundtrack to my summer.
It was also the summer of “Ghostbusters,” of course, and “Splash” was fun, if slight. I was really looking forward to “Greystoke,” which was entertaining (it was beautifully mounted and Ian Holm was great), but it seems like someone must have edited the hell out of it. I’m not a fan of “directors’ cuts,” but this one could have really used one. Again, “Gremlins” was entertaining, but even then I knew it was slick, sick trash. By then, the Spielberg formula was well-worn, and this one skimmed very close to the surface. (It should be noted that this was the summer that led to the PG-13 rating, due to the mounting intensity of movies marketed to the young.)
“Star Trek III,” though a step down from “Khan,” on which it heavily relied, got the job done. Poignantly (and all-too-appropriately, with the frontiers of youth dwindling), the Enterprise goes down in flames. “Buckaroo Banzai” was self-consciously hip, and again entertaining, but not all that it could have been. “Romancing the Stone” (actually released in March) was okay. Again, entertaining, but pretty disposable. I’m glad it gave Zemeckis a boost, but it was no Indiana Jones. At least it took a different approach (and to be honest, it was more consistent than “Temple of Doom”).
But of course it was the off-screen adventure and romance that really resounded. It would be our last hurrah before the old gang was disbanded, our American Graffiti summer. People continued to return from school for holidays and for a good portion of the summer of ’85, of course, but soon other opportunities, interests, and friendships began to present themselves, and we saw one another less and less, and then everyone started to get jobs and get into relationships and gradually disappear from our Neverland. Believe me, I extended my childhood as long as any person possibly could. But there was much weight on my heart back then, nostalgia and longing and melancholy, and much torment in my soul, if I ever tried to rewatch the movies I’d watched during my school years or revisit the stories I’d written.
Of course, my mother was still alive and the house continued to function pretty much as it always had. Hard to believe that we moved in only in the summer of ’83, before my senior year of high school. But I returned to it whenever I could, on weekends and holidays, through the time I opened my own business and started working at the radio in 1995.
After that, my attic bedroom gradually became a storage space, a dumping ground for old clothing, curtains, bins of wrapping paper, boxes of photos. To revisit now is like taking a submersible through the wreckage of the Titanic, everything perfectly preserved under layers of sand and coral. I need to finish cleaning that place out. I’ve already retrieved some of my most valued items, but I’ve even got shoes and clothing up there from back-in-the-day, which really should go. Do I have the heart to get rid of it? Every piece of bric-a-brac is loaded with memory.
I know I said much the same thing a couple of years ago, when recollecting the summer of ‘82, but when I die, if there’s a heaven, and they let me in, I hope it’s an awful lot like the early ‘80s.
