If you love summer SF blockbuster films, you’ll find this season a tad thin. Last year they didn’t show up at all, the screens dominated by Barbie and Oppenheimer. This year we’re up for mere retreads of the Alien, Mad Max, and Crow franchises, with a flicker of promise only in the pairing of Deadpool and Wolverine for F-bombing superhero mayhem, which doesn’t quite count as science fiction.
Things were different in the 1970s and early ’80s. First, as Chris Nashawaty documents in The Future Was Now (Flatiron Books, July 30), came Star Wars, which thrilled geeks in the summer of 1977. More beyond-the-stars masterworks followed until we hit the summer of 1982, when Blade Runner, Tron, E.T., and The Thing hit the theaters in rapid succession, a flurry of SF creativity that’s never been equaled. There’s a reason for that, writes Nashawaty, for soon afterward the suits wrested power from the creatives, tightened budgets, and skimped on niceties like scriptwriting and special effects, leading to turkeys like Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Masters of the Universe. It’s instructive, though, that the 1982 hits remain in heavy rotation on the streaming services, where audiences have migrated.
It’s not science fiction, but David Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet remains a compelling study in psychotic dysfunction, personified by the maniacal Dennis Hopper and the louche Dean Stockwell. It’s a weird flick, essential for fans of existential horror (entomology too), and its very weirdness lands it in Greil Marcus’s canon. In What Nails It (Yale Univ., Aug. 27), Marcus, the renowned rock critic, ponders the opening sequence in particular, joining it to his meditations on the “old, weird America” of documents like Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” Beauty and resistance to ugly authoritarianismgo hand in hand—a useful lesson in this long, hot election summer—if only we open our eyes. As Marcus memorably writes, “There are whole worlds around us that we have never seen.”
One world not often visited lies in that part of the Venn diagram where casual sex, heaps of drugs, and—yes—opera intersect. That’s the world described in brilliant composer Ricky Ian Gordon’s Seeing Through (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, July 23), which recounts a golden age of its own, its soundtrack courtesy of Joni Mitchell and Stephen Sondheim. It’s the music that, Gordon writes, is “the cause of most of my joy in life, as well as much of my unhappiness,” the latter served up against a time when the carefree 1970s gave way to the remorseless and ugly ’80s, those SF classics notwithstanding.
Robyn Hitchcock, the brilliantly idiosyncratic rocker, finds his happy place in 1967 (Akashic, July 2), a year of extraordinary music (Sergeant Pepper, Are You Experienced?). Hitchcock is unapologetically nostalgic for his teenage world of Nehru jackets and sandalwood incense. His own musical career took off a few years later thanks in part to the great producer Joe Boyd, whose second book, a celebration of world music called And the Roots of Rhythm Remain (ZE Books), hits the shelves on Sept. 3. At 750 pages, it’s a blockbuster itself—and just the thing for music lovers.
Gregory McNamee is a contributing writer.
