4. Get a buddy/Make an enemy.
The bad guys are the memorable characters in into-the-night movies—like gas-huffing Blue Velvet ganglord Dennis Hopper, whose animal attraction to Rossellini mirrors MacLachlan's own barely caged lust. Or wiry Ray Liotta in Something Wild, who ruins Daniels oat-sowing adventure with Griffith by delivering a down-to-the-bone ass-beating.
But even more than the villains, the sidekicks help our heroes' respective journeys along. In Repo Man, Harry Dean Stanton teaches Emilio Estevez the practicalities and deeper philosophies of car repossession. In Ferris Bueller, Broderick squires Ruck around downtown Chicago, showing him how to enjoy life on his family's dime. In Planes, Trains & Automobiles, Candy's working-class vulgarity gives the prim, professional Martin a lesson in loosening up. And in Midnight Run, convicted embezzler Charles Grodin gets under the skin of bounty hunter Robert De Niro, who may know more than Grodin about navigating the underworld, but lacks his quarry's disarmingly kindly soul.
Sometimes, friendship comes in threes. In Down By Law, Tom Waits, Roberto Benigni, and John Lurie meet in prison and become reluctant partners in a jailbreak, and a subsequent run through the Louisiana bayou. And in The Last American Virgin, Lawrence Monoson follows the advice of his two sex-obsessed best friends and ends up sexless and penniless after paying for the abortion of the girl he has a crush on. A girl who got pregnant by one of those pals. And who goes back to that pal after she recovers from the procedure. With friends like these, etc.
5. Adapt.
Repo Man's underlying message concerns the way L.A. punker Estevez becomes a natural at boosting cars legally, because being antisocial and working for the man aren't that fundamentally different. A lot of '80s movies are about subcultures learning to conform, like in Down By Law, where the three old-school hipster nightcrawlers discover that their time has long since passed, and the only way to get right is to light out to the middle of nowhere. Even more poignantly, in Running On Empty, an entire family fragments because the hippie parents—on the run from the law since a protest went awry in the '60s—can't hold on to their son River Phoenix, who's too smart and talented to hide. They have to send him out of anonymity, and hope that some of the ideals they instilled in him take hold.
Meanwhile, by the end of Dunne's night in After Hours, he's begun to figure out how to navigate the topsy-turvy world of New York's new bohemia, and to turn its denizens against each other. And in Lost In America, Brooks finally discovers the true U.S.A. when he has to park his RV in a trailer park and take a minimum-wage job. That painful reality sends him scrambling back to the city—New York instead of Los Angeles—to beg for his six-figure advertising gig back.
But nobody in the '80s adapted like Cruise in Risky Business, who masterminded an off-the-books Junior Achievement project by turning his lovely suburban home into a brothel. Time of your life, huh kid?
6. Wake up.
Princeton could use a guy like Cruise, he's told at the end of Risky Business, as his dad holds up a letter from the university's interviewer, a happy customer of Cruise's makeshift whorehouse. In Body Double, Wasson escapes from his near-death experiences as an amateur detective and becomes a braver actor. In Blue Velvet, MacLachlan and Dern take an intimate moment to reflect, objectively at last, on the nature of evil, as a weird-ass, mechanical-looking bird chirps in the background, greeting the new dawn.
Aside from The Last American Virgin and After Hours—which ends with Dunne deposited back at his word-processing job, not having slept a wink—everything tends to work out for those who ventured into the night in the '80s. Even in A Night In The Life Of Jimmy Reardon, poet and player River Phoenix gets to cheat on his rich, virginal girlfriend with her slutty best friend and with a friend of his own mother, yet come out of it the next morning with the grudging respect of his gruff ol' pop.
Of course, Jimmy Reardon, unlike most of the movies above, was set in the past, just like Porky's, The Outsiders, Stand By Me, and a handful of other movies that skirted the '80s increasingly dry repression by hearkening back to an earlier time, when the seeds of the counterculture were originally planted. In a recent essay on Bonnie & Clyde, New York Times critic A.O. Scott quoted Pauline Kael's original review, in which she explained how the film captured the unspoken concerns and unformed aesthetic of the late-'60s youth movement, insisting, "Once something is said or done on the screens of the world, it can never again belong to a minority, never again be the private possession of an educated, or 'knowing,' group.
Yet by the '80s, that’s exactly what was happening, as the culture at large began to assert that the youthful ideals of the previous decade-plus were aberrant and miniscule, held primarily by individuals looking for cheap thrills—and not, say, by masses of young Americans expressing their gratitude for liberty by exercising it. A handful of movies scattered across the decade served as beacons to those desperate not to feel alone in their appetites—base as they sometimes were. Those movies, and their progeny like Superbad today, beckoned us to watch, learn, and take comfort in our shared weakness for sin.
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