Super 8 (2011) is nostalgic and meta-fictional in more ways than one. Set in 1979, it is self-consciously about the past. You could say there is product placement in the film, but those products are shown not for commercial purposes (or at least not directly) but to recreate the atmosphere of the past. I think this is done mostly in good taste and generally pretty effectively. Super 8 evokes the 1970s pretty well, I think. That's especially true in the character of Cary McCarthy, the kid with the explosives, played by Ryan Lee. The moviemakers seem to have gone back in time to fetch him into the 2010s. I knew kids who looked and acted just like him then.
Super 8 is also self-consciously about the moviemaking of the past. J.J. Abrams (Gen X) wrote and directed it in the Steven Spielberg-Joe Dante-Richard Donner mode of the 1980s. (Two of those three are very early Baby Boomers. Steven Spielberg was born in Ohio.) Mr. Spielberg in fact co-produced Super 8. So the movie is an attempt to recreate two pasts, the real-life adolescent past of the 1970s and the moviemaking past of the 1980s. By the way, Joe Dante directed Explorers (1985), another teenage science fiction movie, which may have been an inspiration for the video for The Smashing Pumpkins song "Rocket," released in 1994. The action in the video crosses the decades by way of an Einsteinian time dilation, and so there is depicted, all together, past, present, and future.
Super 8 is about some kids trying to make a movie when they are interrupted by a train wreck. (A dozen years after the movie was released, a real train wreck occurred on the opposite end of Ohio, in East Palestine. The harm there was real. Unlike in the movie, the response of the U.S. government was slow and ineffective. I suspect that that was a kind of punishment meted out to a bunch of deplorables who would dare to vote for the other party and candidate. On the other hand, it could have been due simply to stupidity and incompetence. Robert A. Heinlein made that formulation in 1941. His insights carry through to today.) In Zapruder-film or Blowup (1966) fashion, they examine their film for evidence of what has happened. So Super 8 is a movie about moviemaking within the movie and refers to moviemaking outside of the movie. I would call that meta. And now it occurs to me that Super 8 is like an adolescent version of Boogie Nights (released in 1997, set in the 1970s and '80s) except that the moviemakers within that film are interrupted by changes in technology, lots of drug use, and those forever pesky human feelings and relationships. Super 8 happens before the apple and Boogie Nights after. The amateur child actors in Super 8, by the way, are better than the adult porn actors are in Boogie Nights, within their respective movies of course.
One more thing about "Rocket" . . .
Awhile back I noticed a similarity--and a distinct difference--in the lyrics of "Rocket" compared to those of "For Pete's Sake" by The Monkees, released in 1967 and used as the closing theme of The Monkees TV show. In the former, the singer--Billy Corgan--closes by exclaiming, "I shall be free/I shall be free." In the latter, the singer--Micky Dolenz--closes with a similar exclamation: "We gotta be free/We gotta be free." The first, though, is about only an individual, while the second is about an entire generation. I versus we. Mr. Corgan was born the year the Monkees song was released, but as a Gen Xer, does he have the same sense of belonging to a generation as did the young people of the 1960s? Or was one of the significant changes of the late 1980s and the whole of the 1990s a sense of separation and isolation among young people from the wider world, including from people their own age? So much of the 1960s was about young people. Could the same thing be said of those later years and decades?
Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley
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