Let’s play Ten for Ten! To commemorate the ten-year anniversary of this blog, which launched on June 26, 2014, here’s an appreciation for ten of my formative cinematic influences—an examination of why these movies resonated with me when I first saw them, and how they permanently informed my aesthetic tastes and creative sensibilities. This post is presented in three installments.
“Under the Influence, Part 1” informally ponders through personal example how an artist develops a singular style and voice all their own, and offers an analysis of Quentin Tarantino’s essay collection Cinema Speculation, the auteur’s critical look at the movies of the ’70s that inspired him.
In “Under the Influence, Part 2,” I spotlight five films from my ’80s childhood that shaped my artistic intuition when at its most malleable.
And in “Under the Influence, Part 3,” I round out the bill with five selections from my ’90s adolescence, the period during which many of the themes that preoccupy me crystalized.
Given that my childhood coincided with what Quentin Tarantino terms “the miserable eighties”—that decade of “middle-of-the-road successful films”1 during which “likeability was everything”2—the following ten cinematic specimens that impressed so notably upon my nascent imagination, accordingly, span the years 1978 through 1993.
Before we dive in, let’s stipulate what this digest isn’t. These are not what I consider the Best Movies Ever, or even the best movies of their era, neither of which I am particularly qualified to judge.
Furthermore, they are not necessarily even my favorite movies, merely the ones that made a meaningful, lasting, and demonstrable impression on me, and whose DNA has (repeatedly) found their way into my own work.
Nor does this cover my literary or musical influences, because, as Geddy Lee suggests, the project of tracing this stuff ain’t easy; it took a surprising amount of rumination to settle upon the ten selections studied here. (None of them are particularly obscure; if you haven’t seen all ten, you’ve at least heard of them.)
I have excluded any films that may have once held sway over me, particularly ’80s action movies (from police thrillers to sci-fi dystopias to car-worshipping petro-propaganda), whose hypermasculine spirit and/or trashy cynicism I can no longer in good conscience abide.
It must also be noted I am uncomfortably aware of how, well, white all my chosen case studies are. The filmmakers and screenwriters are nigh exclusively straight white men, with the known exceptions of Joel Schumacher, Leslie Newman, and Janice Fischer.
What’s more, every protagonist across the board is a straight white male, several of them either explicitly or implicitly Irish American, at that. Boys like me were very well represented in popular media back then—still are—as there are precious few actors of color to be found in any these productions, and, in those rare instances, always in small or supporting roles.
These cinematic influences are all unambiguously predicated on a heteronormative worldview and a white male perspective. I acknowledge that.
But… as much as they (mostly) glorify white boys, they all (save one) speak to at least one of two themes that have fascinated me throughout my life, and which are the dominant subjects of my own fiction.
The first is the complicated dynamic between fathers/men and sons/boys.
The second: the special bond of boyhood friendship, and how boys often look to each other for the emotional support they don’t get from their parents.
The stories I respond to and the stories I write are, for the most part, about straight white males. But I consciously seek to eschew the reductive paradigms favored by Hollywood—notably the solitary antihero and middle-aged manchild—in favor of men who are competent but not superheroic, compassionate but not saintly, flawed but not cruel, and definitely not proudly antisocial, brazenly irresponsible, or comfortably violent.
In stark contrast with Tarantino’s reflexively defensive view that cinematic expressions of violence and hypermasculinity (to say nothing of the institutionalized misogyny that inspirits them) are harmless exercises in wish fulfillment, I believe commercial storytellers—particularly straight white cisgendered men—have a moral obligation to be a productive part of the cultural conversation initiated by the #MeToo movement and the George Floyd protests:
We have spent the past half-decade wrestling with ideas of gender and privilege, attempting to challenge the old stereotypes and power structures. These conversations should have been an opportunity to throw out the old pressures and norms of manhood, and to help boys and men be more emotionally open and engaged. But in many ways this environment has apparently had the opposite effect—it has shut them down even further. . . .
Perhaps it’s not surprising that in the grip of the culture wars, caring about boys has become subtly coded as a right-wing cause, a dog whistle for a kind of bad-faith politicking. Men have had way more than their fair share of our concern already, the reasoning goes, and now it’s time for them to pipe down. But for boys, privilege and harm intertwine in complex ways—male socialization is a strangely destructive blend of indulgence and neglect. Under patriarchy, boys and men get everything, except the thing that’s most worth having: human connection.
Silencing or demonizing boys in the name of progressive ideals is only reinforcing this problem, pushing them further into isolation and defensiveness. The prescription for creating a generation of healthier, more socially and emotionally competent men is the same in the wider political discourse as it is in our own homes—to approach boys generously rather than punitively. We need to acknowledge boys’ feelings, to talk with our sons in the same way we do our daughters, to hear them and empathize rather than dismiss or minimize, and engage with them as fully emotional beings.
Ruth Whippman, “Boys Get Everything, Except the Thing That’s Most Worth Having,” Opinion, New York Times, June 5, 2024
The storytellers could contribute to a meaningful shift of the cultural mindset if we summoned the moral imagination to refuse to further represent masculinity as a binary (and compulsory) choice between two equally oppressive and simplistic models of social posturing and self-identity—either he-man or Peter Pan—and dared to instead portray boys and men as human beings of nuanced emotion, as capable of expressing sympathy as they are deserving of receiving it.
Now more than ever, we need thoughtful, responsible fiction by men about men—stories that explore masculinity and manhood without invoking the same tired, narrow, noxious archetypes of tough-guy antiheroes who “play by their own rules” and stunted-adolescent slackers for whom rules, the mere acknowledgment of let alone adherence to, are the stuff of “adulting,” and fuck that shit. Such prosocial, aspirational fiction might very well be called helpful exercises in wish fulfillment. That’s what I’ve called for, and what I strive to produce myself.
Now let’s look, in mostly linear order, at the films that shaped my tastes and style, starting with the first five (of ten) selections. Click on any of the links below to jump directly to that particular subheading and its corresponding treatise:
- Superman: The Movie (1978)
- Ghostbusters (1984)
- Back to the Future (1985)
- Stand by Me (1986)
- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
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