The ‘80s in 40: ‘Flashdance’ (April 15, 1983)

The ‘80s in 40 revisits the decade of the 1980s choosing four movies a year, one from each quarter. This entry covers the second quarter of 1983.

Sometimes a movie seems to have escaped from the near future. Take M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable, for instance. Released in November 2000, the film opens with a crawl filled with facts about comic books as if they were exotic objects in need of explanation to most of the world. But the film itself resembles a response to the wave of superhero movies that would appear in the years after its release, stripping down the capes-and-tights mythology to its basic components to create a spare, humane origin story. Only X-Men, effectively the first ripple of that flood, beat it to theaters by a few months that year, but Unbreakable plays less like a harbinger of the superhero trend than a preemptive corrective to the explosive spectacles to come.

I’ve come to think of Risky Business in much the same way. One of only two features directed by Paul Brickman, the film that made Tom Cruise a star was released in August 1983. That’s too soon to be a response to Flashdance, which would hit theaters in April, much less the many ‘80s movies that valued competition, personal achievement, and (especially) winning over all else that would follow. (Some of these would also star Tom Cruise.) But Risky Business seems to sense what was coming in movies, and what, in the early years of the Reagan era, had already arrived elsewhere.

Risky Business is packaged as a raucous sex comedy and tells a story that, in the broad strokes, could just as easily belong to a Porky’s knock-off: a high schooler named Joel (Cruise) falls for a sex worker named Lana (Rebecca DeMornay) and turns his parents’ upscale suburban home into a brothel. On the most basic level, Risky Business delivers the raunchy comedy goods, but the film has an unsettling undercurrent that keeps suggesting protagonist Joel is unwittingly giving away his soul. The theatrical ending, where it becomes clear that Joel and Lana might sleep together again but will undoubtedly drift apart, works well enough. But Brickman’s original final scene—which concludes with Joel and Lana attempting to toast to their success, and the success they expect to have in the future, then clinging to each other like lost children who suddenly realize they live in a big, scary world certain to tear them apart and maybe swallow them up—feels truer to what’s come before. 

Risky Business gives viewers both the high of the big win but also the inevitable next-day comedown in which the ostensible winners have to question what it all meant. Other broadly similar movies would simply end on the high, whatever drama preceded it. In Top Gun, Maverick gets over Goose’s death by being awesome. Daniel in The Karate Kid uses the crane stance to kick his rival in the face and everyone cheers. Louden completes Vision Quest’s vision quest by defeating his hulking opponent. Taken as a whole, a swathe of ‘80s films—some of them, it must be said, quite good—create a deadening sense that success is an end unto itself and that little else matters. It’s as if the pendulum that Michael Ritchie helped pull in the direction of bittersweet meditations on what it meant to win in America with Downhill Racer, Smile, The Candidate, and The Bad News Bears was now careening wildly in the other direction. Put another way: You couldn’t make Rocky in the early ‘80s. But you could make Rocky III.

You could also make Flashdance. Let’s start at the end: In the film’s second-most famous scene, heroine Alex Owens (Jennifer Beals) auditions before the Pittsburgh Conservatory of Dance and Repertory. After a rough start, Alex delivers a tour de force performance that draws from ballet, contemporary dance, and breakdancing. She exits in triumph and meets her boyfriend Nick (Michael Nouri) (and her dog). They embrace. Freeze frame. Roll credits.