It was the year the 80s officially became "The 80s", with no more overlap from the 70s. In the opinion of this writer, and a few others as well, the year 1983 profoundly changed, altered or broke the fundamental normalcy of our world, our consensus reality, and was a ground-zero year for what would ultimately become "the Digital Age" of our now Hypermodern, internet-dominated, technocratic reality. Without knowing it consciously, this truly seismic year has haunted me since I turned 15 years old during the spring of '83. And only relatively recently, say in the past several years or so, likely since I discovered Vaporwave music, watched the first season of Stranger Things, and Panos Cosmatos' two darkly revealing films, 2010's Beyond the Black Rainbow and 2018's Mandy (both set in the year 1983), has this stark realization finally surfaced in my conscious mind.
One of the others that has been experiencing what I've been going through as well is author and blogger for The Secret Sun, and fellow Gen-Xer, Chris Knowles, whose published books include, "Our Gods Wear Spandex", "The Secret History of Rock 'n' Roll", "The Complete X-Files: Behind the Series, the Myths, and the Movies", and his recent, outstanding collection of Secret Sun blogs, dating from the late-2000s to 2021, "The Endless American Midnight". One of those blog articles in said book first appeared last year and is titled, "1983: the Year That Broke Reality". He began his article in immediate fashion:
"Nineteen eighty-three hovers like a wraith over all my work and I've never been quite sure why. All I know is that I sensed something definitively change in the spring and summer of that year, even if those changes have only become apparent in the past few years. But all I can say for sure is that something somehow seemed to have entered our world from somewhere else. I've never been able to define it and I can only try to track it by what you might call a process of elimination. It's harder than it sounds."
I couldn't agree more with Chris's last sentence, it is very difficult to explain, describe and articulate the elusive essence and nature, or rather mysterious "denature", of that certain "something" from "somewhere" that "somehow entered our world" completely in 1983, reaching peak frequency between May and November, after its seemingly conjuring process began in late 1982 and ultimately spilled over into the early months of 1984.
So, as close to its tenuous proximity as I can access, regarding what it was exactly that happened in the zeitgeist, hyper-morphing pole shift that was 1983, thus forever altering our collective reality en masse going forward, whether one was conscious, semi-conscious or totally oblivious of it, I will simply start with a few immensely significant, world-changing technological innovations that appeared in 1983.
Well, for starters, and quite literally, on January 1st, 1983, the frickin' Internet was born! They referred to it as "Flag Day" when the migration of the ARPANET, that is, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, to TCP/IP, the Internet protocol suite (i.e. Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol), was offically completed, permanently activating these new protocols. After several years of further TCP/IP development and experimental use, with major tech companies like IBM, AT & T and DEC, along with smaller ones such as FTPSoftware and Wollongong Group, all participating in trial 'n' error demonstrations between each other, the ultimate spread of TCP/IP computer technology finally reached the public domain in June of 1989. And then it became commercially available to all consumers during the summer of 1995 as Windows 95 with the major ad campaign slogan, "Start Me Up" via The Rolling Stones' classic rock song.
The first mobile cellular phones, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, or as they were cheekily referred to, unwieldy "brick phones", appeared in 1983; we would soon be seeing these phones appearing in movies and TV shows, usually in the privileged hands of government agents, officials and Wall Street yuppies; and even music videos, such as The Fixx's video for their 1984 hit song, aptly titled, "Are We Ourselves?". Their slightly irksome size would be considerably diminished over the next several years and then suddenly appear in ubiquitous, trendy fashion by the mid-90s, upgraded, dramatically, to what we now know as the all-purpose, conveniently portable, "smart phones", like the ever-popular Apple iPhone line of models. In 1983, we were only at the first generation (1G) of wireless cellular technology, which was of the analog mobile telecommunications standard for the time. It was superseded by 2G in 1991, crucially transitioning from analog to digital capability. We now have arrived at a 5G level technology standard of broadband cellular networks. What generation will eventually deliver a Matrix-like technology standard digital capability? 6G? 7G? Is this the ultimate goal for tech moguls, and for humanity in general?
Also making the technological scene for the first time, in 1983, was the Microsoft Word program, which would eventually be included with Windows 95's computer software. And the two Steve's, Jobs and Wozniak of Apple Computer Inc., would announce the arrival of their electronic baby, the Macintosh 128K PC computer, in October of '83. It would be officially released for purchase in January of 1984, during Super Bowl XVIII, with a very expensive, over-the-top, Orwellian-themed commercial, of course entitled "1984", directed by Ridley Scott, the man who directed the beloved, moody, postmodern noir, cult classic sci-fi film, Blade Runner, in 1982.
In late 1982 and throughout most of 1983, particularly during May through November, the 1982-83 El Nino event, a rare ocean-atmosphere phenomenon, occurred. At the time, it was considered one of the strongest El Nino events since records were kept. Many hurricanes and tropical storms, including Tropical Storm Octave and Hurricanes Gil, Ismael, Iwa, Tico and Raymond, developed and raged, reaching lands located in the southern regions of the U.S., Hawaii, and in Mexico, causing considerable damage, and between 100-200 lives lost. Eastern U.S. and Canada experienced a very mild 1982-83 winter. This extreme climate event caught most scientists off-guard, having not initially noticed the early signs developing in 1982.
Another fascinating phenomenon took place in upstate New York's Hudson Valley subregion beginning in 1982, escalating in 1983, and continuing fairly frequently until around 1985. Allegedly, there were many reported UFO sightings of boomerang-shaped vessels, during the day and at night, for the duration of that time-period. American author, Whitley Strieber, who wrote the popular novels, The Wolfen and The Hunger (which was adapted into the Tony Scott-directed vampire film, starring David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve; a film that had, and continues to have, great influence on the goth sub-culture), claimed that he was abducted by aliens, whom he dubbed "the visitors", from his upstate New York cabin in late 1985. These incredible, other-worldly experiences were chronicled in his 1987 best selling "nonfiction" book, Communion. Two years later, in 1989, it was made into a feature film, starring Christopher Walken, and bombed at the box-office, but has since gained cult film status.
To emphasize the high-weirdness, atmospheric eerieness, mounting anxiety, cognitive displacements and postmodern conjunctions that characterized 1983, there were several strange and atypical movies that were released that "upside-down rendering" year (alluding to the Netflix blockbuster, Stranger Things, of course, which debuted 33 years later and set, appropriately in 1983), both in theatres and on television.
For starters, V: The Original Miniseries, first aired on NBC on May 1st and 2nd. An anti-fascist allegory disguised as a sci-fi adventure romp, V was initially inspired by Sinclair Lewis' 1935 novel, It Can't Happen Here. The two-parter was about a seemingly friendly alien race who "looked like humans", which Earthlings referred to as "the Visitors", who arrived with a fleet of some 50 giant saucer-shaped motherships looking for much-needed chemicals and minerals to remedy their ailing world. In return for Earth's universal hospitality, the Visitors promise to share their amazing, "advanced technology". Relatively soon, however, after the scientific community is curiously subjected to media and public scrutiny and hostility after attempting to examine the Visitors, which leads to restrictions on their activities and movements, resulting in being discredited or suddenly disappearing altogether (hmm...), it's horrifyingly discovered that the Visitors are, in fact, mice-eating reptile humanoid invaders!
The miniseries proved to be a big ratings winner and was only topped by The Day After later that year in November. A major event TV movie, The Day After was a film that dealt with the, at the time, all-too possible scenario of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Collective anxiety was at a fever-pitch in 1983, and for good reason, as we came to the brink of nuclear annihilation a couple of times that year, especially culminating on November 7th when several Soviet officials misinterpreted the NATO exercise called Able Archer 83 as a nuclear first strike, basically forcing a DEFCON 2 level scenario - DEFCON 2 is colour-coded as Red. The colour red was a dominant colour in 1983, in all its psychological and literal associations. Not the least of which, as being associated with the U.S.S.R., the colour red was also featured prominently in V and many other films (such as, aptly enough, WarGames), art, fashion, advertising and music, such as Nena's 1983 international smash-hit, "99 Luftballons", which is translated in english as "99 Red Balloons", an anti-nuclear war song.
Several of the stranger films released in theatres in 1983 - and one particularly significant one "filmed in '83", and literally radiating that year's high-frequency weirdness, but released in early 1984, Repo Man - became box-office failures, only to eventually become beloved cult favorites and semiotics-filled treasures for obsessed, cinematic detectives like me, were the following: Rumble Fish, Strange Invaders, the aforementioned The Hunger, Wavelength, Brainstorm, The Osterman Weekend, Liquid Sky, Christine, Videodrome, Valley Girl, Twilight Zone: The Movie, and The Dead Zone.
Most of these "bitchin'" and rather "rad" films featured off-beat, hallucinogenic, haunting, disorienting, other-worldly, highly-sexualized, weird and eerie settings and atmospheres. And thanks to George Lucas' and Steven Spielberg's special effects influence, as well as great advances in computer technology and graphics, which were really starting to be rolled-out around this time, with PCs, upgraded arcade games and home video games becoming super-popular with consumers, and accelerating consumer-culture in general, the 1983 zeitgiest was a colossally-shimmering mega-glow of electricity, buzzing and bouncing from an ever-expanding electrical grid from ground-level to what I would call "the Electric Ether" of our all-encompassing, denatured, atmospheric density constant membrane that theoretically opened up a possibly forbidden conduit of mind-energy emanating from the collective (un)conscious of a mentally and emotionally barraged populace.
These kinds of critical mass irruptions of human consciousness have happened before in the form of what contemporary philosopher/social critic, John David Ebert, calls a "Maximal Stress Event", most notably in the 20th century with the two World Wars, the Trinity nuclear test of July 16, 1945 in New Mexico, the October/Cuban missile crisis of 1962, and the subsequent assassination of John F. Kennedy; and there is always a stressfully-precipitous, psychical fallout that irrepressibly ensues. One of the more recent Maximal Stress Events was, of course, the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Certain members of the intelligentsia, as well as artists, poets, film-makers, musicians and sensitives in general, represent the comparative few who are able to interpret and express the signs, warnings and wonders of said events, sometimes consciously, but mostly subconsciosly.
In his 2013 book, The Dark Lord: H.P. Lovecraft, Kenneth Grant and the Typhonian Tradition of Magic, author, Peter Levenda, describes such a person in the esoteric writer, and ceremonial magician, Kenneth Grant, who, when confronting said psychical phenomena, concluded that somekind of "invasion" was entering our world:
"Grant clearly believed that the world was undergoing an invasion from some other dimension or from somewhere Beyond. This invasion was being experienced as the UFO phenomenon, among other things. The eruption of interest in occultism, horror films, alternative religions, etc. indicated to Grant that something was already working its way into our world and that the only ones who could interpret this event were the sensitives. Not limited to magicians or occultists, sensitives include artists, writers, and other people who deal extensively with imagination and creativity."
I also feel that the late Mark Fisher, in his final published book, 2017's The Weird and the Eerie, described a corresponding, if indirect, effect of the Electric Ether on the sensitives via the weird and eerie:
"The folding of the weird and the eerie into the unheimlich (Freud's term for the uncanny, the strange, and the 'unhomely' - that which is not familiar and comfortable; much like the Overlook Hotel setting and atmosphere in Stanley Kubrick's evermore relevant 1980 horror masterpiece, The Shining) is symptomatic of a secular retreat from the outside. The wider predilection for the unheimlich is commensurate with a compulsion towards a certain kind of critique, which operates by always processing the outside through the gaps and impasses of the inside. The weird and the eerie make the opposite move: they allow us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside."
A few examples of pop-rock music from 1983 that perfectly encapsulates the sound, tone, vibe and atmosphere of that bewitching year are Men at Work's hit single, "Overkill" ("Ghosts appear and fade away/ Come back another day."); Australian Crawl's "Reckless (Don't Be So)" (this fantastic song's hauntingly dark and moody music is crucially enhanced by its unforgettable, Lynchian-like video, which effectively captures on film the very essence of 1983, as blinking red light emits from an unoccupied Ford Thunderbird, while lead-singer, James Reyne, sings about "Russian subs beneath the arctic" in the chiaroscuro shadows); SSQ's "Synthicide" and "Anonymous" (both appearing on their lone album, Playback, prior to their surprising 2020 comeback album; each song expresses the inescapable feeling of disorientation and disjointed sense of self and identity while immersed in the new technological world; "Anonymous" also plays during the closing credits to Beyond the Black Rainbow). And last but certainly not least, perhaps the most definitive exponent of 1983 displacement and unseen foreboding, The Police's ironically blockbuster, smash-hit album, Synchronicity, an album absolutely replete with "time out of joint" tracks and hit-singles; perhaps no better summed up than in "Synchronicity II" with these cryptic, closing lyrics: "Many miles away there's a shadow on the door of a cottage on the shore of a dark Scottish lake."
Finally, and most curiously, 1983 seems to have, vicariously, captured the imagination and beleaguered attention of a certain cross-section of Millennials and even Gen-Zers. Vaporwave music has not only expressed a hypermodern critique of capitalism and consumer culture at large, but has unwittingly tapped into the residual, spectral electric-echo of 1983 (and the 80s in general). Panos Cosmotos' two "1983 films", the aforementioned Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010) and Mandy (2018) have gained a fervent cult following of Millennial and Gen-Z fans. And, of course, there's the massive success of Netflix's Stranger Things that so impressively channelled '83 in its first, and best, season. Finally, just recently in 2022, the relatively popular goth/industrial metal band, In This Moment, released the first track from their upcoming EP, titled Blood 1983. The song is a re-recording of 2012's, "Whore" and is given the title, "Whore 1983", which features instantly recognizable '83 synths and visual aesthetics.
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However the more discerning wants to interpret/explain it, the fact of the matter is 1983 continues to haunt the 21st century with a ghostly vengeance, as if it's unwaveringly determined to communicate something to us that we, collectively, young and old, have yet to grasp, admit and/or come to terms with.
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