One of the things which the passing of the Reagan/Thatcher era took from popular culture was the pervasive presence of alternative subcultures in dystopian fiction. Virtually every thriller, sci-fi or horror movie from the onset of punk until the early '90s was soaked in alternative fashion and featured a shifting casts of mohawked outcasts, shadow-dwelling vamps and intimidating punk rockers – from 'Bladerunner's cyberpunk operatics to the street gangs of 'Escape from New York' and the chain-wielding bikers of 'Streets of Fire'; these mutated manifestations of youth culture were either predicted to spraypaint a bleak future with neon pink and studded leather or else describe a present that already was, as every average gritty cop drama of the mid-'80s would feature the protagonist in some seedy new wave club featuring glowering skinheads and spike-collared vixens. And then...nothing. So, what happened?
The first factor in
this equation was the explosive effect of punk fashion on all
televisual media. Not only was it the first wave of youth culture to
have a confrontational and nihilistic attitude towards the boomer
generation, it was also so vague as to be universally fascinating and
exploitable to Hollywood; so soon the basic elements of punk culture
were appearing in films such as 'Taxi Driver' and the first wave of
punksploitation movies were spawned. A situation quickly arose where
essentially any director who wanted add a sense of 'edge' to their
films could simply rip off the fashions at CBGBs or the Blitz.
Apocalyptic and
dystopian fictions were also all the rage in the 1980s. The re-heated
Cold War rhetoric, economic collapse and crime wave of Reagan's USA
fed into a deeply hysterical pessimism that pervaded film and TV
during the decade, and dystopia was fashionable once again; and so
naturally if you believed modern society (populated by alienated
youth/Generation X/street punks and the miscellaneous forms of the
'80s idea of juvenile delinquents) was on a slide towards a dark
future of pre-apocalyptic ultra-urban techno-misery then it makes
perfect sense that such a world would also be populated by the same
cultures, mutated into technofied forms (which was of course a
factor in the birth of what became cyberpunk). So as this cultural
tension gave way to a cultural complacency in the early '90s these
tropes became less and less fashionable.
But maybe the key
factor was how our collective understanding of cities has changed
over the past 30 years. In the gloomy, nocturnal urban spaces of
these films the characters were always aware of the different
identities of the streets and the collectives and subcultures that
inhabited them, a feeling of territory and the understanding of
space. The Battery is owned by the Bombers; the Richmond likes rock &
roll; the differing gangs of New York carve up the boroughs in 'The
Warriors'; and each space has it's own identity. Even punks and goths
inhabited their own corners of the city. But today's cities are
sterilised, gentrified, commercial and blanded out by adverts and
chain stores – no one really believes they will be crawling with
street punks in 27 years as much as anyone can believe that today's
subcultures are anything more than atomised and interchangeable.
So the challenge must
be to reclaim our cities as the diverse homes of urban subcultures,
as places for micro-communities to form and resist the creeping rise
of rents and malls. Alternative spaces appear to be much more
resilient in fiction than in reality, but they can still be built and
defended.
And we don't even need
our cities to become high-rise prisons in a post-nuclear wasteland to
do it.
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