Halt and Catch Fire Is the Antidote to ’80s Nostalgia
By Amy Woolsey
Halt and Catch Fire presents the ’80s with a bracing clarity that stands out amid a pop culture landscape swarming with nostalgia.
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In 2010, Hollywood came down with a severe case of ‘80s fever. That year saw the release of Tron: Legacy, the sequel to a cult-favorite curiosity, and Hot Tub Time Machine, a comedy about middle-aged dudes trying to relive their MTV-era glory days. Since then, we’ve been inundated with movies seeking to exploit people’s memories of that decade, from remakes (21 Jump Street) and sequels (Terminator: Genysis) to period pieces (Adventureland) and throwbacks (The Guest).
This year is no different. With four months remaining, we have Richard Linklater’s college romp Everybody Wants Some!!, John Carney’s coming-of-age musical Sing Street, and Paul Feig’s divisive Ghostbusters reboot – not to mention the sneaky-popular Netflix series Stranger Things. 2016’s offerings have been comparatively high-quality, each garnering its share of avid fans. But for anyone not overly fond of the ‘80s, the incessant nostalgia can be wearisome, like attending a stranger’s high school reunion. And it probably won’t subside anytime soon.
Enter Halt and Catch Fire, which returns Tuesday at 9 p.m., EST for its third season. The AMC drama, co-created by Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers, chronicles the revolution in personal computing from the viewpoint of four people looking to break into the industry. The show unfolds during the ‘80s (season one started in 1983, and the new season picks up in 1986), but it presents the time period with a bracing clarity that stands out amid a pop culture landscape swarming with nostalgia.
As a matter of fact, it can be easy to forget Halt and Catch Fire takes place in the past at all. The costumes and sets feel lived-in, lacking the lush elegance of, say, Mad Men or even the kitschy austerity of The Americans. Except for the occasional tilted angle or jitter, the cinematography is unobtrusive, placing viewers in the room alongside the characters rather than maintaining a cool distance the way prestige dramas so often do. Again unlike Mad Men or The Americans, it rarely explores current events in depth, its scope confined to individual lives and concerns; history remains at the periphery, abstract. This hardly means the setting is irrelevant, but it influences the show’s mood more than its plot.
The ‘80s weren’t a sentimental decade. It was the era of deregulation, postfeminism, synthesized music, and self-help movements. You can sense this relentless momentum, the hunger for progress, in the attitude Joe (Lee Pace), Cameron (Mackenzie Davis), Gordon (Scoot McNairy), and Donna (Kerry Bisché) have toward their jobs. They are enamored with technology, sincerely believing that one innovation – a talking computer, for example – will transform the world. They not only embrace change but engineer it, hoping to be part of the bright future that at last appears within reach. In the episode “Giant”, Joe tells an old friend, “Stop living in the past. Why bother with any of that now?” That basically sums up his philosophy.
From a 21st century perspective, the show’s depiction of technology might seem quaint, even romantic. We know that computers, like most machines, are imperfect: they age as rapidly as pop culture references; they obstruct social interactions even as they are supposed to facilitate it; they raise thorny questions about privacy and agency. Our simultaneous reliance on and skepticism of digital technology is manifested in the dystopias conjured up by Black Mirror and Mr. Robot. In contrast, Halt and Catch Fire returns to a time when computers were new and exciting, full of infinite promise, before tech culture solidified its reputation as a bastion of bro-y entitlement and online forums became cesspools of vitriol. It reminds us that the ability to give inanimate objects personality or have conversations with people on the other side of the country is miraculous.
Yet, this isn’t a utopia. Like Mad Men did with advertising, Halt and Catch Fire uses technology primarily as a means of exploring personal relationships. Much of the conflict and tension stems from the discrepancy between the characters’ ambitions and their actual accomplishments, which inevitably fall short. Cameron devises an operating system that enables her to interact with a computer, but she fails to find “a heartbeat” in Joe. Donna maintains chat rooms that enable total strangers to connect, but a mutual failure to communicate nearly wrecks her marriage to Gordon.
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In essence, no matter how sophisticated, technology isn’t magic. It can’t stop humans from being human or having to live with one another. Some things stay the same.