This Year in Pop Culture: 1985

As Passion Pit would say, 1985 was a good year—for pop culture, that is. After all, there was U2, and Blondie, and music still on MTV. Here, we rank the best pop culture of 1985.

5. “And She Was,” The Talking Heads
“And She Was” is the psychedelic first single from the Talking Heads’ album “Little Creatures.” Based on “a blissed-out hippie-chick in Baltimore” that lead singer David Byrne knew, the song chronicles the “pleasant elevation” of the titular “she,” who awakens from a drug trip to find herself floating above the houses and factories: “The world was moving, she was right there with it and she was.” The song’s unusual modulation from verse to chorus to bridge marks its sonic individuality, while its lyrical anaphora (“and she was, … / and she was, … / and she was…”) spins its drug-addled stupor into repetitive circles. Drummer Chris Frantz said in an interview with WNCX that the song’s main character is a woman who levitates above her earthly neighbors. “The guy who’s writing the song is in love with her and he kinda wishes she would just be more normal and, like, come on back down to the ground, but she doesn’t,” Frantz said. “She goes floating over the backyard and past the buildings and the schools and stuff and is absolutely superior to him in every way.”

4. Calvin and Hobbes
Bill Watterson’s comic strip about a precocious boy and his anthropomorphic stuffed tiger charmed readers when it first appeared in newspapers in November 1985. Like Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” characters, Calvin and Hobbes existed as children in their own fictional universe. But unlike Charlie Brown, Calvin’s language belonged to an adult, and the subjects, which ranged from satire to philosophy, were far more cerebral than the shenanigans of Linus and Lucy. Named respectively for the 16th century theologist and the 17th century Enlightenment philosopher, “Calvin and Hobbes” explored not only the imaginative world of children, but also the irony of the intellectual and often cynical humor with which Watterson imbued their dialogue: In one strip, Calvin asks his father, “Dad, are you vicariously living through me in the hope that my accomplishments will validate your mediocre life and in some way compensate for all of the opportunities you botched?” Critics heralded the comic, which ran until 1995, as the last great newspaper comic strip before the age of the Internet.

3. “The Handmaid’s Tale”
Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel imagined a future New England called “Gilead” that legally regulates sex and reproduction. Offred, the protagonist and narrator, is a handmaid, one of Gilead’s many mandated child-rearing slaves. “The Handmaid’s Tale” explores the role of what Atwood termed “speculative fiction,” a genre that imagines a possible future “which could really happen.”

The novel garnered plenty of acclaim during the era of its release, winning the Governor General’s award and the Arthur C. Clarke award. But it gained a particular resonance after the 2016 election of Donald Trump and the rising threat toward women’s autonomy over their own bodies, including the defunding of Planned Parenthood and the ideological opposition toward abortion and birth control. In 2017, Hulu produced a television adaptation starring Elisabeth Moss, which won several Emmys and Golden Globes. In her Golden Globes acceptance speech, in the midst of the height of the #MeToo movement, Moss quoted the text itself, saying, “We lived in the gaps between the stories,” before revising the quote: “We no longer live in the blank white spaces at the edge of print. We no longer live in the gaps between the stories. We are the story in print, and we are writing the story ourselves.”

2. “Back to the Future”
Great Scott! “Back to the Future” made time travel, driving at 88 miles per hour, and Oedipal complexes cool. The highest grossing film of 1985 tells the story of Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox), a 17-year-old whose eccentric mentor Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) transforms a DeLorean into a time machine. But after an ill-timed run-in with Libyan terrorists, Marty travels back to 1955 and gets mixed up in the social fabric of his own parents: his stammering geek of a father (Crispin Glover), a bully who wields power over his family (Thomas F. Wilson), and his mother (Lea Thompson), who inadvertently falls in love with him. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, “Back to the Future” was nominated for five Academy Awards, winning for sound mixing. Its story reverberated throughout generations—the kind of movie whose references cemented themselves as a quintessential part of pop culture (“1.21 Gigawatts!”), alongside “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones.” You don’t have to time travel to the future to know that “Back to the Future” is forever.

1. Gal Gadot, as a person
Born April 30, 1985, Gal Gadot is a real life Wonder Woman. Need we say more?

—Staff writer Caroline A. Tsai can be reached at caroline.tsai@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @carolinetsai3.