In business: how brands like Nike, BlackBerry and Pop-Tarts became film’s hottest stars
Steam trains, tuberculosis, sexual repression, the shadow of a coming war and Colin Firth: the stuff of a period piece was once unchanging. But history is not what it was. Now conjuring the past on screen means 8-bit graphics and Money for Nothing. And Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig will do a synchronised bop before the vintage logos of Pringles and Pepsi.
That last detail comes from the credits of White Noise, Noah Baumbach’s recent adaptation of the 1985 Don DeLillo novel. The book was, among other things, a droll study of the godly place of brands in the US during the 80s. But two giggly new movies now spotlight the same moment with hindsight. In Air, Ben Affleck directs himself and Matt Damon in the 1984 origin story of the Nike Air Jordan. With Tetris, the scene is four years later: Taron Egerton, star of the rum tale behind the video game, plays the video game designer Henk Rogers, drawing together a collapsing Soviet Union, feral press magnate Robert Maxwell and the marketing department of Nintendo.
But like a glorious supermarket, there is still more choice. Summer will see the release of Flamin’ Hot, Eva Longoria’s debut as a director: a biopic of Richard Montañez, the janitor at snack giant Frito-Lay, who, in 1990, is said to have invented the title’s totemic flavour of Cheetos. Pending, too, is BlackBerry, moving later into the 90s to portray the Icarus of Canadian smartphones.
For all four films, the period is an easy win. From Gen X execs to teenage fans of Stranger Things, the stretch of time from the mid 80s to 90s – Rubik’s Cube to early internet – has become the site of a consensus nostalgia: a past we can all agree on. And beyond the big hair and Bon Jovi, the touchstones of the age are the brands, the stuff people bought.
Of course, the 80s has no monopoly on people doing that – or the nostalgia it creates. Jerry Seinfeld is soon to direct his first film, Unfrosted: The PopTart Story, set in 1963. At that point, DeLillo was still working as a copywriter at Ogilvy & Mather, the New York ad agency that inspired Mad Men. But it was the 80s when consumer brands truly claimed our souls. It was the moment DeLillo captured in White Noise; now cartoonishly revived by Air and Tetris.
But that makes us sound gullible, doesn’t it? So these movies have to do something smart: tap our innocent joy around old computer games and junk food, while also letting us feel we are more knowing now. We duly step behind the curtain into the backstories of the brands, to find the uplift and the truth, which is where it gets complicated.
Behind most brands will be a corporation, and to make feelgood from those would be a trial for even the most gifted film-maker. Few of us have misty eyes for the corporations in our lives. Pull on the loose ends of one of those histories and you end up with something like The Social Network, director
David Fincher’s chilly portrait of Mark Zuckerberg en route to signing up 2.9 billion, in his own words, “dumb fucks” to Facebook. Or The Founder, with Michael Keaton as the razor-toothed Ray Kroc, swallowing whole the owners of a family-owned burger restaurant to give the world McDonald’s.
But Tetris and Air are made from different stuff: jaunty celebrations of lovable mavericks. It can make for delicate decisions around how much reality an audience can bear. Flamin’ Hot may already have misjudged that. The Los Angeles Times has reported serious