The Apparent Crimes of Factually-Correct Nostalgia
A (Kinda) Contextual History Approach to The Wedding Singer (1998)
The Wedding Singer (1998) – Contextual History
I am a firm believer that one of the biggest gifts in this life is a piece of art you can grow with and return to as you change and evolve as a person just trying to figure out how to live and love in this world. One such film for me, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, is The Wedding Singer (1998). I love it and always have whether for the jokes I didn’t quite get as a kid, for the quotes that live rent free in my brain decade after decade, for the moment that made me tear up then and makes me openly sob now, or for the fact that now I get to revisit it with the added elements of training as a film analyst and reach new depths with a film text that has stayed with me for years. So, next up in our Wedding March Madness series of Review Roulette is The Wedding Singer.
The Review Roulette wheel landed on Contextual History for this week so let’s dive in with some thoughts about how The Wedding Singer portrays the 1980s from a 1998 perspective. For those unfamiliar, The Wedding Singer is about a former hair metal leading man turned wedding singer, Robbie Hart (Adam Sandler) who develops feelings for catering waitress Julia Sullivan (Drew Barrymore) and a deep hatred for her fiancé, junk bond broker Glenn Gulia (Matthew Glave). While planning her wedding to Glenn, Robbie and Julia are each prompted to reckon with the questions that arise about their own feelings and reasons for desiring marriage in the first place.
In terms of the setting and the ways in which the film depicts the 1980s, we need not look further than the costumes and hair styles of everyone in the film. Sporting shoulder pads, Jheri curl mullets, vibrant colours, ruffles for days, head bands, lace, bangles, statement necklaces, and the suits from that Talking Heads music video, the film is undoubtedly set in the 1980s. The attention to detail in the historical references in the film is particularly impressive, perhaps especially evident in the rare fact that every song in the extensive soundtrack was released before 1985 when the film is set.
Interestingly, while checking some sites to see if I missed something anachronistic in the 1985 moment as depicted in the film, I found some absolute haters nit-picking the movie to no end on technicalities and misunderstandings about how time and life work. One common complaint is that several things depicted as popular happened before 1985, and the filmmakers decided to ignore history by having the characters in the film obsess over Boy George or Flock of Seagulls despite them dropping out of trends by 1983ish. I am curious, however, if those complaining watched the film for its content or to be able to criticise it. (That’s right. This review is turning into a meandering philosophical rumination.)
In a recent review of Madame Web, film reviewer Vern wrote, “What I’ve come to realise is that I tend to go to movies with a mentality of ‘show me what you got, movie’ while some people go to them with more of a ‘listen up you dirty sonofabitch, you can’t slip one past me’.” This quote has come up in conversation and thought for me several times recently as I try to think about the situation we are in culturally and politically and socially. Do we approach art (and, more commonly, people) with sincere interest that we might gain something from our interaction with it, or do we steam ahead with the intent of proving ourselves right and smart and cultured as a way of convincing ourselves that we not only matter but also that we are superior to anyone daring to try to capture a bit of an imagined human experience our own minds weren’t able to, of declaring loudly so all can hear, “I know things too, you’re not special”?
And maybe that’s a harsh critique of those sites harshly criticising the fact that one character wore a red vinyl jacket and white glove emulating a 1982 Michael Jackson look while another drove a long-unpopular 1983 DeLorean and one dressed like Madonna from an ’83 music video. But there are three things to say here:
A central point in the film is that Robbie is contending with aging. He was a hair metal lead singer who gradually became a wedding singer and lost his drive to pursue songwriting as a career somewhere along the way. He and his friends are at an age when they are shifting away from drunken nights out and hard rocking towards a quieter domestic life. The one in the Michael Jackson jacket actively unpacks his desire to stay young and in that cultural moment even a few years earlier while contending with the encroaching loneliness of deeper life experiences. It actually, whether purposefully done or not, strengthens a deeper layer of the film when we revisit it with this historical context in mind. The characters are chasing the aesthetics of youth and wealth in this 1985 moment while admitting that they are both out of touch with that current youth and processing that transition from one phase of life to the next.
If these bits of “anachronism” in the not-so-trendy fashion of the film were not purposeful, which I suspect they were as that is a central theme of the film, there is a far more interesting point to make than tsking at the filmmakers for using popular items from 1982 rather than 1985 to depict the mid-1980s: the construction of nostalgia is an endlessly fascinating challenge, and we should be grateful the filmmakers chose such specific things to highlight as visually important cues for the 1980s. The way we as the audience understand a historical moment in films is by visual and audio cues. A character or subtitle may tell us the date, but the actual understanding of the moment has to be built into the environment of the film by costumes and music and references to historical events or things that situate for the audience the approximate setting of the film and bring that period to life. If the general audience 13 years after the setting of a film would recall specific highlights of that general era, then those are the cues the filmmaker will use to construct that sense of reality. The cues used here offer us a much more interesting view of the 1980s as it was understood through a 1998 nostalgic lens than they would if they were perfectly accurate to the exact trends popular in a three-month period of 1985.
[directly to those critiquing so bitterly] Are you guys okay?
I will be the first to admit that, shockingly, I love analysing and critiquing and exploring films more deeply. It’s fun to engage with deeper levels of art, and I am sure you reading this agree with that as you are here regularly reading my thoughts on films that came out decades ago. But what is the purpose of a critique that instead of engaging with a piece of art to understand it and our world better uses that platform to espouse how “interesting” or “clever” or “challenging” the reviewer and their flameless hot takes are at the expense of the attempt at a genuine thought?
I was going to go in a different direction for this review. Apart from the visual and musical elements that I think are spot on in interesting aforementioned ways, Glenn is a pitch perfect Wall Street guy with his toxic masculinity oozing out of his cheap-looking suits and smug face. The film embraces a conservative view of domesticity and relationships and small-town America, contentment in confinement that is especially indicative of the mid-1980s and the spirit of Reagan’s 1984 “It’s Morning Again in America” campaign ad. There’s a criticism of 80s excess and the pursuit of wealth, but also balance in criticising Robbie for not making enough to move out of his sister’s basement.
There are such interesting historical bits in this film that deserve more discussion, but those criticisms side-tracked me. These nit-picking gotchas are used to dismiss a funny, moving, thoughtful film entirely from the jump, and I find them to be a microcosmic example of the eagerness with which we criticise in our culture. We leap at the chance to tear someone down and get in first to make sure everyone knows our own voices matter too. Maybe it’s a symptom of larger things, voices being taken away or dismissed or spoken over, representatives not listening to their constituents, a cry for someone, anyone to just acknowledge us individuals in the expanse of social media where so many scream into the void without response or recognition at all. Whatever it is, I don’t like it, and I hope that when someone makes a movie about our current moment, they don’t include the selfish, arrogant exceptionalism that seems to be a cultural norm among so many.
“the construction of nostalgia is an endlessly fascinating challenge”Yes! This is what some criticisms seem to miss - the layers of nostalgia we build up in retrospect. The 1983/1985 differences don’t mean that the writers got it wrong, this means that the writers (hopefully intentionally) illustrated that nostalgia for ‘those days’ is made of layers from that past.