“Licorice Pizza” by Paul Thomas Anderson is a delight. Rest assured, I will not be writing the seventeenth review of the film for this newspaper. I just want to talk about the mental place he transported me to: the world I grew up in, in the 1970s and 80s, far away from California.
It was a time of great music, arcade and the permanent fear that everything would go to hell in a Third World War with nuclear weapons.
In the film, the brutal reality of those years sometimes gets in the way of the main couple’s disagreements – a smug 15-year-old boy and a terribly insecure 25-year-old.
One of the backdrops of the plot is the oil crisis of 1973. With gas in short supply, Los Angeles became a huge line of cars stopped at gas stations.
Almost 50 years away, it looks like a scene of extreme chaos. But it was something that was repeated a few times, it was almost commonplace.
I know what it’s like to sit in the backseat of my dad’s white Opal for three hours, waiting for a rationed amount of gas. And oil wasn’t the only thing in scarcity.
For a variety of reasons – crop failure, pressure from producers, abnormal demand – there was always something missing. There was no meat, no beer, if it was dangerous, there was even a matchstick to light the barbecue.
With crazy inflation, people bought food for the whole month as soon as they got their paycheck. They hooked up two or three carts at the supermarket. I remember my mother would take a whole piece of ribeye and spend Saturday afternoon slicing steaks to freeze.
We were used to terms like “cold war” and “iron curtain”, we had nightmares about the final clash between the United States and the Soviet Union, the nuclear threat hovered like a haunting over us.
Fear of atomic catastrophe turned to panic in 1986 with the accident at the Chernobyl power plant in Soviet Ukraine. The leak of nuclear material killed 31 people and stank food over a radius of several hundred kilometers.
A while later, curiously, a different powdered milk started to appear in supermarkets here, coming from Holland or Ireland. It was a product rejected by European countries because it had radiation levels far above acceptable levels. Atomic milkshake spawned in the tropics.
By the turn of the millennium, we seemed to have gotten over the dirty history that had brought us there. The cold war is over, the internet working miracles, even Brazil’s economy is back on track.
Then the ship capsized beautifully again. The mayonnaise came off. Hunger, inflation, fascism and plague have already settled on the sofa. Now it’s the specter of total war that rings the bell.
I suggest that, in addition to “Licorice Pizza”, you watch “The Day After” – a 1983 film that simulated the effects of a nuclear attack on the US interior. Just be sure to rewind the VHS before returning it to the video store.
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