hello friends

1974

(Denver was the old Brooklyn. Or Portland? The Rocky Mountain vogue!)

So what else was part of the Rocky Mountain vogue of the 70s-80s? I keep referencing that, I should lay it out.

• John Denver (obv.)
• The Robert Redford movie Jeremiah Johnson, which you remember as that gif of a mountain man nodding approvingly
• The Sundance Film Festival
• Skiing as yuppie recreation, the “snow bunny”, the development of Vail and Aspen as luxury resort destinations
• Puffy, colorful ski vests & jackets
• The fad for Coors, as dramatized in Smokey and the Bandit
• Dynasty, the daytime soap
  
• The 1984 slasher film Silent Night, Deadly Night

This last one’s kinda interesting, I should explain more. As Carol Clover reminds us, the slasher film was a signature art form of the 80s backlash, and this one really wears that on its sleeve.

As a kid, Billy feared Santa would punish him for being naughty, then on Christmas Eve a felon in a Santa Claus outfit kills his parents when they stop to help him on a road.

Billy goes to a Catholic orphanage where he’s acting out, clearly from trauma, and pathologically averse to Santa Claus. The strict Mother Superior punishes him for his transgressions, and other kids, for being sexual.

Grown-up, Billy works in a toy store and is made to dress as Santa when the regular gets sick on Christmas Eve. He finally snaps and sets about punishing the naughty.

There’s a recurring theme between the Mother Superior and a younger, hippy-dippy, post-Vatican II nun that’s transparently about changing cultural and religious mores. While it never really coheres into a statement, it’s impressively even-handed: while the Mother Superior’s rigid repression might have brought things here, it’s her sense of duty to her charges and firmness in confronting evil that make her the closest thing the film has to a Final Girl.

Anyway this is all set in Utah and there are just so many lingering shots of the landscape you could tell some producer was like “Give ‘em some more of that striking natural Rockies beauty! Audiences love that shit!”

(Utah seems like an odd setting to critique Catholicism, but then I remembered the Great Brain books, which my mom got recommended from some support group for parents of gifted children, were about a Catholic family on the Mormon frontier)