In business: how brands like Nike, BlackBerry and Pop-Tarts became film’s hottest stars
S team 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
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