THE SUMMER OF SCI-FI

1982 and the meaning of moviegoing.

- ANTHONY LANE

A trail of Reese's Pieces. The decapitation of a giant snake. The noble face of Mr. Spock, his skin peeling off like bark from a tree. Police cars that hover above the streets. Skeletons in a swimming pool. Blood in a petri dish, which squeaks and leaps if you touch it with a hot wire. One guy who is sent into virtual existence by the zap of a laser. Another guy who eats dog food from a can. These foolish things remind me of 1982.

Other people, with higher minds, will recall the hefty happenings of that year. Israel invaded Lebanon. Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. Yuri Andropov succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. One barrel of laughs after another. Unaccountably, events of such magnitude hold no appeal for the author Chris Nashawaty, despite the fact that his new book, "The Future Was Now" (Flatiron), is devoted to 1982. He doesn't even mention that the Man of the Year, as decreed by Time, was "The Computer," although that shift of emphasis is germane to his task. His focus is on movies—specifically, on eight movies that came out in the summer of 1982, and the stuff of which they were made. And what stuff it was! The "five-gallon buckets of K-Y jelly" that were, Nashawaty informs us, required to lubricate the special effects in John Carpenter's "The Thing," Or the pink silk pants that were sported by the actor Rutger Hauer, together with "a fox fur draped over his shoulder,"when he went to meet Ridley Scott, the director of "Blade Runner." History isnt all power grabs. It can be a bundle of details that you stroke.