I watched a movie on DVD last night that I’ve heard about for years but somehow never gotten around to seeing, an odd little flick directed by Walter Hill called Streets of Fire.

Subtitled “A Rock & Roll Fable,” Streets of Fire seems to have been deliberately designed to become a cult classic. The plot is basic and more than a little silly: an evil motorcycle gang kidnaps a beautiful young singer; her former boyfriend and miscellaneous sidekicks venture into hostile territory to rescue her; and then they all fight their way back out and prepare for a big confrontation with the gang’s leader. The dialogue is utilitarian at best and the performances so uniformly stiff that I can only assume everyone was directed to act as woodenly as possible. (I blame the direction because we have plenty of evidence from other films that this cast — which includes a very young Willem Dafoe, Amy Madigan, and the ultra-yummy Diane Lane — really can, you know, act.) What makes Streets of Fire at all noteworthy is the film’s look: it’s set in some weird parallel-universe urban environment where women wear shoulder pads and fingerless gloves like all the girIs I remember seeing from high school, but the men all look like they just stepped out of Rebel Without a Cause. Well, all except for the bad guys, who look less like the hard-ass outlaw bikers they’re supposed to be than leatherboys from San Francisco’s Castro District. The streets of this city-without-a-name are always dark and wet, smeared with reflected colors from the neon overhead, and all the cars are vintage. And of course, as the title promises, there are lots of pretty flames flickering behind the action. In short, the movie represents a total triumph of style over substance.

Not that this is necessarily a bad thing; as harsh as all of the above sounds, I really did enjoy the movie. It even helped me put my finger on something I’ve been thinking about for a while, and that’s got to say something for its merits.

I do a lot of grumpy-old-manning on this blog and in my daily conversations about how much I miss the 1980s, but what specifically is it that I’m missing? It isn’t just my lost youth, although that’s part of it. I think what I really find lacking up here in the future is the sense of glamour that was so prevalent back in the day. Sure, the fingerless gloves were cheesy and the neon-soaked movies and TV series superficial. We children of the ’80s knew that even then. But they were also, for lack of a better word, glamourous. The trappings of that moment in history — the clothes, the movies, the music, and yes, the MTV music videos — were impractical and exaggerated, but they were also bright and attention-grabbing. The styles of that moment were new and original. No one had ever worn clothes quite like the ones we had in the ’80s, no one had cut movies to fit the music in quite that MTV-ish way before. We were swaggering peacocks then, showing our colors for no other reasons than that we had them, and we could tell the future was right around the corner, man, because we were already wearing it and watching it and listening to it, and it was cool. And then somehow… at some point… it all went away. The peacocks were bludgeoned to death by the grunge kids in their utilitarian flannels, and now we’re all grown up and wearing bland business-casual khakis and polos.

Yes, I miss the old ’80s glam. Not the specific styles, necessarily — I’d look pretty silly wearing parachute pants and those damn fingerless gloves these days — but rather, the attitude of the styles. The optimism and confidence and uniqueness of them. Hell, I know I’m just another boring old schmuck who pines for a youth that probably wasn’t very much like he remembers it, but is it really so wrong to wish my world looked just a tiny bit more like Streets of Fire than The Office? I’m just saying…