Steam 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.
