We're Going to Need a Bigger Boat: a new perspective on old boat movies
Or, what I think about when I watch TBS.
My husband Chad and I watch a lot of bad ‘80s films, ones we watched as kids and haven’t seen as adults. They take on all new meanings all these years later, the comedy becoming raunchier, and the cultural commentary becoming clearer.
I’m sure by now you’ve recognized skiing as a major topic for movies of the ‘80s, from Better Off Dead to Hot Dog to Copper Mountain, involving some common tropes: skiing as a way to pick up women, the mountain being threatened by rich outsiders, and skiing culture being threatened by bullies (Manifest Destiny).
But what about boating movies? They’re everywhere in the 1980s, from comedies, like One Hot Summer, Summer Rental, Captain Ron, and Overboard, to horror thrillers like the Jaws franchise (started in 1976) and Dead Calm.
Many of the boats in these films are in disrepair. Consider the Summer Rental docked pirate ship, coated in barnacles, or the stolen sailboat in Captain Ron. Conversely, other boats are pristine symbols of untouchable wealth, as in One Hot Summer and Overboard. All these boats, however, become the center of these movies’ conflicts: the nicer boats split relationships apart, the dilapidated ones bringing them together.
The two horror movies’ boats, also in disrepair, represent the line between life and death. In Dead Calm the engine of a sailboat dies, stranding a couple in calm waters, only to be approached by a sinking pirate cruise boat full of murdered passengers and a deranged killer. Here, one injured boat must save them, another injured boat (destroyed for fun by the captain of a wealthy, single cruise boat) might kill them.
While Jaws is technically a ‘70s movie, the boat Orca in it is reborn (as Orca II) in the later films. Quinn’s boat can be viewed as either a tragic figure, representing Quinn’s own hubris and desire for greatness, or conversely as a heroic one, the almost-sunk man/boat willing to take on the greatest shark of all time, all to save the great, American city, Amityville.
So, what’s the deal with ‘80s movies and boats? I posed this question on Twitter
and two of my writerly friends replied, one suggesting the boats represent the “rising boat” metaphor of class divide from the ‘60s, another suggesting the boats represent The Big Purchase for the middle class, still going in the ‘80s, their disrepair representative of the credit economy that threatened their existence.
However, after a little research into the history of recreational boating, I discovered a few facts I thought could offer a third perspective. According to Formula Boat’s website, the 1970s posed a few changes to the industry, namely the creation of the Marine Retailers Association of America and the National Marine Manufacturers Association (NMMA), as a result of fuel shortages and rising gas prices. In the ‘80s, gas prices continued to rise alongside unemployment and inflation, making boats nearly impossible for the average American to afford. Then, in 1980, the Department of Energy banned weekend boating to save gas. It was at this point that the NMMA helped revamp boating culture by pushing smaller, affordable crafts, and Chris-Craft catamarans got back in the powerboat racing market (evident in movies, like Summer Rental), an activity marketed toward the ultra-rich.
In the 1970s and early ‘80s, my family was lucky enough to own a modest lake house in Ohio with several boats, including a 1960s speed boat. We spent summers on those boats, skiing and tubing behind them, fishing in the inlets from them, and jumping off them in the hottest weather. In those days, boating seemed more commonplace than it does now, boats mostly vestiges of the 1970s. In the late ‘80s, my family sold that home, along with the boats, coincidentally when boats became laughingly referred to as Great American Money Pits.
The average American still owning a boat in the ‘80s likely didn’t buy it new. Many of those decades’ old boats, docked during the ban, likely fell into disrepair. In the movies, we see the families bonding over such boats, repairing them as a way to redefine their family. These working-class characters learn to place family time over wealth, the boating pastime of the decades prior no longer about boating itself, but about the time boating afforded families to be together on the weekends and vacations.
Conversely, the nice boats in the movies—yachts and new catamarans—represented the wealthy class still splurging on a dying pastime, often flaunting that ability into the faces of the middle class. These characters do not understand the true value of their boat and thus lose the race/their family/their dignity in the end of the movies.
And, what about our horror movies? In Jaws, the big, old boat brings a diverse group of men together to fight a common enemy, the bigger, unkillable shark (Russia, anyone?). And, in Dead Calm, the couple, threatened by a gorgeous, charming stranger, must work together to get their boat up and running, saving not only their lives, but their marriage.
Maybe thinking this closely about silly, nostalgic movies of the past sounds like too much work, but I invite you to dig out some of those oldies-but-goodies and watch them for patterns. Doing so may shed some light about the culture you grew up in and how we got where we are today (hint: not likely by boat).