Love for Sale.

Anthology Film Archives is running a series on 1980's Hollywood Musicals, a category that includes Purple Rain as well as The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and may justify itself on that basis alone. Last night a friend and I went to see True Stories, David Byrne's film about a fictional town in Texas celebrating the state's Sesquicentennial, back in 1986. The tagline for the film is " A Completely Cool, Multi-Purpose Movie." It pretty much fits.

There are many reasons to see True Stories, amongst them: John Goodman's satiny voice and panda-bear physique, David Byrne's gnomic non-sequitur voiceover, which personally annoys me but many get a kick out of, and of course some terrific Talking Heads songs. But what struck me last night was how prescient the film was about the phase of innovation and development that the country was then entering, and that still obtains today. The movie focuses on the oddball personalities that one expects populate Byrne's imagination, but always in the background is Varicorp, a tech firm that might be standing in for Texas Instruments. One of my favorite scenes is a walk-and-talk in its white-paneled hallways (starting around 2:15), with a sincere and slightly smug IT professional talking about the creative potential of computers, a new kind of poetry. And then there's the dinner scene, which improbably morphs (around 2:00) into a kind of revelatory heralding of the new industrial model, out of Bell Labs and into people's garages. It speaks to the hope that we have for science and engineering to change our lives. It suggests businesses that transform the terms of employment from something financial to something spiritual. And it points out that when you get all of your nourishment from work, you no longer need your weekends.

And I think, "oh, so that's when that happened."