One of the strangest things about nostalgia is the way it distorts and tweaks the eras it pines for. This isn’t always obvious when you are younger, because naturally you don’t have a basis for comparison when it comes to nostalgia for eras you didn’t live through, but once you get old enough that the decade of your birth becomes the nostalgia target du jour it becomes more obvious. Some things get heightened to the point of parody, other things are neglected by the collective memory, eventually the nostalgia material is on the verge of being its own genre that is almost distinct from the material it’s inspired by.
For this article, I’m going to take a look at Michael Mann’s Thief and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, the former an iconic 1980s crime movie which established genre tropes for the decade to come, the latter a synthwave pastiche of Thief and the material it inspired.
Thief
Thief opens with rain, dark urban landscapes, and synthesiser music – it’s Blade Runner without the science fiction. The first full-length feature from Michael Mann, it’s inspired by The Home Invaders: Confessions of a Cat Burglar by professional jewel thief John Seybold, AKA Frank Hohimer.
Jumbled Thoughts of a Fake Geek Boy 