The first R-rated movie I ever saw was Risky Business. I was 13 and at an acquaintence's birthday party. I'm still not sure why she invited me—we weren't friends. For her birthday, she wanted cheese pizza with onions and to watch Risky Business. I wasn't sure about the onions on the pizza, but it tasted better than I could have ever imagined. I still think about that birthday party whenever the option of adding onions to a pizza comes up. But Risky Business? I was on board for that from the beginning. All of us knew about the film and the famous underwear and train scenes, even though we were years away from being able to walk into a theater to see the movie. The new miracle of VHS solved that problem.

Recently, something reminded me about the movie—can't remember what—and I put it in the Netflix queue. Finally, surprisingly, here it is.

I don't know when I saw it last. Might've been when I was still a teenager. But watching it now, I'm surprised that it doesn't look dated. Maybe it is just so iconographic that it set the look and feel of a generation. Or, maybe some part of the lens through which I see the world was established by that first viewing and watching it now is a return to the default view. A part of me wishes for something that romantic. More likely, I think the design of the film errs toward classic styles.

Strangely, I enjoyed the lack of technology. Not a single computer in the whole damn thing. No cell phones. The film seemed ... quieter.

I was struck by how the parents looked like parents in every other film for twenty years. Same slacks, same hair. I wondered how old they were supposed to be. Forties? And then I started doing the math. The film is set in 1983, which, if the parents were 40-ish, would mean that they were born during the war or just before. I thought more about all those 80s films and the stock parent character. All sick rich, conservative, and clueless. While the parental roles in those films are clearly devices to propel their Reagan-era children along the plot line, I still wonder about that between generation they represent. Who were they? Not WWII vets, not hippies. We never hear about them, but we know their kids: Joel Goodson, Alex P Keaton, Barack Obama.