Cocoon Forty Years Later

 

Along the Pinellas Bayway near St. Petersburg, Florida. Some scenes of Cocoon were filmed in this area. Photo by me, 2009.

On a recent summer night, I re-watched the popular summer of 1985 hit, Cocoon. The movie was released that June and my mother and I watched it in our local small-town theater, The Paulding Plaza. The two of us spent many a night in the late 70s through the mid 80s going to movies together until I started dating or going with friends. We saw lots of duds and some good movies too, but Cocoon was a dud. I was a bored twelve-year-old watching a movie about elderly people swimming, dancing and arguing while wearing bad clothes. The characters were the ages of my grandparents and less entertaining. I was eager for the credits to roll, charge up the aisle into the lobby and throw away the empty popcorn container. My mother and I would have discussed the movie on the fifteen-minute drive home with the windows down letting in the cool night air. She liked it and I told her that I did not. She probably said something like I was too young to understand or that I was too picky. She might have been right, but I saw nothing wrong with being picky about what kind of entertainment I liked.

I was willing to give the movie a chance and had reasons to be hopeful that it was going to be good. After all, I was not just any twelve-year-old boy; I was a twelve-year-old gay boy that was into space movies, the ocean, the beach and my newest secret Hollywood crush, who was the same age as me, was in the movie. It was to be the second movie that he was in that had come out that month. I was excited to see Barret Oliver again. I had just seen him two weeks before as the main character (a boy with a big secret) in another new movie that I enjoyed, D.A.R.Y.L., and had liked him since The Neverending Story.

Barret Oliver in Cocoon.

It was not to be, as I was soon disavowed of that hope when I saw that the aliens and their spaceship were not cool in a Star Wars or Close Encounters of the Third Kind way. Barret Oliver was barely in the movie, appearing as an ornament at the beginning and at the end and was absent most of the movie. In the few scenes he was in, he looked as bored making the movie as I was watching it, which might have been the result of the wooden dialogue he was given and bad direction by Ron Howard, who has directed an entire career of pablum. I felt cheated out of a good time by the movie. 

The highlight for me was the ocean and the laid-back atmosphere of 1980s Florida that permeates the movie. Ron Howard at least managed to capture the Florida I miss. Florida was a different place then, more relaxing and peaceful. It was before the state was overly built up, filled with crazy drivers who have boiled their brains with too much sunshine and humidity and it was a place not trying to be more than swamps and orange groves surrounded by nice beaches with Mickey Mouse in the middle. Miami, gauche and trashy today, was not even that big in 1985 despite how the hit show that debuted the year before, Miami Vice, made it seem. 

Wilford Brimley and Barret Oliver during a scene along the Pinellas Bayway in Cocoon.

Cocoon was filmed in St. Petersburg, a place I have spent plenty of time over the last two decades, second only to the amount of time I have enjoyed in Fort Lauderdale. St. Petersburg's downtown has undergone significant change too, but some of the film locations are still recognizable like, John's Pass and the Pinellas Bayway/Tierra Verde/Fort De Soto area. One can go to the beach in St. Pete and not feel as though you are surrounded by influencers faking their fantasy lifestyle of faux wealth and the lie of eternal happiness.

Cocoon was a bland movie about old people who wanted to live forever even if that meant leaving everyone that they claimed to love behind on another planet. It seemed selfish to my twelve-year-old eyes. The old people were silly and the aliens acted more like a cult. Forty years passed before I chose to watch it again. This time, I would have the eyes and experience of a fifty-two-year-old and I would watch it at home. My mother has long since died; she did not get to live forever with aliens, and I was closer to the age of the actors in the movie. I might have an ache or pain every now and then, or “once in a blue moon,” as my mother would have said, so maybe I could relate to physical human frailty. Barret Oliver has not made a movie since 1989, The Plaza Theater closed in the early 2000s and I live nowhere near my hometown. I have always kept my love for movies and this year, after eight years of not going, I returned to watching them in theaters. 

 

Sometimes my perspectives on movies from the past change. A movie I loved as a kid might be one I like less now or a movie I did not like then might be more interesting at this age. The Breakfast Club, which also came out when I was twelve in 1985, is a movie I loved then, but today a film about a group of teenagers doing detention in a school library is as entertaining as reading people's political diatribes on social media. Even the nostalgia factor cannot keep me interested. I am one who believes that tastes in entertainment should mature as we age. I find it odd when adults, especially men, are interested in Star Wars or Legos or collecting toys from their childhood to display. It is some sad symptom of Peter Pan syndrome.

Forty years onward, I still did not like Cocoon. The movie had an interesting beginning but quickly lost itself in the waters of the fountain of youth or the Gulf of Mexico and became sugary sweet and sentimental. It was an instant pudding movie that was safe and the same no matter how many boxes you tasted. I forced myself to finish it. This is a movie about selfish people leaving the ones they love behind so they can live forever without pain or responsibility.

Brian Dennehy and Steve Guttenberg in Cocoon 1985.

After forty years, I remain picky about my entertainment choices. If anything changed for me, it was developing an appreciation of the short swim trunks and nice body that Steve Guttenberg showed off on his boat. I have also traveled Florida from Pensacola to Key West and back several hundred times and there are parts of the state I still like, but those are a secret.