Abstract
In this chapter, I examine the most independent and selfishly suggestive of the eighties objects of knowledge—the yuppie. After its introduction in 1984, the yuppie rapidly ascended as a significant demographic and political category, and was identified by pundits as an especially important target of the American political scene during the 1984 election season. Politicians and businesses alike courted yuppies and, in return, they transformed aspects of society that catered to their power-driven aesthetic—a taste for expensive cars, living in condominiums, and imported salad dressings. However, the yuppie label was soon contested by its members, particularly the association made between the yuppie’s seemingly frivolous lifestyle and the amoral “greed is good” point of view that fueled it. Some wholeheartedly embraced the corporate elitist ethic, while others struggled with the cynicism suggested by such an outlook. Thus, the stereotyped yuppie we are familiar with today fails to consider how the aspirant middle class negotiated the terms of their self-definition.
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Notes
Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 197.
Ibid., 200.
Maureen Dowd, “Retreat of the Yuppies: The Tide Now Turns Amid ‘Guilt’ and ‘Denial,’” The New York Times, June 28, 1985, B1.
Barry Keith Grant, “Rich and Strange: The Yuppie Horror Film,” Journal of Film and Video 48, nos. 1–2 (1996): 4–16.
Ibid., 5.
Richard Chevat, “Gelato Was My Armageddon,” The New York Times, September 1, 1984, 23.
John L. Hammond, “Yuppies,” The Public Opinion Quarterly 50 (1986): 497.
Jerry Adler et al., “The Year of the Yuppie,” Newsweek, December 31, 1984, 14.
“While few baby boomers qualify as yuppies, millions of baby boomers are following the trends that the yuppies set” (“The Big Chill [Revisited],” 29). The number of yuppies ranged from 1.5 million to 20 million, depending on who counts (Jane Feuer, Seeing Through the Eighties: Television and Reaganism [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995], 56).
Steven V. Roberts, “Hart Taps a Generation of Young Professionals,” The New York Times, March 18, 1984, 26. See also “1984 Campaign Oratory Is Yielding Few Memorable Terms” for the importance of American politics on the development of the English lexicon, although a senior editor at Merriam-Webster was at the time skeptical that “yuppie” would make the cut (“1984 Campaign Oratory Is Yielding Few Memorable Terms,” The New York Times, September 1, 1984, 29).
Brett Duval Fromson, “Reaganomics’s Lure for the Yuppies,” The New York Times, October 2, 1984, A31.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
See Howard Nelson, Letter, The New York Times, October 12, 1984, A34 and Eric C. Jacobson, Letter, The New York Times, October 17, 1984, A24.
Gordon Rayfield and Julian Baim, “Don’t Take Yuppies for Granted,” The New York Times, November 16, 1984, A31.
Hammond, “Yuppies,” 488. This at the end of 1986; in the same issue of The Public Opinion Quarterly, Michael Delli Carpini and Lee Sigelman reach the same findings. Using more detailed research and sophisticated regression analyses, they find that the “political distinctiveness” of yuppies is “less a matter of demographic characteristics, than … of a state of mind or a lifestyle” (517). There appears not to be “some unique political profile that results from the combination of being young, urban, and professional [but rather that] yuppies are more liberal than the rest of the population because they are young, and young people are generally more liberal; because they are urban, and urbanites are generally more liberal; and because they are professional, and professionals are, on balance and in recent times, more liberal” (Michael Delli Carpini and Lee Sigelman, “Do Yuppies Matter? Competing Explanations of Their Political Distinctiveness,” The Public Opinion Quarterly 50 [1986]: 515–516).
Walter Shapiro, “The Birth and — Maybe — Death of Yuppiedom,” Time, April 8, 1991, 65.
Marissa Piesman and Marilee Hartley, The Yuppie Handbook: The State-of-the-Art Manual for Young Urban Professionals (New York: Long Shadow Books, 1984), 77.
Ibid., 16.
Jonathan V. Holtzman, Letter, The New York Times, April 1, 1984, E20. George Will points out that “like all caricature it is based on exaggeration of fact” (George F. Will, “Yippity Yumpies,” Washington Post, March 25, 1984, C7).
Bret Easton Ellis, “The Twentysomethings: Adrift in a Pop Landscape,” The New York Times, December 2, 1990, B1.
Janet Maslin, “Now, Slyly, Comes the Yuppie Devil,” Review of Blue Steel, dir. Kathryn Bigelow. The New York Times, March 25, 1990, B1.
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 407.
Michael Kinsley, “Arise, Ye Yuppies!,” New Republic, July 9, 1984, 41.
Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998), 16.
Serial Murders: Hearing on Patterns of Murders Committed by One Person, in Large Numbers with No Apparent Rhyme, Reason, or Motivation (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983).
My emphasis. Peter Bowen, “Die Yuppie Scum!,” Filmmaker 8, no. 2 (2000): 58.
Pagan Kennedy, “Generation Gaffe,” The Nation, April 1, 1991, 428.
Linda S. Kauffman, “American Psycho,” review of American Psycho by Mary Harron, Film Quarterly 54, no. 2 (2000–1): 41.
Ibid., 43.
Ibid., 41.
Ibid.
James Gardner, “A Review of American Psycho,” review of American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, National Review 48, no. 11 (1996): 56.
Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (New York: Vintage, 1991), 5.
Hal Hinson, “Vampire’s Kiss,” review of Vampire’s Kiss by Robert Bierman, Washington Post, June 2, 1989, C2.
Marx pointed this out over 100 years ago in Capital: “capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks” (Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Part I [New York: Cosimo Books, 2007]), 257.
David Denby, “Dirty Harriet,” Review of Blue Steel, dir. Kathryn Bigelow. The New York Times, March 26, 1990, 76.
Janet Maslin, “A Deranged Yuppie with a Thing for His Lover’s Gun,” Review of Blue Steel, dir. Kathryn Bigelow, The New York Times, March 16, 1990, C18.
Cora Kaplan, “Dirty Harriet/Blue Steel: Feminist Theory Goes to Hollywood,” Discourse 16, no. 1 (1993): 51. Kaplan borrows the phrase from a made-for-TV movie starring Angie Dickinson, Prime Target (Robert E. Collins, 1989); David Denby also takes the phrase “Dirty Harriet” as the title for his review of Blue Steel.
Linda Mizejewski, “Picturing the Female Dick: The Silence of the Lambs and Blue Steel,” Journal of Film and Video 45, nos. 2–3 (1993): 6–23.
Ibid., 6.
Christina Lane, “From ‘The Loveless to Point Break’: Kathryn Bigelow’s Trajectory in Action,” Cinema Journal 37, no. 4 (1998): 71.
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© 2016 Kevin L. Ferguson
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Ferguson, K.L. (2016). The Yuppies and the Yuckies: Anxieties of Affluence. In: Eighties People. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137584342_5
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