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The Goonies: An assault on Reaganomics [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-09-06

One day you wake up. Almost instinctively you have an urge to get the hell out of your house. Family is great and all. But from elementary school on you formed your own adopted family. Your circle of friends, usually around the same age as you, woke up this morning with an equal thirst to escape their parent's home.

Together we meet up when you go on a series of benign unforgettable adventures. Every group has a leader, everyone has a clown, and everyone makes fun of everyone. That's the nostalgic pull for the Movie The Goonies. But, there is also an underlining message of income inequality, seldom talked about, that elevates the material.

There’s a cruel, unfeeling villain in the 1980s classic Goonies. It's not a long-dead pirate who has set up a series of traps under the group. It's not the idiotic gang of Italian criminals who are racing after the Goonies. It’s the figure of the millionaire developer who is destroying the entire childhood of a group of close friends just to build a golf course.

He is the symbol of the heartless, greedy one percent that became so frequent in the aftermath of Reagan. The tale of this film is the story of two different moral values. The greed of all-consuming expansion felt by the villains, and the value of friendship felt by the main character, a value he feels to his core.

Mikey Walsh and Brandon Walsh are brothers whose family is preparing to move because developers want to build a golf course in the place of their neighborhood -- unless enough money is raised to stop the construction of the golf course, and that's quite doubtful. But when Mikey stumbles upon a treasure map of the famed "One-Eyed" Willy's hidden fortune, Mikey, Brandon, and their friends Lawrence "Chunk" Cohen, Clark "Mouth" Devereaux, Andrea "Andy" Carmichael, Stefanie "Stef" Steinbrenner, and Richard "Data" Wang, calling themselves The Goonies, set out on a quest to find the treasure in hopes of saving their neighborhood. The treasure is in a cavern, but the entrance to the cavern is under the restaurant of evil thief Mama Fratelli and her sons Jake Fratelli, Francis Fratelli, and the severely disfigured Lotney "Sloth" Fratelli. Sloth through the course of the film befriends the Goonies and decides to help them.

The band of kids who live in the "Goon Docks" neighborhood of Astoria, Oregon, are always being led on wild adventures by their young leader Mikey (Sean Astin), they discover an old treasure map that takes them on an adventure to unearth the long-lost fortune of One-Eyed Willy, a legendary 17th-century pirate. Mikey has been raised on stories of this rogue Pirate who centuries earlier terrorized the coast. He sees this as an all-or-nothing effort to find the treasure, or at least have one more adventure with his friends. Mikey and his friends are about to lose their homes, and he is desperate to prevent that from happening. Mikey senses internally that things like aimless journeys with the Goonies can't last forever. Yet he is determined to prolong the decline of his friendships. It's a feeling we all get as we grow older.

What is so wonderful about The Goonies is not so much that it perfectly captures the essence of childhood friendship and romance. Many other films can do that just as well. What’s marvelous about this film is the fact that they know it’s going to be their last weekend together, and the main character Mikey isn’t accepting it. He’s going to doggedly fight to preserve his tribe of friends. In the equally nostalgic film about Childhood friendships, The Sandlot ends with a slow voice-over of the main character explaining what happened to everyone. Each of them slowly dissolved as their tale came to an end as if to represent how they slowly slipped away from the main character. There is no real sadness in any of this, everything ends, and your childhood friends aren't usually your teenage friends or adult friends. They always have that one magical summer after all. But for Mikey and the Goonies, that is not enough. He wants life to be this one long glorious summer.

Mikey isn’t like his friends. There’s a depth to him and an uncharacteristic sorrow. He openly mourns the loss of his community and instinctively sees the discovery of this treasure as a way to preserve his hometown. The rest of the group ranges from those who are merely humoring Mikey, trying desperately not to get killed, or even intrigued by the notion of instant riches. Mikey is openly in a battle of determination between himself and a long-dead skeleton that lurks inside the captain‘s cabin of an aging pirate ship.

Like so many medieval Knights in so many children’s fables, the most worthy of knights who seek the Holy Grail, aren’t interested in the relic itself. They understand that the glory of the grail lies in the quest, in the act of seeking. Mikey is worthy of the treasure because he has respect for his dead adversary.

Likewise, One-eyed Willy wasn't after wealth, he spent his entire life attempting to preserve what he had conquered and what he was hoarding. To him, the treasure was part of his very person. It allowed him freedom and the immortality of a rebellious rogue. Likewise, Mikey is not interested in wealth, he seeks the treasure because it will allow his community financial freedom. One-eyed Willy’s efforts from the grave to prevent people from taking his treasure are no more dogged than Mikey‘s efforts to reach it.

Personally, Mikey determination and his friends' frustration are perfectly captured in the wishing well scene towards the middle of the film. Our heroes up until now have not so much been searching for One-Eyed Willie’s treasure as they have been running from the Fratellis, the murderous band of fugitives whose hide-out the Goonies have accidentally compromised. But for a moment, once they passed the underground waterfall it looked as though they’d found both the treasure and escape. There are hundreds of dollars in coins and they can climb the well to safety.

Then they hear the voice of Troy Perkins, the town's spoiled rich kid whose father is trying to squeeze the Goonies out of town. He is above the Goonies on the surface of the well and agrees to help them, though he's being a jerk about it. They are going to fail, Troy’s father is going to win.

But Mikey sees the turning point. This is the moment where they can turn back and return to approaching failure on the surface, or fearlessly push forward.

“Our parents, want the best stuff for us. But right now, they gotta do what’s best for them. Because it’s their time, their time up there. Down here, it’s our time. It’s our time down here. That’s all over the second we ride up Troy’s bucket.”

The mission is clear, the social norms that are forcing them out of their homes are far more dangerous than deemed witted criminals or dead pirate's traps. The Goonies are enemies of the norm and they decide to keep pushing on. This one moment alters the lives of all those in the town. Even Troy's. It is the unusual qualities of Mikey that manage to make it all possible. It is only the youngest and weakest among them that can read the situation.



In the end, the gang gets the gold, the criminals get caught, and Troy's Dad is still an asshole with a tool for a son. Of course, it’s unlikely that these people will remain in the same place their entire lives, with daily interactions and marathon bike rides across the rainy Oregon landscape. But there is no doubt that this adventure cemented their friendship and that they will always be in each other’s minds.

But the central theme at the heart of this film’s adventure is that people can preserve their communities against the cruelty of the powerful. At a time when the few control so much and the bottom 50 percent control 2.5 percent of the nation’s wealth, there is a film made for children that provides a map towards social and economic justice.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/6/2191769/-The-Goonies-An-assault-on-Reaganomics

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