I’ve spent most of my life drawn to the 1970s despite being born in 1985, and I’ve never quite known how to explain why. It’s not really nostalgia. I wasn’t there.

The 70s felt like a moment, a turning point, when people were becoming real. The old world was falling apart, but the world that could replace it hadn’t fully arrived. So you get this period of unfinished freedom. People seemed earthy, awkward, sexual, lonely, funny, impulsive. Their clothes look worn, their homes inhabited. Music is something you put in a room. People sit around and talk. Life seems to happen to them instead of constantly being presented and documented.

Then the 1980s arrived and short-circuited it. Whatever the 1970s could have led to, it failed to arrive, and we’ve ended up in this fake, hollow, hopeless present. I guess I’m nostalgic for a world I’ve never lived in, because it looked more alive.

Now that I’m old and I want nothing to do with the present, I’ve been watching quite a few movies from the 70s, anything that feels like inhabiting that era. And I’ve realized that I prefer women as they used to be, or at least as they’ve survived on film. So I’m presenting two beauties that came and went.

Sissy Spacek from Badlands (1973)

Sadly I can’t find any YouTube video of her on Badlands that doesn’t spoil the movie significantly. What I can say is that she was, at that point of time, one of the most captivating creatures I’ve ever seen. The movie is fantastic, too. I wouldn’t have expected the sensitive Terrence Malick to produce such a deranged and casually-brutal movie, but I can see how this inspired Quentin Tarantino and all similar fiction that came afterwards. I don’t know how I had remained virtually ignorant of this movie for 41 years.

Jane Birkin from Love at the Top (1974)

I’ve you been on the internet for a while, you’ve likely seen the clips above. That was Jane Birkin back in 1974. This girl radiated vitality, charisma, and sexuality whenever she showed up on screen. Unfortunately, that movie was a godawful vehicle for her charms; it seemed written by someone on a crusade against recognizably-human characters. Don’t watch it. I wanted to turn it off about fifteen minutes in.

Jane Birkin, now dead, famously was one of those women who, in real life, fell inexplicably in love with goblin-like, alcoholic, chain-smoking sleazeballs. Don’t know what’s with women and this sort of bad boys. Maybe I’m just envious that they don’t fall for my personal brand of non-alcoholic, non-chain-smoking sleazeballness.

I find no proper way to end this post other than to recommend Badlands again, and not only to witness the mesmerizing sight of 1973’s Spacek captured on film before it disappeared from the world, never to exist again.