"What are you watching?" Devon asked, walking into the living room.
I looked up from the screen where Dolph Lundgren stood in a leather loincloth, muscles gleaming, fighting rubber-masked monsters that looked like rejects from some B horror film.
"Masters of the Universe," I said.
She paused. Looked at the screen. Looked at me. "Why?"
Fair question. To anyone seeing me watch this 1987 movie, it would look random. Nostalgia? Maybe. Bad taste? Probably.
But I wasn't watching Masters of the Universe.
I was watching 1987.
I was paying attention to every detail.
The costumes. The synthesizer score. Dolph Lundgren's roid belly. The Burger King wrappers sitting on the coffee table in the middle of a monster attack. The suburban house that looks like a Sears catalog.
But I wasn't watching these things the way people typically watch them.
I wasn't judging whether the movie was good or bad. I wasn't being nostalgic. I was reading the cultural fingerprints.
What was day-to-day life like for people in 1987? What clothes did they wear? What ads were they seeing? What music were they listening to? What did their homes look like? What "operating system" had they downloaded to their minds without even knowing it?
Every detail on screen was a clue. And when you watch this way, you're not really watching Masters of the Universe.
You're watching 1987 accidentally confess what it believes about the world.
The Suburban Confession
Here's the thing that jumped out immediately: why does He-Man land in New Jersey?
The entire first act happens in the fantasy world of Castle Grayskull with cosmic warriors and mystical power. Then a portal opens and the characters fall through to… a fast food parking lot. Strip malls. Beige houses. Teenagers with lockers.
This wasn't a creative choice. It was a studio fear.
In 1987, Hollywood didn't trust that American audiences would sit through an entire movie set in a purely fantastical world. So they anchored it to what they considered "the real world." Suburbia.
That anchoring reveals a lot about the times.
Because the film is unconsciously saying suburbia is the center of American life.
This was the creative landscape of the era. Filmmakers like John Hughes and Stephen Spielberg had sanctioned suburbia as the emotional epicenter. Europe had castles. Japan had neon cyberpunk. America had… teen angst and shopping malls.
And the film treats this as self-evident. Of course that's where the story grounds itself. Where else would it go?
But watching it now, I could see the shallowness of that assumption.
For most of human history, this lifestyle — detached single-family homes, car-dependent sprawl, consumer culture, nuclear families isolated from their extended networks — would have looked bizarre.
Like Michelangelo never tasting tomato sauce, suburbia as "normal America" is a very recent development. And in 1987, nobody making this movie could see it as a construct. It was just reality.
That's what I'm watching for. The moment before a culture realizes what it's becoming.
Other Tells
Once you start looking, the fingerprints are everywhere.
Dolph Lundgren's isn't just muscular — he's specifically 1980s muscular. Big chest, thick arms, but with a distended belly from steroid use. This was the Schwarzenegger-Stallone era. Industrialized hyper-masculinity sold as natural. Their bodies were a pharmacology timestamp.
The monsters Skeletor sends to Earth? They don't look like sci-fi aliens or fantasy warriors. They look like creatures from a horror movie: rubber suits, prosthetics, animatronic faces. That's because the studio making this (Cannon Films) came from a schlock horror background. They were horror makeup artists, not fantasy concept designers. So the "alien bounty hunters" look like they wandered in from a different genre entirely.
Even the music rips off Star Wars because they didn't understand why Star Wars worked, so they copied the surface aesthetics: capes, shoulder armor, space-synth cues, orchestral hero themes. They assumed aesthetic equals success.
This was the awkward adolescence of blockbuster storytelling. The era before Hollywood became fluent in franchise filmmaking.
Every detail tells the same story: 1987 didn't know what it was yet.
How to Develop This Lens
You can learn to do this. It's just a habit of asking different questions.
When you watch something old, don't ask: "Is this good?"
Ask: "What did the people making this believe about the world?"
What did they think was normal that now looks bizarre? What did they think was lasting that turned out to be temporary?
Start with the surface details: the clothes, the houses, the products, the body types. These aren't distractions from the bigger picture. They are the picture. They're the visible symptoms of invisible beliefs.
The goal isn't to mock the past or feel superior to it. The goal is pattern recognition.
Because guess what? You're doing the exact same thing.
You're In It Too
You're in 2025 the same way they were in 1987.
You have invisible assumptions too. You think they're truth, but they're just today.
In 2025:
Fitness signals freedom. A visible, healthy body proves you have time and money in abundance. You can afford quality food. You have time to exercise. Your physique is proof of success. For most of human history, this would have been backwards. Aristocrats were pale because they didn't work in the sun. Now we perform wellness as status.
Where your kids go to school proves you're a good parent. Not whether they're curious or kind, but whether they got into the "right" institution. School choice has become public proof of parental success. You signal class and resources through your child's acceptance letter. For most of history, formal schooling barely existed. The idea that a specific institution determines your child's worth would be insane.
Every hobby must monetize. You can't just do something for pleasure. Everything needs a "side hustle" angle, an optimization strategy, a return on investment. The idea that leisure might be valuable in itself — that you might do something simply because you enjoy it — feels almost irresponsible now.
Can you feel it?
That slight defensiveness rising as you read those? That impulse to justify why these things are actually important?
That's you living through 2025 the same way someone in 1987 couldn't see that suburbia-as-normal was just a temporary cultural construct.
What This Gives You
This isn't about cynicism or detachment.
It's about freedom.
When you can see that you're in a time period — not outside of it, not observing it objectively, but swimming in it — something shifts.
You stop being controlled by invisible scripts.
You can see what's being sold to you as "just how things are."
You can choose which parts to keep and which to question.
The real skill isn't analyzing old movies. The real skill is applying this lens to right now. To the water you're swimming in. To the beliefs you haven't named yet.
Try It Yourself
Here's the perfect opportunity to practice.
There's a Masters of the Universe remake coming out in 2026.
Don't watch it for the story.
Watch it for what it reveals about us.
What will 2026 believe without knowing it believes it? What assumptions will it treat as self-evident? What will it confess accidentally about our moment in history?
And then (here's the real question) what will someone watching it in 2060 see that we can't see yet?
Next time you watch something old, try it.
Look for the operating system, not just the story.
Then turn around and look at your own life.
What story are you living in that you haven't noticed yet?
