Following release, Dafoe was actually briefly typecast as Vance, appearing as variations on his Loveless character in John Mark Robinson’s Roadhouse 66 (1984), William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in LA (1985), and, of course, Streets of Fire.
Not to say that Bigelow and Montgomery aren’t fetishizing the iconography (or that there’s anything inherently wrong with that) just, in doing so, they manage to connect it to the youthful rebellions and anxieties of just about every other era. The Loveless’ stylized dialogue, production design, and costuming tend to authenticate the experience, unlike those music videos (feature-length and short form) and sitcoms, in which period trappings are purely decorative. It wasn’t just the continuing popularity of Happy Days, but the visual language and production design of early music videos, which certainly informed movies like this one and Walter Hill’s Streets of Fire (1984). The Loveless is a good reminder that ‘80s pop-culture was just as obsessed with ‘50s pop-culture as modern pop-culture is obsessed with the ‘80s.
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