In case you needed proof that Hollywood is dominated by and aimed at people in their 30s and early 40s, look at all the movies about the 1980s currently on screens.

Talk about revenge of Gen-X.

Both “Adventureland” and “Is Anybody There?” are set in 1987 – what are the odds? “Lymelife” is set in 1979 – and you can already smell the fumes of the Reagan era. “The Informers” is set in 1983 – perhaps the most vapid and dangerous part of the decade, when MTV and USA Today were permanently altering our genetic make-up to shrink our collective attention span.

The ’80s was a decade snowed under a blizzard of cocaine and Republicanism. If the ’70s was the Me Decade (and I’m not sure it was), the ’80s was the Greed Decade – sowing the seeds for the George W. Bush decade of irrational exuberance.

What does it mean to set a movie in the ’80s? We know what movies set in the ’50s mean: innocence and ignorance, a time of conformity and repression. It was the Eisenhower era, the Cold War, McCarthyism, the rise of suburbia and mass media.

Set a movie in the ’60s and it means something else entirely: turmoil, upheaval, awakening. The rise of youth culture, civil rights, Vietnam, counterculture.

Movies about the ’70s, by comparison, are about the mainstreaming of and hangover from the ’60s. They’re about the aftershocks when the ’60s hit all the places that were still mired in the ’50s. They examine the unexpected, unintended side effects of that same cultural wave on the mainstream. It was, after all, the decade that spawned both disco and punk.

If anything, the ’80s had even less substance than the ’70s. As waves and tides go, the ’80s was an effort by the right to take rewrite the ’60s, a battle they fought again from 2000-2008.

What I see in movies about the ’80s, written and directed by people who were kids and teens during that period, is a certain disapproval of how their parents’ generation – the baby boom that lit the fuse on the ’60s – squandered their opportunity. Rather than build on the ideas of the civil rights and anti-war movements, they focused on themselves: on getting that great car, that great house, those designer clothes, that outrageous windfall profit.

I remember the ’80s as a vapid decade of little that was memorable in the way of music or film. Oh, it started well – “Raging Bull,” the Clash’s “London Calling.” And then – what?

Music and movie-wise, it was the Christopher Cross decade: bland, innocuous, melodic but insipid. It was the decade best epitomized by Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and the “Back to the Future” movies.

The former was a superbly crafted piece of pop that made mega-success a state to lust after. The latter epitomized the empty special-effects film – the tentpole blockbuster mentality that has come to dominate multiplex fare: not that funny, not that great, but so popular that you seem churlish to point out just how much of it was motion, as opposed to actual traction.

That’s what the ’80s mean to me when I see them in a movie. There’s a trap in using a decade to bring context to your film. “Adventureland,” a delightfully smart little film, doesn’t fall into it. “The Informers,” as rancid a movie as you could hope to see, does. Guess we’ll see about the rest.

God help us when they get to the ’90s.

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