American Cinema of the 1980s: Themes and Variations (Screen Decades: American Culture/American Cinema)
Stephen Prince
Language: English
Pages: 280
ISBN: 0813540348
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Bringing together original essays by ten respected scholars in the field, American Cinema of the 1980s examines the films that marked the decade, including Ordinary People, Body Heat, Blade Runner, Zelig, Platoon, Top Gun, Aliens, Blue Velvet, Robocop, Fatal Attraction, Die Hard, Batman, and sex, lies & videotape.
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urges Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down” the Berlin Wall. 19 OCTOBER Stock market drops 23 percent, its largest single-day decline in history. 31 OCTOBER The MPAA claims video piracy robs studios of $1 billion per year. 18 NOVEMBER ■■■■■■■■■■ 3 JULY 12 AUGUST The committee investigating the Iran-Contra scandal concludes that President Reagan bears responsibility for the illegal armsfor-hostages operation. 1988 The U.S. Navy mistakenly shoots down an Iranian commercial
other women directors also gained a foothold in the film industry this year: Amy Heckerling, with her hugely successful teen comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and Amy Holden Jones, who produced and directed the reflexive send-up slasher movie Slumber Party Massacre, written by feminist author Rita Mae Brown. There was also a mini-cycle of mainstream gay-themed films, which as a group received little press attention at the time; these included Arthur Hiller’s Making Love, Robert Towne’s Personal
together. Like The Dresser and Educating Rita—both essentially two-character films— Tender Mercies focuses on a small group of people. The film can be viewed as a country-and-western version of Terms of Endearment in the way that it depicts a family encountering tragedy and redemption. Excepting the epic scope and cosmic revenues of Return of the Jedi, the bulk of the major films had an introspective quality, often tainted by untimely death: the death of Karen Silkwood, the deaths of the daughters
communications industry. During the eighties, multinational communications companies bought all the Hollywood majors except for INTRODUCTION 7 Disney, and the logic of big budget filmmaking shifted toward synergy, toward getting all the interrelated markets of film, music, book and magazine publishing, and retail merchandising to work together around the release of a highly commercial film. Top Gun, Gremlins (1984), Flashdance, E.T., Footloose (1984), Batman, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and Return
execute its political opponents. Jack Lemmon plays an American father searching for his son amid the repression, learning finally that the boy was among those killed with U.S. complicity. Another cycle of films offered a sustained critique of Reagan’s economic policies, which rewarded the wealthy and the corporate sector while cutting the social safety net from the poor and the inner cities. In this case, the critique was not as overt as in the Central America films because it was typically
