American Cinema of the 1980s: Themes and Variations

1981. Movies and Looking Back to the Future

1981 Movies and Looking Back to the Future DIANE NEGRA In a year that witnessed serious assassination attempts on both the U.S. president and the pope, the successful assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, the birth of the first American test tube baby, and the unanimous confirmation of Sandra Day O’Connor as the first female U.S. Supreme Court justice, discourses of possibility and constraint, progress and recidivism, seemed to characterize American life in particularly marked ways. It is especially interesting therefore to ponder the frequency with which Hollywood films in this year raided the archive of classical Hollywood genres, tropes, and archetypes, recirculating (and occasionally refreshing) the repertoire of ideas and images that had dominated American cinema in its robust mid-century commercial years.1 It was a notable year in popular film for both franchise formation and continuation. On the one hand, American cinema was showing an emerging propensity for remaking and sequelization—some of the biggest hits of the year included Superman II, the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only, Tarzan, the Ape Man, and Halloween 2. The year saw a large number of classical heroes, heroines, villains, and monsters revived, including not only those in the above films but also Cinderella, King Arthur, and assorted werewolves. Yet equally important is the fact that a number of films (including Raiders of the Lost Ark, Body Heat, On Golden Pond, Mommie Dearest, and Under the Rainbow) referenced the studio period through potent but diffuse aspects of genre and stardom. Popular cinema appeared itself to be highly nostalgic, with many of its fictions reaching back to Classical Hollywood.2 A survey of films released in a particular year of the decade may provide an opportunity to alternately historicize a period we think we know so well. In December New York Times film critic Vincent Canby bemoaned, “For much of this year we’ve sat through megamovies based on minicomic strips, through failed comedies at which only the charitable could laugh, and through hideous horror movies about psychopaths. . . . It has sometimes 43 seemed that filmmakers either had lost touch with the nervous, unpredictable , frequently unfair world the rest of us inhabit or had simply accepted it at sleazy face value, without question or curiosity.” American films were clearly preoccupied with classical Hollywood, though the relationship sustained with Old Hollywood forms was both complex and mutable. This preoccupation was also heavily gendered, working most frequently to excavate heroic and empowered images of masculinity and to discredit images of active femininity. Already Hollywood was exhibiting a tendency to disingenuously move audiences “back to the future.” This shift might easily be located within a broader cultural turn, bearing in mind that in Ronald Reagan’s first term, national life in America itself was broadly turning back toward a classical set of images and archetypes to “explain” American character, concerns, and dilemmas on conservative terms. As Michael Rogin skillfully analyzes, Reaganite storytelling was devoted to certain broad themes presented as inherently and classically “American,” yet built into many of these themes was a broadly countersubversive mindset, a stigmatization of dependency, a paranoid fear of contamination , and a psychologically insulated position in relation to violence in all its forms. Popular films exhibit an ongoing preoccupation with the morality of violence, regularly requiring that male protagonists rededicate themselves to violence under conditions when it is justified for civic defense (this theme runs through films as disparate as Superman II and Nighthawks).3 In this sense and in others, the fictional content of many Hollywood films harmonized with the emergent political framework, as seen in a selective sampling of the year’s biggest box office hits. American films displayed certain clear ideological tendencies, among them the propensity to recast the terms of couplehood, familialism, and neighborliness. Ironically, this recasting frequently took place in selfconsciously revived classical genres or through overt remakes of earlier films. At a time when many of the concepts of self and society that had shaped the civil rights, feminist, and student movements of preceding decades were being pushed underground, cinema often paired conservative and progressive ideological impulses together, and the result could produce a high degree of textual irresolution in regard to the negotiation of gender. ■■■■■■■■■■ The New Femme Fatale: Body Heat Instructive in this regard is Body Heat, Lawrence Kasdan’s languid reformulation of the classical film noir, a film whose video jacket advertises a “liberated but illicit relationship.” Body Heat initially appears 44 DIANE NEGRA...