American Cinema of the 1980s: Themes and Variations

Introduction. Movies and the 1980s

I N T R O D U C T I O N Movies and the 1980s STEPHEN PRINCE The 1980s significantly transformed the nation’s political culture, as it did the Hollywood industry and its products. Today, the United States is an extremely conservative nation, and the turn toward right-wing policies began in the eighties with the administration of Ronald Reagan. Today, Hollywood filmmaking is beset by out-of-control production costs with no ceiling in sight, and these soaring costs, and the industry’s turn toward the global film market for its blockbusters, have their origins in the 1980s. The decade’s most important developments, however, have given rise to a set of core myths in both domains, even as the realities of film and politics proved to be more complex, more nuanced, and more contradictory than the myths acknowledged. The myths about American film in the period are these: blockbusters took over the industry, leading to a general lowering and coarsening of the quality of filmmaking; the films of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg epitomized this blockbuster style and proved detrimentally influential on a generation of American filmmaking; and Hollywood film mirrored the politics of the Reagan period, shifting to the political right and helping to popularize the Cold War politics of the era. ■■■■■■■■■■ Popular Perceptions Each of these propositions is partially true, but like all myths each also distorts by oversimplifying complex and often contrary realities. Each proposes a monolithic view of Hollywood and American culture in the period when, in fact, a more diverse and heterogeneous set of films and influences was at work. Let’s consider each of these propositions in turn as a way of building an introductory survey of the decade. The critical tendency to equate eighties filmmaking with blockbusters is understandable because in that decade the industry did realize that motion pictures were capable of generating a tremendous amount of revenue, and the studios aimed to produce one or more blockbusters each year. As a 1 result, when one looks back at the 1980s, the blockbusters seem to tower over other pictures because of the media attention and hoopla that surrounded them and the mass audience that turned out to see them. Although the industry’s initial move toward blockbusters began in the mid1970s , the eighties was the first full decade in which the top box office films consistently earned increasingly huge returns. The Empire Strikes Back (1980), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Return of the Jedi (1983), Ghost Busters (1984), and Batman (1989) all broke the $100 million earnings threshold in the year of their release. At the time, that was a historic threshold, and many other films closed in on it, among them Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Back to the Future (1985), Top Gun (1986), Beverly Hills Cop II (1987), and Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). Media attention in the period increasingly focused on these popular pictures and on the question of which one was leading the box office in a given weekend. The prevalence of sequels and series (today called franchises) was another symptom of the emphasis on blockbusters. James Bond continued as the most successful franchise in film history with four movies in the eighties, beginning with For Your Eyes Only (1981) and ending with License to Kill (1989), the character’s popularity undiminished despite changes in leading men (Roger Moore in the decade’s first three Bond offerings and the harder-edged, less jokey Timothy Dalton in the fourth). Sylvester Stallone’s two most popular characters, Rocky and Rambo, romped through the eighties with Rocky III (1982), Rocky IV (1985), Rocky V (in production 1989, released 1990), First Blood (1982), Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), and Rambo III (1988). Eddie Murphy reached his career height with Beverly Hills Cop (1984) and Beverly Hills Cop II (1987). And it seemed as if the industry had been taken over by mathematicians . More and more movies had numbers in their titles: Superman II (1981), Superman III (1983), Superman IV (1987), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984), Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989), The Karate Kid, Part II (1986), Police Academy 2 (1984), Lethal Weapon 2 (1989), Back to the Future, Part II (1989). The imperative to sequelize a successful picture became so all-powerful in the period that the industry viewed the...