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Journal of Popular Culture (2013) - Beneath the Surface and the Excess: An Examination of Critical and Aesthetic Attacks on Films of the 1980s

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Beneath the Surface and the Excess: An Examination of Critical and Aesthetic Attacks on Films of the 1980s

The arguments and virulent tirades against the lack of artistry in the films of the 1980s have been numerous. The films are criticized for their lack of creativity, their sameness and standardization, and their kowtowing to corporate demands. Criticisms spring from the media, artists, and from academics. In Down and Dirty Pictures, Peter Biskind, Hollywood journalist and author of books about filmmaking in every decade since the 1950s except the 1980s, complains of the slick, overproduced, and empty studio fare of Hollywood in the period between the experimentation of the early 1970s and the later resurgence of the independent film market in the 1990s. Perhaps the most stringent condemnation of films of this period is found in Robert Phillip Kolker's A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, where he argues that:

Most often money (or loans or credit) is ventured on the promise that no imagination will be exercised at all, or only on already known and successful ideas. The potential of something new and intriguing being done in American cinema is always undercut by the reality that the new will, in fact, be the same as always. All novelty or originality is subsumed under the conventions informing all mass market cultural representations—film, television, journalism, politics—assurances that what is to be seen and heard is the simplest, least threatening, and most easily assimilable of what has been decided we need to know. (ix)

Grand and sweeping generalizations of the failure of American film in the era after the Hollywood Renaissance in the late 1960s and early 1970s seem a bit too all-inclusive and echo the cries that writers have unleashed on art that appears from generations after the ones to which they are beholden. While the commercially driven, blockbuster trend of filmmaking continues in current practice, the 1980s is when the style started to dominate, and is the period against which criticisms are the most stringent.

From an ideological perspective, these attacks likely stem from the supposed close ties films of the period share with the ideals of the Reagan-era government. The 80s are known largely as a time of greed and neoconservatism, where economic reforms and deregulation, conservative social agendas, and interventionist military policies overtook the more liberal social and economic policies of the 60s and 70s. Indeed, some of these tenets are borne out in film cycles that dealt with the pursuit of materialism, like Risky Business (1983), Trading Places (1983), and Wall Street (1987), even though all these films have dramatically different takes on what can happen when capitalism runs unchecked and are not necessarily in line with Reagan-era policies. Likewise, films that depict the yuppie, or the young urban professional, focus on characters that “exhibited a neoconservative style fostered by Reaganomics” (Palmer 280) where some of the stories revolve around the issue of the “loss of idealism and social consciousness in the face of materialism and selfishness” (Palmer 299). Films in this cycle include The Big Chill (1983), as well as a number of films with younger characters, such as Bright Lights, Big City (1988), and some with “Brat Pack” actors as in St. Elmo's Fire (1985). Again, even though these films have different takes on the challenges posed by neoconservatism, the focus on the loss of idealism of the 60s that is replaced by the cynicism and materialism of the 80s is often cause for the disparaging view of films from this period.

From an aesthetic and historical perspective, some of these criticisms are derived from the perceived differences and breaks films of the New Hollywood make with the Classical Hollywood Cinema. Films of the 80s are often accused of using style to a degree of excess not motivated by the narrative; instead of a coherent whole, the films are accused of being spectacles with loosely linked set pieces as in Flashdance (1983) or Top Gun (1986). Other condemnations stem from ties to the modernist movement and are linked to the way critics define what is considered art. Inherent in these definitions are long-standing arguments about how art can be produced commercially and elitist notions of what and who can claim to understand what it is that makes a film artistic or noteworthy. When these criticisms are applied to films labeled “high concept,” films that Justin Wyatt defines as those that emphasize a sleek look and marketing tie-ins, the categorization still in effect denigrates the artistic merit of the films themselves.

In order to readjust our impression of cinema of the 1980s, instead of trying to redeem a small number of films based on limited artistic criteria, it is necessary to examine the variety of production trends, genres, and cycles emblematic of the decade and to recognize that critiques that lump all th...

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Notes

  1. See Tino Balio, Hollywood in the Age of Television for a further discussion of this time period.
  2. This idea of fusion was pointed out by Simon Frith in his discussion of how rock did not appear outside a capitalist system of production, but rather gained popularity by being a commodity at a time when creativity and commerce were closely linked (Negus 47).
  3. See chapter 2 of Wyatt's High Concept, “Construction of the Image and the High Concept Style,” for a more thorough description of these five elements and how they function.
  4. For two highly informative, although very different, explanations of postmodernism, see Jim Collins, Uncommon Cultures and Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.”
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