Hollywood Bloodshed: Violence in 1980s American Cinema

by James Kendrick

Overview

In Hollywood Bloodshed, James Kendrick presents a fascinating look into the political and ideological instabilities of the 1980s as studied through the lens of cinema violence.

Kendrick uses in-depth case studies to reveal how dramatic changes in the film industry and its treatment of cinematic bloodshed during the Reagan era reflected shifting social tides as Hollywood struggled to find a balance between the lucrative necessity of screen violence and the rising surge of conservatism.

As public opinion shifted toward the right and increasing emphasis was placed on issues such as higher military spending, family values, and “ money culture,” film executives were faced with an epic dilemma: the violent aspects of cinema that had been the studios’ bread and butter were now almost universally rejected by mainstream audiences. Far from eliminating screen bloodshed altogether, studios found new ways of packaging violence that would allow them to continue to attract audiences without risking public outcry, ushering in a period of major transition in the film industry. Studios began to shy away from the revolutionary directors of the 1970s— many of whom had risen to fame through ideologically challenging films characterized by a more disturbing brand of violence— while simultaneously clearing the way for a new era in film. The 1980s would see the ascent of entertainment conglomerates and powerful producers and the meteoric rise of the blockbuster— a film with no less violence than its earlier counterparts, but with action-oriented thrills rather than more troubling images of brutality.

Kendrick analyzes these and other radical cinematic changes born of the conservative social climate of the 1980s, including the disavowal of horror films in the effort to present a more acceptable public image; the creation of the PG-13 rating to designate the gray area of movie violence between PG and R ratings; and the complexity of marketing the violence of war movies for audience pleasure. The result is a riveting study of an often overlooked, yet nevertheless fascinating time in cinema history. While many volumes have focused on the violent films of the New American Cinema directors of the 1970s or the rise of icons such as Woo, Tarantino, and Rodriguez in the 1990s, Kendrick’ s Hollywood Bloodshed bridges a major gap in film studies. This comprehensive volume offers much-needed perspective on a decade that altered the history of Hollywood— and American culture— forever.

 

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809386611
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	03/30/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

James Kendrick is an assistant professor of communication studies at Baylor University.  He is the author of the forthcoming book Film Violence: History, Ideology, Genre, and his articles have appeared in several publications, including the Journal of Film and Video and Journal of Popular Film and Television.

Table of Contents

Contents List of Illustrations 00 Preface 00 Acknowledgments 00 Introduction: The Mainstreaming of Hollywood Screen Violence 00 1. A Bloody Renaissance: Screen Violence and the Rise of the New Hollywood Auters 00 2. Retreating from the World of Revolution: Controversies over Screen Violence at the Dawn of the Reagan Era 00 3. Pure Action, Packaged Violence: The Role of the Action Film in 1980s Hollywood 00 4. Fighting Outward, Looking Inward: Violence in the 1980s Vietnam Film 00 5. Disavowing Horror: Independent Production, Fandom, and the Fetishizing of Make-Up Special Effects 00 6. Children in Danger: Screen Violence, Steven Spielberg, and the PG-13 Rating 00 Conclusion: Fashioning a New Screen Violence from the Old in the 1990s 00 Notes 00 Works Cited 00 Index 00

Editorial Reviews

Much ink has been devoted to the differences between 1970s and 1980s American cinema, most of it (in the form of books like Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls) focusing on the shift from socially conscious, morally ambiguous character studies (The Last Detail, Taxi Driver, etc.) to conservative, big-budget blockbusters (the Indiana Jones sequels and the Don Simpson-Jerry Bruckheimer/Joel Silver-produced shoot-’em-ups). James Kendrick’s Hollywood Bloodshed: Violence in 1980s American Cinema zeroes in on this transition as well, but from a more specific (and, in comparison with Biskind’s gossip-driven tome, more sophisticated) perspective. He compares and contrasts the presentation of screen violence in the ’80s with that of prior decades and examines what it says about American culture in the age of Ronald Reagan. The result is not only one of the best film books of the year, but also a superb piece of social commentary, a volume that ranks alongside Robin Wood’s Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan and Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Movie Wars as an all-time great study of the intersection between movies and the political climate they both reflect and influence.
     
Kendrick begins with a brief history of violence in American movies, with particular focus on the period when the Motion Picture Association of America’s rating system came into being, allowing directors such as Sam Peckinpah and Arthur Penn the freedom to represent violence more graphically than ever before. As the author notes, The Wild Bunch and its progeny — films including Taxi Driver and Apocalypse Now — used violence to discomfort and provoke the audience; this was in stark contrast to the violence of the ’80s, a period during which films were just as graphic but in which the violence was drained of its intellectual and emotional power. As the decade began, William Friedkin’s Cruising, Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill and Sam Fuller’s White Dog  — all films ideologically and aesthetically aligned with the 1970s — met with storms of controversy and protest that scared the Hollywood studios away from the kinds of challenging films they had funded only a few years before. Friedkin and Fuller were marginalized by the industry, and although De Palma continued to direct incendiary works like Scarface and Body Double, his greatest commercial success came in 1987 with The Untouchables, a film that erased moral shades of gray in favor of an almost comically extreme universe of good and evil.
    
Kendrick sees Cruising, Dressed to Kill and White Dog as the last gasp of an era and spends the bulk of his book studying the kinds of films that replaced them. He begins with the “pure action” genre as represented by Simpson-Bruckheimer productions, including Beverly Hills Cop and Top Gun. These movies embodied the spirit of Reagan’s “morning in America” in that they celebrated winning and self-confidence at the expense of all other values. The “losers” (Simpson’s word) of earlier genre films like Chinatown were replaced by “winners,” whose moral and physical superiority was never challenged or questioned. These films celebrated Reagan’s popular belief in American supremacy (a philosophy that was either inspiring or psychotically solipsistic, depending on one’s political persuasion) and thus avoided controversy even though, in terms of sheer body count and bloodshed, they were just as violent as anything that had come before. The cultural shift is best understood via Kendrick’s case study of Red Dawn, a World War III fantasy that began as a Lord of the Flies-inspired allegory and was consciously transformed into a conservative, anti-communist, underdog story.
    
The section on Red Dawn exemplifies what makes Hollywood Bloodshed a landmark work: it seamlessly combines meticulous research into production history with cogent aesthetic and social analysis. Throughout the book, Kendrick unearths details about individual films and filmmakers that will be surprising even to the most learned historians, and he consistently offers critical assessments that are original and provocative. He also refuses to settle for oversimplifications, acknowledging the changing presentation of cinematic violence in the 1980s was far more complicated than a simple shift from a radical to a conservative ideology. His refusal is most obvious in his chapter on Vietnam films, which brilliantly contrasts feel-good-event movies like Rambo: First Blood Part II and the Missing in Action series (films in which America was permitted to rewrite history and “win” the Vietnam war) with more troubling pictures such as Platoon and Casualties of War. The book’s passage on Rambo is particularly illuminating, especially when Kendrick compares the sequel with its ideologically opposite predecessor, First Blood — a movie that has a lot more in common with Taxi Driver than it does with its own sequels.
   
Although some of the Vietnam films represent an exception to the overall arc of violence in American movies of the 1980s, for the most part, Kendrick convincingly argues, violence became oddly comforting in a decade in which audiences wanted to sweep the psychic pain of both the past (Watergate, race riots, Vietnam) and the present (Iran-Contra, AIDS, growing economic inequality) under the rug. Hollywood Bloodshed makes the case even graphic slasher flicks like the Friday the 13th series played into this ideological movement, partly through the emergence of fanzines such as Fangoria. By exposing the tricks behind the gore and making celebrities out of special-effects-makeup artists like Tom Savini and Rick Baker, Fangoria, in its own way, made violence safe and palatable — a sharp contrast with the shocking brutality of 1970s assaults on good taste such as Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  Kendrick scrutinizes this transition with the same scholarly rigor he applies to war movies and action extravaganzas and wraps his book up by addressing yet another shift, that between the American cinema of the 1980s and the return to a more ideologically complex form of violence represented by Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher and others in the following decade. This brief epilogue makes one hope Kendrick will eventually write a follow-up volume to study the new wave of cinematic violence; for now, however, Hollywood Bloodshed is more than enough.                     

— Jim Hemphill

The American Society of Cinematographers

Much ink has been devoted to the differences between 1970s and 1980s American cinema, most of it (in the form of books like Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls) focusing on the shift from socially conscious, morally ambiguous character studies (The Last Detail, Taxi Driver, etc.) to conservative, big-budget blockbusters (the Indiana Jones sequels and the Don Simpson-Jerry Bruckheimer/Joel Silver-produced shoot-’em-ups). James Kendrick’s Hollywood Bloodshed: Violence in 1980s American Cinema zeroes in on this transition as well, but from a more specific (and, in comparison with Biskind’s gossip-driven tome, more sophisticated) perspective. He compares and contrasts the presentation of screen violence in the ’80s with that of prior decades and examines what it says about American culture in the age of Ronald Reagan. The result is not only one of the best film books of the year, but also a superb piece of social commentary, a volume that ranks alongside Robin Wood’s Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan and Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Movie Wars as an all-time great study of the intersection between movies and the political climate they both reflect and influence.

Kendrick begins with a brief history of violence in American movies, with particular focus on the period when the Motion Picture Association of America’s rating system came into being, allowing directors such as Sam Peckinpah and Arthur Penn the freedom to represent violence more graphically than ever before. As the author notes, The Wild Bunch and its progeny — films including Taxi Driver and Apocalypse Now — used violence to discomfort and provoke the audience; this was in stark contrast to the violence of the ’80s, a period during which films were just as graphic but in which the violence was drained of its intellectual and emotional power. As the decade began, William Friedkin’s Cruising, Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill and Sam Fuller’s White Dog — all films ideologically and aesthetically aligned with the 1970s — met with storms of controversy and protest that scared the Hollywood studios away from the kinds of challenging films they had funded only a few years before. Friedkin and Fuller were marginalized by the industry, and although De Palma continued to direct incendiary works like Scarface and Body Double, his greatest commercial success came in 1987 with The Untouchables, a film that erased moral shades of gray in favor of an almost comically extreme universe of good and evil.

Kendrick sees Cruising, Dressed to Kill and White Dog as the last gasp of an era and spends the bulk of his book studying the kinds of films that replaced them. He begins with the “pure action” genre as represented by Simpson-Bruckheimer productions, including Beverly Hills Cop and Top Gun. These movies embodied the spirit of Reagan’s “morning in America” in that they celebrated winning and self-confidence at the expense of all other values. The “losers” (Simpson’s word) of earlier genre films like Chinatown were replaced by “winners,” whose moral and physical superiority was never challenged or questioned. These films celebrated Reagan’s popular belief in American supremacy (a philosophy that was either inspiring or psychotically solipsistic, depending on one’s political persuasion) and thus avoided controversy even though, in terms of sheer body count and bloodshed, they were just as violent as anything that had come before. The cultural shift is best understood via Kendrick’s case study of Red Dawn, a World War III fantasy that began as a Lord of the Flies-inspired allegory and was consciously transformed into a conservative, anti-communist, underdog story.

The section on Red Dawn exemplifies what makes Hollywood Bloodshed a landmark work: it seamlessly combines meticulous research into production history with cogent aesthetic and social analysis. Throughout the book, Kendrick unearths details about individual films and filmmakers that will be surprising even to the most learned historians, and he consistently offers critical assessments that are original and provocative. He also refuses to settle for oversimplifications, acknowledging the changing presentation of cinematic violence in the 1980s was far more complicated than a simple shift from a radical to a conservative ideology. His refusal is most obvious in his chapter on Vietnam films, which brilliantly contrasts feel-good-event movies like Rambo: First Blood Part II and the Missing in Action series (films in which America was permitted to rewrite history and “win” the Vietnam war) with more troubling pictures such as Platoon and Casualties of War. The book’s passage on Rambo is particularly illuminating, especially when Kendrick compares the sequel with its ideologically opposite predecessor, First Blood — a movie that has a lot more in common with Taxi Driver than it does with its own sequels.

Although some of the Vietnam films represent an exception to the overall arc of violence in American movies of the 1980s, for the most part, Kendrick convincingly argues, violence became oddly comforting in a decade in which audiences wanted to sweep the psychic pain of both the past (Watergate, race riots, Vietnam) and the present (Iran-Contra, AIDS, growing economic inequality) under the rug. Hollywood Bloodshed makes the case even graphic slasher flicks like the Friday the 13th series played into this ideological movement, partly through the emergence of fanzines such as Fangoria. By exposing the tricks behind the gore and making celebrities out of special-effects-makeup artists like Tom Savini and Rick Baker, Fangoria, in its own way, made violence safe and palatable — a sharp contrast with the shocking brutality of 1970s assaults on good taste such as Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Kendrick scrutinizes this transition with the same scholarly rigor he applies to war movies and action extravaganzas and wraps his book up by addressing yet another shift, that between the American cinema of the 1980s and the return to a more ideologically complex form of violence represented by Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher and others in the following decade. This brief epilogue makes one hope Kendrick will eventually write a follow-up volume to study the new wave of cinematic violence; for now, however, Hollywood Bloodshed is more than enough.

The American Society of Cinematographers - Jim Hemphill