Disney Duster wrote:Goliath, well, the 80's were certainly the best time when it came to fun and leisure, it was also great times to be a kid, a teenager, and great times to be gay. And it was a great time to make movies. It was a great time for certain ideas and certain freedoms.
No. And if you want to know why not, read my replies to Lazario. I'm sorry, but after answering him and Super Aurora, I'm too exhausted to react to this magintude of ignorance and self-deception.
Lazario wrote:I wasn't trying to implicate Stone in glorifying the 80's ideal of "get rich at any cost" with that film. I was asking you- do you feel 80's audiences were getting unsophisticated about that subject matter / took the film as a love letter in any way?
Well, audiences sure seemed to embrace
Wall Street's main character Gordon Gekko as a hero, while in fact he was the villain of the story. The sympathy of the audience should have been with Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen)'s father and his little one-man enterprise, but instead people cheered for Wall Street rat Gekko was destroyed that character's life. It has often been said that the 1980's was 'the age of me', 'the age of materialism'. During an interview, the director and producer of
Back to the Future said their film was also influenced by it, because Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox)'s ultimate reward at the end of the movie is a Landrover pick-up truck. He's seen in the beginning of the film dreaming about it. It's material wealth as the ultimate satisfaction.
Now it's a complicated question where this attitude came from. Did media influence the public or was it the other way around, and did media reflect the general attitude? More on that below...
Lazario wrote:Well, [pop culture has] been the target of criticism by both "sides," politically. Liberals complain that an increase of violence in the media and fictional entertainment makes people desensitized to it. And so did Bob Dole, [...] he jumped on the bandwagon a bit late since the crew involved in the [...] horror film Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer were criticizing both the Freddy and Jason slasher films of the 80's and the Arnold Schwarzenegger shoot-em-up blood-baths (especially Total Recall, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Predator, and The Running Man).
Films have always been subject to harsh criticism, especially when it comes to violence. It's not only liberals who complain about that, I believe both sides engage in it, although conservatives often seem to be more concerned with sex than they are with violence. But certainly there are a lot of 'puritans' in conservative circles who also loathe the increasing violence. This goes back as far as
Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, in which Arthur Penn showed the violent death of the title characters in a graphic way that had never been seen before. It unleashed a huge controversy and it was the last blow to the Hays Code. The westerns by Sam Peckinpah (most notably 1969's
The Wild Bunch) only increased the violence, and slowly, it became to be a part of (American) cinema, amongst considerable protest from left and right.
I think the 1980's action flicks are way different because of the way they deal with excessive violence. Directors like Penn and Peckinpah (and Sergio Leone in his spaghetti westerns) showed how violence
hurt people. Instead of just seeing a guy get shot from some distance and immediately drop dead, like in the old days of 'classic' Hollywood, they let the audience know what impact it had on those who got hit, and they did so in extreme close-up to show the pain and the horror. The 1980's action films (you named a few prime examples) were a lot different, because it didn't show the impact of violence; instead, it glorified it. Schwarzenegger and Stallone and those guys were 'single person armies' who'd take out 100 guys without ever getting in danger, and their victims were always indiscriminate strangers. You never got to see the impact of it on either the 'hero' or the 'villain'. There was no psychology behind it. Just wack a whole bunch of guys without blinking your eyes. They were very macho and 'testosterony'.
(A notable exception to this rule was
Die Hard, which featured a regular guy who wasn't looking to be a hero, who got hit and beaten severely, and who constantly was in danger and worried about how to get out. He wasn't the untouchable macho hero, but just a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was in 2007's
Live Free or Die Hard; hence why that film sucked so hard.)
A lot of those 1980's action movies also glorified, or were inspired by, the Reagan (Bush sr.) administration's foreign policies. There was a whole range of B-movies and some A-films (
Top Gun comes to mind) about life in the S army that was about bombing, invading and taking over little, far-away countries with mostly brown-skinned people. Indeed much like reality.
Lazario wrote:There are other examples. But the point is - everyone blames entertainment for trends to follow afterward that they find are dumbing down the culture. [...] All media, these days. And I find that germane here for one reason, one thing makes me give it a serious consideration. It's that people don't look to politics and politicans to teach them anything. They want to be respresented by the people they think see the world the same way they do (like you said, the Beer-Drinker's Companion theory). And when people usually blame something for making the culture and children ill, they look to entertainment. It surely influences some people.
No doubt about the fact that media influence people. If they didn't, companies wouldn't spend billions of dollars a year to advertise their products in the media. But strange thing is, it doesn't influence all the people the same way. If it did, we would all react to a certain film or tv programme the same way, which we obviously don't. Some people get violent from playing violent video games, while other people get rid of their anger by playing the very same games. The same goes for movies. When I watch a violent movie, I have no intention of acting it out. But some people do. Obviously the film contributes to that, but it seems to me a lot also has to with the personality of a person, their surroundings, upbringing and social climate.
And I really do think politicians play a very big role in this. They lead the country, they're in the media and thus in the public's eye all the time. Their voices and opinions sound loud and clear in a society's national debates. It's like when you said politician's opinions on gay rights have an influence on how regular people look to homosexuality. The current anti-intellectual, anti-science atmosphere in the US has got something to do with people like Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann and the Tea Party candidates being given so much attention in the media and being considered as serious contenders for the Senate races. Ever since Reagan, not knowing things became fashionable. "Facts are stupid things", he infamously said in 1988 at the Republican National Convention.
Lazario wrote:But now, it's a case of: they created the fire. And we feed it. Instead of recognizing how stupid things are now and hating it- we embrace it. We've grown to love it. We've been loving it ever since (as I said) the Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, and Farrelly brothers started it in the 90's. (But then again... critics were complaining that films were getting less sophisticated in the mid-to-late 80's with The Great Outdoors, the Bill & Ted series, Steven Seagal movies, and some Eddie Murphy films- I believe The Golden Child was considered something of a Gigli in its' day.)
People have been complaining about the stupidity and vulgarity of movies since the beginning of the movie. The 'common people' loved the nickelodeons, with their slapstick and chase scenes and mocking of authorities, while the middle and upper classes snubbed at it. To draw in the middle class, in the 1920's , movie companies started to make historical dramas, to add sophistication to their products. I do believe that, over time, this ideal of wanting to be 'better' than the lowest common denominator, has vanished. Not that bad, sleazy B-movies ever really disappeared. They were the craze of the youth audience in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. But the public in general didn't approve of it. And that's what has changed (what you pointed out).
It's not really only an American phenomenon (although everything is always 'bigger and better' in the US). You will see the same when you watch the 2009 documentary
Videocracy, about Italy under prime-minister Berlusconi, ruling since the mid-1990s, whose countless tv stations and newspapers (he's a billionaire) have seriously damaged Italian society. In The Netherlands, tv has become more and more disgusting and celebrating dumbness and vulgarity since the introduction of commercial tv in the late 1980's. One of Holland's most popular tv programs today is a reality show about four teenagers from The Hague who are on vacation in Greece. Every week, the audience can see 30 minutes of them getting drunk, getting naked, making out with everybody and everything, trashing things, proudly displaying their ignorance.
I think it says something about our culture. And I think it says something about the reason why, in my lifetime, I will probably see the United States fade away as the world's dominant superpower; see the European Union dissolve into insignificance; and see China as the new major global force. Not a pretty picture, but a result of our way of life. Every great culture in history has gone under because of its own decadence. We're today's Rome.
) from there to the public? When did we start to exhibit this same goofiness and screw-anyone-over for a penny idealism? America's Funniest Home Videos? Wall Street? When did we start making our entertainment dumber and more pointless?
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