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.
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.
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