I have noticed, and I'm sure I'm not the first to notice this, that in a large amount of movies from the 80s the criminal element all wear outlandishly punky/ cyber goth clothes and scream/laugh manically everywhere they go. There is plenty of examples of this type of behaviour lurking around the place in your local dvd store, but one of my personal favs is the Robocop attempted rape scene. But you know you can find these type of crims in any 80s action flick really. Bill Paxton in Terminator for instance. Any Troma film. Jeff Goldblum in Death Wish. I like how if you watch the credits on Death Wish, his character is labelled as 'freak 1'. Not rapist, not murderer and not even criminal. Freak.
In movie land in the 80s, most of the time you were a criminal, you screamed and shouted and generally acted up a lot. You were a freak of society that was easy to spot, and most probably easy to kill in most of the movies I am thinking about.
Anyway this got me thinking about the time frame in which these films were made and something I read about, have heard and studied.
You see in the 70s and 80s, before the Berlin wall came down, America was pretty much scared of Communism. (The early 80s was a bad time because of Russia invading Afghanistan, Americas then Allies and Regan and Thatchers hard line ideals that Communism was complete evil)
The problem with being afraid of Communism, is that you're afraid of an idea or ideal, and not something that you can touch, or taste, or blow away face to face with a machine gun.
I think, maybe not on purpose, Americans made and wanted movies where the bad guys were obvious. Where they knew who to shoot and everything was in black and white.
The most classic example of preying intentionally on this fear is Predator with Arnie. The Alien is an unseen presence for the first 40mins of the movie. An unseen enemy picking the squad off one by one. What are they fighting? Its an evil they can't quite comprehend. I know John McTiernan was essentually dealing with this on purpose, as I have heard him talk about the influence of fear of communism on this film, but I don't think he realized that in the end he turned it into another America triumphs over evil post the Vietnam war loss movie though.
This is of course, one of the main ideals behind the glut of action films about invincible characters dealing punishment to destroy all enemies in their path. The re-masculinisation of America after suffering a loss in Vietnam.
This is a well documented trend. Missing in Action, Rambo, Commando to name a few.
America had taken a knocking. Their egos were bruised and their backs were up. What better way to fix that than fictional action films where your heroes are ex US military hard asses that can't be killed. (strangely Schwarzenegger feature in a few of these and he doesn't really sound American at all)
An interesting series in this period is the American Ninja movies. This is a weird one, because, a culture Americans don't understand, they do in this film, and then make a case and point of saying they are actually better at it than the Japanese originators. A strange take for action film makers of the time, because, well who needs to use the enemies skills when you can just blow them up with guns.
My favourite of all action films in the 80s has to be Robocop.
Robocop is a funny one, because all of the things I have talked about enough are in the film, and on purpose. The trick was, when the script went around they couldn't get anyone to make it. The script fell into little known (then) art house film director Paul Verhoeven.
Verhoeven, having never been to the States before, saw all these things about America and there culture and movies and put them in his. Don't believe me? The proof is in the movie.
The adverts in Robocop? (and later Starship Troopers) The story goes Verhoeven arrived in America for pre-production meetings on the film and the Shuttle Challenger exploded in Flames. Breaking news reports were all over the television, yet instead of staying with the action, occasionally the news would go to commercials and advertise things as inappropriate as childrens toys.
Vietnam references? In shovel loads. The Robot ED-209 face is roughly a mimic of the Bell Huey gunship used for urban pacification Vietnam, which was a completely failed (and in-human) way of dealing with riots in small towns and villages by shooting them from gunships. As a further nod in this direction, Ed-209s creator, who introduces the Robot, is called Robert McNamara. Robert McNamara was the Secretary of Defense from 1961-1968 for the US, when their Urban pacification idea came about. Then as one final nod a bit later, they state clearly that ED-209 was built for urban pacification.
On the flip side of this, the film deals with the unseen threat, but with a much more anti-establishment swing on things. The unseen or unknown threat to our hero is coming from the company that created him. His own soil. Not an outside force at all.
Either way. The lowly crims are still loud mouth, screaming and laughing punks and in the end Robocop still shoots everyone bad all to hell. I think maybe I over thought this. This sounds like a loud of shit.
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80s action films Rulz.
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