Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2002 16:33:45 -0800 (PST)
Subject: AUT: 70s movies (including Network)/New Right


I found this of interest:

http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/MCkellner/HOLSOC.html

"During this period as well, the culture wars that had
raged since the 1960s were reproduced in Hollywood
films. As the 1970s progressed, conservative films
were becoming more popular (e.g. Rocky, Star Wars,
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Superman, et al)
indicating that conservative sentiments were growing
in the public and that Hollywood was nurturing these
political currents. Indeed, even liberal films
ultimately helped advance the conservative cause. A
cycle of liberal political conspiracy films (e.g. The
Parallex View, All the President's Men, The Domino
Principle, Winter Kills, and so on) vilified the state
and thus played into the conservative/Reaganite
argument that government was the source of much
existing evil. Other films that took a perspective
sympathetic to the working class and critical of
business (Blue Collar, F.I.S.T., et tutti quanti),
blaming corrupt unions for the working class'
problems, while liberal films dealing with race
(Claudine, A Piece of the Action, and the like)
attacked welfare institutions and celebrated
individual initiative and self-help -- precisely the
Reaganite position. And even the most socially
critical films (such as the Jane Fonda films, Network
and other Sidney Lumet films, et al) posited
individual solutions to social problems, thus also
reinforcing the conservative appeal to individualism
and attack on statism. Consequently, reading Hollywood
films of the decade politically allowed one to
anticipate the coming of Reagan and the New Right to
power by demonstrating that conservative yearnings
were ever more popular within the culture and that
film and popular culture were helping to form an
ideological matrix more hospitable to Reagan and
conservatives than to embattled liberals (Kellner and
Ryan 1988)."

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