Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2002 21:30:43 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Re: AUT: 70s movies (including Network)/New Right


Interesting indeed.  However,  I am surprized they
didn't mention the ultimate middle-class backlash film
of the period:
"Death Wish".

Thomas
--- Michael Handelman <mhandelman1-AT-yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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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===="The tradition of all the dead generations
 weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living"

-Karl Marx

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