By Steve Saragossi
GORDON GEKKO/WALL STREET (1987)
If ever a movie could be carbon-dated to a specific time, Wall Street (1987) – Oliver Stone’s tale of corporate greed – would be it. In attempting to write a classic money-grubbing villain in Gordon Gekko, Stone shot himself in the foot. Michael Douglas took the character as written – a villainous foil to Charlie Sheen’s redemptive hero – and turned him into the ultimate eighties anti-hero. As the decade drew on, the watchword was “Me”. Satisfying one’s own desires, be they material or carnal, was seen as a completely valid, even noble, pursuit. Gekko, with his slicked backed hair, red braces and famous espousal that “lunch was for wimps”, was such a caricature of a villain that he unintentionally became the film’s focus. Gekko’s rampant materialism and self belief came to be seen as admirable, and totemic for the whole yuppie ethos. His infamous catch-cry of “Greed is good” became not a damning indictment of corrupt corporate voracity, but a rallying call for every young gun from New York to Milan to embrace materialism in all its hollow glory. Seen today, Wall Street looks more prophetic than ever – with the hubris and arrogance of corporate bigwigs hogging headlines around the world, Gekko’s legacy echoes to this very day. “Gekko’s character was written to create an engaging, charming, but deceitful and brutal being,” says Wall Street co-writer Stanley Weiser. “I have nevertheless run into quite a number of younger people who, upon discovering that I co-wrote the film, wax rhapsodic about it…but often for the wrong reasons.”
STAR WARS (1977)
“I call upon the scientific community who gave us nuclear weapons to turn their great talents to the cause of mankind and world peace: to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.” So said President Ronald Reagan in March 1983, in what became known from that point on as his Star Wars speech. The epithet took, and from then on was the accepted shorthand for Reagan’s ambitious Strategic Defence Initiative, which included the capability to use ground and space-based weaponry to protect the interests of the United States. That a film – any film – could be used as shorthand for such a monumental and important political initiative, and everyone who heard mention of it knew immediately what was being talked about, speaks volumes about the staggering cultural currency with which that particular film was held. Star Wars (1977), of course, was nothing new: it was a swashbuckler dressed up with lasers and spaceships. Despite the familiarity of its influences, however, Star Wars was a revelation. Its impact is so profound, and so epoch-making, that many younger people are seriously of the opinion that films began with Star Wars. Its legacy is practically unquantifiable, and the film can quite rightly lay claim to being the inspiration for an entire generation of filmmakers, directly influencing everything from the way movies are made to the way in which they are marketed. “People say that my movies are just like Hollywood movies,” George Lucas once said. “And I say, ‘I can’t help it if Hollywood copies.’”
JOHN RAMBO/FIRST BLOOD & RAMBO 2 (1982, 1985)
First Blood (1982) was an intelligent thriller and a thoughtful meditation on the alienation of damaged Vietnam veterans trying to assimilate back into their communities. The film was a sober examination of isolation and disillusionment in which the action flowed plausibly from the narrative. As the eighties progressed, however, lead actor Sylvester Stallone was at the forefront of the action-hero blockbuster genre. It was inevitable that, in 1985, the character of killing machine Vietnam vet John Rambo would be revisited. In the intervening three years, however, the movie landscape had changed. All realistic attempts at character motivation had been discarded in favour of a ridiculously muscled-up superhero of a man, whose motives are as jingoistic as they are dumb – much like the man in The White House at the time, who was tacitly responsible for the cycle of fascist uber-heroics that defined Hollywood at the time. Ronald Reagan’s influence on the cinematic landscape probably hits its zenith with Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), which posits the idea that, as far as Vietnam is concerned, “this time, we win”. Both tapping into – and then in fact influencing – the right wing mood of the time, the film was an enormous success. Rambo became a symbol of America’s “might is right” attitude to world politics. Stallone, however, has become somewhat ambivalent about the character’s influence. “Please stop,” he replied when asked what he thought about President George W. Bush being referred to as a Rambo type. “What rhymes with Rambo? Dumbo? We have nothing to do with that, believe me.”
DEATH WISH (1974)
It’s easy to dismiss Charles Bronson today as a granite-faced macho behemoth of a bygone age. It’s even easier to dismiss Michael Winner as an overbearing boor and filmmaker of tacky actioners. To do so, however, would be to severely underestimate how spectacularly prescient they were when they combined their venerable talents on Death Wish (1974). This luridly well-made tale of revenge in Manhattan tapped into and then influenced the zeitgeist like no other film for years. Audiences were literally cheering as Bronson’s urban avenger took his wrath out on New York’s more colourful roster of scumbags. Bronson plays architect Paul Kersey, whose life is turned inside out when his wife is beaten and murdered and his daughter raped and left catatonic. He’s quickly converted into a one-man vigilante crusader. The knee-jerk reaction that the film generated was huge, largely because of its perfect timing. New York in 1974 was on the verge of corporate bankruptcy, needing a huge cash injection from federal reserves to basically avoid going out of business. Crime was consequently on the rise and muggings were endemic and practically out of control. The public saw Death Wish as a cathartic release for their pent-up frustrations. Timing is, indeed, everything. The forgotten 2007 Jodie Foster movie The Brave One (essentially Death Wish in drag) failed to engage on almost every level because New York today is now so wholly sanitised. “There’s no moralistic side to Death Wish,” said the notoriously flippant Michael Winner of his most infamous film. “It’s a pleasant romp.”
EASY RIDER (1969)
A seismic shift took place in the Hollywood hierarchy of the late sixties. Two films directly sent out a clarion call that the times, they were ‘a changing. The Graduate (1967) and Bonnie And Clyde (1967) announced to the world that a new paradigm of mainstream cinema was about to occur. The film that brought the walls down on the old Hollywood regime for good was Easy Rider (1969). It was the antithesis of every known rule for making a hit film. It had no stars, no budget, and hardly any narrative. It appealed solely to an audience that wasn’t thought to be of significant value, and had a nihilistic ending that should have sealed its fate. The growing significance of the youth demographic, however, was spilling into all aspects of popular culture, and the disillusionment over Vietnam brought about a significant divisiveness between adults and teenagers. Into this void bravely leapt director/star Dennis Hopper, who made a counterculture classic that resonated at such a deep level with its audience that it became a byword for disenfranchised youth for decades. The film spoke to an entire generation, changing the commercial and cultural landscape of Hollywood and America for years to come. “The idea that you could make a movie for your own kind, about your own time, was something that had not been allowed to happen,” Dennis Hopper has said of Easy Rider. “Formula films had frozen the industry, and there was no independent film movement at all. It was a unique time, and I was very fortunate to be there.”
NATURAL BORN KILLERS (1994)
As the years pass, Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994) is becoming more and more prescient. Made before the widespread advent of celebrity culture and reality TV, the film is a stunningly pre-emptive gush of angrily satiric bile dished up onto an unsuspecting audience, which promptly vilified it for its ultra-violence and failed to see the blood-spattered writing on the wall. A serial killer flick-meets-road movie, Natural Born Killers redefined the meaning of screen violence, whilst at the same time holding a mirror up to its ever-desensitised audience as if to say “Hey, this is America, 1994: the era of Rodney King, OJ Simpson and The Menendez Brothers. This is now”. Unfortunately for Stone, his rabid satire turned round and bit him. A spate of killings allegedly directly influenced by Natural Born Killers elevated the film to the level of national disaster. Celebrity author John Grisham even came out in defence of two of the copycat killers, trying to establish a direct causal link between Stone’s film and the killings. He attempted to sue Stone and the film’s distributors, but the director vehemently denied the allegation. “An elementary principle of our civilisation is that people are responsible for their own actions,” Stone seethed. He posited that if Grisham were allowed his vision of the world, stifling both art and artists, the result would be “apocalyptic”. The film stands today as a warning to America of the eventual chaotic escalation of random massacres, bloodlust, deification of non-entities, and the ever more barbaric twists and turns of reality TV.
DIRTY HARRY (1971)
“A right-wing hymn to fascism”. So opined film critic Pauline Kael about Don Siegel’s seminal 1971 thriller. It’s not hard to see why she came to that conclusion, given that Eastwood’s Inspector Harry Callahan tramples over the rights of the film’s killer before shooting him dead in cold blood. With the benefit of hindsight, the film, and its runaway success, can be seen in another light. San Francisco in the late sixties and early seventies was terrorised by the serial killer nicknamed Zodiac. David Fincher accurately and soberly chronicled this story in 2007’s Zodiac, but Dirty Harry came out whilst the city was still in the grip of this terrifying maelstrom, and the movie was seen as a loosely fictionalised wish-fulfillment fantasy. Eastwood nailed the appeal of Callahan: “What I liked about playing that character is that he becomes obsessed; he’s got to take this killer off the street. That appealed to the public. The general public isn’t worried about the rights of the killer; they just want him off the street.” Harry Callahan embodied a can-do attitude to law enforcement that had hitherto not been portrayed in such a political and culturally prophetic milieu. In fact, credit is due to Siegel, whose own Madigan (1967) and Coogan’s Bluff (1968) had paved the way for a cop who dealt with felons in a more “straightforward” way. That it fictionally dealt with a very real threat – the Zodiac killer – was the catalyst that propelled the movie from mere cracking thriller to the iconic classic that it’s considered to be today.
ALEX FORREST/FATAL ATTRACTION (1987)
As the materialistic eighties rumbled on, its ever-savvy poster boy Michael Douglas once again captured the times. In the slick thriller Fatal Attraction, however, he’s reduced to the role of hapless victim as the film’s trump card, Alex Forrest (Glenn Close), graphically illustrated the distaff side of power-dressing, high-achieving women who, in this case, not only broke the glass ceiling but used the shards to mutilate the notion of the mistress-as-trophy adornment that it was beforehand. Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction (1987) was in truth as highly improbable as it was era-defining. How could such an obvious nut-job hold down such a powerful position? Still, the movie will forever be defined by its infamous scene in which the deranged Alex takes out her misplaced anger on Douglas’ character by letting herself into his family home and disposing of the family rabbit in a boiling pot of water. From that revolting moment on, she defined forever the descriptive term for a scorned, potentially deranged, woman: bunny boiler. Fatal Attraction set itself up as an eighties morality play. In the age of AIDS, Alex is the physical manifestation of the dangers of casual sex, and infidelity, and Douglas is a selfish idiot who almost pays with his life for his foolhardy dalliance. “That movie has become a part of our culture,” Glenn Close has said of Fatal Attraction. “The term ‘bunny boilers’ is now a part of our language. People still come up to me and say, ‘You scared the shit out of me!’”
TRAVIS BICKLE/TAXI DRIVER (1976)
Although many people claim that movies don’t influence people to commit terrible crimes and that they’re simply a mirror on society, the naysayers are quick to point toward Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver as the crowning proof of their argument that life indeed imitates art. As essayed in stark colours by a never better Robert De Niro, Vietnam vet Travis Bickle mentally decays in a New York milieu that at once suits and repels him. His spectacular disintegration is as ugly as it is inevitable, and the nexus of the film – his almost cathartic but aborted assassination of a Presidential nominee – is the precursor to the bloodbath at the film’s end. Most people saw the deranged Bickle for who he was, but not so John Hinckley Jr., who became besotted with Jodie Foster after seeing her play a child prostitute in the film. Hinckley stalked the actress, and became convinced that if he assassinated a President, she would take notice of him – hey, he got that bit right! After trailing, but failing to target, President Jimmy Carter, Hinckley bided his time and made an attempt on President Ronald Reagan’s life, almost succeeding in his mission. The film, although a brilliant and undiminished classic, is also doomed to be forever co-joined at the hip with the notion of obsession, delusion, and the birth of the celebrity stalker. Despite its bruising personal aftermath, Jodie Foster has never denied the film’s quality. “It’s one of the finest American films,” she has said. “It’s a statement about America, about violence, about loneliness, and anonymity. It’s just a classic.”
REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955)
Although the term “teenager” had previously been in existence, it wasn’t until the fifties that it came to mean not just a defined age range, but an individualistic state of being. James Dean cast in stone forever what it meant to be a tormented youth. In just two movies, Rebel Without A Cause (1955) and East Of Eden (1955), he both catapulted himself to stardom and invented the term “teen angst”. It’s fascinating that these films were made at all, given that prestige productions featuring young adults as their main protagonists were fairly rare – the youth audience wasn’t seen as particularly lucrative. That all changed after East Of Eden, and specifically Rebel Without A Cause, which accurately depicted the nascent tribal nature of high school kids. Knife wielding boy racers were new to audiences at the time, but seem ever timelier today. James Dean was the perfect actor to carry the flag for this new generation. He epitomised an ideological rebelliousness that was appealing to both the guys who wanted to act and emote like him, and the girls who could fixate on the ultimate bit of rough trade. Dean’s untimely death cemented his iconic status and helped him become the standard bearer for all tortured teens. Along with Elvis Presley and the birth of rock’n’roll, James Dean was a vital influence on the creation of teen culture. “If a man can bridge the gap between life and death,” Dean once mumbled, “I mean, if he can live on after his death, then maybe he was a great man.”
SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977)
Saturday Night Fever exploded from nowhere in 1977 and crystallised the definition of the word “disco”, then and forevermore. This small film from a director with no track record (John Badham), and a leading actor just starting his movie career (John Travolta), single-handedly kick-started a completely new teenage vogue for dance, fashion, and a style of music, virtually out of thin air. The film came together from unlikely sources to become an era-defining phenomenon, a cultural earthquake whose aftershocks still reverberate today. “It was a $3 million picture,” recalled director John Badham. “It was meant by Paramount as a way to give Travolta something to do while they were waiting to start Grease. [Producer] Robert Stigwood wanted to do it, and they said, ‘Fine, Robert. You pay for it, and we’ll distribute it’.” Paramount, however, really didn’t want to make it. When they saw it, they were horrified by the language and the sexuality, all of which Robert Stigwood was very insistent about keeping. “Every time I would suggest softening it, Robert would say, ‘No! Keep it as it is,’” says Badham. The rather unlikely universe that the film creates depicts life in bleakly graphic terms – what it is to be a working class youth with nothing much to look forward to except an escape in dance. The style owes much to the British kitchen-sink urban dramas of the early sixties, adopting an almost documentary style, but in so doing it incredibly captured both a moment in time and nailed an abstract, not-yet-formed ideology and catapulted it round the world.
DO THE RIGHT THING (1989)
Spike Lee doesn’t always get it right. In 1989, however, his political ear and creative eye were in perfect synchronicity when he wrote, produced, directed and starred in Do The Right Thing, possibly the most honest film about racism in America ever made, and certainly one of the most confrontational. Set over one scorching day in Brooklyn, the film is deliberately populated with characters with every tolerance of racism from 0 to 100%. The film literally blew the lid off race relations in the late eighties, highlighting the rifts between blacks, Italian-Americans, and the Hispanic population. “I knew that it was going to be big,” recalled one of the film’s stars, Rosie Perez. “Crack was prevalent in urban areas, and it was becoming prevalent in rural areas. Just the inherent racism was still at hand. Nobody was addressing it in such a big way. I also knew that a lot of people would not understand what satire meant.” The film was also one of the first to use rap music in an organic, positive way, almost as an overarching narration on the escalating proceedings. The film’s anthem – Public Enemy’s battering “Fight The Power” – becomes ever more meaningful as the film propels towards its tragic denouement, and its influence on the depiction of black culture in the media is still felt today. It’s shameful that this masterpiece failed to win an Oscar for Best Picture, but Lee took it well. “When Driving Miss motherfucking Daisy won Best Picture, that hurt…and no one’s talking about Driving Miss Daisy now.” Ouch.
If you liked this story, check out our features on feuding critics and filmmakers, warring actors, battling actors and directors, actors who got the sack, directors who got the sack, more directors who got the sack, and tyrant directors.
