As discussed in Robert Ray's A certain tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, during the 1960s and 1970s American cinema became more ideologically polarized than Hollywood cinema classic, left and right cinema. Movies like Bonnie & Clyde, Midnight Cowboy, and Easy Rider were on the left while movies like Dirty Harry, Patton, and Death Wish were on the right. On the left the protagonists were outlaws and martyrs and on the right the protagonists were the law. The protagonists were both collective (on the left) and individual (on the right). Two films, Jaws and Vivono, from the 1970s and 1980s show how these ideologies are evident in Hollywood cinema. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay In 1975, Steven Spielberg made a film that left its mark on cinema. Jaws became the first big summer hit. The film was released towards the end of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. You could argue that Jaws is a right-wing film. Three men are sent to sea to destroy a threat to small-town America. This could be an allegory for the Vietnam War and the motivations behind it. The United States believed that the spread of communism was a threat to the world, but really to its own interests. The three characters also embody middle-class American masculinity. What would problematize this reading would be the businessman mayor who seems to embody capitalist greed and bureaucracy. John Carpenter, known for both horror and science fiction films, is no stranger to incorporating sociopolitical elements into his films, whether intentional or not. The Thing could be read as an allegory of the AIDS crisis, the blood test scene comes to mind as the most visually representative of this reading. Escape from New York eerily predicted the rise of private prisons, and its sequel Escape from LA predicted the rise of an unpredictable and dangerous president who banishes anyone he deems "un-American" within the walls of the private prison in Los Angeles. Prince of Darkness is bizarrely about strange, zombie-like transmissions coming from a satanic vat of green goo in a church basement that can be read as a commentary on mass media and the “religious right.” Carpenter's 1988 film They Live is a scathing critique of the Reagan administration. conservatism and the excessive materialism of capitalism. The film came out at the height of the Reagan administration and the beginning of the George H. W. Bush administration, which pursued many of the same policies. The Reagan administration was notorious for its treatment and neglect of marginalized people, from its disregard for the AIDS crisis, to its anti-abortion legislation, to its trickle-down economic system voodoo that led to increased poverty and the homeless. Carpenter's heroes, Nada and Frank, are working class and homeless. In They Live, a drifter named Nada gets a job on a construction site where he befriends Frank and is given a place to stay in a shantytown near a church where there is no real choir, just a recording. After discovering scientific equipment and boxes of sunglasses in the church, the church is raided by the police. Nada manages to save one of the boxes of sunglasses and hides it safely in an alley. When he wears sunglasses he sees the world for what it is, run by ghoulish aliens and subliminal messages to “obey,” “conform,” and “consume.” The "ghouls", as Carpenter calls them, are the Reaganites who took power by putting America to sleep by making it "sleep",.
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