The "'80s Jerk," Again

The last time that I raised the issue of the "'80s jerk" my explanation of the phenomenon was that in that earlier era of film-making we still had lots of grounded, smaller-scale stories where the stakes are personal rather than galactic and petty meanness or ambition could be significant plot points in movies viewed by large numbers of people.

Yet I can also see a possibility of there being more to the matter than that--reflecting the rightward turn of politics and popular culture in that time. One is a strengthening of the tendency (admittedly, probably always stronger in America than other places in the Western world) to think less in terms of society and the way it is structured and more of individuals, and the obstacle to the hero's realization of their goals as a matter of entirely individual villains. ("It's not the apple barrel that's rotten, just a few bad apples," the conventional always say. Like Sigourney Weaver being all that's really wrong with Wall Street so that Carly Simon sings "Let the river run!" over the end credits to Working Girl.)

Another may be that it was a vehicle of selective bashing of authority--the kind of authority that those skewing rightward did not much like, who tend to be the equal and opposite of the ultraconformist "maverick" the conventional so love. (Thus in libertarian Ivan Reitman's Ghostbusters we see the Environmental Protection Agency presented in a very bad light indeed--in contrast with the protagonists who departed academia for private entrepreneurship who save the day.)

So far as I can tell the essential outlook endures, even as the stories that big movies tend to tell have not.