Genres and Production Cycles

Contrary to a popular critical perspective that 1980s Hollywood marched in lockstep with the Reagan revolution, film production during the decade exhibited multiple and often contradictory sociopolitical perspectives.¹ Existing in some tension with this social engagement were the era's genre pictures. Genre production was prolific, and many of the period's biggest hits were straight genre pieces.

While genre films can be inflected with social content, what may count for most viewers are the pleasures derived from the repetition of familiar elements of character and story. If a genre persists over decades, it does so because its core elements transcend the issues of a political-social period, even as individual pictures in the genre may be responsive to a specific zeitgeist. HIGH NOON (1952) speaks to the conflicts of the McCarthy period, but its core genre elements gesture beyond this...