80s/90s "message" movies - how were they a thing?
October 4, 2016 10:44 PM   Subscribe

The late 80s/90s seemed to be a golden era for "message" movies. Not after school special but "let's explore a theme" type movies. Why is this?

Ok so I've been on a Netflix binge lately and I've noticed that some movies from the late 80s/90s have a similar feel to them that I haven't seen out of movies lately. Wondering if anyone else has remarked about this?

The movies are
- thriller / drama / crime
- very clearly exploring one "big picture" topic or theme, more than just the crime at hand
- heavy handed with the symbolism (visual & otherwise)
- not terribly character driven; characters are quite flat and they seem to exist just to represent their piece in the theme
- no real sub plots to speak of
- interesting to watch but ultimately rather shallow?
- a "thinking person's crime movie" if the person in question was tired after a long week and didn't want to think too hard

Examples
- Eye for an Eye: is revenge ever justified?
- Devil's Advocate: we are constantly tested to choose virtue or vice
- Seven: hey let's make a movie about the 7 deadly sins, that'd be cool
- Indecent Proposal: is infidelity ever ok? Talk amongst yourselves
- Fatal Attraction (arguably): infidelity is NOT ok, just stay in the suburbs, will you?

There are of course, some excellent "message"" movies with rich characters: Witness, Kramer vs. Kramer, Groundhog Day, Themla and Louise, Shawshank Redemption, Fight Club...... I'm not talking about those

Any other movies spring to mind? Why did these kind of movies peak in the 90s never to return?
posted by St. Peepsburg to Media & Arts (5 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: That was one side effect of the end of the Hays Code in 1968. Suddenly a lot of subjects became available for movies that hadn't been before.

I think the reason you started seeing those in the 1980's is that it took a while to build up to that. And the reason it stopped is that message movies are mostly pretty boring and audiences were mostly staying away. No one wants to buy a ticket in order to get preached at. (Besides which there are fads in movies just like in pretty much every other form of entertainment, and this one had run its course.)

The ones that were successful later were so in spite of the message, not because of it.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 10:57 PM on October 4, 2016 [3 favorites]


I really don't think there were any more in the eighties and nineties than any other era. It's just that they tend to be fairly unremarkable, and the unremarkable films tend to be quickly forgotten -- except in the eighties and nineties, with the home video boom keeping the mediocrity in circulation long after the two weeks those movies lasted in the theatres.

(TCM plays a good half-dozen a day, all in black and white.)
posted by Sys Rq at 1:14 AM on October 5, 2016 [4 favorites]


Best answer: I'm not the first to point out that mainstream, mid-budget dramas in general (and provocative, button-pushing ones in particular) are really struggling in the age of the CGI-driven blockbuster. We still occasionally see earthbound movies where Robert Downey Jr. plays an attorney or whatever, and there have been plenty of message-y movies about the Gulf War. But these days almost everything is supposed to kick off a gazillion dollar franchise or it's an indie that's going to play for two weeks on the coasts but will mostly be seen via VOD. The erotic thriller, the courtroom drama, the mafia picture, that stuff still happens but it's been pushed way to the margins by people running around in front of video game scenery.

People who want to make dramas now do it for TV. If it's a golden age for TV, it sure as hell ain't for movies.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 2:01 AM on October 5, 2016 [7 favorites]


Best answer: I also don't think this is unique to the 80s and 90s. This has been a component of literature for centuries. On adultery, there's Anna Karenina. On sin and hell, there's Dante. The difference in the 80s and 90s is that, instead of writing novels or epic poems, people wrote screenplays.

The question then becomes, why did people who would have otherwise written novels start writing screenplays in the 80s and 90s? That's a little more difficult to answer. First and most obviously, there's the money. You can make a lot more money in Hollywood than you can by writing a literary novel (and the lifestyle is better). Second, there's the exposure. Tolstoy wrote novels because that was the state of the art in fiction in the 19th century. Likewise Dante and epic poetry. In the 20th century, the state of the art of fiction was cinema. If you're a writer, you could continue working in old forms, or you could explore a new medium. Which is more appealing? Finally, the 80s and 90s were a period in between two different Hollywood eras. There was the New Hollywood of the 70s, which valued plot, conflict, and character development; then in the late 90s, there was the rise of the action blockbusters as CGI became more commonplace. As a result, the 80s and 90s were a fertile time for character-driven dramas.
posted by kevinbelt at 8:17 AM on October 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


Yeah, this is selection bias. There have always been moralizing or message movies, ever since movies were made. Honestly, more of these movies were likely made in the 1930s and 1940s (at least in American cinema) than in other decades.

The historian in me also must remark that "Zeitgeist arguments" like this (i.e., "these movies so clearly reflect their historical era"), 99.9999% of the time, do not hold water. Every type of film (and novel and piece of music, etc.) was made at every era, and you can find just as many counterexamples as examples.
posted by Dr. Wu at 11:00 AM on October 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


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