Hollywood Bloodshed: Violence in 1980s American Cinema

By James Kendrick. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, March 2009. Paper: ISBN 978-0809328888, $35.00. 272 pages.

Review by Sarah Boslaugh

The most important thing James Kendrick does in his new book Hollywood Bloodshed: Violence in 1980s American Cinema is to bring some much-needed clarity to the discussion of violence in movies. As Kendrick argues (with ample supporting evidence), violence in film is nothing new: The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (Edison Co., 1894) used stop-motion substitution to present a quite convincing beheading of the title character, and the most celebrated single shot in Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 The Great Train Robbery is the one in which actor Justus D. Barnes appears to fire directly at the audience.

Kendrick argues that “violence” means so many different things to so many different people that without further clarification it’s useless to discuss it, and that reactions to violence often rest more on how violence is used in a particular film rather than the specific acts portrayed on screen. Even the Production Code did not prohibit the portrayal of specified violent acts or content (as it did with sexuality), but specified that they “must be treated within the careful limits of good taste.” This was the regulation that gave us on-screen violence without pain and suffering by requiring directors to developed a screen language which indicated violent acts (such as shooting someone) without showing the consequences of those acts.

Most film historians agree that American cinema changed radically in the period from the late 1960s through the most of the 1970s. Several factors played a role, including the collapse of the Production Code, the failure of several big-budget films leading to increased interest in marketing to a youth audience, and the emergence of the Film School generation of directors, who learned filmmaking in universities rather than as apprentices in the studio system. One major change in the films of this period was a marked increased in portrayals of graphic violence (violence whose consequences are actually portrayed on the screen): the most famous example may be the death of Bonnie and Clyde in Arthur Penn’s film of the same name. However, Kendrick and many other critics believe that the violence in this and similar films was not gratuitous but part of a larger social critique heavily influenced by graphic television and newspaper depictions of the consequences of real violence in the Vietnam War.

In contrast, the 1980s are usually interpreted as a period in which the radical innovations and social criticism of the previous decade went into retreat and the self-satisfaction and prosperity of the Reagan years were mirrored on film screens across America. Kendrick does not disagree, but notes that screen violence did not disappear during this period: rather it was repackaged in order to support the new ethos of the time. He illustrates his point with a case study of Red Dawn, directed by John Milius in 1984. Red Dawn began as a dark, anti-war script written by Kevin Reynolds in the late 1970s which had thematic similarities to William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies. By the time the film went into production in 1983, it had become a conservative fantasy dressed up as an action movie which celebrates violence while glorifying a band of teenage vigilantes heroically fighting off Communist invaders (Red Dawn was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for containing more acts of violence than any other Hollywood film).

The teenage heroes could be considered a collective example of a type of hero often featured in the action films of the 1980s: characters who use violence to triumph over a simplified, demonized enemy and who are neither limited by self-doubt nor restrained by any considerations beyond winning. The enemy could be terrorists (Die Hard), drug runners (Beverly Hills Cop; Lethal Weapon), Vietnamese (First Blood), Soviets (Top Gun) or unnamed guerrilla fighters (Predator) because all that mattered was that the hero triumph over them. Critical and social outcry over the violence in these films was muted, often non-existent, a response which could be reasonably interpreted as: violence which reinforces dominant social values is good and should be celebrated, while violence which challenges them is bad and should be prohibited or denounced.

After setting up his historical argument, Kendrick devotes chapters to analyzing how violence was used in 1980s action films, Vietnam films, horror films, and children’s films. The latter chapter includes a fascinating discussion of how the PG-13 rating came into existence and what it implies about the whole system of rating movies in terms of their content and suitability for different age groups. The book concludes with a discussion of how screen violence was used and interpreted in films of the 1990s, followed by extensive end notes, a 13-page reference list and a detailed index.

Hollywood Bloodshed is an exemplar of modern film criticism which integrates the careful analysis and theoretical knowledge expected of academics with the sense of immediacy and well-crafted writing required in popular writing. This is a book about movies and the experience of watching them, not a book about what other critics and theorists have said. Perhaps not surprisingly, the author has a foot in both worlds: Kendrick earned his PhD from Indiana University and is a professor at Baylor, but he’s also been a film critic for Q Network since 1998. The film studies world needs more writing of this type, and I hope there’s a scholar out there who can bring a similar perspective to examine another great hot-button issue, the portrayal of sex and sexuality in the movies.