Interactive Syllabus

“American Cinema of the 1980s” introduces students to six of the most important Hollywood production trends of this decade, albeit with a spin. These trends include Backlash Cinema like Dressed to Kill (1980), Cold War Cinema like Rocky IV (1985), and High Concept like Flashdance (1983). As well as Family Films like Big (1987), Yuppie Cinema like Wall Street (1987), and LGBTQ+ Cinema like Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985). The course invites students critically to reevaluate the industrial, social, and textual dimensions of these trends, and at times revise current understandings thereof. In so doing, they are invited to develop new ways of seeing one of the most industrially important, culturally significant, influential – and indeed misunderstood – chapters in western popular culture.

This course uses the case of American Cinema of the 1980s to promote critical and revisionist understandings of Hollywood during this decade, considering its industrial, aesthetic, and socio-cultural dimensions. The course familiarizes students with transferable frameworks, approaches, and skills that promise to deepen their engagement with media formats on and beyond this course. By the end of the course, students will be expected to demonstrate a capacity to synthesize in argument-driven fashion their engagement of scholarly frameworks and textual and contextual analyses. Their proficiency in such areas shall be assessed with an original essay, one requiring direct engagement with one of the topics examined on this course. All of this requires students develop insights into the following areas:

• Hollywood & the Cold War

• Hollywood & the Yuppie

• Hollywood & Family Values

• Hollywood & the Battle of the Sexes

• Hollywood & LGBTQ+

• Hollywood & High Concept

About the teacher: Dr. Richard Nowell gained his PhD at the University of East Anglia. In his research he focuses on the generative mechanisms underwriting the development of film cycles and textual/thematic trends; the mechanics, motivations, and algorithms of repackaging American genre cinema and the appropriation of popular generic discourse in the assembly and marketing of American cinema. He is a widely published film theorist and historian, author of the book Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle and editor of the collection Merchants of Menace: The Business of Horror Cinema.