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• Same-sex marriage as the win that cannot be repeated.
Infamously known as the central legal battle for the LGBTQ+ community, same-sex marriage finds itself in many political speeches, campaigns, and social commentaries. Interestingly, after being legalized through a Supreme Court decision in the United States, Same-Sex Marriage finds itself framed as the social inevitability that should not be repeated in politics or any legal shift. In other words, “the gays have won this battle, but not the war.”
• There are risks around the “LGBTQ+ lifestyle” and its careful catering to an elite minority and the mediation through bans.
The risks of the LGBTQ+ “lifestyle” date back far, with many connotations being attached to being LGBTQ+ (AIDS epidemics, etc.). In modern journalism, many media outlets portray LGBTQ+ individuals to be a tiny minority (.001% according to some) that demands the whole society to adhere to their requests. This framework portrays the LGBTQ+ community as oppressors and obsessed advocates that can never “seem to get enough” (ex: more than just marriage). The bans are framed as the neutralizing factor to the catering.
• LGBTQ+ children and topics in academic and social spaces are the extreme degree.
When it comes to LGBTQ+ issues and conversations as they revolve around children, media outlets have some of the most passionate opinions about them. Often portrayed as “the line that shouldn’t be crossed,” LGBTQ+ issues, as they find themselves in schools and other spaces, are thus portrayed as bearable to a certain degree, never completely. Claims of indoctrination are also presented prominently even when institutional efforts are to protect LGBTQ+ kids.
An entire decade of films that emerged from the Hollywood system during the blockbuster era of the 1980s is often summed up as one marked by a “curious and disturbing phenomenon of children’s films conceived and marketed largely for adults — films that construct the adult spectator as a child, or, more precisely, as a childish adult, an adult who would like to be a child.” If it is possible, as film theorist Siegfried Kracauer proposed, that “in recording the visible world — whether current reality or an imaginary universe — films … provide clues to hidden mental processes,” what are we to deduce about the mental processes of the American public who would pay to sit in a movie theater and watch Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) or Rambo: First Blood (1982) for multiple viewings? In addressing this questions it may be helpful to turn again to Krakauer, who reminds us that a box office “hit may cater only to one of many co-existing [mass] demands, and not even a very specific one,” and that even if one could draw conclusions about the “peculiar mentality of a nation” by analyzing the “pictorial and narrative motifs” of box office hits, this “by no means implies a fixed national character.” This is a key insight because it implies a diverse national character composed of mass demands that remain unmet by the “children’s films” produced for adults which remain emblematic of Hollywood during the 1980s. In this thesis, I argue that the mainstream Hollywood film Beverly Hills Cop contradicts this notion because it employs sophisticated strategies to work as resistance against the dominant American cultural ideologies of the mid-1980s. I briefly contextualize the film in its historical and cultural setting. Then, I analyze three narrative aspects of the film. First, I begin with the various interactions Eddie Murphy’s character Axel Foley has with several “gatekeepers” throughout the film. Next, I analyze a scene in which Foley is assaulted by Sgt. Taggart of the Beverly Hills Police Department. Finally, I analyze Foley’s relationships with the supporting characters Mikey and Jenny. Beverly Hills Cop is one of the most popular and successful American films of the 1980s. Its subversiveness suggests the possibility that a host of other popular films from the decade are similarly sophisticated. This points to the need for a reexamination of a decade of American cinema that has been cast as “children’s films conceived and marketed largely for adults.”