Filtering by
Set in 1999, the film focuses much of its time on exploring alternative visual interpretations of a color-saturated digital space, and contrasting these with a less-vibrant analog world. This contrast intends to provide a visual differentiation between the digital and analog worlds, serving as the basis of the film’s storytelling. The built worlds privilege the emotional context of the internet, and contain an inherent thesis statement: that the digital experience can be as rich and meaningful as that of the analog, if not more so. The visual direction is the result of integrating several perspectives, including contemporary representations of the internet on film, personal observations, digital themed art installations, and experiences of others on the internet. As such, this film intended to engage with the existing body of work, and provide an artistic contribution to what already existed within the film and music video landscapes.
With this, I intend to use storytelling as a tool for conceptualizing worth. Specifically, with the centering of two Black women as romantic interests, I hope to provide a nuanced affirmation in a space where representation is often lacking.
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.”