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.”

With the assistance of my thesis committee, I created a podcast to fulfill my objective of interviewing survivors of sexual abuse/grooming practices and their support systems. I utilized this method to have in-depth discussions and provide people with a safe space to share their experiences. By doing so, we were able to reflect on the areas in which professionals can improve on recognizing signs of abuse in their communities. My goal was to show how training teachers to recognize signs of trauma is essential for effectively assisting the population we serve. Ultimately, this came down to what instruction was taught in the Teachers College. Curricula centered on properly managing trauma in the classroom, including sexual abuse, should be required for courses in the upper and lower division degree program for Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College.

An effort to experiment on the novel Usutu virus in pure in silico methods was made to determine conformational changes with non polar point mutations in the amino acid sequence. The first method consisted of creating a Python program to exhaustively identify codons, amino acids, and dinucleotide bridges & nonbridges, including viral characteristics defined by Mollentze in 2021. The second method consisted of creating point mutations to non polar amino acids in deemed key sites of the Usutu virus envelope protein and finding the RMSD from the original structure. This resulted in one of two outcomes - either the experiment showed that the Usutu virus envelope protein is highly resistant to point mutations or in silico methods are inconsistent and biased, leading to inaccuracy.