Quentin Tarantino names the only uncompromising directors of the 1980s: “That’s it”
In the opinion of Quentin Tarantino, the former video store employee and movie fanatic who became the defining cinematic auteur of the 1990s, there are two decades in which Hollywood fell into the doldrums. The first decade was the ’50s, when he argued that a repressed post-war society and the studio system imposed restrictions on what filmmakers could depict on screen, leading to an entire decade of sanitised, safe, cookie-cutter movies.
Fascinatingly, though, Tarantino believes the ’80s were even worse for Hollywood. This may surprise some cinephiles, as that decade has been subject to an incredible amount of nostalgia in recent years. It was chock-full of classics to an entire generation, from Top Gun to Ghostbusters, and Beverly Hills Cop to ET the Extra-Terrestrial. All of those movies were then rediscovered in the 2010s by that generation’s children, who became fixated on Stranger Things, the ultimate ’80s nostalgia-fest.
However, according to Tarantino in Cinema Speculation, his excellent memoir-meets-film criticism odyssey, he argued that these movies could be viewed as examples of everything wrong with Hollywood in the ’80s. He believed this was the decade that the movie business fell victim to self-censorship, instead of filmmakers diluting their visions because of societal pressures. “The harshest censorship is self-censorship,” Tarantino wrote. “And it doesn’t always come from the big, bad studio either. Many filmmakers watered down their own vision right from the beginning.”
Arguing that filmmakers in the ’80s chose to censor themselves is a unique take from the Pulp Fiction director. After all, most critics of Hollywood movies in that decade attribute much of the conservatism and aversion to risk-taking to a trickle-down effect of Ronald Reagan’s presidential ideology and “Reaganomics” economic policies. Not Tarantino, though. He believed the vast majority of filmmakers took the easy road by turning their backs on the progressive aspects of ’70s cinema, which prioritised nuance, realism, and an unflinching look at the ills of society.
“The complex and complicated lead characters of the ’70s were the characters that ’80s cinema avoided completely,” Tarantino raged. “Complex characters aren’t necessarily sympathetic. Interesting people aren’t always likeable. But in the Hollywood of the ’80s, likeability was everything.”
The Kill Bill helmer’s biggest beef with ’80s movies was that they were predominantly “drained of life, changed, or turned into morality plays,” which meant that even when a filmmaker attempted to make a movie about an unlikeable character, anyone could see the predictable ending coming a mile away. “If you did make a movie about a fucking bastard,” Tarantino groused, “You could bet that fucking bastard would see the error of their ways and be redeemed in the last 20 minutes. Like, for example, all of Bill Murray’s characters.”
Thankfully, despite his scathing verdict on the ’80s as a whole, Tarantino didn’t believe the whole decade was a write-off. He spotlighted several one-off films that bucked the trend of sterilised platitudes by showing audiences uncompromising visions. “John Carpenter’s The Thing,” Tarantino name-checked. “William Friedkin’s Cruising. Robert Harmon’s The Hitcher. Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark…Clive Barker’s Hellraiser.”
To his chagrin, though, these directors weren’t celebrated for taking risks; instead, they were “punished for their perceived transgressions, by the press, the public, and the industry.”
Crucially, Tarantino also claimed there were six directors whose work in that miserable decade was always uncompromising, confronting, and artistically engaging. “You had David Lynch, Paul Verhoeven, Abel Ferrara, Terry Gilliam, Brian De Palma (sometimes), and David Cronenberg,” Tarantino claimed. “And that’s it.” These helmers made boundary-pushing films like Blue Velvet, RoboCop, Ms 45, Brazil, Scarface, and The Fly in an environment that valued conformity over expression. For Tarantino, that was something to be celebrated.
Never Miss A Take
The Far Out Quentin Tarantino Newsletter
All the latest Quentin Tarantino content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.