Cobra. Over the Top. Robocop. Top Gun. All movies that came out in the 80s from one of two producing teams: Bruckheimer / Simpson and Golan / Globus. Peep this article by Ben Maraniss at n+1. He beings by describing the illicit experience of this culture while living in Amherst, Mass. Of course, there it's all about high culture and academia but with MTV (commercials and such) how could any young kid resist Stallone ripping some Latino's shirt off?
Out of that experience comes this piece, a really nuanced exploration of how these films came about and how the mood still hangs around. The films of Bruckheimer and Simpson were simpler, more white bread. They were just cinematic expressions of bottled-up male sexuality. Like what you see at New Ho King with all those guys in button-shirts eating General Tso's instead of some general Ho. There's Maverick's overcompensating hot-dogging, for instance. According to Maraniss, his sexual energy running everyone over. Sure, it's a theme as old as time itself, but why the sudden flood? Cuz Saturday Night Fever did it so big. It's true: Days of Thunder, Top Gun, Flashdance, etc. all feel like overblown, entrenched in motif (jets, race cars, disco) extensions of SNF.
So, if Bruckheimer and Simpson are about nice, clean, so hetero it feels gay, movies, then Golan and Globus add a bit of edge. Like at New Ho, with said guys going a bit further and scrapping after steamed rice. Cobra, Missing in Action (Chuck Norris vs. Asia), Red Heat. These movies, you find their revenge roots in Vietnam and more specifically The Deer Hunter. But while that film was so artful, the Golan and Globus team had a hard and fast rule: budget under 5 mil. So, you get a bit less craftsmanship, a bit more fantasy, a bit more reliance on default cynicism:
"On the one hand there are the Oscar-nominated critical reassessments (Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket) and on the other, the profit-drenched pictures which focused on re-fighting the war with a different result. This divergence obscures the special place of Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978), which got the ball rolling in both directions. Ostensibly a film about the war’s unique brutality and its effects on a group of steel workers, The Deer Hunter was also the first major hit to use the POW/MIA storyline in which a veteran returns to rescue his deserted buddies. That film’s massive success helped to teach Hollywood that backlash jingoism would play."
Even though we don't get these straight action movies anymore (think the stretch from True Lies to The Expendables) you can still feel the motifs in the media everyday. Where? In the ultra-right conservative movement of course:
"The legacy of Simpson/Bruckheimer, Golan/Globus, and Kassar/Vajna functions as the sarcophagus of a received wisdom which has ceased to live but still animates the zombified Right in modern political debate. The 1980s sloganeering that suggested that “the government that governs best is the government that governs least,” the assumption that a few trained American soldiers are capable of subduing an entire nation of “bad guys,” and the insistence that virtuous intentions justify insane action, formed the intellectual substance of the Right then and has lingered long enough to form the emotional core of its rhetoric today."
