Instead, the jokey, "let's just all hang out and have fun" vibe of Stripes is still found in virtually all of the comedies successful enough to penetrate the mainstream at all: the films of Judd Apatow and his many, many colleagues and spiritual descendants which dominate 2010s film comedy are cut from exactly the same cloth as Stripes, right down to a 2005 DVD release of this movie that added footage to take it up to a puffy 124 minutes of scenes plugged in because they're enjoyable on their own, not because they are in any way the result of discipline of any kind. The loosey-goosey plotting and especially the open and constant reliance on improvisation and riffing to build character and flesh out jokes is still very much with us tightly-constructed and streamlined comic racecars still exist, as they still existed in the '80s, but never anywhere close to to quantity that existed in the '30s or '40s. Nor can one imagine a film that should have more to say about the current state of the world, while simultaneously going almost visibly out of its way to avoid saying any of it than Stripes, one of the biggest films of 1981, and certainly the most important release outside of Animal House itself in definitively stating, "this is how we're going to make comedy now" - and to some degree, we've never quite stopped. Not that they're political manifestos political commitment has never been common in commercial American cinema, even when they openly bring in politics. The last of these are in some ways the most interesting cases, since they are the only ones to overtly espouse any kind of anti-establishment anarchism (a different thing from the low-simmering paranoia of government found in many action films), an inheritance no doubt from the single movie whose success largely established the genre: 1978's Animal House, which had more focused anti-social rage than the genial, sloppy movies which came in its wake. It feels, at a first approximation, like the movies of that time came in one of five basic flavors, and most of these were also a little bit prone to what we would tend to associate with social or political conservatism, in one guise or another: the excruciating prestige dramas that hogged all the awards glossy fantasy/sci-fi extravaganzas that were only good when Steven Spielberg was involved in making them in some capacity horror films about implausibly creative violent psychopaths, xenophobic action films in which muscly men with unintelligible accents delivered leaden one-liners while mowing down wave upon wave of faceless henchmen and puerile comedies about juvenile masculinity. But whereas generic studio shlock from the 1930s, say, has a strong personality and prideful sense of work ethic, and the shlock from the 1960s is visibly desperate and anxious, shlock from the '80s tends to feel as anonymous and forgettable as the movies ever have. But the results in movies were an enormous reliance on the tried-and-true, and an increasingly derivative, formula-driven approach to storytelling and craftsmanship alike that does not make, at any rate, for a terribly exciting cinema culture, even if you can cherry-pick masterpieces here and there, for masterpieces are of course to be found in every era, even among the carefully market-driven Hollywood products of this period. The results, in the political and social and economical spheres, are beyond the scope of this project. The dominance of the anglosphere's politics by Thatcherism and Reaganism doesn't have a one-to-one relationship with the kind of movies being produced - there wasn't exactly a wave of anti-union propaganda or popcorn epics about supply-side economics - but both come from the same general impulse to slowing down and consolidating and trying really hard not to rock the boat. It is an exaggeratedly safe time in American cinema but then, it was an unusually conservative time in culturally, in both little-c and big-C senses. And it's perhaps not even the case, exactly, that the quality of the filmmaking in the '80s was at a particularly low ebb, but that it was an era of extreme caution and a level of conscious anti-creativity. Masterpieces can be found - masterpieces can be found in any era, of course - but the standard level of mainstream Hollywood filmmaking reached, I think, its lowest level during this period. The first thing the writer on film must do is to confess to all biases, and here is the one that matters the most for me: the 1980s are my least-favorite decade in the history of American film.
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