At Flashbak, I celebrate Post-Apocalypse Week (leading up to Fury Road) with a look at five great heroes of the 1980s Post-Apocalyptic Cinema
Here's a snippet (and the url: http://flashbak.com/cock-walk-feather-duster-five-greatest-heroes-1980s-post-apocalyptic-cinema-34516/ )
"Thanks
to George Miller, Mel Gibson and The Road Warrior (1982), the
eighties represents the great era of post-apocalyptic movies.
It
wasn’t just the success of The Road Warrior, either.
During
the Reagan Era of politics, there was a pervasive “apocalyptic mentality” roiling the culture. This may have been
because the senior citizen president joked on an open mic (on August 11, 1984) about
outlawing The Soviet Union, noting that bombing would commence in “five
minutes.”
Or
the zeitgeist of apocalypse might also have arisen because President Reagan and
his Secretary of the Interior, James Watt both spoke in public about the
possibility that the End Days were coming. Reagan did so in an interview in People Magazine in December of 1983 --
as commander-in-chief -- stating that the 1980s was the first time in history
that so many Biblical prophecies were coming together. He had also said, on the
campaign trail in 1980 -- to televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Baker -- that “ours might be the generation that sees
Armageddon.”
Watt,
on the other hand, testified before the U.S. Congress on February 5, 1981 that
there was no need to preserve America’s national resources for future
generations because he did not know “how
many future generations” we could count on before “the Lord” would return.
As
a tuned-in kid of that era, I paid attention to such terrifying words, as did
many filmmakers, musicians and writers.
Accordingly, the 1980s imagined all kinds of apocalypses (nuclear,
comet-based, and even zombie-oriented) but also provided the strategy for
surviving it: creating a brand of sturdy hero who could adapt to the world
after the fall of civilization.
Here
are five of the greatest heroes of 1980s post-apocalyptic cinema. I have included Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) --
a character from a post-apocalyptic future – only because he does all his
fighting in The Terminator in the 1980s, not in the new landscape of the post-apocalypse."
No comments:
Post a Comment