Coming-of-Age at the Movies in the 1980s
At the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2018, psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford testified against Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh, accusing him of attempting to rape her at a high school party in 1982.[1] Kavanaugh denied the charges of sexual assault, but he did admit to acting inappropriately in his youth, saying, “I said and did things in high school that make me cringe now. But that’s not why we are here today. What I’ve been accused of is far more serious than juvenile misbehavior.”[2] This “juvenile misbehavior” Kavanaugh mentioned included the typical drunken shenanigans that Americans had come to expect from privileged jock types, and, as if to confirm this notion, Kavanaugh referenced three movies that influenced him and his peers: Animal House (1978), Caddyshack (1980), and Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982).[3]
Kavanaugh’s cinema picks served as a justification for the “boys will be boys” mentality that he used to excuse his youthful behavior.[4] A handful of articles immediately surfaced outlining how these Generation X coming-of-age films acted as conduits for an entire range of sexual misconduct, including everything from female objectification to date rape. In Sixteen Candles (1984), the heartthrob Jake passes off his drunk girlfriend Caroline to the geek Ted so that Ted would have no problem getting laid. Jake rationalizes it by saying, “She doesn’t know shit about love. The only thing she cares about is partying.”[5] In Animal House, the freshman Pinto tries to decide whether or not he should have sex with his passed-out date.[6] And in Revenge of the Nerds (1984), the main nerd Lewis tricks the popular cheerleader Betty into having sex with him by disguising himself as her jock boyfriend.[7]
These are just a few examples of how teen movies of the 1970s and 1980s normalized sexual misconduct. However, these films were created in a time when the very notion of date rape was relatively new. Feminist Susan Brownmiller coined the term “date rape” in her 1975 book Against Our Will, saying that date rape (also called “acquaintance rape” at the time) was especially tricky to prosecute because there existed a prior socially-accepted expectation for sex as both parties knew each other in a romantic capacity.[8] Journalist Robin Warshaw’s 1988 book I Never Called It Rape, based on the Ms. magazine study about sexual behavior on college campuses, discussed how date rape was rarely labeled as such because the perpetrator and the victim knew each other, blurring the distinctions between right and wrong in sexual relationships.[9] That same year, ABC ran an afterschool special about date rape that tackled many of these Gen X teen movie tropes—especially the notion that all dates lead to sex—but it would take years for the concept of date rape to become commonplace.[10]
These deep-seated beliefs about acceptable sexual behavior reemerged in the Kavanaugh case, causing pundits and academics to explore the issues all over again. The films that Kavanaugh watched as a teenager perpetuated the old notions that “rape” was something that happened to women walking alone in dark alleys, not something that happened as part of suburban high school hijinks. As professor Jason Nichols noted, “Society had a clear image of what a rapist looked like: young, poor and black or brown. They certainly didn’t look like Brett Kavanaugh, an upper-middle-class prep schooler headed for the Ivy League.”[11]
That 1970s and 1980s teen flicks reinforced sexist behavior is hardly debatable, yet there exists in them another dynamic worth exploring. Compared to Baby Boomer films, Gen X movies often dealt with the theme of the male underdog finally getting the upper-hand over the dominant male type. While these films usually meant using women as props or adjuncts to male goals, they worked as a form of catharsis for the types of young men who had historically been emasculated. Whereas cinema in previous eras glorified the rebel or the tough guy, Gen X cinema elevated the loser: the freaks, the geeks, the nerds, the wimps, the squares, the virgins, the slackers. The fact that so many of these films centered around the theme of the loser beating the jock or the bully demonstrates that there was a crisis of masculinity happening for Generation X, and this crisis was being worked out through the medium of popular culture.
The Crisis of Masculinity in Film, a Brief History
The Baby Boomers were the first to fully articulate a crisis of masculinity in cinema. Before World War II, Hollywood movies usually depicted men in sturdy and confident roles. The silent era showed women as “domestic, delicate, and passive” while men were portrayed as “outgoing, strong, and active.”[12] The gangster movies that were popular in the 1930s almost always centered on a tough, macho male character.[13] Westerns, epics, and war pictures all showcased men as rugged and resilient, usually battling another male for superiority in some fashion.[14] The hard-boiled men in film noir were more complex than the men in prior crime movies, but the inclusion of the femme fatale character served as a warning never to let down their guard, for “when the hero does trust the woman… he is ultimately destroyed.”[15] Even the romantic comedies that were billed as “women’s pictures” presented female concerns as goals that centered around men: marrying them, raising their children.[16] Despite being marketed to women, the male characters maintained the standard expression of masculinity, while the women were expected to “cheer from the sidelines, to wait passively until the hero claimed her for his reward.”[17]
A variety of cultural and political factors caused cinema to change after World War II. During the postwar years, America experienced a couple decades of increased birth rates and economic growth.[18] Appliance companies promoted their products on television, encouraging women to return to domestic roles.[19] Federally-funded highway development and mass-produced homes caused Americans to move out of the cities and into the suburbs.[20] This renewed prosperity, domesticity, and suburbanization instigated toy manufacturers, record companies, and the movie industry to advertise heavily to the Baby Boomers, causing an entire generation’s milieu to be heavily shaped by pop culture.[21]
Because of this seismic shift in American culture, films of the Baby Boomer generation took a different tone. As men returned home after the war, they faced a variety of challenges moving back into the workforce. Despite the fact that women had demonstrated competence in “men’s jobs” while the men were at war, women were strongly encouraged to return to domestic roles, and many were even terminated from their wartime positions so that men could return to their previously-held jobs.[22] Additionally, many veterans returned home with a host of behavioral disorders, such as substance abuse and shell shock (now referred to as PTSD), which created strife in their personal and professional relationships.[23] The 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives captured these woes, showcasing the interwoven struggles of three veterans trying their best to readjust to civilian life.[24] The movie countered the mythic notion that these servicemen came home contented with having won the “good war” and ready to assimilate back into Main Street American life; instead, it showed how many of these men had been broken by the war, both physically and mentally.
The implementation of the G.I. Bill was intended to ease some of these problems by giving governmental assistance to veterans for housing, education, and business ventures, allowing veterans to enter into white-collar jobs.[25] However, the conformity of middle-class life often led to more problems than it solved. In 1950, sociologist David Riesman’s book The Lonely Crowd analyzed the way white-collar work affected the American character. Riesman observed how suburbanization and middle-class life created an “other-directed” personality, where an individual’s identity drew upon what they felt others expected of them, or, in other words, the “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality.[26] A year later, sociologist C. Wright Mills’ book White Collar delved into the ways that this new class of workers became cogs in a bureaucratic and capitalist machine, creating a generation of men who were socially anxious and alienated. Mills noted that the shift from manual labor to white-collar service jobs created employees who were “drawn into the sphere of exchange and became commodities in the labor market,” causing men to be “estranged from one another as each secretly tries to make an instrument of the other, and in time a full circle is made: one makes an instrument of himself and is estranged from it also.”[27]
These postwar men became the fathers of the Baby Boomers, and psychologists and cultural critics at the time explored the ways that white-collar employment and suburban life altered their approach to childrearing. In his 1958 essay “The Crisis of American Masculinity,” Arthur Schlesinger claimed that the lines between male and female roles were becoming blurred, and whereas a man used to be “utterly confident in his manhood, sure of his masculine role in society,” men in the 1950s had become “more and more conscious of maleness not as a fact but as a problem.”[28] Compared to the traditional portrayal of the strong male role model, suburban fathers, with their 8-to-5 jobs and their grey flannel suits, seemed weak and ineffective at properly training their adolescent kids. Coupled with the controlling mother figure, who stayed at home and dominated the domestic sphere, psychologists blamed the weak father for raising rebellious and spoiled children, a trope featured heavily in the films of the 1950s.[29] Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955) epitomized this generational conflict, exposing the tensions between an unassertive father and his rebellious teen, suggesting a correlation between the father’s parenting style and juvenile delinquency.[30] The 1985 movie Back to the Future pays homage to Rebel Without a Cause by making Marty McFly travel back to the 1950s to make his father stand up for himself, ultimately solving the domestic issues that existed for his parents in the 1980s.[31]
Juvenile delinquency, then, became a key theme in Boomer films. For the social scientists of the day, the nuclear family played a primary role in this rising adolescent male rebellion.[32] The suburban teen male, in order to achieve his masculinity, had to become the “bad boy,” and that usually meant rebelling against his closest authority figure—the father.[33] As a result of these fears, Hollywood responded by making films that were intended to show the downfalls of such unruly behavior. Films like The Wild One (1953), East of Eden (1955), and Blackboard Jungle (1955) captured the fears of juvenile delinquency on the big screen. However, instead of warning youngsters about the dangers of rebellion, these films did the opposite: they actually ended up promoting the rebel as a hero figure. In music, the rebel was Elvis Presley; in literature, it was Jack Kerouac; and in film, James Dean and Marlon Brando played the leather-jacket-wearing rebel celebrities that teens wanted to emulate.[34]
Even though Boomer masculinity differed from that of the previous generations, their heroes remained hip. Hollywood rarely portrayed the rebel as a nerd—sensitive beneath a tough exterior, perhaps, but never a wimp. As James Dean’s character Jim Stark emphatically exclaimed in Rebel Without a Cause, “I didn’t chicken!”[35] Boomer movie rebels might have been outsiders, but they were cool and masculine outsiders, like the main characters in Cool Hand Luke (1967) or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Even as Boomer films continued to rail against authority figures, especially against parents and teachers, movies made counterculture rebels cool. Teenagers who acted relatively normal or did not participate in the counterculture’s drugs or sexual experimentation were often labeled “squares” and teased for their old-fashioned disposition.[36] By the 1960s and 1970s, terms such as “geek,” “nerd,” and “dork” began to be used as a description for a variety of social outcast types, everything from the bookish kids to the awkward ones, and these terms were almost always associated with males who lacked a certain masculine nature.[37] These stereotypes showed up in Boomer films, often portrayed in side characters who refused or felt too uncomfortable to participate in something edgy that the main characters were doing. In other words, even though Boomer films were rebellious, the rebels remained popular characters whereas the losers were emasculated or bullied for being squares.
This phenomenon can be seen in many of the celebrated New Hollywood films of the late 1960s and 1970s. Take Bonnie and Clyde (1967), for instance. Hailed as a turning point in Hollywood cinema, Bonnie and Clyde glorified violence and captured the mood of the disaffected youth culture.[38] Clyde exhibited a crisis in masculinity as well, as the character was either sexually impotent or ambivalent toward heterosexuality.[39] Yet, even though Clyde was an outsider from normal society, he was still handsome and tough—nothing like a nerd or a wimp. It would not be until the late 1970s and early 1980s that the loser character would finally get its due.
The Gentler, Milder Gen X Male
Second-wave feminism is often remembered as a product of the 1960s sexual revolution, but most of the progresses made by the women’s movement happened in the 1970s. Roe v. Wade struck down abortion bans, Title IX allowed women to participate in sports and scholarship programs, colleges approved the first women’s studies departments, the Combahee River Collective formed, Billie Jean King won the “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match, and Ms. magazine put out its first issue.[40] These advances made Time magazine choose “American Women” as its 1975 Person of the Year.[41]
At the same time, another movement budded in response to women’s advances: the men’s liberation movement. As more women gained their place in male-dominated spheres, men began to acknowledge that a cultural shift was happening, and this shift would require an adaptation of what masculinity meant. In his 1970 essay “On Male Liberation,” psychologist and sociologist Jack Sawyer argued that the stereotype of the dominant male actually hindered men’s humanistic potential, and that there need not be a battle of the sexes if men could shed these stereotypical expectations of what it means to be a man.[42] He noted that the “increasing recognition of the right of women to participate equally in the affairs of the world” meant that men would have to work with women towards equality, and that “women are trying to become human, and men can do the same.”[43]
This new form of manhood continued to surface in the 1970s. In 1976, Ms. magazine interviewed actor Alan Alda, a celebrity praised at the time for his male sensitivity, who argued that the feminist movement would liberate men in a similar way as women.[44] In 1978, the New York Times outlined how Hollywood films had begun to portray kinder, gentler men in a positive light, saying that “the new man is more responsive, softer, in some ways more domestic” than the images of men on the silver screen’s past.[45] That same year, the Washington Post noted how these social changes have “spawned the contemporary ‘sensitive man.’”[46]
A series of popular books came out around the same time that promoted similar ideas, encouraging men to reconsider traditional masculine roles in exchange for more feminine ones. The Role of the Father in Child Development, for instance, made the case that a father’s masculinity proved less important in childrearing than did “secure, supportive, reciprocal, and sensitive relationships.”[47] The Forty-Nine Percent Majority outlined how common notions about masculinity (anti-femininity, competitiveness, toughness, and aggressiveness) were phasing out as new forms of masculinity had begun to form.[48] Books such as The Male Machine, The Liberated Man, The Season’s of a Man’s Life, and The Hazards of Being Male popped up frequently in the 1970s, all determining that traditional masculinity posed problems for manhood, and instead, “becoming more sensitive, more liberated” offered men social, psychological, and even medical benefits.[49]
While the men’s liberation movement took a pro-feminist stance, an off-shoot movement—the men’s rights movement—became concerned that women’s issues had gone too far, effectively criminalizing masculinity and ignoring real issues that predominately affected men. One of these issues concerned men in the workplace. As women were beginning to move into the workforce, men were often trapped in jobs they were forced to work whereas women were gaining more freedom of choice when it came to careers.[50] Even after women made headway in their own careers, men were still expected to be the main breadwinners, and the pressure to maintain a steady job in a declining economy led to male worker alienation and employment dissatisfaction.[51]
These tensions captured a new growing crisis of masculinity in the 1970s and 1980s. On one side, there was a budding sense of the “new man,” a man who was more in touch with his feminine side and who was not tied down to the machismo expectations of the past. However, on the other side, there was a feeling that real concerns of working-class men were being left behind in lieu of politics that championed visible women’s successes over larger structural socio-economic changes. Both themes could be seen in the Hollywood films of the 1970s. Movies such as Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) and An Unmarried Woman (1978) featured the new sensitive man as a preferable male type, whereas films like Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Blue Collar (1978) unveiled the lingering struggles of working-class men. These films, though, presented Boomer problems, but even if they were for the older generation, they still exhibited the social and cultural milieu in which Generation X was coming of age.
Born between the early 1960s and the early 1980s, Gen Xers were teenagers in the 1970s and 1980s, and Hollywood marketed films to this budding generation with an awareness of the economic and social situation in which they were growing up. One of the best examples of this conflict is in the film Breaking Away (1979). The movie follows four working-class friends who just graduated high school and who are trying to figure out what to do with their lives. Much of the tension within the film lies between them and the wealthy college kids, who refer to the locals derogatorily as the “cutters” (as the majority of blue-collar work in the town is stonecutting in the quarries).[52] The story centers around Dave, a local who loves competitive cycling and Italian culture. Throughout, Dave must obscure his working-class background to compete with those around him. The college students look down on him, his love interest belongs to a sorority, and the professional cyclists cheat him in one of the races.[53] Despite all this, Dave wins the race in the end and enrolls in college, leaving the viewer feeling that there is a glimmer of hope for the locals after all.
Breaking Away set the stage for a recurring theme in Gen X films: that of the little guy getting the upper hand on those who oppress him. While this theme was sometimes expressed from the female point of view, such as in Carrie (1976) or Heathers (1988), it was mostly seen from a male perspective. The crisis of masculinity that had been building throughout the postwar years culminated in the Gen X era, and young men who had felt emasculated were beginning to fight back—on screen, at least. Unlike Boomers, who were born into a world of prosperity, Gen Xers were born into a world of economic decline and political polarization, imprinting the youth with a nihilistic sense about their future.[54] Sociologists William Strauss and Neil Howe observed that, because of the darker realities they were brought into, Gen Xers were forced to mature much earlier than Boomers, noting that the adolescent moment of awakening they should have had was replaced by “a nightmare of self-immersed parents, disintegrating homes, schools with conflicting missions, confused leaders, a culture shifting from G to R ratings, new public health dangers, and a ‘Me Decade’ economy.”[55] For Gen Xers, the time had come for the underdog to get his due, and this was especially true for Gen X men who were forced into adulthood at a young age.
Taking on the Bully
In 1973, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids aired an episode where the large tough guy Slappy tortures the smaller kids in the neighborhood, but hides his bullying from Fat Albert because they are the same size.[56] Fat Albert solves the situation through song, as expected, and he makes the case that a bully is merely someone who wants attention, asking Slappy, “are you really happy being that kind of guy?”[57]
Bullying had always been a problem for adolescents, yet it rarely received any attention in the Boomer era. Confronting bullies was considered a necessary part of growing up and becoming a man, and those who did not learn to stand up to them were considered cowards or wimps. However, in the 1970s and 1980s, parents and teachers began to pay more attention to the bullying problem. Educational training videos came out to help guidance counselors recognize and deal with the issue, mothers wrote in to women’s magazines asking for advice, and psychologists wrote books analyzing the issue.[58] In a 1978 article in America magazine, a study of 4000 public schools revealed that, each month, an average of 280,000 students faced violent attacks by other students.[59] Almost every teenage television sitcom set in suburbia featured a bullying episode at some point, but the theme fully manifested itself in Gen X teen cinema.
The classic film example of the underdog facing the bully is Back to the Future. Mixing science-fiction and suburban high school tropes, Back to the Future follows average teen Marty McFly as he travels to the 1950s, altering and then fixing the historical timeline along the way.[60] Besides the Freudian romantic tension between him and the 1955 version of his mother, the movie’s main conflict lies between Marty’s father George and George’s bully, his 1955 classmate/1985 boss Biff. George is portrayed as a perpetual sissy—something that is suggested lasts throughout his adulthood, especially as foreshadowed by the diner busboy: “If you let people walk over you now, they’ll be walkin’ over you for the rest of your life!”[61] To fix the messed up timeline, Marty must create a scenario that allows George to stand up to Biff’s bullying.[62] Once the situation is resolved in the 1950s, George has no problem standing up to Biff in the 1980s. But the problem affects Marty, too. Like his father, Marty constantly feels the need to prove he is not a coward. Always critical, Marty’s school principal yells at him not to bother competing in the school auditions, saying, “You don’t have a chance—you’re too much like your old man!”[63] The theme of bullying runs through the entire Back to the Future franchise, with Marty consistently not taking it well when his masculinity is challenged, so much so that, in the sequels, the plot is often driven by Marty overreacting and exclaiming, “nobody calls me chicken!”[64]
Back to the Future also presented another layer of the masculinity crisis of the 1980s. Ronald Reagan loved the movie (he even mentioned it in his State of the Union Address) as it subtly promoted conservatives’ nostalgic view of 1950s America to which 1980s Republicans wished to return.[65] Marty’s family was a disaster in the 1980s (his mother an alcoholic, his father a wimp), but the way to fix all their contemporary problems was to return to traditional masculinity—teaching his father to be a man in the 1950s fixed their problems in the 1980s. As film professor Michael Dwyer noted, this thesis of the film offered “the promise of the New Right for the Re-Generation.”[66] And herein lies the odd dual nature of how manhood was portrayed in cinema at this time: the wimp-versus-bully theme was simultaneously the wimp’s resistance to male expectations of the past, and it was also an overcorrection by the wimp that was needed to defeat the overly masculine bully. This duality meant that the underdog usually had to temporarily become like his oppressor in order to fight back against him, but, at the same time, it also pointed to the new generation’s dissatisfaction with the old expectations of masculinity.
The bully concept played out in Gen X cinema in two ways. The obvious scenario is the bully (usually a jock or a fraternity guy) who picks on an outcast type (usually a wimp or a geek). But a subtler way is when the wimp becomes self-aware of his wimpiness because of being bullied and overcompensates by insulting or attacking someone even geekier than him (usually his sidekick). The most common method here was to question that person’s sexuality, often by calling him names like fag, wuss, pussy, queer, homo, punk, pansy, or fairy.[67]
While homosexuality is far less stigmatized in America today, in the 1970s and 1980s, gay culture was still viewed as deviant. Over time, the gay liberation movement worked to change that. Until 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) classified homosexuality as a mental disorder, and it was not until 1987 that the APA completely removed it as a “sexual disturbance.”[68] During that time, the gay liberation movement tried to establish that one’s sexual preferences did not determine their weakness or strength, nor their femininity or masculinity. Sociologist Michael Kimmel noted that the gay liberation movement “provided a frontal assault on the traditional way that men had defined their manhood,” and that it was “as if the screen against which American men had for generations projected their manhood had suddenly gone dark, and men were left to sort out the meaning of masculinity all by themselves.”[69] Like the women’s movement, as gay men gained more recognition, straight men felt their masculinity challenged, often causing them to overreact and resist the possibility that they shared homosexual tendencies.
This brand of anti-gay bullying existed in almost every 1980s teen flick. Take Sixteen Candles, for instance. When Ted, the geek, is unsuccessful in his attempts to seduce Samantha, he asks her, “What’s the problem here? I’m a boy. You’re a girl. Is there anything wrong with me trying to put together some kind of relationship between us?” to which she responds, “Yes, you’re a total fag.”[70] Later, when Ted’s fellow geeky friends are too nervous to enter the party, Ted scolds them by yelling at them, “Don’t be such faggots!”[71] Similarly, in Weird Science (1985), two outcasts channel their computer skills to create a virtual dream woman who spends the majority of the movie trying to toughen them up, taking them out of boyhood and into manhood. In an early scene, Gary’s masculinity is challenged by older men at the bar, and one character asks Lisa (the dream girl), “What are you doing with this malaka anyway?”[72] Lisa protects Gary’s masculinity by saying, “It’s purely sexual.”[73] Gary then recalls a story to the table of grown men about how his girlfriend dumped him in the worst way, by “kneeing him in the balls and calling him a faggot in front of everyone.” He later proves he is a tough man by kicking out the party crashers, telling them not to come into his friend’s house “with [their] faggot friends.”[74]
In each of these cases, homosexual slurs are used to undermine manhood, turning the insulter into a kind of passive-aggressive bully while making the insulted party seem weak or emasculated. The emasculated wimp, when challenged by more masculine men, ends up taking cues from them and mirroring their behavior as a way to prove his own masculinity. In other words, men frequently gain their self-esteem and manhood from other men acknowledging their masculinity.[75] Using Ted from Sixteen Candles as an example, when he obnoxiously hits on Samantha throughout the first half of the movie, one could simply claim his failed attempts bordered on harassment. But, considering the way that the wimp often internalizes the bullying he experiences, Ted’s attempts could alternatively be seen as him trying his best to “be a man” in order to get the girl, behaving as he perceives that a real man should in courting situations.
Revenge of the Nerds (and the Freaks, the Geeks, and So Forth)
No 1980s movie quite captures the tensions between wimps and bullies as perfectly as Revenge of the Nerds (1984). The story follows two nerds, Lewis and Gilbert, going to college to study computer science (still a relatively new academic discipline at the time) who run into trouble with the jock fraternity on campus.[76] Along the way, they befriend a collection of misfits: a brainiac exchange student, a gay black man, and a handful of other unpopular outcasts. The nerds must work together to fight off their bullies, which include the principal and the campus police in addition to the jocks.[77] As was typical in these kinds of films, the jocks have the girls and the brawn, but the nerds have the brains. To defeat the jock requires demonstrating that smarts is superior to traditional masculinity.
The fact that the nerds in these movies were smart, especially computer smart, is no accident. The late 1970s and early 1980s marked the era of the computer revolution, a moment where computing power dramatically increased and the personal computer became mainstream.[78] Computers, and the geeks who knew how to use them, became more visible in popular culture at this time. In 1982, the movie Tron featured a computer programmer trapped inside the software who must figure out how to interact with it to escape.[79] That same year, Silver Spoons showed the episode “The Great Computer Caper,” where the children hack into a secret military mainframe.[80] An identical theme surfaced in the movie WarGames the following year, where a computer genius hacks into a military supercomputer that calculates possible war outcomes.[81] Even Time magazine changed its annual “Man of the Year” award in 1983 to “Machine of the Year,” bestowing the honor to none other than the personal computer.[82] When Apple advertised the release of the Macintosh at the 1984 Super Bowl, it demonstrated that the personal computer promised to “make all existing authority obsolete: not just government, but school, blue chip corporations, church—even parents, who inevitably did not understand the new box as well as their kids.”[83] Even though the computer itself did not live up to that promise, computer geeks were poised to become the rulers of the new information age, and 1980s movies knocked jocks down a few pegs, allowing the nerds to assume their rightful place on the throne.
The rise of the computer geek in mainstream culture finally gave nerds the chance to demonstrate that masculinity did not have to conform to traditional notions of toughness and strength. When the nerds in Revenge of the Nerds defeat the jocks at the Greek Games for homecoming, they do so not by athletic prowess, but by their wits. The nerds win the talent competition due to their techno-computer knowledge applied to synthpop music, showing that the nerds were not only smarter and more capable than the jocks, but more attune to what was hip in the 1980s.[84]
Beating the bully with brains is one way to get back at the jock, but there is another way: to get the jock’s girl. This theme shows up in practically every teen comedy of the 1980s. It usually features a popular girl who dates a popular guy, but through a series of deceptive shenanigans, the nerd ends up with the girl in the end. This storyline does not, of course, do much for the promotion of fair treatment of women. But in stories about young men experiencing a crisis of masculinity, the women are props, and their wellbeing is usually secondary to the goal of the nerds establishing their manhood. When Betty realizes she had sex with Lewis and not her jock boyfriend, she asks him, “Are all nerds as good as you?” to which Lewis replies that they are because “all jocks ever think about is sports; all we ever think about is sex.”[85] This scene is pure male fantasy, of course, for if it were a reality, one could guess that most women would not take being tricked into sex so amicably. Yet, the scene functions precisely because it animates the reasoning behind the nerd-jock mentality: jocks equate to meatheads whereas nerds are more attentive to what women actually want in bed. This moment in the film allows the nerd to win the ultimate battle against the jock—winning the affections of his girlfriend—for what in the male mindset could be manlier than being better in the sack?
“I’m a Nerd, and I’m Pretty Proud of It”
The final scene in Revenge of the Nerds ends with Gilbert giving a speech in defense of being a nerd. He says that he is a nerd, and he wants to “stand up for the rights of other nerds” who have been “laughed at and made to feel inferior.”[86] Gilbert goes on to say, “I’m a nerd, and I’m pretty proud of it,” and is then joined by Lewis who tells the audience “any of you who have ever felt stepped on, left out, picked on, put down” to join them because, as Gilbert interjects, “no one’s really going to be free until nerd persecution ends.”[87]
This final scene essentially captures the mood and thesis behind Gen X coming-of-age cinema. The expectations of masculinity had been steadily evolving since the Boomer era, and these tensions culminated in the teen films showing losers finally winning over the “manly” types who had historically kept them down. By the 1990s, many of these tensions had resolved themselves in film: gay characters became more prevalent, women characters became more complex, and male characters became less macho and more feminine. Yet, the movies of the 1980s had to move past that late-twentieth century crisis of masculinity, pushing the wimps and the nerds over the finish line and ensuring that the oppressive bullies finally got their comeuppance.
Footnotes:
[1] Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer, “A Sexual-Misconduct Allegation Against the Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh Stirs Tension Among Democrats in Congress,” The New Yorker, September 14, 2018.
[2] Alex Swoyer, “Brett Kavanaugh Admits to ‘Juvenile Misbehavior,’ Denies Sexual Assault in Testimony,” The Washington Times, September 26, 2018.
[3] Rebecca Gibian, “How Your Favorite ’70s and ’80s Movies Condoned Rape Culture,” Real Clear Life, September 21, 2018.
[4] Megan Garber, “Brett Kavanaugh and the Revealing Logic of ‘Boys Will Be Boys,’” The Atlantic, September 17, 2018.
[5] Sixteen Candles, directed by John Hughes (Los Angeles: Universal Pictures, 1984), film.
[6] Animal House, directed by John Landis (Los Angeles: Universal Pictures, 1978), film.
[7] Revenge of the Nerds, directed by Jeff Kanew (Santa Monica: Interscope Communications, 1984), film.
[8] Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York: Fawcett Books, 1975), 257.
[9] Robin Warshaw, I Never Called It Rape: The Ms. Report on Recognizing, Fighting, and Surviving Date and Acquaintance Rape (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 4.
[10] “Date Rape,” ABC Afterschool Special, directed by Jesus S. Trevino (New York: ABC Network, 1988), television.
[11] Jason Nichols, “The Defenses to Brett Kavanaugh’s Alleged Sexual Misconduct Expose Double Standards for Whom We Consider a Predator,” NBC Think, September 25, 2018.
[12] Bob Mondello, “Who’s the Man? Hollywood Heroes Defined Masculinity for Millions,” All Things Considered, July 30, 2014.
[13] Lucy Fischer, “Mama’s Boy: Filial Hysteria in White Heat,” in Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in the Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (New York: Routledge, 1993), 75.
[14] Ina Rae Hark, “Animals or Romans: Looking at Masculinity in Spartacus,” in Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in the Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (New York: Routledge, 1993), 151.
[15] Frank Krutnik, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 1991), 63.
[16] Louis Giannetti, Understanding Movies (Upper Saddle River: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008), 477.
[17] Ibid.
[18] LeRoy Ashby, With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture Since 1830 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 281.
[19] “1940s War, Cold War and Consumerism,” Advertising Age, March 28, 2005, 39.
[20] Owen D. Gutfreund, Twentieth-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 55.
[21] Ashby, With Amusement for All, 281–282.
[22] Ruth Milkman, “Gender at Work: The Sexual Division of Labor During World War II,” in Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, ed. Linda K. Kerber, et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 541–542.
[23] Thomas Childers, Soldier from the War Returning: The Greatest Generation’s Troubled Homecoming from World War II (New York: First Mariner Books, 2010), 3–6.
[24] The Best Years of Our Lives, directed by William Wyler (Hollywood: Samuel Goldwyn Productions, 1956), film.
[25] Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, The G.I. Bill: The New Deal for Veterans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 168.
[26] David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 23–24.
[27] C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), 182–187.
[28] Arthur Schlesinger, “The Crisis of American Masculinity,” Esquire, November 1, 1958, 62.
[29] Noel Brown, The Hollywood Family Film: A History, from Shirley Temple to Harry Potter (London: I. B. Tauris & Co., 2012), 93.
[30] Rebel Without a Cause, directed by Nicolas Ray (Burbank: Warner Bros., 1955), film.
[31] Back to the Future, directed by Robert Zemeckis (Universal City: Amblin Entertainment, 1985), film.
[32] Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 228.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Joel Dinerstein, The Origins of Cool in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 307–309.
[35] Rebel Without a Cause, Nicolas Ray.
[36] Tom Dalzel, Flappers 2 Rappers: American Youth Slang (Springfield: Merriam-Webster, 1996), 100.
[37] Ibid., 70, 187.
[38] Bonnie and Clyde, directed by Arthur Penn (Burbank: Warner Bros., 1967), film.
[39] Jill Elaine Hughes, “Review of Bonnie and Clyde: A Love Story,” The Missouri Review 28, no. 2 (2005): 190.
[40] Michael Stewart Foley, Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013), 65–94.
[41] “Great Changes, New Chances, Tough Choices,” Time, January 5, 1976, 8.
[42] Jack Sawyer, “On Male Liberation,” Liberation, October 1970, 32.
[43] Ibid., 33.
[44] “Alan Alda on the ERA,” Ms., July 1976, 93.
[45] Paul Starr, “Hollywood’s New Ideal of Masculinity,” The New York Times, July 16, 1978, D1.
[46] John M. Wilson, “The Male Model,” The Washington Post, January 13, 1978.
[47] Michael E. Lamb, ed., The Role of the Father in Child Development (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1976), 11.
[48] Deborah S. David and Robert Brannon, eds, The Forty-Nine Percent Majority: The Male Sex Role (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1976), passim.
[49] Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics. (Boston: Da Capo Press, 2002), 178.
[50] Michael A. Messner, “The Limits of ‘The Male Sex Role’: An Analysis of the Men’s Liberation and Men’s Rights Movements’ Discourse,” Gender and Society 12, no. 3 (1998): 264.
[51] Harold L. Sheppard and Neal Q. Herrick, Where Have All the Robots Gone? Worker Dissatisfaction in the 70s (New York: The Free Press, 1972), 96–101.
[52] Breaking Away, directed by Peter Yates (Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox, 1979), film.
[53] Ibid.
[54] William Strauss and Neil Howe, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1991), 317.
[55] Ibid., 321.
[56] “The Bully,” Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, directed by Hal Sutherland (Reseda: Filmation, 1973), television.
[57] Ibid.
[58] “Fighting, Bullying, Gossiping, and Teasing People,” School Library Journal, December 1981, 41; “My Son Was Being Bullied at School,” Good Housekeeping, November 1980, 38–48; Dan Olweus, Aggression in the Schools: Bullies and Whipping Boys (Washington, D.C.: Hemisphere Publishing, 1978), passim.
[59] John W. Donohue, “Violent Schools,” America, July 8, 1978, 10–11.
[60] Back to the Future, film.
[61] Ibid.
[62] Ibid.
[63] Ibid.
[64] Back to the Future II, directed by Robert Zemeckis (Universal City: Amblin Entertainment, 1989), film.
[65] Graham Thompson, American Culture in the 1980s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 104.
[66] Michael D. Dwyer, Back to the Fifties: Nostalgia, Hollywood Film, and Popular Music of the Seventies and Eighties (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 26.
[67] C. J. Pascoe, “Exploring Masculinities: History, Reproduction, Hegemony, and Dislocation,” in Exploring Masculinities: Identity, Inequality, Continuity, and Change, ed. C. J. Pascoe and Tristan Bridges (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 18–19.
[68] Neel Burton, “When Homosexuality Stopped Being a Mental Disorder,” Psychology Today, September 18, 2015.
[69] Kimmel, Manhood in America, 280.
[70] Sixteen Candles, film.
[71] Ibid.
[72] “Malaka” is a Greek slang term for a “jerk-off.”
[73] Weird Science, directed by John Hughes (Los Angeles: Universal Pictures, 1985), film.
[74] Ibid.
[75] Victor Rios and Rachel Sarabia, “Synthesized Masculinities: The Mechanics of Manhood Among Delinquent Boys,” in Exploring Masculinities: Identity, Inequality, Continuity, and Change, ed. C. J. Pascoe and Tristan Bridges (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 172.
[76] Revenge of the Nerds, film.
[77] Ibid.
[78] Robert Collins, Transforming America: Politics and Culture During the Reagan Years (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 100.
[79] Tron, directed by Steven Lisberger (Burbank: Walt Disney Productions, 1982), film.
[80] “The Great Computer Caper,” Silver Spoons, directed by Jack Shea (Culver City: Embassy Television, November 6, 1982), television.
[81] WarGames, directed by John Badham (Beverly Hills: United Artists, 1983), film.
[82] “Machine of the Year: The Computer Moves In.” Time, January 3, 1983, 1.
[83] John Leland, Hip: The History (New York: Ecco Press, 2004), 274.
[84] Revenge of the Nerds, film.
[85] Ibid.
[86] Ibid.
[87] Ibid.
By Shalon van Tine