Moving Pictures
The Moral Transformation of American Cinema
Read Mercer Schuchardt
January 1, 2000
I spent a large portion of my childhood hiding under a blanket in the backseat of our VW Microbus so my mother could sneak us into drive-in movies without paying. The movies I remember best all opened in the shadow of 1977's globally cathartic Star Wars. I was just old enough to go to the movies by myself, and my mother, as aforementioned, was just pagan enough to escort me into R-rated films so that she wouldn't have to hire a baby-sitter. For me, such exposure wasn't too damaging—once you've had "The Pit and the Pendulum" read to you as a four-year-old, the adult content in Saturday Night Fever is pretty manageable when you're eleven.
The thing I enjoyed so much about movies in those days was rooting for the underdog. The clear-cut depictions of good versus evil in films like Rocky, Jaws, and Star Wars gave me such an emotional rush that I would try desperately to see these films several times before they left the theaters, attempting to memorize them for subsequent mental replay.
In these films, the bad guy was both really bad and really obvious—a huge boxer, a huge shark, a huge guy dressed in black whose name translated to Dark Father. They were enemies that my untrained cinematic eye could appreciate, even in the complex situation of The Godfather, which must have prompted one of my earliest uses of the word "ironic"—I remember my middle school buddies wanting me to shut up about how cool it was that, like, you know, it's the bad guys who are actually the good guys. But even that irony was rooted in moral certainty. There were strict rules, even for Don Corleone.
Fast-forward twenty years. Like cool clothing, really great films came back in fashion in 1997 and kept coming straight through 1999 (the best ...
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