Slant's The 100 Best Films of the 1980s

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In 2019, Billboard teamed up with SiriusXM to determine the 500 best songs of the 1980s, with Olivia Newton-John’s 1981 pop hit “Physical” topping the list. It’s an apt choice for many reasons, foremost among them that the ‘80s, if mainstream American filmmaking from the era is any indication, might be called the decade of the body—of turning away from the more cerebral, auteurist cinema of the New Hollywood and toward star-driven genre vehicles, featuring the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Cruise, and Melanie Griffith, who in Brian De Palma’s delirious Body Double plays a porn star named—wait for it—Holly Body.

Conventional historical accounts of the decade see this transformation through the lens of box office, as studio practices tended toward market saturation, and stardom became dependent on the potential to make viewers feel rather than think. But that narrative overlooks the plethora of small, seedy gems made by Hollywood filmmakers starring well-known actors still vying to challenge audiences with daring visions of the modern world. Such as William Friedkin’s Cruising, Michael Mann’s Thief, and Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, whose nocturnal animals discover new, and often unwanted, shades of themselves while moving through city streets.

If the neon-lit cityscape is an essential image in ‘80s films for the way it expresses the allure and danger of living by night, it also points up how a fear of AIDS—and its association with city life—leapt into the collective consciousness. Maybe that’s partly why Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner seems to epitomize ‘80s aesthetics for many: The replicant, whose body often looks like an ideal and healthy human, is actually a machine. The city, though, need not be essential for the metaphor to work. In fact, author John Kenneth Muir argues that, in a film like John Carpenter’s The Thing, which is set in Antarctica, the necessity of a blood test to determine “what is really going on inside the human body” could be understood as a direct reference to the AIDS epidemic.

If that potentially sounds like a grim diagnosis of the decade’s films, it actually points to the vitality of the decade’s cinematic artistry, as filmmakers from across the globe emerged to share their haunted visions of sex, music, and voyeurism. In France, Jean-Jacques Beineix, Leos Carax, and Luc Besson each helped create cinéma du look as a hybrid strain of popular and art cinema with a lush visual style. Meanwhile, aging master Robert Bresson was making his last (and arguably finest) film. In Canada, David Cronenberg showed us how exploding heads, penetrative home video, and wayward twin gynecologists could encapsulate various maladies of the times. And in Taiwan, Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien were at the forefront of New Taiwanese Cinema, diagnosing the twin poles of urbanization and globalization as they started to define contemporary life.

The number of singular filmmakers who emerged in the decade is extensive. Auteurs such as Abbas Kiarostami and Souleymane Cissé created works that helped further introduce the realities of their respective countries to audiences around the globe, while, back in the U.S., Lizzie Borden and Donna Deitch were making their first feature films, each of which has endured as a classic of queer cinema. The decade’s films help us understand that, in order to see all titles of consequence, one needs to remain open to movies playing at the multiplex, the arthouse, and the grindhouse. The latter includes numerous slasher films, itself a subgenre enamored with the dangers and pleasures of the flesh. We must remember that, sometimes, wisdom comes from unlikely places, so consider this seemingly throwaway line from 1982’s The Slumber Party Massacre as words to live by: “It’s not the size of your mouth; it’s what’s in it that counts.” Clayton Dillard

Published on April 23, 2020
By Staff