The 1980s: “The British Are Coming”

Sue Harper

Abstract

The decade of the 1980s was marked by a cultural and political revolution whose consequences are still overwhelming. In 1979-1990, the British government was headed by Margaret Thatcher who managed to impose an astonishingly brutal regime on the British, and who promoted the rat race culture and individualism at the expense of a general consensus and public responsibility. The economic policy and conservative ideology had also had their impact on the cinema. In her essay Harper concentrates first of all on the representation of gender in the films of the period. She writes how many films were not only paeans to national identity and an ostentatious approval of masculinity of exceptionally aggressive character. The phenomenon was not only present in mainstream films that conformed to the official ideology of Thatcherism but also in films that opposed it, representing such marginalised groups as gays. Harper looks at how femininity is represented in the cinema of the decade, analysing the work of both classic and avant-garde British directors. She harshly exposes sexist tendencies of the filmmakers, sparing only few of them.

• The text is a translation of the chapter from the book Women in British Cinema: Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know by Sue Harper, Continuum, London 2000. © 2000 by The Continuum International Publishing Group London – New York.

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