The Politics of Popular Representation: Reagan, Thatcher, AIDS, And the Movies

This study of American and British political phenomena and thinking in the eighties uses popular English-language movies of the last two decades as evidence of the influence of the Right - particularly on our conceptions of the family and sexuality. Ultimately, it argues that sociopolitical attitudes toward AIDS were shaped in the eighties by sociopolitical attitudes toward the sexuality most assiduously linked to the syndrome. The study also proposes that, by the seventies, a "frame" had already been fashioned for the picture of AIDS painted in the Reagan-Thatcher years.The decade of the eighties appears, in the United States and Great Britain at least, to have an unusually credible unity and image, thanks to President Reagan's two terms of office and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's three terms. Dominant political thinking shifted dramatically to the Right under these leaders, signaling an end to postwar political consensus and ushering in economic doctrines hostile to "welfarism" and supportive of private enterprise.The eighties was also the period of the appearance of a mysterious new complex eventually called AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), which was, at least in the United States in its early years, associated popularly with, above all, homosexual males and intravenous drug users - as well as Haitian immigrants.This book attempts to show how New Right - and particularly Christian fundamentalist - thinking profoundly affected attitudes toward, as well as spending on, the syndrome and both actual and believed-potential sufferers. The intensification of traditional familialism, the attempted balkanization of sexualities, the attacks on homosexuality and on gay rights, are results of the marked influence of the Right on politics on both sides of the Atlantic. These, together with the emphasis on individual responsibility for health and material security - not to mention resurgent machismo and a restored belief in the natural and unnatural - help to explain the health disaster experienced in the United States, United Kingdom, and elsewhere.A review of English-language cinematic entertainment of the eighties reveals that the health crisis was scarcely alluded to, although such values as those of militarism, masculinity, and family loyalty were addressed - whether supportively or critically. It is the argument of this book that the HIV virus and AIDS are approached, if at all, only obliquely, particularly within the genre of the horror film, and especially through those films dealing with corporeality or with lethal challenges to the traditional nuclear family.The popular entertainment of eighties America and Britain provides eloquent testimony to the dread of AIDS and particularly of the sexuality with which the complex has from the earliest days been associated. The "AIDS imagery" recoverable from eighties movies helps to make visible the linking of negative thought and phobia that has so signally helped to produce the health crisis.