You Must Remember This

The erotic thriller goes commercially mainstream with Fatal Attraction, a film which starts a national conversation about whether or not women can “have it all” – “it all” meaning both careers and marriage. Is Fatal Attraction an indictment of working women as “witches” and a call to roll back women’s rights, or a snapshot of extreme toxic masculinity? Plus: Dirty Dancing. Is it evil?

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Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin would become icons for how immigrants and people of color could access the American Dream in the 20th Century. Both grew up in marginalized communities where they learned an ethos of success based on hustle. Today we’ll track both Dean and Sammy to major coming-of-age moments in the middle of World War II. Coming up in industrial Ohio as both a card dealer and a nightclub singer, Dean learns how and why the house always wins. As a child, Sammy joins his father’s touring dance act, and eventually becomes the main attraction, before the war forces him to encounter racism at a level he’d never experienced before.

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Dean Martin meets and begins collaborating with Jerry Lewis. Martin and Lewis — an Italian and a Jew — become the most successful nightclub act in the country, and transition to Hollywood. Meanwhile, Sammy Davis Jr, determined to get the attention of the white entertainment world, starts working impressions of white stars into his act.

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The New Hollywood directors of the late 1960s and 70s were the first generation of Hollywood filmmakers to grow up studying Hollywood movies as art. In 1981-1982, a number of those directors made actual or virtual remakes of classic Hollywood noir films, including Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat, and Bob Rafelson’s The Postman Always Rings Twice; and Paul Schrader’s Cat People. What was the value of revisiting the tropes and narratives of 1940s noirs in the 80s, beyond the fact that the sexual relationships implied in the original movies could now be depicted graphically? Today we’ll talk about how these films played into the personas of stars Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner, how they challenged the standards of what could be shown in movies of the 80s – and how and why they were received extremely differently.

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While the music video was still in its infancy as a cultural phenomenon, two films were released that were accused of aping the “MTV aesthetic”: Adrian Lyne’s Flashdance, and Risky Business, which turned Tom Cruise into a major star. Today we’ll talk about what the “MTV aesthetic” was and why it was considered a big deal for movies to be influenced about it, and we’ll examine how both of these movies treated sex work and race within the context of 80s social mores and Reagan capitalism.

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