Transcription
The late 60's and early 70's were a time of rebellion and change – of a counter-culture that shunned traditional values and obstinate patriotism in favor of anti-imperialism. Hippies espoused free love, and activists criticized the principles of the United States of America. But time wore on.
“The 60's were over, and people were once again ready to feel bad about themselves.” Cultures change, even counter-cultures change, and all of the sudden, it was like nobody wanted to join The Weather Underground anymore! Counter-cultures often have a cultural response, a reactionary movement that hopes to turn back the clock to the aforementioned traditional values. A combination of the rise of the religious right and the ascension of a certain president imposed these values on the nation, and with the hippies and activists all grown up and selling out, not enough people objected or even cared anymore.
“Luckily, by then it was the 80's, and no one noticed.” It was morning in America again. So. Let's talk about slasher movies. Watching slasher movies, at least the most famous entries from the 80's, is like watching the horror version of what the 80's were like under the Ronald Reagan administration.
“You have to ask yourself: Who was the most towering, charismatic figure of the 1980's? And you could say Ronald Reagan or you could say Freddy Krueger. They both essentially pursued the same policy – that they were going to, through their actions, visit the sins of the father upon the children.” If pop culture is influenced by the culture that creates it and shaped by the time it's created, then there may be no greater pop culture reflection of the 1980's zeitgeist and 1980's social politics than Friday the 13th. Jason Voorhees and his mother before him felt like Ronald and Nancy Reagan, respectively. They were not directly inspired by them, of course, but the rampage of Jason mimicked the id of the Republican Party in the 1980's.
“In the 1980's, at the height of the success of these movies, there were multiple cases made that he was the modern Reagan-era killer because he was making those kids who didn't 'just say no' or having pre-marital sex pay. It's like, watch out young people, be careful what you do or Jason's gonna come for you.” Whatever else Friday the 13th and all 80's slashers might be, they are very telling artifacts about the values, politics and culture of the time. They are culture...and counter-culture.
“Do a lot of coke and vote for Ronald Reagan.”
[I. Drugs]
Early in the first Friday the 13th movie, the teenagers meet a motorcycle cop. His name is Officer Dorf. That's his name! He's there to warn the teenagers that crazy Ralph is on the loose, but he also takes the opportunity to interrogate and harass them for suspected drug use. This sets the tone for the rest of the Friday the 13th film series. The victims smoke weed in Part III and do cocaine in Part V.
In the 1980's, Nancy Reagan became the public face of the war on drugs. Her “Just Say No” campaign was hollow and empty and did not address the actual reasons for the drug epidemic or real solutions like treatment over punishment or decriminalization. The “war on drugs” actually began earlier during the Nixon administration but the modern form began under Ronald Reagan. Aggressive policing has led to the mass incarceration epidemic, which itself has fueled private prisons. Private prisons then have the money to lobby politicians for greater power, and those politicians then have no incentive to actually curtail the drug problem because the private prisons want more drug offenders, not less. Countless thousands of young, non-violent drug users are filling American prisons, where they then learn how to become violent criminals instead of what they were before: people who needed help.
The strict prohibitions on drugs have created economic incentives that make combating drug producers and distributors extremely difficult. The high black-market price for illegal drugs has generated huge profits for the groups that produce and sell them. That income is then invested in buying state-of-the-art weapons, hiring gangs to defend their trade, paying off public officials and making designer drugs that are easily available to children, to get them addicted. Measures that could have a meaningful impact are ignored, partly for the aforementioned money-in-politics reason but also because swaying public opinion toward solutions that are less about punishment and more about results is challenging in a nation that still holds puritan beliefs.
Solutions like decriminalizing marijuana and decriminalizing small-scale possession of drugs were not options back in the 1980's, and though public opinion and gently swung toward the former, the war on drugs and the private prison pipeline are still in full effect today. So, remember that escalation of drug use from the first few Friday the 13th movies to the cocaine in Part V? Well, this isn't just an escalation of Jason's body count getting higher and therefore the “sins” of the victims getting stronger. It's also history.
Iran-Contra is the term used to reference the scandal involving the Reagan administration illegally selling weapons to Iran to fund the Contra terrorists in Nicaragua, but this treasonous scandal is even worse than it seems on the surface. The Reagan administration also helped fund the Contras with revenue from crack cocaine. Reagan and the CIA conspired with the Contras to smuggle cocaine from South America into the US. The administration shielded the smugglers from investigation. Reagan had Oliver North funnel the proceeds to the Contra army in Nicaragua. US flight crews smuggled both arms and cocaine on their return flights. Some hangars used to dock the airplanes were owned by the CIA and National Security Council, and some were operated by Oliver North himself. After the cocaine was smuggled into the US, it would then be sold to a drug distributors. The distributors would then convert the cocaine into crack and distribute it to street-level dealers. The actions by the CIA and Reagan Administration are credited with sparking the crack epidemic by flooding the drug market with an unprecedented amount of high-quality cocaine at a low cost.
The Reagan administration's own war on drugs was escalated due to the rise in drug crime, which itself was the responsibility of the Reagan administration to begin with! It's the political equivalent of “Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself!” So, in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, when Bob and his girlfriend are doing cocaine and murdered by the impostor Jason, we get a clear look into both the secret and public drug policies of the Reagan administration. Remember: the killer in the Friday the 13th movies is judging the victims much in the same way that the Reagan administration did. The reason Bob has cocaine in the first place is probably because of Ronald Reagan, and he is then punished for getting high on cocaine by the killer – who is himself a supernatural and fictional stand-in for Reagan. Bob being punished by Reagan for doing drugs that he could only get because of Reagan is similar to the real world hypocrisy of the war on drugs.
By Friday the 13th: Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, drug use is even more prevalent, but much like the Reagan administration, the drug users are portrayed as the “bad” people and the character who abstains is the good girl who followed Nancy Reagan's advice. If drug use and drug abstinence are moralized, then we don't have to sympathize with those who are addicted. We don't have to consider any solutions besides locking them up and making matters worse – both for them and for society at large. When doing drugs is framed as a moral failing and not an addiction that needs treatment, then we don't have to care.
Speaking of moralizing...
[II. Sex]
Special effects guru Tom Savini said it best: “Sex, die. You have sex, you die. That's the premise. That's the underlying theme going through the Friday the 13th movies.” In the first film, Pamela Voorhees blames teenage camp counselors for what she believed she was the death of her son, Jason. The real culprit, however, was sex. The counselors were too busy having sex to notice Jason was drowning.
[“They weren't paying attention. They were making love while that young boy drowned.”] The first kill in the film, during a set-up decades prior, is a teenage girl who had the audacity to have sex with her boyfriend. Mrs. Voorhees goes on a murder rampage at the beginning of the 80's when the film was released. All these teenagers, hanging around, having sex, being young. Hey. F*** them, right? Mrs. Voorhees is the “concerned mother” of the 1980's, the Nancy Reagan. A reactionary force that wants to bring back traditional values that were “lost” in decades prior. A reactionary movement is a socio-political backlash against changing values or social norms. The free love of previous decades had to be stopped, and it was up to the conservative forces of the 1980's to put a stop all this.
“What's interesting about the Friday the 13th movies is that if you watch those films, down to a film, Jason is compared with nature. In every one of the Friday the 13th films, there's a storm coming when he's coming. At the same time. So, is Jason actually an avenging force of God? Is he nature? Is nature angry, or is God angry with these teens for smoking weed or occasionally doing cocaine or having pre-marital sex? It's really interesting that the forces of the Moral Majority and the religious right had such an objection to these films because they were essentially depicting an Old Testament world. You behave badly, and you will be killed. Vice precedes slice and dice.”
What would eventually be known as the Christian right was solidified in the presidential race of 1980, the same year as the first Friday the 13th movie. A pivot in evangelical politics changed the relationship between religion and government. All three candidates in 1980, Democratic president Jimmy Carter, independent Republican John Anderson and Ronald Reagan described themselves as born-again Christians. Jerry Falwell supported Anita Bryant’s 1977 anti-gay-rights crusade, and Pat Robertson got involved with the Washington for Jesus rally of April 1980. During the 1980 campaign, Ronald Reagan and the evangelical conservatives engaged in a very public courting ritual. Moral Majority executive director Robert Billings signed on as a Reagan campaign adviser, and the 1980 Republican Convention was controlled largely by Moral Majority supporters in Alaska Republican organization. Congressman Guy Vander Jagt of Michigan, an evangelical conservative, delivered the keynote address. Reagan, during his acceptance speech, asked the party for a moment of silent prayer. The Christian Right had found a friend in their new president.
The Christian Right's activism against “promiscuity” was a reactionary movement against the more permissive 1960's. The broadening of sexual rights arising from Roe v. Wade gave them a banner issue. The Moral Majority pushed to ban sex education programs in public schools if the programs did not require parental consent. The group also opposed sex education programs “which reject Judeo-Christian rules” or which hint at “liberal sex education.”
Following discovery of the first AIDS cases in 1981, it quickly became clear a national health crisis was developing. That is, it became clear among the medical community but not among the political right. AIDS became a tool in conservative politics and the Christian Right specifically to target gay men. Falwell said “AIDS is the wrath of God upon homosexuals.” Reagan's own communications director, Pat Buchanan said that AIDS is “nature's revenge on gay men.” Researchers and healthcare professionals demanded funding, but the response from the Reagan administration was largely that of indifference. On April 23, 1984, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced 4,177 reported cases in America and 1,807 deaths. Writing in the Washington Post in late 1985, Representative Henry Waxman wrote: "It is surprising that the president could remain silent as 6,000 Americans died, that he could fail to acknowledge the epidemic's existence. Perhaps his staff felt he had to, since many of his New Right supporters have raised money by campaigning against homosexuals."
Years later, Reagan finally addressed the issue of AIDS while president. His remarks came May 31, 1987 near the end of his second term. It was not only too late but too little – advocating abstinence instead of safe sex. Statistically speaking, safe sex education fares better than abstinence education, but the moralizing of sex requires punishment – not solutions. Friday the 13th's sex = bad and virginity = good binary had no room for the idea of safe sex. In Part V, someone mentions a condom, but it's...a joke? Once again, the moralization of something personal and private turns it into a stigma and something easily demonized and ignored. If sex is a “moral failing” then we don't have to help anyone who contracts a sexually transmitted disease. If sex is a “moral failing” then a pregnant teen has done something shameful. If sex is a “moral failing” then they...get what they deserve. In the 80's, sex became “scary” again instead of liberating.
[III]
Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning features a grown-up Tommy Jarvis suffering from a mental illness and with minimal assistance. Rather than getting the care he needs, he's part of some rag-tag group of at-risk misfits. One of the first major legislative actions Reagan undertook as president was to repeal mental health reforms and slash federal funding for mental health care by 30 percent. As his presidency progressed, the Reagan administration basically threw people out of their mental health hospitals. During his presidency, approximately 40,000 beds were eliminated. In 1988, with his presidency dying down, the National Institute of Mental Health estimated that as many as 300,000 mental patients with chronic mental illness were homeless. Tommy's fate in Friday the 13th Part V is not too dissimilar to what it might have been in the real world.
One criticism of the Friday the 13th movies is that most of the characters barely have personalities. In the first movie, they don't have any motivations or backstories. By the third, we get a handful of personalities, and by the fourth, we get Tommy Jarvis – the closest the film series has to a protagonist. He appears in IV, V and VI – played by three different actors. In Part VII, we get Tina, one of the better characters throughout the series and a challenge for Jason. Also, Demon is great because his name is Demon, but these are few and far between. Many slasher movies in the 80's were like this. Not a lot of emphasis on a character's motivation outside of surviving the serial killer or undead monster. For the most part, nearly all the victims are are interchangeable. They are...disposable. That's how the Reagan administration saw a lot of people. These are not victims with hopes and dreams. These are...statistics.
Because of this, audiences sometimes identified more with Jason or other slashers because they were the only recurring characters. If you ask the average person who is the main character of A Nightmare on Elm Street, they are more likely to say Freddy Krueger than Nancy Thompson – even though Nancy has a lot more depth than the average slasher movie character. But if you ask the average person who is the main character of Scream, they will probably think of Neve Campbell's character Sydney, if they don't immediately remember the character's name. Something happened to slasher movies in the late 80's and early 90's. Slasher movie series that began in the late 80's and 90's sometimes had a recurring protagonist. Child's Play 1, 2 and 3 all feature Andy. Wes Craven's New Nightmare brought back Nancy, kind of. It became her story and not the story of a monster.
One aspect of the Scream movies that sometimes goes unnoticed is this inversion of protagonist. In the Friday the 13th movies and A Nightmare on Elm Street movies, the star is the killer, and the victims change in each sequel. In the Scream movies, the star is the would-be victim, and it's the killer who changes in each sequel. By the 90's, this aspect of slasher movies was a joke. It might be a coincidence that the end of the Reagan era was also the end of disposable people in slasher movies...but it does seem to fit a little too neatly to be ignored, right?
There were a lot of “panics” in the 1980's – ranging from the Satanic panic, an explosion of homophobia, continued panic during the waning days of the Cold War about communism, a panic about crime and drugs that was often racialized – and it's not hard to notice that these panics tend to come from the political right. It's no wonder slasher movies were so popular in the 80's. Conservatives, Ronald Reagan chiefest among them, always made us think there was a...boogeyman out to get us.