Nathan Niehaus
Ronald Reagan entered office in January of 1981 facing a longstanding economic crisis, characterized by stagflation and rising unemployment. In his inaugural address, Reagan presented a diagnosis of the calamity, hinted at a plan of action to overcome it, and projected a vision of future prosperity and national renewal. Half a century before, Franklin D. Roosevelt had responded to the miseries of the Great Depression by expanding the role of the government in the everyday life of citizens, endowing it with a new role as caretaker. He created new agencies and programs which together established the New Deal welfare state. Reagan took a drastically different approach to national economic hardship. “In this present crisis,” he asserted, “government is not the solution to our problem: government is the problem.”
If government was the problem, then what was the solution? In direct contrast to what he saw as a bloated, intrusive, and stifling bureaucracy, Reagan presented the ideal of the free, enterprising, creative individual. He evoked an exalted national past which he aspired to revive, an America whose flourishing was animated by the spirit of individualism:
If we look to the answer as to why, for so many years, we achieved so much, prospered as no other people on Earth, it was because here, in this land, we unleashed the energy and individual genius of man to a greater extent than has ever been done before. Freedom and the dignity of the individual have been more available and assured here than in any other place on Earth.
Appealing to a transcendent American “we,” Reagan negated other possibilities of collective formation and action for groups centered around class, race, and gender. What’s more, what distinguishes this “we,” for him, is an individualism marked by ‘negative’ liberty, or freedom from restraint (in economic terms, free-market capitalism). As opposed to a collectivist understanding that places communal interest and identity above the desires of any one person, this view identifies anything beyond oneself as a mere limitation, something that gets in the way or holds one back. Reagan promoted a vision of the world where all significant action or toil fundamentally took place at the individual level, as did all true success and all due earning. This was a world where, with the government out of the way, every American citizen would have a fair and equal opportunity to build his or her own wealth, where the “unfettered, hardworking entrepreneur…living by the inexorable market laws of supply and demand, either fail[ed] the test or ma[de] a fortune.” It was a world where heroes were not confined to the movie screen, nor were they hard to find: great in number (though their greatness lay not in their numbers), they walked the streets of America every day.
Drawing on his long career as a Hollywood actor, the president expressed this ideology with romantic flourish. Indeed, if Reagan channeled his experience in the movies to dramatize these ideas, individualism featured on the silver screen as well. What do the major movies of the 1980s have to say about Reagan-era individualism? This essay answers this question by considering three Hollywood blockbusters, roughly spanning Reagan’s presidency: Rocky III (1982), Silkwood (1984), and Wall Street (1987). It pays attention to the role of class and how it informs each film’s position on the issue. In their depictions of the wealthy and the working class, how and to what extent do these movies affirm or challenge this individualist ethos? What particular meanings do they attribute to it? What do their representations of solitary struggle and/or communal solidarity suggest about American society at the time?
Given the many layers of meaning associated with individualism (see Table 1), it’s impossible to claim any single version as definitive. While these movies’ articulations are not identical, we will see that they often overlap. Furthermore, many aspects of individualism involve an opposition to a collectivist value system. Thus I will also gauge how some form of collectivism appears in these movies, implicitly or explicitly. Beginning with a strident celebration and ending with a scathing critique of Reaganist individualism, we will see that even the most skeptical of these films attest to the powerful grip of this ideology in the 1980s.
Table 1.
| Some elements of individualism I will be looking for in these movies (note that some of these include opposition to collective ideals): |
| A. A belief in self-reliance and self-interest, often with an opposition to relying on anyone but oneself. B. Conversely, a denial of obligation or duty towards anyone but oneself. C. A belief in the individual as the fundamentally meaningful social unit. D. A belief in the individual as the fundamental source of action; the denial of collective action. E. Heroization of the individual; in economic form, heroization of the self-made man/woman, or lone entrepreneur. F. In economic form, a belief in “money meritocracy,” or the idea that the economy is an even playing field where individuals prove their worth. This view identifies wealth with success and with moral merit. |
Rocky III
The third installment of the Rocky series arrived in 1982 and became the highest grossing movie in the series up to that point. In it, Rocky Balboa fittingly finds himself with more wealth than he has ever had. His life is unrecognizable from what it had been in the original Rocky, when he worked as a loan-shark’s debt collector while earning practically nothing as an amateur boxer. He has gained fame and fortune. Leather jacket and jeans have been traded for finely tailored suits. He has left his blue-collar Philadelphia neighborhood and brought his wife (Adrien) and trainer (Mickey) with him. The three of them, along with the couple’s child, now live in a lavish mansion, decked out with grand paintings, glass chandeliers, and expensive furniture. Rocky’s is a bonafide rags-to-riches success story. Meanwhile, his old friend and brother-in-law Paulie has seen no improvement in his economic standing. An early scene depicts Paulie’s sense of frustration at his immobility in comparison to Rocky’s success. A long night of drinking is followed by an interaction with a bartender who seems less interested in the man himself than in his connections to Rocky. Paulie wanders off into an arcade, nursing a half-pint of whiskey. Suddenly finding himself before a Rocky-themed pinball machine, he reaches the breaking point: he hurls his bottle at the arcade fixture in a jealous rage.
In the next scene, Rocky collects his hungover, half-drunk friend from a jail cell, and the conversation that follows clearly illustrates the film’s individualistic core. Paulie berates the boxer for neglecting to share any of his newfound wealth or offer him a job. He feels that his past good deeds towards Rocky (which he exaggerates) have gone unrepaid. He takes off a watch Rocky had gifted him and throws it on the ground. Rocky responds, “You talk like everybody owes you a living! Nobody owes nobody nothing. You owe yourself.” (WATCH 2:05-3:06)
It is necessary to take a step back from the story and reflect on the scene’s basic elements to grasp the cultural “work” it performs. We have here what are basically two moral positions, one of which is collectivist, stressing social obligations, and the other of which is individualist, arguing for self-reliance. Who embodies these positions? Rocky is a self-made man, a heroic underdog from humble beginnings who overcame the odds to achieve success (in the boxing ring, a metaphor for the playing-field of life, and in material terms). Paulie, on the other hand, is an envious and crude friend hurling insults and accusations. Rocky isn’t too far off when he calls his friend “a jealous, lazy bum.” But by giving Rocky and Paulie these two moral positions, Rocky III identifies the positions with these characters: heroic economic individualism takes the moral high ground, while the argument for social obligations appears as a cheap way of masking one’s own envy and lack of will-power and self-discipline to go out in the world and work hard for an honest living.
The Rocky series was individualist from the start. The very genre of the boxing-movie focuses on two individuals struggling to triumph within the ring. And Rocky, of course, has become a legendary example of the underdog story, another genre which lends itself to heroic expressions of individual worth. The success of the first Rocky–released during the presidency of Jimmy Carter who, in contrast to Reagan’s vision of abundance, stressed the need to ‘cut back’ and frugally accept economic limitations–demonstrates that such stories were equally inspiring prior to Reagan’s particular promotion of individualism.
However, the differences between the two films are instructive, and they reflect different individualist ideals between these two presidencies. Whereas the original film romanticized the working class, Rocky III romanticizes the self-made economic success story. Rocky isn’t rewarded with a stable fortune for his struggles until the third film. The first movie displays a self-esteem battered by economic hardship: Rocky hopes that by enduring a match with the legendary Apollo Creed, he can prove to himself that he’s not “just another bum from the neighborhood.” (WATCH 3:40-4:10). Acquiring a fortune has nothing to do with proving this in the first film. Yet in the third, his wealth has become that proof, distinguishing him from the “jealous, lazy bum” Paulie. As the scholar Chris Jordan observes, this shift between the films reflects a new focus on upward social mobility as a proof of individual right to socioeconomic privileges. If the working class still forms any part of Rocky’s identity, it is only in the sense of “where [he] came from” (something Rocky’s new trainer, Apollo Creed, constantly reminds him to remember WATCH 0:46-0:52). But “where [he] came from” does not matter to him as a hometown community: he is no longer a member of this collective. Rather, for Rocky III, the boxer’s origins mean a tough condition that he rose above, by his own hard work, just as he climbed up the socioeconomic ladder.
Silkwood
Set in Oklahoma, Silkwood is a working class drama about a woman’s efforts to combat the exploitation and corruption of her employer, a nuclear fuel production plant. With a limited release in late 1983 and wide release in early 1984, the movie is based on events which took place a decade earlier and generated a public controversy over the years: Karen Silkwood was a labor union activist who died in a mysterious car crash on her way to deliver evidence of corporate malpractice to a New York Times reporter. Her story first entered the public spotlight following her death, and it reappeared regularly as a result of lawsuits brought against the company, Kerr McGee, which eventually reached the Supreme Court. By the late 1970s, Karen Silkwood had become an icon for anti-nuclear and feminist groups who invoked her name in their protests.
The premise and themes of the film lend themselves perfectly to a collectivist critique of the idea of money meritocracy: a woman joins her company union in order to fight against the corporation’s exploitation of her working-class community. Arguably, the logic behind labor unions is that, due to the unequal power of the rich over the poor, workers need to join together in solidarity to negotiate for more equitable working conditions. However, the movie suffers from a paradoxical mixture of individualism and collectivism. Unlike Rocky III, no central characters exemplify individualism (and certainly not of the economic variety). Rather, the movie itself is structured by it: Silkwood derives its meaning through the celebration of an individual, without dedicating space to an exploration of the meaning or significance of her struggle. As a result, the film’s initially collectivist message remains half-baked.
Silkwood’s conflict emerges as Karen Silkwood comes to appreciate the grave threats to health posed by the plutonium she and her coworkers handle. The company had played down these dangers, but after Karen’s middle-aged friend gets exposed and undergoes a traumatizing emergency shower, her suspicions grow (WATCH). Then Karen discovers that her company has been shipping faulty and potentially deadly plutonium rods to their buyers in order to fulfill a contract deadline. After this discovery, she gets more involved in the union, joining its negotiating committee and even flying to Washington for a meeting with the national union. The national representatives assign her to dig up documented evidence of this malpractice, which they could share with a New York Times reporter for an exposé. She also begins keeping a notebook of employee mistreatment.
Yet her work for the collective good is overpowered by forces in the film that single her out. Her coworkers (including her boyfriend Drew and close friend Dolly), with whom she shared a harmonious relationship in the beginning, grow increasingly hostile towards her due to her union work. They treat her coldly and occasionally confront her directly. Dolly calls the national union representative an “outside agitator.” Another coworker accuses her of failing to scan herself for radiation, angrily shouting, “I hope you write it down in your little notebook every time you don’t [monitor yourself]. Along with the stuff about the rest of us!” It is as though she were the workers’ adversary, not their advocate. Others jibe at her trip to Washington, implying that she has taken on her activism out of vanity, thinking herself better than everyone else.
All of these accusations grant Karen an opportunity to justify herself, to respond that she wants to work for the collective good. Yet she never does. Besides a private conversation with her boyfriend (whom she asks, “You don’t give a shit if everyone in the plant is being poisoned?”), Karen never explicitly connects her union work with a desire to achieve communal wellbeing. Her activism continues to set her apart, to individuate her. The effect is amplified by the fact that the movie’s subject matter is not so much Karen’s activism, but Karen herself (consider the movie’s name). It presents her as a lone, embattled figure opposing ominous forces bigger than herself. In this sense, she shares similarities with Rocky: hers is an underdog story, but without the happy ending. The film makes her out to be a charmingly naive idealist, and the many unanswered arguments made against her seem to prevail in the end.
One review perceptively called Silkwood a “tissue” of “contradictory implications.” How do we explain these contradictions? The reviewer attributes it to the movie’s basis on a true story whose details were surrounded by controversy and multiple court cases: “rarely has the desperation to square inspirational myth with provable, nonlibelous reportage been more apparent.”
In addition to these pressures, I would argue that the answer lies in the film’s intended audience. As noted above, by 1978 Silkwood had already been made into an icon by anti-nuclear groups and some women’s rights activists (both largely represented by the middle-class). This association was not lost on one angry male reviewer, who cavalierly derided Silkwood for what he called “prefab antinuke, profeminist rhetoric.” Though aimed at a broader audience, the film was certainly made with these publics in mind, particularly the growing antinuclear crowd. This perhaps helps to explain Silkwood’s emphasis on an individual’s story over communal values, as well as its emphasis on the dangers of nuclear energy over the evils of class-based exploitation. Moreover, the movie’s release (1984) came at a time of falling union membership and rising anti-union sentiment. It came three years after President Reagan famously crushed the PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) strike of over twelve thousand federal employees. Just as unions were losing strength and popularity, the anti-nuclear movement never managed to garner much support from organized labor. All of this serves to suggest why the film’s producers were more concerned with reproducing Silkwood as an iconic, martyred individual than as a participant in class struggle.
Wall Street
Wall Street goes further than Silkwood, delivering a scathing critique of unbridled economic individualism. The film centers on Bud Fox, an aspiring stockbroker taken under the wing of Wall Street veteran Gordon Gekko. Bud’s gradual seduction into Gekko’s shady exploits contrasts with the ideals of another figure in his life–his father Carl Fox, a laborer and union leader at Blue Star Airlines. Gekko and Fox represent two contrasting worldviews: ruthless individualism and loyal collectivism. These two characters provide the thematic center of the movie, and the narrative arc traces Bud’s rise as a protege under Gekko, his disillusionment to Gekko’s evil nature, his conversion to his father’s position, and an attempt at redemption.
The film hit theaters in 1987, towards the end of Reagan’s presidency. The 1980s had witnessed the “takeover movement” on Wall Street, where “corporate raiders” would buy up a company’s stock (typically with borrowed money) and liquidate the company to pay off these debts, effectively destroying the company while turning a profit. This development on Wall Street went hand in hand with a flurry of scandals and provoked some negative reactions in the press. The takeover movement reflected Reaganist economic individualism at its worst, and Gordon Gekko, Wall Street’s villain, embodies this spirit. In fact, screenwriter Stanley Weiser largely modeled Gekko’s character on Ivan Boesky and Carl Icahn, two of the most notorious corporate raiders of the time.
Before his unmasking as a villain, Bud admires Gekko as a hero. Like Bud (and like Rocky) he came from humble beginnings: his father was an electrician. He is an outsider of sorts in the Wall Street world, as an eccentric self-made man. Gekko despises the “Harvard MBA types” who represent Wall Street’s majority: they come from ‘old money,’ and as such don’t have to earn their wealth like Gekko did. He thus presents a nuanced position on the idea of money meritocracy: while the economy doesn’t naturally distribute wealth according to individual merit, it still allows the upwardly-mobile individual to prove his merit through the accumulation of wealth.
Gekko elaborates his vision of work and society in a series of conversations with Bud. His philosophy abounds with contradictions, a result of his cynicism and self-justification. Take again the idea of money meritocracy. He seems to discredit the idea during a limo ride with Bud, for he rejects the idea that hard work alone brings monetary success (WATCH 0:11-0:54). He illustrates the point with the example of his working-class father. Yet Gekko then goes on to assert that you are either a multimillionaire “player, or nothing.” Looking out the window, he points towards a businessman and a homeless man, saying, “Are you gonna tell me the difference between this guy and that guy is luck?” (WATCH 1:05-1:13). If Gekko doesn’t believe all the rich deserve their wealth, he does blame the poor for their poverty. As in the case of Rocky, the businessman’s wealth sets him apart from the “bum” on the street. Gekko’s massive fortune–which he invites Bud to emulate–reflects his absolute superiority: a player, or nothing.
Wall Street attacks this ideology, and it does so implicitly (most famously in Gekko’s “Greed is Good” speech) before Bud comes to his senses. Until then, Bud drinks it up. Meanwhile, Bud’s father represents an alternative, collectivist viewpoint. It is with this position that the film’s sympathies lie. Leader of his airline company’s maintenance workers’ union, he devotes himself to his men, with whom he identifies and sympathizes. His communal, class-based sympathies shine through when he tells his son: “Fare wars are killing us. Management’s gonna lay off five of my men this week. There’s nothing I can do about it.” Carl feels a moral duty to defend the welfare of his fellow workers, and he consistently connects this ideal to his union work, unlike Karen Silkwood.
These philosophies clash when Bud uses his dad’s connections at Blue Star Airlines to organize a meeting with its three union leaders (including his father), Gekko, and himself. Pointing out Blue Star’s ongoing losses and claiming that these will lead to bankruptcy, Bud and Gekko propose a deal: Gekko will buy up the company’s stock and install Bud as president, so that he can improve the company’s financial performance and avoid the destruction of unions that would come with bankruptcy. To make it profitable for Gekko in return, the unions would have to slash workers’ wages, which would be restored once the company began generating net profits. Unlike Bud, Carl Fox sees through Gekko, and says as much in accusation (WATCH). Carl identifies Gekko as a member of the ruling class whose riches derive from exploitation of the poor. He rejects the deal and leaves.
Humiliated, Bud runs out to apprehend his father. Though Bud conceived the deal with good intentions, Carl points out that Gekko is using him for profit. The ensuing argument reveals the father’s unswerving collectivism and the son’s arrogant economic individualism.
Bud: What I see is a jealous old machinist who can’t stand the fact that his son’s become more successful than he has!
Carl: What you see is a guy who never measured a man’s success by the size of his wallet!
Bud: That’s because you never had the guts to go out in the world and stake your own claim!
Bud continues to press his dad to agree, who continues to resist out of responsibility to his men. “Your f****** men! All my life, your men have been able to count on you! Why is it you’ve never been there for me, huh?” In fact, Bud’s father has been there for him. But this accusation successfully guilts Carl into budging. He lets the union membership decide, and they opt for the deal.
But Carl was right: Bud soon learns that Gekko plans to liquidate Blue Star. When Bud confronts him, Gordon’s bottomless cynicism comes fully to light (WATCH 2:11-3:15). He disdainfully mocks the idea that capitalism and equality are compatible: “You’re not naive enough to think we’re livin’ in a democracy, are you buddy? It’s the free market, and you’re part of it.” In the end, Bud manages to save Blue Star through a complicated stock-market scheme. He goes to prison for insider trading, but he has redeemed himself. The film’s final comment comes from Carl, who advises Bud that the purpose of work is in giving, not gaining: “Stop going for the easy buck and produce something with your life. Create instead of living off the buying and selling of others.”
Conclusion
Rocky III, Silkwood, and Wall Street each represent a particular form of individualism and of collectivism. Considered chronologically, they show a progression from an endorsement of individualism and rejection of collectivism, to the opposite. Yet, it would be wrong to draw the conclusion that a similar shift in outlook took place within American public opinion at large. Instead, all three (in their own ways) attest to the immense appeal of individualism throughout the Reagan presidency.
Rocky III straightforwardly affirms this ethos. In the case of Silkwood, a struggle against worker exploitation, carried out through a collective body, reduces to a celebration of a lone hero’s bravery and idealism. Indeed, the story of Karen Silkwood had been given this meaning in the public sphere–in the papers and in memorials and protests–before the movie entered production. And Wall Street, despite its scathing critique of economic individualism, has had a paradoxical effect on audiences. The movie’s screenwriter regretfully reflected on this in a 2008 article, entitled “Repeat After Me: Greed is Not Good.” Over the years, young adults would tell him that the movie inspired them, and that they wanted to be like Gekko. Although Gekko stopped being a hero for Bud Fox, he remains one for many to this day. This enduring audience reaction leads us to conclude that Wall Street’s case for collectivism ultimately succumbs to the allure of heroic individualism as embodied by Gekko and the ambitious Bud Fox.
It is primarily through their impact on and reception by audiences that films shape the societies from which they emerge. Yet audiences are not blank slates: to their engagement with a movie, viewers bring a whole cache of ideas, beliefs, and past experiences. Inasmuch as these are acquired and modified through life, they are conditioned to some extent by a particular historical context, in which any given life is situated. Americans came together with the movies reviewed above during the pivotal presidency of Ronald Reagan. At this time, economic well-being was increasingly seen as the burden of the individual. As noted in the introduction, Reagan himself promoted this perception, in direct opposition to the tradition of state activism for the alleviation of poverty. This fading paradigm, established by FDR, rested on an acknowledgement of social responsibility for poverty, utilizing government channels to fulfill that duty. The individualism on display in Rocky III, Silkwood, and Wall Street reflected and reinforced a trend towards denial of that responsibility. Rocky, perhaps, captured this attitude best, when he said, “Nobody owes nobody nothing. You owe yourself.”
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