As discussed in Robert Ray's A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, during the 1960s and 70s, American cinema became more ideologically polarized than the classic Hollywood cinema. , cinema of the left and the right. Films like Bonnie & Clyde, Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider were on the left while films like Dirty Harry, Patton and Death Wish were on the right. On the left, the protagonists were the outlaws and the martyrs and on the right, the protagonists were the law. The protagonists were either collective (on the left) or individual (on the right). Two films, Jaws and They Live, from the 1970s and 1980s, show how these ideologies manifest in Hollywood cinema. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why violent video games should not be banned"? Get the original essay In 1975, Steven Spielberg made a film that left its mark on cinema. Jaws became the first big blockbuster of the summer. The film was released near the end of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. You could say that Jaws is a right-wing film. Three men are sent to sea to destroy a threat to a small American town. This could be an allegory for the Vietnam War and its motivations. The United States believed that the spread of communism posed a threat to the world, but in reality to its own interests. All three characters also embody middle-class American masculinity. What would problematize this reading would be the businessman mayor who seems to embody capitalist greed and bureaucracy. John Carpenter, known for both his horror and sci-fi films, is no stranger to injecting socio-politics into his films, whether intentionally or not. The Thing could be read as an allegory for the AIDS crisis, the blood test scene comes to mind as the most visually representative of this reading. Escape from New York eerily predicted the rise of private prisons and its sequel Escape from LA predicted the rise of an unpredictable and dangerous president who banishes everyone he considers "un-American" within the walls of Los Angeles' private prison Angeles. Prince of Darkness is bizarrely about strange, zombifying emissions coming from a satanic vat of green goo in a church basement that can be read as a commentary on mass media and the "religious right." Carpenter's 1988 film They Live is a scathing critique of the Reagan administration. the conservatism and excessive materialism of capitalism. The film was released at the dawn of the Reagan administration and the start of the George HW Bush administration, which continued many of the same policies. The Reagan administration was notorious for its treatment and neglect of marginalized people, from disregard for the AIDS crisis, to anti-abortion legislation, to the voodoo of the "trickle down" economic system that led to an increase poverty and homelessness. Carpenter's heroes, Nada and Frank, are working class and homeless. In They Live, a drifter named Nada finds work on a construction site where he befriends Frank and is offered accommodation in a slum near a church where there is no real choir, just a recording. After discovering scientific equipment and boxes of sunglasses in the church, the police raid the church. Nada manages to save one of the boxes of sunglasses and hides it safely in an alley. When he puts on his sunglasses, he sees the world as it is, ruled by ghoulish aliens and messages..