1980: Richard Gere and American Gigolo (Erotic 80s Part 3)
You Must Remember This
Karina Longworth
4.6 • 15.7K Ratings
🗓️ 19 April 2022
⏱️ 68 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
One of the most aesthetically influential movies of the ‘80s, Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo sets a template for much of what we’re going to discuss this season: it’s about sex as a conduit for wealth, masks and double lives, and the role of danger in desire. Today we’ll talk about the sexual persona of Gigolo star Richard Gere in the early 1980s; the ways in which Gigolo and other films from 1980 (Dressed to Kill, Cruising) grapple with straight male anxiety over gay male visibility; and the tension between the promotion of sex-positivity for women and the anti-feminist backlash.
Transcript
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| 1:21.3 | Welcome to another episode of You Must Remember This, the podcast dedicated to exploring |
| 1:32.0 | the secrets and or forgotten histories of Hollywood's first century. I'm your host, |
| 1:40.1 | Karina Longworth, and this is part three of our ongoing series, Erotic 80s. |
| 1:56.0 | And that doing this because somebody's making me do it. Last year he was discovered making |
| 2:12.5 | a lot of noise. |
| 2:29.3 | Today's episode is about 1980. On the one hand, if you're just counting by the occurrence |
| 2:38.5 | of certain types of imagery, that previously would have been censored out of movies publicly |
| 2:43.9 | screened for money, this was the most permissive moment in the history of commercial filmed |
| 2:50.2 | entertainment. On the other hand, there was a building fear that a crackdown was coming. |
| 3:00.0 | Jimmy Carter was unpopular enough by the end of his term that it seemed likely that a |
| 3:05.6 | Republican would be replacing him. And the last elected Republican president, Richard |
| 3:11.9 | Nixon, had pushed a censorship agenda in defiance of both pornosheak popular culture, and |
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