ABSTRACT
Film critic Andrew Britton identifies most Hollywood films released between 1977 and 1986 as being ‘Reaganite entertainments,’ offering reassurance to its audience and redeeming conservative values. In addition, special effects offered spectacle and an illusory sense of originality, returning the viewer to a childlike state, while patriarchy was legitimized, with female characters acting as support or being expelled from the narrative. This chapter explores cyberpunk films of this period and beyond—including TRON, Blade Runner, WarGames, and The Matrix—to show how some of these films fit the Reaganite entertainment mold, but others appear to challenge it. In fact, a number of them appear to offer novelty by focusing more on women and people of color as protagonists, but still endorse neoliberal and neoconservative positions. As a result, this chapter shows the (anti)hero in cyberpunk film often becomes an entrepreneur of himself, disrupting the neoliberal world but typically only in his favor.
