Something’s Happening Here

Abstract

This chapter examines films that served as flashpoints in the heated ‘culture wars’ of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The chapter begins with a discussion of the work of filmmaker Oliver Stone and a detailed analysis of his Jim Morrison biopic The Doors (1991). The Doors offers interesting glimpses into Stone’s scripting of the Sixties at a time when the filmmaker was both riding a wave of commercial and critical success (on the back of his Vietnam dramas Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July) and in the process of developing his focus beyond Vietnam veteran protagonists and towards other historical events and characters. I then turn to a discussion of the much-debated comedy-drama Forrest Gump (1994). While this film is often charged with outright conservatism, the analysis of script development here argues that it was written in line with broader liberal discourses of the period.