From a 1960 apartment to Jurassic Park: when movies started slipping in the message

From Billy Wilder to Jurassic Park: the first time a movie slipped you the message

Cinema has always been propaganda. The question is not whether there is a message, but when it became so blatant that it stopped hiding. The most common answer comes with a date and a title: The Apartment, 1960, by Billy Wilder. There, the mistress stops being the villain of the story and becomes a girl in love who is about to get screwed over; the villain is him. Subtle, slight, almost imperceptible. But with that film —and the Oscars it won— something changed in the playbook.

The 1960 precedent nobody disputes

The dominant thesis places the turning point there. Before, in the Hollywood of the 30s, 40s and 50s, the mistress or the other woman was a slut and an evil one, by definition. No nuance. The sarracena code was so ingrained that it did not even need explaining. Wilder broke it with a story where the bad guy is the system and the good one is the one who suffers.

The problem came later. The director got carried away and in his next film threw in a partner swap —Kiss Me, Stupid—. The result: total failure, and he was nearly stoned. The 1964 audience was not ready to have the ground pulled from under them that fast. The lesson the industry drew was the opposite of what you might expect: if the wrapping is soft, the message goes down.

The Pink Panther and the ridiculous cop

A year earlier, in 1963, The Pink Panther already showed the inverted pattern: the thieves are seductive and refined; the clumsy, ridiculous character is the policeman. Shortly before, such a portrayal would have been unthinkable. The story's sympathy had switched sides without anyone offering an explanation.

Some go further back and place the origin in Kennedy's arrival in 1960 and 1961, with a Hollywood that, in this reading, showed its true face after years of self-censorship. The chronology fits too well to be a coincidence.

Jurassic Park: the case that comes up most

When people are asked about the first time someone thought this is not what I came to see, the most common answer is not an auteur film: it is Jurassic Park, 1993. The complaint has two versions. One, that the girl becomes the level-headed and brave one while the boy is left as a geek good for nothing. The other, that the paleontologist goes full empowered, ridiculing poor Sam Neill —a total sweetheart— while flirting with the mathematician.

The scene is funny: many were nine or ten years old and could not name what they were seeing. They only noticed something did not add up. Three decades later, rewatching the cinema of the 80s and 90s, the messages show up everywhere. They were there, camouflaged.

Breakfast at Tiffany's and the heroine who abandons her family

The prize for antiquity goes to Breakfast at Tiffany's, 1961: a protagonist who abandons her family to take up prostitution and con men in the big city, and whom the film presents as a heroine. Seen today, the portrayal looks less like romance and more like a sarracena anomaly.

The underlying diagnosis is more pessimistic: cinema only fools children, and as soon as the technique was perfected it became as boring as looking out the window. Propaganda, ever more brazen, fits the story to ideological parameters and the result is predictable. A current film from a certain studio, they say, would have been impossible in the 50s.

The lingering doubt is whether cinema was ever anything else. Collective lobotomy, some argue, has been working for decades. With this track record, the sensible bet is that the next shift will arrive sooner than we think, though nobody yet knows what wrapping it will come in.