A taste for trash: the persistence of exploitation in American cinema, 1960-1975

This dissertation, “A Taste for Trash: The Persistence of Exploitation in American Cinema, 1960-1975,” aims to situate the development of marginal independent genre filmmaking in the 1960s alongside the broader historical, cultural, legal, industrial, and intellectual trends that characterize the period. Rather than attempting a holistic model focused on one particular exploitation filmmaker, company, or genre, this project opts for an eclectic methodology, isolating three particular entry points by which to explore exploitation cinema and its rhetorical strategies – sex, drugs, and money. Within this broad structure, the dissertation’s chapters address the equivocal address of softcore filmmakers when they were threatened by the advent of hardcore pornography; the negotiation of educative content and titillating content in LSD films and exploitation’s unstable relationship with the counterculture; and an in-depth analysis of an exploitation production/distribution company that failed in its attempt to ascend to mainstream viability. The dissertation concludes with an analysis of the 2007 film Grindhouse as an example of exploitation nostalgia and a misguided attempt to recreate on a large scale the often accidental appeal of low-budget cinema. ❧ “Exploitation” is a descriptor that resists definitive meaning – this project embraces the term’s inherent polysemy and examines a range of genre cycles and films with particular emphasis on their contradictions and paradoxes. Exploitation films offer an additional paradigm by which we can better understand the relationship between studio and independent filmmaking; the distinctions between narrative and experimental cinema; and the ways in which the New Hollywood negotiated legal and industrial developments during the tumultuous 1960s. Exploitation cinema’s mode of address – the means by which it presents subversive imagery and content under the guise of educative and/or conservative moral positions – embodies an ambivalence that maximizes commercial opportunities and mitigates the risk of legal persecution. Exploitation films thus exist at a unique cusp of industry and culture, offering a map of the content that mainstream Hollywood studios refused to present, and a barometer of the cultural strategies that could effectively justify the taboo.