In his quirky and clever 1987 book Ronald Reagan the Movie: And Other Episodes of Political DemonologyPolitical scientist Michael Rogin considered how Reagan the actor became president. “Reagan became president thanks to film,” Rogin wrote, and no one understood the power of the medium better than Reagan himself. In fact, the former B-movie star and newly sworn-in president was to deliver a speech at the Academy Awards on March 30, 1981. “Film is for the ages,” Reagan would tell the Motion Picture Academy and the millions of viewers at home. “It is the film that shows all of us not only how we look and sound, but more importantly, how we feel.”
But the president never made those comments. On the day of the Oscars, he was shot and nearly killed by John Hinckley Jr. In a strange twist, Hinckley Jr. was “inspired” to carry out his attack by another actor, a young Jodie Foster, as she appeared in Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film. Taxi driver. Hinckley “catapulted himself into the role of the isolated, disturbed and violent protagonist,” played by Robert De Niro. The would-be assassin, Rogin said, has trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality.
Reagan, of course, survived the assassination attempt and remained president for the next eight years. During his two terms in office, Reagan “rose above reality” and, as a Hollywood hero, led the nation through “a titanic struggle between the forces of good and an empire of evil.” As cable television fueled the tabloidization of the news industry and public confidence in government waned, the 40th President, the line between fantasy and real life grew ever thinner. Thirty-five years after Reagan left office and 20 years after his death, as tens of millions of people prepare to vote (again) for a lying and malicious former reality TV star, that line has all but disappeared from American political life.
Like Reagan the actor and Reagan the president, Reagan The new film has a strained relationship with reality. In director Sean McNamara’s biopic, the Gipper, played by Dennis Quaid, can do no wrong. Charming, principled and relentlessly optimistic, McNamara’s Reagan single-handedly revives the US economy, overthrows the Soviet Union and leads the nation back to glory. Suffice it to say that such a hagiographic treatment requires countless omissions, distortions and outright fabrications. Worse still, perhaps Reagan is bloated and boring – its lack of focus and vision is only made worse by an insulting 135-minute running time. This is an insult to both history and cinema, to both reality and fantasy.
Reagan begins with Hinckley’s assassination—an event that, the film awkwardly suggests, may have been orchestrated by the Soviets. It then switches chaotically between the distant past and the present (2024). After several minutes, the film finally stabilizes in a largely chronological narrative delivered by retired KGB agent Viktor Petrovich (played apathetically by Jon Voight). A fictional amalgamation of several KGB agents and Soviet intelligence officers, Petrovich takes viewers through Reagan’s setbacks and triumphs from childhood to old age. (About halfway through the film, he informs the audience that Soviet agents actually had nothing to do with Hinckley’s assassination attempt on Reagan.)
Petrovich says in his voiceover that he had been keeping an eye on Reagan since his early days as a movie star in the 1930s and 1940s, when the “communists” (a term used unironically in the film) were supposedly gaining a foothold in Hollywood. In reality, that was not the case. Historians and ordinary Americans alike now recognize that the Second Red Scare was an overzealous and misguided attempt to purge alleged communist sympathizers from government, academia, Hollywood, and beyond. But Reagan missed the memo. Ronald Reagan’s communist-baiting – most clearly exemplified by his testimony as president of the Screen Actors Guild before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 – becomes a virtue in the film. Eventually, Ronnie must discipline people like the (queer-coded) Hollywood writer who, in one scene in the film, deigns to discuss inequality in front of the future commander in chief.
While the film rightly identifies anti-communism as Reagan’s lodestar and seems to celebrate his disdain for the oppressed and disenfranchised, it also (very oddly) makes him into something of an anti-racist trailblazer. As a security guard for the Eureka College football team in the 1930s, the real Reagan invited two of his black teammates to stay with his family after a local hotel refused to accommodate them. In ReaganThis act of kindness serves as proof of the fundamental decency of its protagonist.
Yet in order to portray Ronald Reagan as a white ally in the fight for racial equality, the film must obscure his actual record on racial and civil rights. For example, in describing Reagan’s support for Senator Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, the film makes no mention of either Reagan’s or Goldwater’s opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act—or the fact that Goldwater won only his home state of Arizona and five former Confederate states in that election. When Reagan officially launched his own political career in the mid-1960s, he flattered racist voters by demonstrating his hostility to African-American civil rights. He opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. When he ran for governor of California in 1966, he supported the controversial Proposition 14, which had eliminated fair housing protections in the state. “If an individual wants to discriminate against blacks or others in the sale or rental of his home,” Reagan explained at the time, “that is his right to do so.”
The list goes on. From his speech on “states’ rights” at the 1980 Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi—just miles from where Freedom Summer organizers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were murdered—to his enthusiastic use of the term Welfare Queento his intensification of the racist war on drugs, Reagan’s record on race is clear. And to maintain the illusion of a racially egalitarian Ronald Reagan, it is a record that Reagan must completely ignore.
In the film, the war on drugs is reduced to a short montage that focuses on the most passionate opponents of Reagan’s tenure in the White House. These people are on the fringes of American society, Reagan suggests. Protesters carrying signs condemning the “new Jim Crow” appear briefly, as do nuclear weapons freeze activists and members of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) demanding a stronger government response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. During the Reagan administration, nearly 90,000 people – disproportionately gay and people of color – died from AIDS-related causes. HIV/AIDS represents the president’s most consequential political and policy blunder, but quickly disappears from the screen, replaced by the 1984 Electoral College map illustrating Reagan’s decisive 525-13 victory. In Reagandissenting voices, no matter how legitimate, might as well be shouting into the void.
Even the character Petrovich, who spent his (fictional) career undermining democratic capitalism and everything Ronald Reagan stood for, can’t help but admire and respect the Gipper, the alleged architect of the Soviet Union’s demise. The film’s claim that “Ronald Reagan won the Cold War,” as Pat Buchanan declared at the 1992 Republican National Convention, is perhaps its most outrageous claim. This is not to say that Reagan played no role at all, but historians such as Fritz Bartel have stressed the importance of structural causes in the demise of the USSR. More specifically, amid the global stagflation of the 1970s, democracy and neoliberal capitalism proved the most effective means of enforcing economic discipline. These “were the best political and economic systems for breaking promises,” Bartel writes. Penny Von Eschen, for her part, laments the “confusing abstraction of the term (Cold War) itself.” For Von Eschen, “there is no uniform version and no universally accepted end” of the Cold War, and “it is misleading to say” – as Reagan, I would say that is true – “that the Cold War ended when hostilities between the United States and the Soviet Union ceased.” A consummate Cold Warrior like Reagan would love nothing more than to be remembered as the man who brought down the evil empire. Despite ReaganHowever, he did not comply with the allegations.
Beyond the relentless abuse of the historical record, Reagan is simply a terrible film. Director McNamara’s filmography to date is extensive, but full of trash—Sister swap: A holiday in the hometown; a sequel to The cutting edge; a movie based on Bratz dolls. Reagan is painfully slow, far too long, poorly written and stylistically inconsistent. It is also held back by bizarre casting and song choices. While Dennis Quaid delivers a mostly solid (if not remarkable) performance as the title character, a steady parade of new, often irrelevant characters – played by C- or D-list celebrities, many with conservative tendencies – only adds to the film’s cheesiness. There’s Jon Voight, of course, but also Creed’s Scott Stapp as Frank Sinatra (!), Kevin Sorbo as Reagan’s youth pastor and entourage‘S Kevin Dillon as film producer Jack L. Warner. The biopic also features cover songs by Bob Dylan, Gene Simmons and Clint Black, the latter of whom performs John Denver’s Appalachian anthem “Take Me Home, Country Roads” and plays scenes in which Quaid Reagan rides horses on his California ranch as Alzheimer’s disease takes its toll. It’s an odd selection that turns a potentially poignant scene into an enigmatic one.
As Michael Rogin noted in the final years of Reagan’s presidency, it was the movies that made Ronald Reagan an actor, a president, and an icon. Reagan attempts to revive and perhaps expand the myth and legend, and it might work with diehard Reaganites who have little interest in historical veracity or well-made movies. The rest of us may not be ready to forgive Reagan or Reagan for their many sins.
