Ronald Reagan and the Optimistic Cinema of the 1980s

Living in California and having as friends many artists, writers, and poets (all of them, to a one, blissfully, unreflectively liberal), I often have the opportunity to hear them wax poetic about the Golden Age of their lives: the late 1960s/early 1970s hippie scene centered around San Francisco/Berkeley. The drugs were amazing, the sex constant and unreserved, the spirit of joie de vivre and carpe diem all-encompassing.

After listening to these misty-eyed reveries, I usually press them with what, to anyone else, would be the obvious question: If it was all so great, why did they leave the Haight and the Castro and all of their associated communes and bong-fueled revolutions behind, and fall into a more conventional lifestyle elsewhere? Why not continue living in what was, according to them, the closest thing to paradise on earth imaginable?

The answer, boiled down, is usually some variant of “I realized the lifestyle was killing me — that if I didn’t get away I would soon be dead.” I’ve heard tales of bad drug trips, violence and paranoia, anarchism and terrorism, and any number of utterly disgusting and disease-ridden sexual perversions. Promising paradise and delivering nightmares is as good a definition of socialism as any (socialism, communism, liberalism, progressivism — call it what you will, it’s all the same poison, just delivered in different doses and by different means). Every few decades a new group of idealistic young fools attempt to stage a new revolt (“Yes, we can!”) in an attempt to overturn the wisdom of their forefathers and the immutable laws of reality, and each time they end up like Icarus, staging spectacular belly-flops into cesspools of unintended consequences.

Examine the cinema of the era, and you’ll see this whole thing play out again and again. Easy Rider, Billy Jack, Vanishing Point, The French Connection, Apocalypse Now!, and so many others glorified nihilism, hedonism, revolution, and hopelessness. Again and again we were treated to, on the one hand, liberal myths of heroes striving mightily to fight, escape, or ignore evil conservative society only to be mercilessly extinguished, and on the other stories of conservatives discovering the corruption and emptiness infecting their base values and ideals.

One of the things I am most grateful for in my life is that I came of age not in the late Sixties, when America was descending into this chaos, but in the early Eighties, when Ronald Reagan was dragging us out of it.

Reagan was a longtime FDR-Democrat turned staunch Republican — once, when reporter Sam Donaldson tried to embarrass Reagan at a press conference by asking him pointedly if he bore any of the blame for the country’s fiscal woes, Reagan shot back, “Yes, because for many years I was a Democrat.” He argued tirelessly for a return to can-do American optimism, family values, and conservative policies, bringing both domestic inflation and foreign totalitarians to heel.

Wherever he spoke, one could almost feel the deeply destructive hippie mindset of the Seventies fleeing like a vampire from sunlight. I find it poetically appropriate that would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley Jr. was obsessed with the movie Taxi Driver — it was as if the entire Seventies zeitgeist, encapsulated into one deranged man, was striking out in a last-gasp effort to stave off what was coming. When Reagan not only took the bullet but virtually laughed it off, that was the true end of the Flower Power era and its often insane grip on the popular culture.

At the same time Reagan was transforming us politically, guys like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were transforming our cinema. They were suburban kids who, unlike many of their filmmaking friends, had largely avoided the hippie lifestyle, and their early efforts at politicized “message” filmmaking (Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express, Lucas’ THX-1138) were flops. It was only when they embraced the needs and desires of America’s great middle class, in effect becoming the unwitting cinematic arm of the Reagan Revolution, that they experienced the stupendous success for which they are best known.

They did this not by being avant-garde or trying to impress liberal critics or professors, but by refreshing themselves at the wells of myths, old movies, and pulps (much of them politically incorrect), and then infusing their new versions of those tales with a sense of optimism largely absent from the hyper-politicized movies of the Seventies. Jaws (1975), Star Wars (1977) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), in addition to being monster hits, don’t feel as if they belong in the 1970s at all. Monsters, sci-fi, special effects, genuine everyman heroes, conventional happy endings — they instead are the harbingers of the mass flowering of such films (and books, and video games) throughout the 1980s, movies that inspired and entertained more than they depressed or preached, that recapitulated the alleged “Goody Two-Shoes” cinema of their youth rather than rebelled against it.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Reagan is destined to become something of a Lincoln figure in our nation’s history. He brought optimism and rejuvenation to an America wrecked for over a decade by liberalism (in both parties), and in so doing set the stage for one of the Golden Ages of cinema: the era of the populist, family-friendly, PG-rated blockbuster. It was a great time, for both the nation and its moviegoers.