MAKE MY DAY

A film critic looks back at the movies of the Ronald Reagan years.

The 1980s was an era in which one of the most popular American TV shows, Family Ties, featured a teenager “who wears a tie, carries a briefcase, and has a poster of Richard Nixon in his bedroom,” a program that was reportedly one of the president’s favorites. In this book, the last in his Found Illusions trilogy, Hoberman (An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War, 2011, etc.) examines some of the most popular films from Reagan’s eight years in office to view how politics affected popular culture and vice versa. The author covers everything from paeans to the capitalism that Reagan—who “understood that stardom was the ultimate form of public service: the Department of Amusement”—dearly espoused, films such as Risky Business and Trading Places to the Vietnam revisionism of the Rambo movies to pictures like Ghostbusters and Gremlins, which, by “dramatizing instances of alien aggression,” barely concealed their xenophobia. Even readers who share Hoberman’s distaste for Reagan—the book includes long excoriations he wrote for the Village Voice—may think he occasionally lets his contempt get the better of him. It may have been a “bravura performance” when Reagan waved to cameras as he left the hospital after having been shot two weeks earlier, but, unlike many of his other performances, that seems a reasonable one to have made. Constant references to the films Reagan watched as president grow tiresome. Much better are passages that show the president mirroring behavior of movie characters, as when Hoberman notes that one of Reagan’s first-term speeches on economic recovery sounded as facile as the utterances of TV-obsessed Chance the gardener, the simpleton from Being There—one of the book’s many sly digs that apply as much to Donald Trump as to Reagan.

A passionately argued jeremiad about an era and its lingering effects on politics and culture.