The cinetrix is of an advanced enough age that she remembers full well the actual President Ronald Reagan, as opposed to the water-walking figure even NPR flaks are busily lionizing this week. [She has a theory about the reason why liberal media types are creaming themselves. Today's senior correspondents came of age during Ronnie's reign, and his passing has touched off all sorts of emotions they'd be better off working out in 50-minute-hour increments rather than on the air. Ehhh, no such luck.]
Anyway, last night I saw 20-odd minutes of footage I hadn't seen since 1984. It was not the long-form "Thriller" video, though it was plenty scary. No, I saw the final-push Reagan-Bush '84 campaign propaganda video, with artfully assembled footage--from the first inauguration on January 20, 1981, to his cue-the-balloon-drop acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention on August 23, 1984. In case you don't remember, Ray Charles sang his version of "America the Beautiful" at that convention, people. I can't even imagine where one might have seen the whole thing in 1984--we only had three networks and MTV then, right? But there it was.
This is a cinema blog, not a political one, so I'd just like to tell you about what I saw, because you'd be hard pressed to find a better example of 20th-century Hollywood craftsmanship anywhere.
In shot after shot, ordinary folks explained why Reagan's approach to the economy and defense made their lives better and the country stronger. Little children ran up to Ronnie. Senior citizens heartily endorsed his administration's coersion and coddling of the AARP crowd. Working folks in hard hats and central-casting brown people spoke with comical immigrant accents about pride, and respect, and a new attitude. And through it all there was Ronnie on horseback, Ronnie getting shot by Hinckley and cracking wise to the surgeons, glimpses of the Statue of Liberty tucked shyly behind scaffolding, George Herbert Walker Bush biding his time, Iron Lady Maggie Thatcher glowering, anorexic Nancy gingerly embracing children with Down's Syndrome and telling us all to just say no, Sinatra crooning whenever "Proud to Be an American" wasn't playing. The editing pace was slower then, and the hair was bigger, but the flag-waving montages were just as glossy and slick as any today.
Seeing all of the images that defined my adolescence--and knowing which ones were left on the cutting room floor [hint, they rhyme with "AIDS" and "crack" and "Nicaragua"]--was really upsetting, but it reminded me very strongly of Reagan's abiding legacy. Not as second banana to Bonzo, mind, but just as cinematic. He was the most scripted and stage-managed president of the modern era, and he understood the power of images like few ever have. This was a guy who addressed the nation on television twenty-six times in his first term alone. He dyed his hair and wore makeup on screen and knew how he should be lit and from which side better than Claudette Colbert did. He could pull off a brown suit, even. You knew he was fake, but he was so shiny you couldn't look away. The cinetrix learned to watch from Ronald Reagan, and she's been at it ever since.
In life, the man marshaled his Illinois earnestness and Hollywood gloss to strike the pose of a Western hero. Indeed, the Great Communicator often addressed the nation as though the larger world was no more complex than the simple, black-or-white-hat frontier morality of a John Ford flick. Now he's riding into the sunset, and we can expect his funeral to be the most glittering, stage-managed production number yet. The cinetrix expects something as lavish and overproduced as Annie's funeral from Imitation of Life.
“He said dusk is the time to do this. He understood that this would be his closing scene.”
Ah, yes. The Magic Hour. Wonder whether the storyboards will be on view at his presidential library afterwards?
