Title: The Power, the Glitter, the Muscles: Movie Masculinities in the Age of Reagan
Abstract: The Power, the Glitter, the Muscles: Movie Masculinities in the Age of Reagan Clayton R. Koppes (bio) Susan Jeffords. Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994. ix 212 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $42.00. Stephen Vaughn. Ronald Reagan in Hollywood: Movies and Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. xiv 359 pp. Illustrations, notes, references, and index. $24.95. Ronald Reagan’s election as president in 1980 occasioned much disbelief that an actor (of all things!) should ascend to the White House. This surprise is, in retrospect, surprising. Popular culture and politics are both in some measure dependent on projecting messages that mass audiences want, and the communications abilities of actors and politicians are more similar than either might wish to acknowledge. The belief that Hollywood could not prepare Reagan for politics reflected the success of a particular version of movie colony myth-making — that the movies were “pure entertainment.” The master of this beguiling nonsense about Hollywood was Will Hays, the Hoosier politician and architect of Harding’s victory in 1920, who headed the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association — better known as the Hays Office — from 1922 to 1945. This was the Hollywood in which Reagan rose to success and came into political consciousness. It was Hays’s genius to cast the movies as apolitical while he had in fact been hired for the most political of tasks: saving the industry from federal antitrust lawyers and citizen censorship groups. Hollywood, meanwhile, seethed with politics. In World War II, for instance, industry people actively supported groups ranging from the rightwing Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals to numerous liberal and antifascist causes and the Communist party. From their earliest days the movies conveyed powerful political messages. Some were overt, such as Birth of a Nation ‘s racist brief and pro-interventionist pictures from 1939 to 1941. Movies that were seemingly the least political were often freighted with heavily political implications for gender roles. Whether one [End Page 528] looks at the movie community’s active political involvement or the screen’s political message, the links between politics and the movies are potent. Journalist Ronald Brownstein deftly terms the connection The Power and the Glitter (1990). The movies’ putative power have made them a political target since the nickelodeon. Film censorship was a respectable cause, joining reformers as diverse as Jane Addams, Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell, and Roman Catholic bishops. Social scientists lent their support in the Payne Fund studies of the early 1930s, popularized by journalist Henry Forman’s portentously titled Our Movie-Made Children. Although Hollywood is much different from the days “when the movies really counted,” the cinema remains a popular target for diverse ideologies, from Michael Medved’s Hollywood vs. America (1992) to Frankfurt School theorists and their successors. 1 In Reagan’s particular case the link between his Hollywood years and his persona and politics is crucial but elusive. In a perceptive essay Michael Rogin locates Reagan’s political consciousness in the roles he played on screen. Garry Wills depicts an American Everyman who contains contradictions but does not experience them, most notably in a simultaneous embrace of conservatism and capitalism. 2 Now Stephen Vaughn offers an implicit corrective on Reagan’s formative years in Hollywood, and Susan Jeffords brings feminist insights to 1980s movies and politics. Vaughn, a historian who is a professor of communications at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, presents the most comprehensive study of Reagan’s early life and Hollywood career that we are likely to have for some time. Vaughn’s research is thorough, ranging from church and public-library records in Reagan’s hometown of Dixon, Illinois, to the archives of Warner Brothers and the Production Code Administration to once secret FBI files. Interviews, including one with Reagan, add depth to the written record. In accessible prose Vaughn tells the familiar story of the president’s progress, from childhood with an alcoholic father to Chicago Cubs broadcaster to second-level movie star. Vaughn endorses the plausible, if conventional, thesis that for Reagan “Hollywood turned dreams into reality” (p. 237). Vaughn’s narrative is...
Publication Year: 1995
Publication Date: 1995-09-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot