He DID say "well" a lot!

Lots to post about that I may not get to: L's college reunion. A rather odd conference in Maine. Parents and in-laws in town this week. narcissime's abominable taste in women. djwilhelm's quite respectable taste in men. Commencement yesterday! Party tonite! But I need to post this first, it being a national day of mourning and all that.



What do you know? I find myself mildly bereaved by Reagan's death. Not because I'm a big fan. Almost the opposite. More because I am rather conflicted in my feelings about him. Intellectually, I deplore most of Reagan's achievements, both the ones that pinko intellectuals like me are supposed to deplore, and even the ones we acquiesce to in retrospectives on the News Hour and NPR. For instance, as I've said in my own lectures about Reagan, and as I've heard about a hundred times this week, he "made Americans feel good about themselves again," Granted, I have no memory of America in the 1960s and 1970s, but it's hard for someone my age to believe this was ever really a problem. Honestly, Americans should look into finding a president who makes them feel bad about themselves for a change.

But while I have no intellectual disagreement with the final anti-Reagan shots many of my friends are taking, I take little pleasure in them. I can't bear to watch the beatification of St. Ron currently in progress on every TV channel, but I do want to observe his death in some way. Hence this post.

Reagan is my default president, the first one I remember being elected and being president, and the one to which I instinctively compare all who follow. I was an Alex P. Keaton conservative in high school, and Reagan was probably much of the reason. Which is not to say there was ever a point when I didn't think he was a senile, probably dangerous old coot who couldn't quite tell the difference between the movies and reality. But for me, in a proto-po-mo-ironic-Gen-X kind of way, that was a big part of his appeal! How could I of all people fault somebody else for spending more time in a world of fantasy and pop culture than in real life?

Tangent: Liberal pundits often point out, as if they'd caught him in something, that all of Reagan's best lines were from movies he'd been in or seen. As I say, I can hardly fault him for that. So are all of my best lines. You've heard the stories about Reagan watching The Sound of Music instead of prepping for Reykjavik, or mining the movie Ghostbusters for lessons about the 1984 election. I'll bet while Reagan was president, every third thing he said was a line from a movie or a TV show, and every third thing Nancy said was, "What's that from?" (In this one small thing, Lisa can empathize with Nancy Reagan.) Don't be fooled by his G.I. generation birthdate! Reagan was the first and so far only Generation X president.

In college my politics did a 180, but I remained fascinated by Reagan and the Reagan years. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Reagan's foreign policy, and when I first arrived at Harvard thought I might write my PhD dissertation on the same. I've long felt towards Reagan much of the same push-pull I feel towards the United States in general—the same itch to figure it out that brought me here, and made me devote my career to studying the USA. Warm-hearted and diabolical, well-meaning and destructive, charming and insane—that's Reagan, and America, to me.

Next Post: Quintuple Dutch: The Alternate Reagan Film Festival.

Five For The Gipper

The Ronald Reagan Memorial Film Festival
Check your local listings.


Murder Out of Space
1940. Ronald Reagan, Eddie Foy, Lya Lys. Director: Max Castle. 1½ stars.

The fourth in a series of B-movies starring Ronald Reagan as Secret Service agent Brass Bancroft. After Bancroft's "T-Men" raid a counterfeit ring operating out of Innsmouth, Massachusetts, he is reassigned to the "Green Deltas," a secret squad of government agents fighting fifth columnists from beyond the stars. There, Brass foils a plot by a Siberian sorceror named Koschei the Deathless to steal the Inertia Projector, a device that banishes extra-dimensional irruptions and incursions. Forgettable in the 1940s, Murder Out of Space gained notoriety in the 1980s because of parallels between the Inertia Projector and President Reagan's controversial Sorcerous Defense Initiative, designed to protect the nation from entities out of space and time. "The Sorcerous Defense Initiative has been labelled Star Wars," Reagan said in 1985. "But it isn't about war. It is about peace. If you will pardon my stealing a film line: Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."


House of Meese
(aka The Terrortastic House of Meese, aka The Frightatious House of Meese, aka Dr. Gipper's 3-D House of Meese)
1954. Bela Lugosi, Ronald Reagan, Tor Johnson. Director: Edward Wood, Jr. ½ star.

After their car breaks down during an unconvincing thunderstorm, a young couple (played by B-movie stalwarts Ronald Reagan and Nancy Davis) seeks shelter in a seemingly abandoned white mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Shrieking and running away from the mansion's monstrous geriatric denizens ensues. Some genuinely frightening villains do not redeem this otherwise by-the-numbers Ed Wood stinker. "The President," played by Bela Lugosi, is barely seen. Lugosi, drug-addled and close to death during filming, munches on jelly beans and makes a couple of good speeches, but it's hard to believe he's entirely aware of the idiocy going on around him. The House of Meese really belongs to his diabolical minions, including a haughty, blood-sucking "First Lady" (Vampira), the sinister "Michael Deaver" (Dudley Manlove), and Tor Johnson as the lumbering "Ed Meese." A goofy introduction by the psychic Criswell (as the First Lady's astrological adviser) alerts us that this story is set in the far-off future year of 1984, and the plot does involve some claptrap about using flying saucers to shoot down missiles or vice versa, but otherwise it's your basic cross between Assisted-Living Dracula and Manos, Hands of Fate.


Bedtime for Gonzo
1969. Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Ronald Reagan. D: Dennis Hopper. 2 stars.

This bizarre, hypnotic slice of late 1960s psychedelia, loosely based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, features Peter Fonda as "the Gipper," an amnesiac biker driving across a post-apocalyptic California with a slightly sinister chimpanzee named Gonzo (Jack Nicholson). It is a surreal desert mindscape where ketchup is a vegetable and trees cause acid rain. Reading road signs, the hexagrams of the I Ching, and patterns in Gonzo's stool, the Gipper discovers traces of a strange alternate reality in which he himself seems to have been a movie actor who became governor of California and later president of the United States. (Footage of Fonda as "the Gipper" is spliced with stock footage of Ronald Reagan throughout. Reagan was of course the real governor of California when this film was made. Nancy Reagan used her own political clout to block the film's release and destroy almost all copies, but it is rumored that Ronald Reagan himself enjoyed the film immensely.) The trippy special effects are dated, but the final peyote trip in which the Gipper discovers his own part in the nuclear armageddon that destroyed his world remains powerful. He falls to his knees on a rocky beach while Gonzo the chimp shrieks, "You maniac! You blew it up! Damn you! God damn you to hell!"


Sandanisto Y El Demonio Azul Contra Los Contras
(aka Sandanisto and The Blue Demon Versus The Contras)
1986. Santo, Alejandro Cruz, Roxana Bellini. Director: Alfonso Corona Blake. 2 stars.

¡Los Yanquis Maldecido están viniendo! ¡Los Yanquis Maldecido están viniendo! ¡Ay-ay-ay! ¡Es una invasión de los luchan comandos de la robusteza de los Estados Unidos! ¡Conducido por los consejeros malvados de "NSC," Juan "El Piledriver" Poindextro, y Oliver "El Norte" Norte, el Contras desea a nuestras mujeres! ¡Funcionan sin la sanción! ¡Venden los brazos a Irán! ¡Los medios de la "Boland Amendment" nada! ¡Pararán en nada! ¡La llamada sale! ¿Quién puede ahorrarnos? ¡Solamente los héroes de lucha, Sandanisto (Santo) y el Demonio Azul (Alejandro Cruz), los amos del "círculo ajustado"! ¡La aclamación como Sandanisto y el demonio azul luchan legiones de los goons de CIA y de los barones vampiros de la droga de Medellin! ¡El grito de asombro como "el Norte" sujeta a Demonio Azul a la "Desfibradora" temida! ¡La emoción como Sandanisto aborda a gringos locos con una tapa-cuerda Frankensteiner! ¡Viva el Demonio Azul! ¡Viva Sandanisto! ¡Lucha para los niños! ¡Lucha para la libertad! ¡Lucha para Nicaragua!

Edit: English translation now available in comments, below.

You Talking To Me?
1989. Jack Lemmon, Anthony Michael Hall, Molly Ringwald. Director: John Hughes. 3½ stars.
This odd and underrated film marked a transition between director John Hughes' teen comedies in the 1980s and his more family-oriented films in the 1990s. Jack Lemmon is brilliant as "Ronald Reagan," an outgoing president who strikes up an unusual friendship with "John Hinckley" (Anthony Michael Hall), the needy and twitchy young man who once tried to assassinate Reagan in order to impress a girl. Although initially wary, the two film buffs bond over a shared love of the movies and thin grasp of reality. Hinckley introduces Reagan to Taxi Driver; Reagan shows Hinckley The Sound of Music and Ghostbusters. The president, secretly wiser and more capable than he appears, engineers a romance between Hinckley and "Jodie Foster" (Molly Ringwald), the serious-minded actress who has stolen the boy's heart. But the real chemistry in this sweet though never saccharine buddy picture is the May-December friendship between Hall and Lemmon. The president teaches the would-be assassin he can make friends just by being himself; the young man teaches the president that it's wrong to have the CIA sell AIDS-laced crack to ghetto children in order to fund Latin American death squads. Or something like that.