Movies of the Ronald Reagan Era

Ronald Reagan.

You either love the guy, or you hate him. It’s like, you’re either like this lady here, and look where that gets you, or you’re like this guy here.

Either way, Reagan had a huge effect on the movies made while he was president.

Movies were in Ronald Reagan’s DNA. The kinds of movies with white picket fences, clearly defined good guys and bad guys, a strong sense of law and order.

For a lot folks, the 1950s represented that sort of paradise. There were plenty of good jobs and a little hard work could secure a better future. There was a strong respect for the past, for authority and an unwavering belief in a bright future.

Then came the 1960s. Assassinations, war, pain. Anger. Upheaval. A loss of innocence At the dawn of the Reagan era, a lot of folks saw that perfect life drifting away and they wanted to get back to the 1950s. Fast.

To restore our innocence. And to restore our country’s strength and glory.

So, let’s take a look at the movies of the Reagan era.

And consider how realistic they were. Yeah, not…really…very.

Why not? Well, in one Reagan era favorite, Red Dawn from 1984, we see a bunch of high school kids from, I don’t know, Wyoming or some shit, take down the entire Soviet Army in a show of can-do spirit that would make even the Gipper himself shed a single red, white and blue tear.

The evolution of certain characters is also telling. Like in 1976, Rocky Balboa was a hard working, blue-collar hero. He’s eating raw eggs, he’s climbing stairs, he’s punching meat.

By Rocky 4, in the heart of the Reagan era, he’s a lubed-up, jacked-up commie-punching machine and he’s a stand-in for the entire United States during the cold war. The plucky underdogs standing up to the unstoppable Ivan Drago.

“I must break you,” says Ivan Drago.

And you know he wasn’t going to be broken, because the Reagan era needed to restore our power, our glory. Our manhood.

Stallone’s other most famous character, John Rambo, begins his onscreen life in 1982 as a drifter, a troubled Vietnam vet who just wants to be left alone. But by Rambo: First Blood Part 2, which is just 3 years later, Rambo pretty much single-handedly wins Vietnam 2, Electric Boogaloo. And then he’s all…

“Mission accomplished.”

The guy’s like a 4 hour erection personified.

There’s also the Future Business Leaders of America favorite Risky Business. It’s the heartwarming story of a handsome young entrepreneur played by Tom Cruise who sets up a highly successful and lucrative…prostitution ring…in his family home. His reward for slinging flesh to a bunch of teenage guys? A one way ticket to prison. Oh no, I’m sorry, I misread that, that says Princeton.

Something something deregulation, ammirite? This guy gets it.

In Field of Dreams, you can ‘wish’ your greatest dreams into existence and, of course, that’s because things used to be way better than they are now. Strangely, the actual message of Field of Dreams is that the idealism of the 60s was scary and bad and that only a return to a simpler time can save the family farm.

Everywhere you looked in the 80s, movies seemed to be saying, look where we’re headed if we don’t get back to the past.

These kids who grew up watching the Leave it to Beaver, Andy Griffith, Donna Reed, Superman and the Lone Ranger, must have felt comforted by the massive increase in nostalgic movies during the 80s that ignored real world problems and showed them exactly what they wanted to see.

Good guys in white, bad guys in black. Trusty minority sidekicks, dutiful women. Heroic actions of one man saving the day. Not very realistic. But, like Blanche DuBois said…

I don’t want reality, I want magic.

Honestly, that might sum up the Reagan era attitude better than anything.

The Reagan era actually predates his presidency by several years, back when he had risen to national prominence politically. The first movie to really catch hold of that ultra-nostalgic feel was the 1973 movie American Graffiti directed by George Lucas.

The appetite for the innocence of the 50s was strong in the shadow of the Vietnam war and Watergate, the assassinations of John F Kennedy, Dr Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and Malcolm X. Women’s agency over their reproductive cycle and the civil rights movement. For people threatened by those changes, American Graffiti provided a sweet relief from the real world.

The movie is only set 11 years before it’s release date. Can you imagine that? I’m making this video in 2020 and nobody I know of would be thinking back on the innocence lost since 2009. Well…maybe? But for these young adults who had been through so much in so few years, Modesto, California in 1962 might as well have been a century ago on another planet.

American Graffiti is a coming of age story and a reality tour of what made the 50s and early 60s worth living a second time. From the non-stop hit-spinning of Wolfman Jack to the innocent hijinks of buying booze underage, American Graffiti presents a whitewashed version of life. Fast cars, tasty burgers, cute girls who just might fall in love with you at a stoplight.

Dude, she’s way outta your league.

Kennedy was still in the White House and nobody was worried about Vietnam. There was no AIDS pandemic, everybody had a job, could buy a sack of hamburgers for a nickel or some shit, so everything’s cool.

The culmination of the entire movie, Harrison Ford’s character Bob Falfa has wrecked his 1955 Chevy into a field. As it bursts into flames, it’s symbolic of the end of an era. Or maybe symbolic of the beginning of the 60s, which the Reagan era seemed to blame for all the problems we faced in the 80s.

Back to the Future came out in 1985.

You know by now, Back to the Future tells the story of Marty McFly, who is transported from 1985 to 1955 in a time machine his buddy Doc Brown made out of a Delorean.

“Doc, are you telling me you made a time machine…out of a Delorean?”

I just said that. I literally just said that.

He meets his parents. His dad George is a total loser, but hey, even the 50s weren’t perfect, and mom Lorraine has the hots for him which is…uncomfortable at best.

When Marty finds himself in 1955, he sees an idealized world. He gets to see just how badly things have gone downhill over the last 30 years.

Probably the most famous line in Back to the Future is…

“Ronald Reagan. Ha, the actor?”

Reagan loved Back to the Future. When he first saw that line delivered, he made the projectionist stop the movie and rewind it so he could hear it again. He even quoted Back to the Future in the 1986 state of the union. Back to the Future had just what audiences needed. Good guys and bad guys. Changing history, and changing the future. Pure movie magic.

And Pure Reagan era bullshit.

But when you think about it, Marty isn’t actually the one who ‘saves’ the future, it’s George. After Marty gives up on his…

“Dad, dad, daddio.”

He concocts a hare-brained scheme to…sexually assault his own mother to force George to stand up for her? Yeah, that shit got pretty dark. The scheme goes wrong but George finally does decide to stand up for himself, to channel his inner Ronald Reagan and sock Biff in the face, winning Lorraine’s love forever.

When Marty returns home, everything has changed. It’s as if Marty didn’t really change the future as much he brought some good old 1955 back with him and that’s what actually saved the day. And since Lorraine was a girl of the 50s, even her life is better thanks to her relationship with the new and improved George.

In Back to the Future, the 50s are a time where, if you set your mind to it, you could change your future and even score a sweet Toyota pick-up truck in the process…

“Great Scott!”

Yeah, it is pretty great. Plus, as an added bonus, you can create an entire musical genre to help out a poor Black musician who’s fresh out of ideas.

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

1984’s blockbuster hit Ghostbusters lacks the nostalgia of many other movies on this list. But the effects of this movie’s remake is telling.

“The effect? I’ll tell you what the effect is, it’s pissing me off.”

Meh, a lot of people felt that way.

And even if Ghostbusters didn’t have that same, powerful pull back to the 50s like Back to the Future or American Graffiti, the Reaganomics-friendly theme is right on point.

Ghostbusters tells the story of a group of men who are rudely thrown out of the stuffy, no-fun university where they worked and they manage to bootstrap themselves, overcoming the aggressive, needless actions of the overbearing and dare I say EVIL….Environmental Protection Agency?

The famously dickless Walter Peck’s reckless actions only make things worse and soon, the entire city is threatened by spooky spectres and pesky poltergeists.

The message is very clear. Business saves the day. The useless Poindexters at that stupid old university could only hold our boys down for so long. Best of all, there’s a token Black guy so you don’t have to feel too guilty and there’s a beautiful lady shaped trophy to be won along the way.

It’s a real win-win is I guess what I’m saying. Win-win-win actually.

So, there is some aspect of Ghostbusters that called for simpler times when women were objects to be won and you couldn’t be a bad guy because you had a Black friend.

The real nostalgia is shown in the backlash against the Ghostbusters reboot. It’s not strictly that the movie isn’t funny, which it kind of isn’t, or that it was a needless remake of a good movie, which it kind of is, but that it takes the ‘no girls allowed’ sign off the clubhouse door. It’s just not Reagan’y enough. When we open the time capsule that is the 1984 version, it shows us how far we’ve come and how much we’ve changed. For some viewers, that’s a little scary.

“I’m terrified beyond all rational thought.”

Of course, not all movies fit perfectly into the Reagan era messaging. In fact, there are a lot of subversive movies from later in the 80s that are really cool and have interesting messages. But a lot of these movies were either ignored or completely misinterpreted.

They Live is a movie that wasn’t so much ignored or misinterpreted as it is dismissed, at least not originally, but we’ll get back to that in a minute. It didn’t perform very well at the box office and people wrote it off as being another dumb action flick. Why? Maybe the next sentence will shed some light on that.

Professional wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper plays John Nada, an unemployed drifter who stumbles upon a rebellion against yuppie-alien invaders. When Nada finds a box of magical sunglasses that allow him to see the world as it really is…what he sees is…pretty fucked up.

It’s a corporate wasteland of hidden messages to keep people complacent, to make us consume and obey. There’s a massive inequality of wealth. Drones flying overhead, spying on us. And all around us, aliens lurk. They’re average rich assholes. The police. The media, even our politicians, they’re aliens and they’re here to be a bunch of dicks.

It seems like everywhere Nada looks, these aliens walk among us. And they look, well, how would you describe them John?

Ouch. Well, how about that other lady?

Yeah, okay. Harsh, but fair.

Oh, and if you like fight scenes, you really have to check out They Live, it’s got an absolute classic between Piper and his construction worker friend played by Keith David. Piper wants David to put the sunglasses on to see the world as it really is. David…resists.

It’s hilarious at times, brutal most of the time and when you think of it as a metaphor for how hard it is to make some people wake up to an uncomfortable truth, it’s got a great message. Maybe nobody gets that? Maybe that’s why audiences dismissed it as a simple action movie, not the critique of the police state, corporate overlords and all of the things director John Carpenter has said the movie is about.

Who knows.

Lately, They Live has also had it’s message hijacked. Holocaust deniers, Neo-nazis and other assorted nuts in the Alt-rght bowl have tortured the original meaning into an anti-Semitic conspiracy.

I mean, it’s one of Alex Jones’ favorite movies, so…yeah.

Piper himself once said, They Live is ‘kind of the Cliffs Notes for what’s going on.’

As always, ‘what’s going on’ is in the eye of the audience. I think I’ll stick with Carpenter’s statement that: THEY LIVE is about yuppies and unrestrained capitalism. It has nothing to do with Jewish control of the world, which is slander and a lie.

That should pretty much be case closed, but one of the powers of Reaganism is to reject reality if it doesn’t fit the narrative you want to create for yourself.

Another great example of a movie that’s misinterpreted is 1987’s Wall Street, by Oliver Stone. Stone believed the movie was about corporate greed destroying lives, about the excesses of the Reagan era and about selfishness, about moral and ethical bankruptcy. But when Gordon Gecko, played by Michael Douglas in an academy award winning role, says…

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.

What a generation of would-be Bud Fox’s heard was…Greed is good. And that’s how they remember that line, how they still quote it they took that message to heart. Wall Street motivated thousands of Gordon Gecko-stans to get into the cutthroat world of finance to do exactly what the movie warns you is a really shitty thing to do.

“What an asshole man. That’s a shame.”

The 1987 blockbuster RoboCop also sailed over the heads of a lot of the audience. It’s a satire, a brutal portrayal that warns against privatization of critical government functions and also warns of corporate greed.

A lot of viewers just saw a badass mecha-cop cleaning up the streets caused by moral decay in the big cities.

RoboCop was seen as a sort of throwback to 50s western TV shows that a lot of viewers had grown up watching. The good guy with a gun kills the bad guys with guns.

That’s the only message they wanted to hear, so that’s what they heard.

So, where does that leave us? And why do I care anyway?

Ultimately, there’s nothing wrong with nostalgia and a lot of the movies I’ve talked about are favorites of mine, movies I saw when I was a kid. For me and a lot of Gen-Xers, these movies are comfort food.

I suppose if Gen-X were bigger, we might see nostalgic movies pining for the good ole’ days of the Atari 2600 and riding dirt bikes without a helmet. And we might look forward to the upcoming State of the Union Address by president Molly Ringwold with vice president Chunk from The Goonies watching from the wings.

But if Gen X had more appetite for rewinding the 80s, I’d expect those movies to show a little more balance.

And, yeah, I get it, they’re movies about time travel and busting ghosts. I’m down to suspend disbelief and strap in for some fun entertainment. I don’t have a problem with most movies of the Reagan era, I just think you need to tell the full story. The 1950s weren’t idyllic. They weren’t perfect. Just like the 1980s weren’t perfect. There was racism, sexism, poverty, unrest, unhappiness, income and wealth gaps, disease, hate, division, cats and dogs living together. They’re all still with us, just like they always have been and probably always will be. Self-mythologizing is dangerous, it prevents us from learning and growing.

And you know, the Reagan era never really ended, we’re still living in it today. Instead of a B list movie star, we have a B list reality TV star in the White House. We’re still fighting the same culture wars. We’re still on the same desperate quest to satisfy a hunger, to scratch an itch or fill some hole in us.

We’ll never fill it. We’ll never relive the past. It’s impossible. Change isn’t bad, it’s inevitable.

The nostalgia of the 50s was weaponized. The relentless optimism was unrealistic. The history it told was revisionist. There was corporate greed and toxic individualism. Nothing was connected to reality, because the reality on display had been established in the 50s and it wasn’t even realistic back then. That mythology presents a time and a place that can’t be lived up to, because that time and place never existed.

If we address the problems we have today, if storytellers are honest, and we read and watch with a critical eye, maybe we can come to a better understanding of what this country, and really the entire world is going through. What we’ve always been going through.

And we can keep trying to see the world as it really is.

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