‘Make My Day’: J. Hoberman on Reagan, Rambo and ’80s Movies

‘Make My Day’: J. Hoberman on Reagan, Rambo and ’80s Movies

(Link): ‘Make My Day’: J. Hoberman on Reagan, Rambo and ’80s Movies

Excerpts:

July 2019

The film critic and author of a new book on 1980s cinema talks Spielberg, the Gipper and getting flak for writing about politics and pop culture

by David Fear

He was a former radio announcer who broke into movies in the late 1930s and served time as an actor in Warner Brothers’ B-movie unit and a TV host (and corporate pitchman) for General Electric Theater.

Then, after flirting with the growing post-Goldwater conservative side of the G.O.P., Ronald Reagan successfully ran for the governorship of California in 1966.

That was when Jim Hoberman, a Queens, New York, native who’d wound up in Berkeley right as things were coming to a sociopolitical boil in the Bay Area, first encountered the Gipper as something other than a stock player on the screen.

By the time Reagan began his second Presidential campaign — the one that would get him elected commander-in-chief in 1980 — Hoberman had been a second-string film critic at the Village Voice for a few years. But he’d been closely following the man’s career for a while.

And he was both fascinated and a little horrified by how the man who shared scenes with a chimp in Bedtime for Bonzo was using his “movie stardom” — and the movies themselves — to sell some seriously reactionary policies with a smile.

Hoberman’s new book, Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan, charts how Reagan’s ideology both reflected and refracted what was playing at a theater near you during his extended “morning in America” tenure — from an adventuring archeologist’s romps to a time-traveling teen’s wild rides, a Reese’s Pieces-eating E.T. to Rambo, Top Gun to Blue Velvet.

The third in a trilogy of tomes examining the relationship between the political stage and the silver screen (following the Sixties-centric The Dream Life and the Fifties-focused An Army of Phantoms), it’s a sprawling look back at a formative media-driven moment in our nation’s history.

And like the work Hoberman pumped out during the three-plus decades he served as the Village Voice‘s primary film critic, the book has a way of connecting various dots between real figures/events and their reel-life counterparts that feels singular, stylish and slightly intoxicating in its scope.

The venerable writer sat down to discuss his deep-dive into what he calls “Reaganland,” his love-hate relationship with Spielberg’s movies, how researching the book changed the way he thought about the former President, the ne plus ultra film of the Eighties and more. The conversation has been edited for clarity and to include as many references to Jaws as humanly possible.

….Is there one movie that, in your opinion, really sums up the Reagan era?
[Pause] I mean, the temptation is to say Rambo: First Blood Part II, but I don’t want to say that.

Why? Because it seems too obvious?
Because it seems too oppressive that Rambo would be the quintessential statement from that era. Maybe Blade Runner — whether or not it speaks to the Reagan presidency specifically, it strikes me as very much a movie of that moment.

The same could be said about Ishtar, which I’m really glad is getting a major critical reappraisal. I mean, two showbiz entertainers having a big misadventure in the Arab World and the C.I.A. is involved — that is a genuine Reagan era movie! Maybe The Terminator. Maybe The King of Comedy.

But I guess I’d pick Blue Velvet.

Read the rest of that article here, on Rolling Stone’s site