Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan

by J. Hoberman

Acclaimed media critic J. Hoberman's masterful and majestic exploration of the Reagan years as seen through the unforgettable movies of the era The third book in a brilliant and ambitious trilogy, celebrated cultural and film critic J.Hoberman's Make My Day is a major new work of film and pop culture history. In it he chronicles the Reagan years, from the waning days of the Watergate scandal when disaster films like Earthquake ruled the box office to the nostalgia of feel-good movies like Rocky and Star Wars, and the delirium of the 1984 presidential campaign and beyond.

Bookended by the Bicentennial celebrations and the Iran-Contra affair, the period of Reagan's ascendance brought such movie events as Jaws, Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner, Ghostbusters, Blue Velvet, and Back to the Future, as well as the birth of MTV, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the Second Cold War.

An exploration of the synergy between American politics and popular culture, Make My Day is the concluding volume of Hoberman's Found Illusions trilogy, of which the first volume, The Dream Life, was described by Slate's David Edelstein as "one of the most vital cultural histories I've ever read." Reagan, a supporting player in Hoberman's previous volumes, here takes center stage as the peer of Indiana Jones and John Rambo, the embodiment of a Hollywood that, even then, no longer existed.

Genres: Film, History, Nonfiction, Media Tie In, Cultural, Art, Politics

400 pages, Hardcover

First published July 2, 2019

About the author

Author bio from Verso Press:

J. Hoberman served as the senior film critic at The Village Voice from 1988-2012. He has taught at Harvard, NYU, and Cooper Union, and is the author of ten books, including Bridge of Light, The Red Atlantis, and The Dream Life.

Reviews

[Daniel Archer · Rating 5 out of 5]

E.T., Rambo, Red Dawn - how 80s films reflected/refracted Reagan ideologies, i.e. big helpings of post-World War II moral and political certainties. The book’s scope is impressive, starting around 1973 with the nostalgia-fest that was American Graffiti, concluding with the author arguing Reagan (and "vulgar Reaganite" Trump) is Hollywood's greatest invention. Hoberman at the top of his form - erudite, stylish, witty.

[Biblio Files (takingadayoff) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Film historian J. Hoberman's point is that ultimately all movies exist to do the same thing—offer nostalgia for supposedly better times. Even a trashy movie like Earthquake provides a catharsis.

Another way of saying the same thing is to quote one of the first female directors in Hollywood. Doris Wishman, director of Nude on the Moon and similar films said: “All movies are exploitation movies.”

Hoberman might not go that far, but I would.

In Make My Day, Hoberman compares movies from the sixties, seventies, and eighties, for example what he calls Watergate films like Jaws and Nashville.

Film critic Kenneth Turan wrote he had seen the future and it was Jaws. That turned out to be prescient. And while Nashville was about the entertainment machine, Jaws was the machine.

It shouldn't be surprising that Spielberg worries about his movies as much as filmmakers like Robert Altman and Warren Beatty, nor surprising he's as involved with the philosophy in his films as with the technology.

But we've seen the future and it's Jurassic Park.

Another theme running through this book is what Hoberman calls the Cold War kinderkultur that runs from Davy Crockett to Star Wars. (I recently read that Disneyland is about open a new Star Wars land. Davy Crockett and Han Solo have a lot in common.)

One reason I like reading Hoberman's books is that he realizes politics is more important than movies. He tells the story of the Shah of Iran being overthrown as Michael Cimino's Deer Hunter was released. Hoberman lets us know when atrocities committed by real people are ascribed to others in the movies. (For instance, we were prepared for the Russian roulette scenes in Deer Hunter by the famous documentary clip of a North Vietnamese soldier being shot in the head by a South Vietnamese officer.)

Real people inhabit various historical figures.

Ronald Reagan is compared to Chance the gardener from Jerzy Kosinski's novel and Hal Ashby's film Being There.

John Hinkley Jr. is an example of the Secret Agent of History, who by his failure to assassinate Reagan redeemed the killing of JFK and the turn away from original American values that the country supposedly took in 1963.

Robert de Niro's Travis Bickle, another Secret Agent of History, gave way to Sylvester Stallone's Rambo, now a Hollywood Freedom Fighter.

Is it possible for us to wake up from this Dream Life?

(Thanks to NetGalley and New Press for a digital review copy.)

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having worked for the Village Voice and seen this first-hand, Hoberman is quite an appropriate author for a book of this nature. It takes a bit of a long on-ramp into the Reagan presidency (covering his film career, touching upon the political and film landscapes prior to Reagan's taking of the reins, as well as giving big news events to assist in keeping a grip on context), but it gets there.

Covering the years he was Commander-in-chief, we get to see a structured 1-2-3 combo of the major events occurring under Reagan, the films premiering under his watch, and, just as important, the movies he screened (also, what he thought of them, if hearsay and/or his personal diary has any information to distribute). If applicable, Hoberman also peppers in various film reviews, including snippets from his own, to help out.

This all is topped off by a few pages on our current media-obsessed president; Hoberman's thoughts are quite profound, I think.

I find it easy to forget that Reagan, coming from Hollywood, always kept a toe dipped into that pond. The films he watched (or didn't watch) say a lot without saying anything. Since he helped shape the 80s, an examination such as the one that Hoberman has written is pretty incredible. One of the books he mentions, Susan Jeffords' HARD BODIES, is equally fantastic and mind-blowing, although she focuses more on male masculinity and how that shifted through film over the course of the Reagan era (and just a little bit afterward).

If political books are the bane of your existence, you might find some of these pages to be torturous, but it's all pretty cool to look at on a grander scale. Any fan of films from the 80s should be checking this out.

Many thanks to NetGalley and The New Press for the advance read.

[Mike Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cannot believe I've been avoiding Hoberman books for years because the covers are so garish. Someone should make a life lesson about that.

[Skjam! · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) was the first president of the United States to have been a movie star. Motion pictures that he’d worked in and that he saw certainly affected his politics, and his politics affected the movies that came out during his time in office. This volume examines the intersection of film and politics in America between 1976 (Reagan’s first run for president) and 1988 (his last full year in office.)

The author was a movie and cultural columnist in the Village Voice newspaper for many years, and has written two previous books on the intersection of movie culture and political culture in previous time periods. He quotes columns he wrote about Reagan at the time extensively.

It’s pretty obvious from the outset that the author was and is not a big President Reagan fan. The emphasis is on Ronnie’s skill at projecting an image of “normal guy you can trust, but tough on the inside”, and believing what he said even when it was at odds with observable reality.

The writer also makes it clear that many of the movies he’s discussing are not his favorites from that time period, but rather those that were most influential or that reflected the times best. Lots of summer blockbusters in here!

The first full chapter compares and contrasts Nashville and Jaws from 1975, and how each reflected the political climate at the time, whether overtly or as subtext. In the runup to the Bicentennial election, America thought it was thirsting for moral rectitude in its leaders, so Jimmy Carter was narrowly elected.

But it turned out that the ability to make the American people feel like they were in the right worked better than trying to steer a course based on moral principles, so Reagan came in four years later.

This was a time of Rocky and Rambo and Terminator and a bit of Dirty Harry, as well as Star Wars, feeding the president lines he could use to describe his policies and actions in Hollywood terms.

I found this book to be a nostalgic blast, even if my personal circumstances during that decade-plus weren’t the best. The author makes good points and brings up some interesting films. I suspect, however, that this book will resonate more strongly with those who were and are critical of the Reagan administration and its policies and aftereffects. (Including the very disappointing remake in the 2010s.) Unabashed President Reagan fans will find less here to enjoy.

I could have done with some more digging into the AIDS crisis and the Bork fiasco, but perhaps those didn’t have (at the time) the right movie counterpart to grapple with.

Overall, a good overview of the time period from a film culture perspective. Recommended to those who want to learn more about the intersection of Hollywood and politics.

[Alex Abbott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strong 4. Less freewheeling than The Dream Life, but few critics or academics are as adept at dissecting the symbiotic relationship of politics, culture, and cinema as J Hoberman. I have some disagreement points, Hoberman has a dismissive blurb about David Byrne's True Stories where he seemingly misinterprets the film's inherent sense of sarcasm about American life. But a misplaced opinion here, or an overlooked film there, are small potatoes for the big picture. It's also nice to see a baby boomer who can actually diagnose the reasons why Trump was in office by drawing from Baudrillard and media theorists rather than parroting all of the lame CNN-type talking points (not viewing previous Republican presidencies with a sense of sanctimony certainly helps too).

[Hsingh · Rating 4 out of 5]

life imitates art, art imitates life.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though it is hardly ancient history, neither human memory nor our collective sense of historical sequence would currently appear to be in the best shape, so there is perhaps reason to underline some key points that aren't necessarily radical critical insights. Ronald Reagan was, of course, a onetime Hollywood actor turned American politician. He headed the Screen Actors Guild (late 40s), served two terms as Governor of California (from 1967 to 1975), and eventually became the first President of the United States in a good while to successfully serve two full terms. In his latest book, MAKE MY DAY: MOVIE CULTURE IN THE AGE OF REAGAN, J. Hoberman situates the cinematic texts and sundry cultural phenomena under his purview directly alongside a decade plus of political theatre. He reminds us that Reagan, a crafty manager of his own personae with a more than serviceable read on his audience, publicly asserted, before announcing his presidential bid, that Americans are “hungry to feel once again a sense of mission and greatness.” Running in the ’76 primary, Reagan called for the “re-establishment of American superiority,” and promptly won the North Carolina primary. I remember the basic methodology—exceedingly successful—behind his 1980 campaign. We studied this then-still-relatively-fresh history in school in the early 1990s. I had one social studies teacher, very knowledgeable and gifted as a rhetorician, who loved declaiming on these matters with the utmost rue. I have had cause to consider the Reagan mantra of 1980 these past few years, recalling the scorn of my old teacher, directed primarily as it was toward the dupes who buy into such fatuous inanities. Do you remember the slogan? Have you been filled in? Ronald Reagan, 1980: “Let’s make America great again.” Hard not to see it as a harbinger of things much worse to come. Hoberman himself notes the deviation from the current MAGA orientation in all its proud updated obscenity. Gentle cowboy Ronnie Reagan included a folksy “Let’s,” almost a soft sell, like everybody’s favourite grandpa tendering an irresistible pitch. As a studio-indentured actor in the Classical Hollywood era, Reagan was primarily constructed by the handlers to be as boy-next-door as it gets, to the extent that Reagan would call himself Mr. Norm good-naturedly in fan magazine interviews and the like. Reagan made a good presidential candidate because, whatever his considerable limitations, he knew perfectly how the part ought to be played. The current president obviously has a certain unusual talent in this respect as well, though whereas Reagan was the ever-affable Eisenhower-era cowboy hero (with more than a touch of Clint’s squinting “make my day”), Trump is, though also a combative squinter, the heel in a professional wrestling spectacle, having gone from dubious brand name real estate developer to post-Jerry Springer reality television star and ultimately—unthinkably, at least at first, to those of us capable of thought—the oval office. Just as Reagan was the first American president to fully exploit the televisual age, Trump is the Twitter president, existing as such matters invariably would further down the post-truth wormhole, a subject explored brilliantly and at length in Mark Doten's hellacious 2019 novel TRUMP SKY ALPHA. J. Hoberman has gotten to Reagan in due course, this being the endpoint in a cycle of three books which the author in his preface here declares one singular work entitled FOUND ILLUSIONS; he someday hopes to see it published in a single volume. I read the first of the FOUND ILLUSIONS books, AN ARMY OF PHANTOMS: AMERICAN MOVIES AND THE MAKING OF THE COLD WAR, a number of years ago. I have not read the second. In FOUND ILLUSIONS, Hoberman, once the preeminent film critic for THE VILLAGE VOICE, is addressing culture and history coterminous with his own life (perhaps even his coming of age). Very much a Boomer from the strictly chronometric standpoint, Hoberman was eight years old when the Soviets launched Sputnik, fourteen when Jack Kennedy was assassinated, and, recently appointed the senior film critic at the VOICE, thirty-nine when President Reagan’s second term concluded in January of 1989. The fundamental methodology of MAKE MY DAY (and by extension the greater FOUND ILLUSIONS undertaking) is laid out succinctly in the book’s brief preface: “MAKE MY DAY is not a work of film criticism. Nor is it strictly speaking a history. I see it rather as a chronicle in which political events and Hollywood movies are folded into each other to illuminate what, writing in 1960, Mailer termed America’s ‘dream life.’” Hoberman's lengthy and dexterous introduction begins with Reagan speaking in a segment filmed in advance of the 53rd Academy Awards, which the president would not attend, convalescing as he would be (unbeknownst when being filmed) in the aftermath of John Hinckley Jr.’s failed assassination attempt: “It’s surely no state secret that Nancy and I share your interest in the results of this year’s balloting. We’re not alone; the miracle of American technology links us with millions of moviegoers around the world. It is the motion picture that shows us all not only how we look and sound but—more important—how we feel. When it achieves its most noble intent, film reveals that people everywhere share common dreams and emotions.” Elaborating on the American “dream life,” the terminology borrowed from Norman Mailer in the preface, Hoberman stretches it out: “political unconscious, a social imaginary, or simply America’s dream life …,” proceeding to establish the propagandistic nature of Hollywood movies in the age of Reagan, said propaganda productive of a general image culture (a Dream Life) “more rational in its irrationality.” This is propaganda that, we are told, philosopher Jacques Ellul calls “sociological propaganda.” Film theorist Richard Dyer is invoked, his having made the case that mass entertainment is engineered to show us “what utopia would feel like rather than how it would be organized.” Hoberman locates Reagan’s political populism within the coordinates of the Classical Hollywood entertainment complex from which the entertainer-politician originated, and two key classical films are considered: 1) the 1934 Hollywood musical STAND UP AND CHEER!, a breezy piece of New Deal hucksterism is which the United Sates government sets up a Department of Amusement, testament (both the agency and the film) to the power of what Benedict Anderson called “imagined community”—“Everyone in America—welders, blacksmiths, hillbilly farmers, street sweepers, cops, chorines, railroad engineers—unites in the struggle against self-pity”; 2) MGM’s 1950 production THE NEXT VOICE YOU HEAR…, featuring future second wife of Ronald Reagan (and future First Lady) Nancy Davis, and a film in which God His Damned Self hijacks the radio waves for six consecutive days in order to restore a wavering public’s faith in the might & right of American values. Hoberman has set us up to conceive of Reagan as a regent bringing restorative blarney to heal our wounded souls, sent out on his rounds by the Department of Amusement. Towards the end of the book, Hoberman will return to this theme, wrapping everything up niftily: “Hollywood was founded on the proposition that scenarios that are naturally hegemonic and usually reassuring will appeal to the largest possible audience.” Of course, this hegemony is hardly a cleanly determined affair of the top-down variety, and Reagan himself little more than a stooge the Department of Amusement found at Central Casting. The dreamland fantasia that incorporates Reagan does just that, it renders him highly serviceable component, though dreamland and all of its pieces are subject to fissures, torsions, schized-out glitches. Reagan comes in large part to exorcize the 60s, restore the old order, especially seeking to dispel the assassinations, Vietnam, Watergate, and the counterculture’s would-be insurgency. The culture has experience much turbulence, the fear of fear endemic to the Great Depression making way for the Cold War and the tribalistic us-against-them fear of an “Implacable Alien Other” (the latter embodied with proficiency and constancy be any number of villainous movieland aberration). Hoberman locates the etymological basic of “nostalgia” in a Greek word meaning something more like “homesickness,” and suggests that America’s nostalgia is not a homesickness for any actual home—a real home once lived in, better times that were actually better—but rather a more inchoate disconsolation, a psychospiritual (and psychosexual) experience of felt lack, perhaps summed up perfectly in a 1970s TIME puff piece concerning the then-forthcoming AMERICAN GRAFFITI: Americans are “searching for the past, a simpler time, a hometown they may never have known.” Surely there is truth to this, and just as surely it was an ideal time to happen to be Ronald Reagan. AMERICAN GRAFFITI would perform a dubious return to idealized PaxAmericana, all the kids listening to the same radio station, a broadcast hosted by Wolfman Jack, as they cruise up and down Main Street ad infinitum. Hoberman quotes one kid’s sinister proclamation: “The Wolfman is everywhere.” If Jimmy Carter presented himself with total lack of political guile as a man who will never lie to you, Reagan appears as countermeasure, a movie hero who fights disillusionment with “re-illusionment.” Dream America follows happily along, if a little psychotically, subject to regular turbulence. It is a revival not only of PaxAmericana but of PaxAmericanArama. Following the introduction, MAKE MY DAY consists of six chapters proper, leading us from 1975 to 1988 (although historical considerations require the regular insinuation of earlier and later events). As the books is about the Dream Life of a kind of emergent mediatized posthistory, it does not operate as conventional historiography, though what is most fascinating about it is probably its expeditious method of situating all manner of phenomena in terms of their chronometric coincidence. An opening chapter looking at NASHVILLE and JAWS as radically divergent and more or less simultaneous counter-deployments of the conventions of disaster movies, situates both of these films from the summer of 1975 in terms of the bicentennial, the forthcoming federal primaries (Reagan’s first), plus the Chappaquiddick and Mayaguez incidents. Later, the specific timeline of the release of TAXI DRIVER is shown to correspond to the ascent of Jimmy Carter in the lead-up to the 1976 federal election. “Happening in mid-July, around the time George Lucas wraps STAR WARS, the Democratic Convention turns out to be a love-in that, as if to exorcize Travis Bickle, is held in New York City. Carter accepts the nomination and the wisdom of the counterculture, telling the convention, ‘We have an America that, in Bob Dylan’s phrase, is busy being born—not busy dying.’” It is in this context that Travis Bickle and Stallone’s Rocky emerge as variant modalities, Rocky enshrining a transition from feel-bad to feel-good, a “template” that “would endure for the rest of the twentieth century and beyond,” populism vanquishing the counterculture’s ghoulish malcontents. Final months of Carter’s presidency: RAGING BULL, HEAVEN’S GATE, the assassination of John Lennon, all declarative of general symptomatology. Hoberman focuses primarily on the highly visible films of the period, the headline makers and busters of blocks, the movies and the politics very often of the water cooler discussion variety. Naturally, much analysis will be given over to the hard bodies, the war porn, the yuppie esprit de corps, the merchandizing and cross-platform synergy. In Rambo and Chuck Norris and Schwarzenegger et al. we see iterations of “compensatory” phantasmagoric efforts to go back and win the Vietnam war a posteriori, rituals performed explicitly for the audience’s pacification and/or edification. Yes, the ‘feeling’ of utopia. Certain relative lowliers will enter the frame, if briefly, Hoberman for example discussing Alex Cox’s anachronistic and anarchistic WALKER, a unambiguously anti-Reagan film in which Ed Harris plays 19th century mercenary William Walker as a kind of Colonel Oliver North. Not only was WALKER not a box office draw or public talking point, Hoberman insists that it categorically destroyed the possibility of Cox making any more films in Hollywood. Any number of films discussed in MAKE MY DAY could be characterized as emblematic, that’s very much the point, but I feel it a nice bit of felicity—as Hoberman obviously does himself—that WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT emerged right at the end of that second presidential term, a film perhaps prophesied by Anna Karina in Godard’s MADE IN U.S.A, the true premise of which Hoberman believes to be that “in the age of all media, we live our lives in a thicket of cartoons and trademarks.” Drawing attention to his own presence within the Dream Life maelstrom, Hoberman routinely excerpts (in slightly modified form) some very fine pieces he wrote in the 80s for THE VILLAGE VOICE on the subject of Reagan, who he loathed, as well as reviews of a number of films, including a funny and ruthless takedown of INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM. If I have a problem with the book it would be that, though the material is continuously varied, the mode is repetitive, the author going through the same paces chapter by chapter, stuck in a sometimes benumbing formal/stylistic rut. That being said, a great many vital insights abound throughout, useful sources regularly introduced (such as incredible stuff from psychohistorian Lloyd deMause). Truncated critical insights are very often extremely apt. Example: “In JAWS, the crisis must be met. In CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, it’s an illusion that only need be dispelled.” If Hoberman turned forty about two months after Reagan left office, I had just turned nine when the auspicious event came to pass. I was falling in love with movies during these years, saw a number of these pictures in the theatre. I remember how excited I was to get to go see CROCODILE DUNDEE at a late screening in 1986 on account of my parents not being able to find a babysitter for my younger sister and I. I remember it as an epochal outing, God save me. I have my own chronometric context. Reagan taught us a lot. Mostly he taught public relations, as an emissary from the Department of Amusement. It was a period of new bombardment and new incoherence. What you said was less important that what was said about what you said. Ronnie never maintained unanimous support and he was regularly a party to malfeasance and disaster, but I wouldn't think there can be any denying that the ol’ Gipper’s “talent for selling illusions to the Indiana Jones generation is the greatest gift a modern president can have.”

[El_kiablo · Rating 1 out of 5]

Look: I am a stubborn man and if I start a book I almost always force myself to finish it on general principle. But I had to permanently discard this a third of the way through because it was trash and I just couldn't bring myself to keep suffering through it.

You know that meme where Charlie Day is standing in front of a corkboard with a a thousand random papers and photos all tied together with a bizarre tangle of red string? Well, that's basically what this book is.

The moment that broke me was in a section that tracks John Hinckley's movements in the days before he shot Ronald Reagan. At one point Hinckley is in Denver and Hoberman notes that this is "four days before [the Brian De Palma movie] Blow Out wraps shooting." What the fuck does the one thing have to do with the other? The two events aren't directly linked because Hinckley didn't have anything to do with the production of the movie; the events aren't connected via simultaneity because the events were still separated by four days; and I don't really see a thematic connection between the two events, either. Yes, Blow Out is about an act of politically motivated violence but it is an act of violence that is committed by a rational actor, not an agent of chaos! Also, while Hinckley was obsessed with a lot of things he was not obsessed with either De Palma or Travolta.

So... What's the point of that aside? Even if they were connected in some real way - which again: they are not - that still doesn't tell us anything. That's not actual analysis. That's just a mention of a coincidence!

And the book just keeps going on an on like that. The next paragraph is: a week later Hinckley checks in at a hotel under the name J. Travis and Jerry Lewis becomes the first celebrity to visit the White House. Again: why is either fact relevant to anyone? I don't understand what we're supposed to gleam from Hinckley's choice of pseudonym or see any way that fact connects up with Jerry Lewis's pointless cameo.

And that is just the last example of an unhelpful connection that I read in the book. However, that is not the worst one. No, that would go to the chapter that discusses Jaws where Hoberman writes this footnote:

During the 1976 campaign, Carter's toothsome smile would be used as a syntagma for the candidate himself. A mask with nothing but a set of giant red lips and bared teeth was a novelty hit at the Democratic national convention. It is tempting to view this ferocious grin as an inverted version of a shark's ghastly grimace.

Is that tempting? Is it really?

What the hell are you talking about dude?!? Again: this comparison is utterly useless. What does it matter that a specific human being and a movie monster both had big mouths? There are a ton of humans and a ton of sharks that have big mouths - that's not a real connection, that's a coincidence you emphasized for no clear reason!

And again... even if they were worth comparing: it is not a great insight to say that a political party that is supporting a politician who is running for office would want to portray him as the exact opposite of a cold blooded monster that eats children!

You know what that Jaws footnote reminded me of? There's a scene in the Simpsons where Mr Burns looks at a puppy that's standing on his hind legs and the evil billionaire asks his assistant Smithers "that puppy reminds me of that guy who was always standing up. What was his name?" (For the record: Smithers responds: "Rory Calhoun.") I could honestly see J. Hoberman writing a footnote that says "On March 15th a litter of puppies was born, and each puppy had legs. And you know who else had legs? That's right: Ronald Reagan, a man who was about to propose drastic cuts to welfare programs."

Obviously I'm zeroing in on a couple of hyper specific passages. And maybe that seems pedantic or unfair. But trust me when I say that this guy's analysis generally stinks! It's not just that he has a bad habit of making inexplicable connections / is bad at articulating why a specific comparison might be relevant or interesting - although obviously both of those things are a problem.

No, the big problem here is that he regularly does the worst thing that a cultural critic can do: namely Hoberman loves to make assumptions about what the individual artists were trying to say with their works of art based on the cultural trends that emerged after their films were released. But that's exactly backwards!

The fact is that artists work on their own projects for their own idiosyncratic reasons and then after they are released into the world those projects either match up with the zeitgeist or they don't. You can analyze the trends that arise from the collection of all of those individual works but you cannot reverse engineer those artist's intentions based on the emergent trend; those artists probably didn't know that other people were working on other projects that were thematically similar to their own so you can't claim that they were all trying to comment on the same themes at the same time. (Hell, making any sort of assumptions about what an artist was trying to say with a specific piece of work can be tricky because they might not have even been fully conscious of why they themselves were attracted to their own project!)

I'm not saying that you can't try to connect the dots between different works of art; of course you can. But you need to keep the focus on the art itself without putting words in the creator's mouth. Alternatively, you can make an explicit connection between disparate works if you can prove that the creators of those works were intentionally trying to converse with each other - but unless you can do that then any such connection is sloppy analysis and post-facto nonsense.

Look: I can respect how well researched this book is. (Hell, he lists John Hinckley's entire travel itinerary for about half a year; I mean that's deep research. Pointless research - but deeply pointless research.) And the old saying is true - a broken clock can be right twice a day. (He makes a good argument that Jaws is the inverse of Nashville.) But holy crap, I spent so much of this book asking myself "what the hell is this guy talking about?" ... And half the time when I did figure out what he was talking about I'd find myself wondering "why in the hell would anybody think that was a point worth saying???" This book was just that bad.

[Mfaiella2 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would like to rate this 3.5. The information is great, and it provides a fun way to learn and discuss movies along with the major political events of the time. I think the downside is that Hoberman is not the most approachable writer, so I found myself re-reading pages and still asking "what does he mean by that?"

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

I haven't read many historical books about the years in which I was an adult. I remember the 80s as a time of enormous discovery for me, living between the ages of 21 and 30, clouded by political events which I didn't always understand, but knew intuitively were not good for the country.

In this, the third and final volume in Hoberman's brilliant analysis of American politics and culture in the second half of the 20th Century, he covers the years of Reagan's national political ascent until he left the national stage retired from politics. Along the way, the most popular movies reshaped themselves into fantasies in which nostalgia for an imagined simpler time (the 1950s) vied with a newfound super-patriotism and warnography (Hoberman loves that coined word) to top the box office numbers every year. Hey, what politician did the same, leading to two big presidential election victories and ridiculous approval numbers no matter how badly his policies left real life people?

Hoberman covers the basic events in Carter's and Reagans years in the Oval Office, and highlights descriptions of most of the biggest movies of that time, from American Graffiti to Jaws to Close Encounters to Star Wars to First Blood to E.T. to Rocky and beyond. It was all a sense of unreality that Hoberman details in far richer ways than I can go into here. And, with an epilogue written in 2018, the year of this book's publishing, he connects Reagan's role as a movie star president to Trump's appearance as a Social media/Reality TV master of emotional manipulation and denial of truth. It's not a happy story, but Hoberman tells it brilliantly from points of view not seen by historians less tied in to popular culture.

[Jay Gabler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ronald Reagan was a lifelong avid movie viewer (Hoberman carefully notes many of the films the Reagans screened at the White House and Camp David, along with some capsule reviews from the President’s diary), and biographer Lou Cannon, who talked with Reagan at length during his presidency and after, believes he had “difficulty in distinguishing actual from cinematic experience.”

Hence Reagan’s repeated suggestion that Americans and Soviets would quickly forget their differences if they faced a common foe: invading space aliens. Hence his belief that the 1983 Mathew Broderick movie WarGames depicted a legitimate national security threat. “I don’t understand these computers very well,” he told congressional leaders, “but this young man obviously did. He tied into NORAD!”

Thus the fascination of Hoberman’s book for those of us who watched the ’80s with wide eyes turned to the movies. For better and for worse, the President of the United States was just as captivated as we were. You don’t need to go as far as Hoberman — in arguing, say, that E.T. deployed “the narcissistic fantasy of the stranger in (our) paradise and the joyful recuperation of the authoritarian Fifties” to “restore universal faith in smoke and mirrors” — to appreciate his argument that those of us hoping for the decade’s brilliant cinematic fantasies to come to life ought to have been careful what we wished for.

I reviewed Make My Day for The Tangential.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

J. Hoberman is one of my favorite film critics (I still miss his regular reviews in The Village Voice), but he's also an insightful essayist whose major subjects are the intersections of politics, media, and pop culture, and the USA of imagination, mythology, fantasy, and nostalgia manifested as real-world ideology. This book is Hoberman's third in a loose trilogy about the synergistic relationships between movies, history, and politics in post-WWII 20th century America (following The Dream Life, about the 1960s, and Army of Phantoms, about the first decade of the Cold War). Beginning post-Watergate in 1975 with Nashville and Jaws and ending in 1989 with Reagan watching himself in Cattle Queen of Montana at Camp David (with an epilogue about the Bushes, Clinton, and especially Trump), Make My Day traces Hollywood movie culture in the Ford, Carter, and Reagan years, taking the national temperature through our box office hits (and cult films and bombs), major political events, and personalities and viewing habits of our presidents (with a particular emphasis on Reagan), presented with Hoberman's dryly subversive left-wing humor and observant critical detail and his knack for making unusual but illuminating connections. It's a fascinating, embarrassing, terrifying, hilarious, and occasionally pathetic look at who we are and who we think we are and the bridges we build out of that cognitive dissonance.
P.S. As a pinko lefty from birth and one of only two students who voted for Mondale in my second-grade class's mock-election in 1984, I am always up for a Reagan critique, but this is a particularly solid and unique take. Also, the Art Spiegelman cover art is fantastic.

[Kyara]

This non-fiction book fascinatingly encapsules and celebrates film and pop culture history. By incorporating the chronicles of the Reagan years and the effect of his rise starting from the Watergate Scandal, Hoberman shares the truths about today's nostalgia educing films victim to the delirium of the 1984 presidential campaign. The book offers a compelling analysis about the ways culture and ideology shaped movies in the 80s and how Reagan took advantage of Hollywood to portray his conservative values. Furthermore, action movies like Top Gun glorified the United States military and showcased the dedication and strengths of American if ever faced with communism. "Bookended by the Bicentennial celebrations and the Iran-Contra affair, the period of Reagan’s ascendance brought such movie events as Jaws, Ghostbusters, Blue Velvet, and Back to the Future". With this, Star Wars is another film turned classic that depicts an “evil empire” easily compared to the Soviet Union. Using Hollywood, films, and tv shows, Reagan gave way to a new form of hyper patriotism. This book explores how Raegan used the "synergy between American politics and popular culture" to transformed the nation’s politics with a cultural and societal shift.

https://thenewpress.com/books/make-my...

[Michael Samerdyke · Rating 5 out of 5]

The conclusion to Hoberman's "dream life" trilogy seemed a bit slight. Maybe because it deal with an era he had lived through as a working film critic and didn't want to dig into as fully for a second go-round?

Still, "Make My Day" was very interesting in pointing out connections between movies and movies and politics. While Hoberman did reprint several of his original pieces from the era, he did footnote them to point out where he had been wrong or otherwise had different takes on things. I appreciated the fact that he showed us what Reagan saw at the movies and what he thought. (And, like Hoberman, I am amazed that Reagan watched "Being There.")

In some ways, Steven Spielberg is as much the protagonist of this book as Reagan, which makes the last couple chapters seem odd when Spielberg seems to vanish after "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom." Still, this is a terrific book about perhaps the last era when people cared about movies and movies held a large role in "the national conversation."

[Zachary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hoberman's book is a fairly interesting look at the cultures of cinema and politics across the 1980s, but it ultimately lacks a driving thesis to help carry the narrative forward. There's no denying that the politics of cinema and a cinema of politics were around and thriving in the time of Reagan, and some of Hoberman's analyses get at this in interesting ways. But for the most part this book just reads like a string of movie reviews interrupted by reporting on the progress of various political races across the 1980s with only the minimal presence of a larger narrative arc to help tie it all together. None of the chapters are bad or uninteresting, and most of the reviews and connections are at least lucid enough. I still felt there was something lacking to help the book itself achieve a larger thematic cohesion, though, and the length of the chapters and the kaleidoscopic approach to each chapter's organization ultimately hindered rather than helped my enjoyment of the whole piece.

[Glenn Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reminded me of an old, rich reactionary in the 1950's ranting about how FDR was a communist and had tried to destroy America and free market capitalism. Hober is an old angry, garrulous, bitter hippie who can't stand that Reagan was triumphant and that the bums from the 60's lost. Trapped in 1968 in Berkeley, pitiful. That being said, pretty solidly entertaining book. For me it was a trip down memory lane having lived and watched my way through these years in high school and college. Reagan like FDR is a giant of the 20th century. Morning in America baby!

[Ilya Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Хобермана всегда приятно читать, но в этой книге он слишком увлекается деталями выборных кампаний и прочей политической требухой, не слишком пытаясь запараллелить это с фильмами, про которые пишет (без особого интереса).

[Adrianne]

I didn't know what to expect from this book. I had a feeling it would be about politics, but I didn't know that it was the last in a trilogy of books. Had I read the others, I might have enjoyed this book more.....but it was a pretty good read

[Eric Leonard · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating movie review and cultural critique of the 1980s. A mixture of new prose and reviews written at the time. Strong political opinions expressed and well defended. Could have used some proof reading.

[Jason Béliveau · Rating 4 out of 5]

Analyse fascinante des influences mutuelles des deux mandatures de Ronald Reagan, acteur de séries B dans les années 40 et 50, et du cinéma hollywoodien dans l'Amérique des années 80. La dernière décennie réellement fascinante d'un point de vue blockbustérien aux USA?

[Sal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hoberman's usual insightful analysis of how films reflect and refract the times in which their made. And I found it oddly reassuring to contemplate the copious similarities between Trump and Reagan. I mean, we did live through the 80s, right?

[Steve Erickson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I will be interviewing Hoberman about this book for Filmmaker magazine. Watch this space - I'll post a link upon publication.

[Lydia]

exceedingly hard to read--maybe the fact that my library only had an ebook copy available? I noticed several typos and kept getting lost.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

[J. Fakename · Rating 5 out of 5]

America Fuck Yeah

[Simon Popek · Rating 4 out of 5]

3,5 ⭐️

[Julesreads · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great politicians are really our best con-artists. Seeing Reagan’s rise from Hoberman’s point of view—informed by Reagan’s political career, but also by the movies he watched, the movies surrounding his time in office, and even his long but milquetoast and plain bad acting career in film—illustrates just how susceptible even our most advantaged political “leaders” are to the loudest, crudest American cultural touchstones. The movies shaped Reagan in ways no political force should’ve allowed. Hoberman covers some really fun, conservative, reactionary, alarmist stuff, and gives us the juicy bits of Reagan’s presidency. I didn’t finish the book, not because it got bad, but because, like many film books of this nature, it states its purpose and then analyzes until blue in the face. I wanted to move onto another book, so I leave this 2/3’s finished, and appreciated nonetheless. Read it, y’all!