The Power, the Glitter, the Muscles: Movie Masculinities in the Age of Reagan

Abstract

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