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Popular Culture Review
President Reagan exploited these insecurities and provided a sense of
purpose for Americans on the international stage by rekindling Cold War fears
of a monolithic communist movement centered in Moscow. Describing the
Soviet Union as the ‘"evil empire” responsible for threats to American interests
and democracy in Western Europe, Angola, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and Central
America, the Reagan administration won Congressional approval for a SI.2
trillion increase in defense spending.
Thus, Reagan successfully exploited simplistic Hollywood conceptions of
the good-guy white hats opposed to the evil figures in black hats and outfits.
Indeed, historians have noted the extent to which the public policies of the
Reagan White House were shaped by the former actor’s Hollywood experiences
both on and off the screen. In Ronald Reagan’s Hollywood, Stephen Vaughn
argues that during the 1940s and 1950s, the nation’s film capital was divided
over many of the same issues which dominated American political debate in the
1980s:
matters involving communism, liberalism, welfare, the revival
of patriotism, national defense, the role of Judeo-Christianity
in entertainment and politics, women and the family, sexual
behavior, anti-Semitism and ethnicity, racism and civil rights,
the use of history, and freedom of expression to name a few.3
While his film past certainly exerted considerable influence, the President also
employed contemporary Hollywood symbols from the popular Star Wars series
to denigrate the Soviet Union and celebrate his Strategic Defense Initiative.
The role played by popular culture, notwithstanding, scholarly
interpretations vary regarding the impact of Reagan’s defense build-up and
targeting of the Soviet Union. Reagan partisans credited the President with
ending the Cold War and ushering in the collapse of Soviet totalitarianism.
Critics of the Reagan administration, on the other hand, found the military
spending and bellicose rhetoric dangerous, crediting the avoidance of a wider
conflict to Reagan’s luck and policies of his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail
Gorbachev. In The Unfinished Journey, William Chafe asserts that the spirit of
negotiation and compromise which marked the final years of the Reagan was
“above all a gift of Gorbachev, who for his reasons had entered into the world
stage with a commitment to radical change.”4
The pivotal nuclear discourse of the 1980s was hardly limited to traditional
venues of political debate as the popular culture art medium of the feature
motion picture sought to both influence and reflect the national conversation. In
The Films o f the Eighties, William J. Palmer maintains that popular film, placed
within historical and cultural context, comprises insightful social history texts.
Palmer writes, “The importance of film history lies not in the images or themes
of individual films but in the emplotted metaphors and motifs shared by groups
of films that together portray, approach, and even comment upon a specific
historical event or sociohistorical trend.” In a similar vein, Robert Burgoyne