Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan

by J. Hoberman

Overview

Named a Best Book of the Year by Financial Times

"Singular, stylish and slightly intoxicating in its scope."
—Rolling Stone

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; 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"; Film Comment called the second, An Army of Phantoms, "utterly compulsive reading." 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781595580061
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	07/02/2019
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

J. Hoberman's books include The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties; An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War; and Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan (all from The New Press). He has written for Artforum, the London Review of Books, The Nation, and the New York Review of Books. For over thirty years, he was a film critic for the Village Voice. He lives in New York.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

Introduction: The Department of Amusement 1

I Nashville Contra Jaws, 1975 18

II Born Again in the U.S.A., 1976-80 48

III Bad Trips, 1981-82 101

IV "I Ain't Afraid of No Ghost!," 1983-84 165

V Forward into the Past, 1985-86 230

VI Once upon a Time in the Eighties, 1987-88 296

Epilogue: Remake My Day 339

Acknowledgments 353

Sources 355

Index 375

Editorial Reviews

04/22/2019

Former senior Village Voice film critic Hoberman (Film After Film) provides an intelligent, insightful conclusion to his trilogy, begun with The Dream Life and An Army of Phantoms, juxtaposing politics and movies to “illuminate what... Mailer termed America’s ‘dream life.’ ” Hoberman starts in 1975 with the “intellectual and exclusive” Nashville and “visceral and populist” Jaws, noting the former “looked back to the 1960s” and the latter “ahead to the 1980s.” From there he explores the parallels between Jimmy Carter’s election and the commercial and critical success of Rocky and how Raiders of the Lost Ark reflected the same nostalgia that helped boost Ronald Reagan. Hoberman’s approach is light-handed, presenting ample evidence for his thesis (including from his own contemporaneous reviews), but leaving readers to connect many of the dots themselves. The book only falters with the overarching “dream life” theme, which Hoberman leaves under-realized, perhaps relying on readers being acquainted with his previous works. Closing with the thought-provoking assertion that “Trump is a beneficiary of Reagan-nostalgia, which is to say, a nostalgia that is nostalgic for nostalgia itself,” this erudite study presents a convincing case for the benefits of engaging critically with seemingly trivial popcorn movies. (July)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Make My Day:
"Singular, stylish and slightly intoxicating in its scope."
—David Fear, Rolling Stone

"Unfurls as a richly narrated timeline in which the passage of months and years is marked by the inception, arrival, and aftermath of totemic 'Movie Events.'"
—Brooklyn Rail

"The appeal of a book like Make My Day lies . . . in the opportunities it affords an able, committed critic like Hoberman to dig into a variety of individual titles. . . . There are bits here that you'll want to read again even before you've finished them."

—Cinema Scope Magazine
"Rigorous, scholarly . . . for readers seeking an insightful, academic meditation on the relationship between media and sociopolitical issues."
—Library Journal

"Intelligent, insightful. . . . a convincing case for the benefits of engaging critically with seemingly trivial popcorn movies."
—Publishers Weekly

"A passionately argued jeremiad about an era and its lingering effects on politics and culture."
—Kirkus Reviews

Praise for The Dream Life:
"One of the most vital cultural histories I've ever read. Hoberman's deceptively easygoing yet deliriously compacted prose threads history through movie lore through McLuhanesque media criticism. . . . An extraordinary publishing event."
—David Edelstein, Slate


Praise for J. Hoberman:
"Nobody in America writes as well about culture and film as J. Hoberman."
—Peter Biskind

From the Publisher

2019-04-23
A film critic looks back at the movies of the Ronald Reagan years.

The 1980s was an era in which one of the most popular American TV shows, Family Ties, featured a teenager "who wears a tie, carries a briefcase, and has a poster of Richard Nixon in his bedroom," a program that was reportedly one of the president's favorites. In this book, the last in his Found Illusions trilogy, Hoberman (An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War, 2011, etc.) examines some of the most popular films from Reagan's eight years in office to view how politics affected popular culture and vice versa. The author covers everything from paeans to the capitalism that Reagan—who "understood that stardom was the ultimate form of public service: the Department of Amusement"—dearly espoused, films such as Risky Business and Trading Places to the Vietnam revisionism of the Rambo movies to pictures like Ghostbusters and Gremlins, which, by "dramatizing instances of alien aggression," barely concealed their xenophobia. Even readers who share Hoberman's distaste for Reagan—the book includes long excoriations he wrote for the Village Voice—may think he occasionally lets his contempt get the better of him. It may have been a "bravura performance" when Reagan waved to cameras as he left the hospital after having been shot two weeks earlier, but, unlike many of his other performances, that seems a reasonable one to have made. Constant references to the films Reagan watched as president grow tiresome. Much better are passages that show the president mirroring behavior of movie characters, as when Hoberman notes that one of Reagan's first-term speeches on economic recovery sounded as facile as the utterances of TV-obsessed Chance the gardener, the simpleton from Being There—one of the book's many sly digs that apply as much to Donald Trump as to Reagan.

A passionately argued jeremiad about an era and its lingering effects on politics and culture.

Kirkus Reviews