The Rea­gan Show

Even from beyond the grave, a hoary gag­gle of history’s most vile tyrants are like­ly look­ing at the cur­rent polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion in Amer­i­ca and chuck­ling to them­selves as, day by day, their rep­u­ta­tions are, if not sal­vaged, then at least soft­ened. Though Ronald Rea­gan might be ear­marked as the guy who blazed a trail for light enter­tain­ers want­i­ng to enter high office, what this new doc­u­men­tary sug­gests is that he at least played the part of ​‘Leader of the Free World #40’. Even if it wasn’t quite and award-wor­thy turn.

His Hol­ly­wood bona fides served to enhance his per­son­al­i­ty and made the ​“Gip­per” appear as a wipe-clean scion of flinty, oil-slicked affa­bil­i­ty, even if some believed that he didn’t real­ly have the bus fare up top to be wran­gling with the duplic­i­tous pinkos of the Evil Empire. The image he por­trayed was one of extend­ed fam­i­ly sta­bil­i­ty, and his was a watch where PR fire fights occurred before any sparks had start­ed to fly. Pacho Velez and Sier­ra Pettengill’s film sug­gests that Rea­gan over­saw the first media pres­i­den­cy, where tele­vi­sion became not only a tool for mass com­mu­ni­ca­tion, but a way to build a rock­steady per­sona for those vot­ers who per­haps didn’t pore over the pages of the dai­ly broadsheets.

Com­prised entire­ly of TV cam­era and news footage rang­ing across his entire pres­i­den­cy, the film doesn’t employ talk­ing heads and there are only a few cap­tions to guide the way. There’s no con­tem­po­rary com­men­tary on top of the images. Instead, polit­i­cal wags from the day analyse the meet­ings, address­es and speech­es and offer hints that, even then, most saw through the White House’s ​“every­thing is fine” tactics.

Inter­est­ing­ly, the lat­ter years of the Cold War became key to Reagan’s time in office, and its iron­ic to see the reserved, con­stant­ly on-script com­man­der in chief deliv­er­ing behind-the-scenes barbs at the expense of his Com­mu­nist soon-to-be-almost-allies. He chides them for state-spon­sored manip­u­la­tion of truth, while he indulges in exact­ly the same tac­tic on home turf.

The Rea­gan Show pret­ty much gives away its entire the­sis in its title, but it’s fun to trawl through these archive images and it allows us to pon­der whether we’ll ever real­ly be able to claw through the pro­tec­tive lay­ers of spin. Plus, the film depicts an an era where emp­ty provo­ca­tion and nuclear brinks­man­ship took the world to the edge – it was the years of repa­ra­tions after­wards which sealed Reagan’s image as some kind of home­spun sav­iour of human­i­ty. You have to threat­en human­i­ty to reap the ben­e­fit of sav­ing it.