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We wanted to offer something of a palette cleanser for our subscribers, so we decided to watch the recent movie, Reagan, with our intrepid producer, Jesse Brenneman. Even better, it's based on the 2006 book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, by Paul Kengor—who just happens to have been Matt's close mentor as an undergraduate student. Reagan clocks in at over two hours and twenty minutes, and it's a wild, even fantastical ride that offers a revealing glimpse into the conservative psyche and a faithful rendition of the most hagiographic version of the Reagan mythology, especially his personal responsibility for ending the Cold War and finally putting the Soviet Union on the ash heap of history.
Sources:
Reagan (2024)
Paul Kengor, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism(2006)
— God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life(2004)
— A Pope and a President: John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Extraordinary Untold Story of the 20th Century(2017)
Edmund Morris, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (1999)
I have to say, this movie was, I guess I thought it would be bad in the way that these conservative movies that we do on the podcast are bad. It was so much worse, but also so much weirder than I could possibly have imagined. Yes, including, very importantly, what the setup is. In other words, what is the excuse they've come up with to tell you the life story of Ronald Reagan? I was surprised. Yeah, so the movie is about Ronald Reagan, but really right away from the top, it's about Ronald Reagan and the Cold War. And, fascinatingly, bizarrely, the framing for this film is that it is a story being told by a XKGB agent, played by John Voigt, to a younger agent. Why? I don't quite remember or understand. He basically goes to John Voigt and he's like, "Come Red, tell me, why did Russia lose communism?" Yeah, yeah. And John Voigt is like, "To tell you the story, we have to tell story of Ronald Reagan." My official title was endless. At the Committee for State Security, I beloved KGB, but I was a psychologist, profiling those who could become threats to our nation, sometimes decades away. And it sets up this deranged framing device where John Voigt is a KGB officer who spent his entire life fixated on, almost you might say psychosexualy, fixated on, Ronald Reagan, who studied him in his entire life, including when he was a child somehow, and is retelling the tale of Ronald Reagan through the eyes of the people he defeated. It's actually quite artful. I mean, it's artful in a like a dumb, dumb, dumb way. But if the film was a little bit more sophisticated, like if it was more like the quality of depictions of communist and American relations that you get in the show like the Americans, it would actually be like extremely interesting, like how did they see Reagan over these years? But the sole purpose of this framing device for the purposes of this film is that this KGB agent who was assigned to watch him was in effect just completely in awe of him at every moment, of every part of his life. There's so much to say about him throughout the film, but I will say, I think another purpose that his narration plays is, in the very beginning of the film, confusingly for like a sentence, you hear Ronald Reagan's inner monologue, which immediately struck a bum note for me, because I was like, I don't believe he has one. And like, you realize like, oh, this movie wouldn't work if Reagan were narrating it, you know, because he is so surface level, just it's all right there, that what would he say, where's the rest of me? But like, what's interesting is that I think the movie also doesn't portray there being a there, there, it just thinks that it's good. Like, there's no depth, I don't want to call it a child's understanding of politics, but the film is sort of anti-political in that everything is effective and performative, but that is how politics happens, it's just like, oh, he said the thing and then the thing happened, and that's it. I think you're right, Reagan never engages in politics in the sense of like making difficult choices, like politically, like it does just kind of unfold, but the reason that is is because the entire narrative is the unfolding of God's providence. And John Voig consistently just calls him the crusader, like that's the nickname he gave him, and it's kind of portrayed as like, why did the Soviet Union lose? Well, because there was one man who made it his personal crusade to like defeat the Soviets, it's really the story of Ronald Reagan's destiny, and if we're talking about providence and destiny, how does politics fit into that? [Music]
Matt and Sam discuss the (awful) 2024 biopic "Reagan" with our intrepid producer Jesse Brenneman.
