Watching ‘Reagan’ in Manhattan

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Although I’ve spent most of my life in New York City, I haven’t been back in years – until a few days ago, when I had to make a very quick trip there to deal with some urgent business matters. After such a long absence, it was a revelation. I’m not talking about the spike in crime – although, as it happens, at about 8:30 one evening, I was followed at close quarters up 6th Avenue all the way from 58th Street to Central Park South by a highly aggressive black man demanding money. Eventually I shook him off, but if I’d been smaller or he’d been bigger or the street had been less busy, who knows what might have happened? In all my years in New York, nothing like that ever happened to me – not in any part of town, and not at any time of day. But as I say, I’m not talking about the descent of New York into at least the first or second circle of hell.

(Still, while we’re at it, I might as well mention that another thing I noticed, from the moment I stepped off the LIRR train from JFK at Grand Central Station, was a disgusting smell that suddenly came wafting at me at a number of other locations in the city. This was also new – well, almost new: it brought back not–so-fond memories of what is now known as the Great Garbage Strike of 1968. Also new was the ubiquity of virtue-signaling signage, such as the message posted in huge letters on the scaffolding around Carnegie Hall, which informed us that the venue’s “mission” is “to bring the transformative power of music to the widest possible audience,” or the big sign on Broadway telling us that New York-based astronomer Neil DeGrasse Tyson is “more brilliant than a thousand suns,” or something to that effect – this about a man who tied himself in knots on a recent podcast trying to reconcile transgender ideology with objective science.)

In any event, it occurs to me that “revelation” isn’t the mot juste for what I’m getting at here. “Reminder” is better. Walking the sidewalks of the Upper West Side, I kept passing little kids – I’m talking three years old and up – telling off their parents in the most obnoxious fashion and getting no flack for it. I overheard women of a certain age complaining about – well, you name it – and congratulating themselves for various things they’ve said or done at some point in their lives. I noticed that these same women, or rather women very much like them, couldn’t order a simple meal in a diner without making a big deal about it — leave out this ingredient, add more of that, cook it this way, put this or that on the side instead of the top, and why is it taking so long to prepare? If they had their small children or grandchildren eating out with them, they didn’t encourage them to sit still and be polite to the waiters but to, shall we say, develop a critical language about food and service. And I lost count of the number of youngish women – almost all of them, curiously enough, with long blond hair – who power-walked past me on the sidewalk, Sex and the City style, while being snotty to somebody on their cell phones or griping about a third party or, in one case, about how the “gallery opening” was shaping up into a disaster. I did overhear one funny comment by an exasperated woman as she was leaving the West Side YMCA with her small son: “I never heard of a seven-year-old having so many ailments as a result of exercise!” I may be mistaken, but I don’t think a non-New Yorker would have put it quite that way.

I’d experienced these sorts of things for years when I lived in New York, but had forgotten about them.

Yes, a lot of these women are Upper West Side Jews – and, not to overgeneralize, many of them, at least, think Trump is just this side of Hitler and that Netanyahu is being too tough on Gaza. This being said, perhaps I should mention my pleasant exchange with an Orthodox Jew who was standing outside one of those buses that are known as “Mitzvah tanks,” in which Jews who have fallen away from the faith are invited in for a friendly talk during which they’re encouraged to return to the fold. “Are you Jewish?” he asked me. “No,” I said, “but I’m very pro-Jewish.” “God bless you,” he replied. “God bless you, too,” I said. (I think I can state with a pretty high level of confidence that he is one Jewish New Yorker who will not be casting his vote for Kamala Harris.) That same day I had another very brief, nice interaction. On the way to my business meeting, I was about to pass my old church, St. Thomas Fifth Avenue, when I decided to poke my nose in for a minute. Standing in the narthex, I looked into the nave and up at the magnificent reredos. As I recalled the years during which I used to sit in those pews being inspired by the beautiful setting, the beautiful music, and the beautiful sermons, I wondered about the extent to which the appalling ideological changes that the Anglican Communion has undergone in recent years have affected this extremely special place. A black man in a suit who obviously worked there walked over to me and kindly invited me to go inside. “No, thank you,” I said. “I just wanted to take a quick look.” “It’s very beautiful in there,” he told me. “I know,” I responded softly. “I used to go here. I was baptized here.” He reacted with a warm smile.

For some reason both of these simple encounters brought me close to tears.

There is, then, a great deal of beauty, human and otherwise, in Manhattan. You can walk around any city in Norway every day for a year and never run into as many strangers who’ll reward you with as many smiles, hellos, “thank yous” (for, say, holding a door open), or even friendly impromptu conversations as I experienced in a single day in New York – most of my interlocutors being, for whatever reason, black and Hispanic women. Still, in many ways, it – or a certain portion of it – is a world unto itself, with its own dominant culture, values, and rules. For all too many of its denizens, power and fame and wealth and some definite if not fully definable sense that being a New Yorker, in and of itself, is a sign of extraordinary sophistication reign supreme. To perambulate among them is to be reminded why there’s such  a receptive audience in Manhattan for all that Hillary-type talk about the “deplorables” on the far side of the Hudson with their plows and pitchforks and pickup trucks.

Looking into some of these people’s faces and listening to them interact, you realize that to them, most of America might just as well be Tajikistan. And the pleasant, quiet, modest little town where I live in the mountains of Norway would be utterly beyond their imaginations, and, not unlikely, far beneath their contempt. It’s no wonder that no matter how much damage the Democrats do to the Big Apple, these people remain loyal to the vile party of Obama and Biden and the Clintons. That loyalty is one of the things that, in their minds, set them apart from the rabble out there in the outback. In their minds, to be a blindly loyal Democrat, and a daily reader of the New York Times who looks upon the damn thing (which still celebrates the Soviet Union) as if it were the Talmud, is a mark of social and cultural superiority to everyone who hangs his hat between Parsippany and Pasadena.

I must admit, to be sure, that I didn’t walk around Manhattan as much as I expected to. For one thing, I had work to do. For another thing, after a full day of traveling, I was wiped out. So when I discovered that a cineplex a couple of blocks from the rattrap of a hotel where I was staying was running the new movie Reagan, I went and caught the 1:15 PM showing. Actually, the movie itself didn’t start until way after 1:15 PM. First there was the longest series of trailers I’d ever seen in my life. There must have been ten of them. Two were for movies about how awful the Nazis were. Yes, the Nazis certainly were awful. But where are the movies about the monstrosity of Communism?

Well, once the coming attractions were over, there it was. Finally. Reagan. A movie whose moral compass about the Evil Empire was so totally right on the money that you could weep for joy. Directed by Sean McNamara and with a script by Howard Klausner that’s based on Paul Kengor’s book The Crusader (2006), it was terrific in every way. There have been complaints that it tried to cram in too much history. I didn’t feel that way, although I suppose the Iran-Contra material could have been trimmed a bit. Some have found fault with the narrative structure: Reagan’s life story is told by a retired KGB profiler, played wonderfully by Jon Voight, who saw from early on that Reagan – then an actor under contract to Warner Brothers and an official of the Screen Actors Guild who fought to keep Communist Party apparatchiks from taking over the union (and the film industry) – could be trouble. For my part, I thought this device worked like a charm.

But the main critique, especially on the left, of course, is that the movie is pure hagiography. Well, let me say a thing or two about Hollywood hagiography, especially when it comes to presidents. In 1944, Twentieth-Century Fox released Wilson, a nauseatingly worshipful movie that made one of our most appalling commanders in chief out to be a virtual saint. (Wilson was a personal hero of studio chief Darryl Zanuck.) And how about FDR? Just a brief selection: Sunrise at Campobello (1960) celebrated his triumph in overcoming his handicap; Warm Springs (2005) professed to show how his disability taught him empathy for the downtrodden. In Hyde Park on Hudson (2012), Bill Murray made FDR out to be nothing less than adorable. Eleanor and Franklin (1976) and its 1977 sequel, Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years, painted a loving portrait of both Roosevelts. And what all these films had in common is that in order to deify their subjects they were obliged to scrub out a hell of a lot of very unpleasant facts.

Yes, Reagan gives us a highly admirable protagonist, played brilliantly and movingly by Dennis Quaid. But, damn it, it’s all true. The son of a tragically alcoholic father and a devout, loving, and inspiring mother, Reagan decided from a young age that he wanted to do good and make his life mean something. He also learned early on about the evils of Communism. One scene in Reagan shows our hero, newly arrived in Hollywood, getting into a bit of a fracas on this topic with Dalton Trumbo, Tinseltown’s highest-paid screenwriter – and a dedicated Stalinist who, speaking of hagiographies, was treated as a First Amendment hero (and the epitome of offbeat charm) in the shamelessly dishonest 2015 biopic Trumbo, in which he was played by Bryan Cranston. I read plenty of reviews of Trumbo and not a single one called it out for what it was – sheer, utter hagiography.

No, reviewers are hating on Reagan for the same reason they hate on anything that defies the media narrative. And even nowadays, the narrative on Reagan – who despite the major contributions of Thatcher and Pope John Paul, was the individual most responsible for bringing down Communism in Europe — is that he was an unrefined simpleton who was raised in small-town Illinois and attended some presumably laughable institution called Eureka College. Reagan’s diaries and letters, and the speeches he wrote (all by himself) before ascending to the White House, prove otherwise, and then some. And this film presents us with the real thing – a man of wisdom and insight and courage who, at the risk of his career, led the fight against the threat of Communism in Hollywood, who “devoured books about Communism,” and who, well before he became governor of California, understood the Kremlin mentality better than pretty much any politician in America. Yes, he and Nancy (played convincingly by Penelope Ann Miller) adored each other in a way that made cynical souls smirk and that is utterly alien to certain politicians, then and now, whom I need not name, as well as to many of the kinds of people who populate certain parts of Manhattan. Nancy was Ron’s rock – and of course in this day and age that’s not forgivable either.

I was delighted to have the chance to see Reagan, because for obvious reasons it’s not playing anywhere in Norway, where I live, and where the movie offerings seem to be picked out by some nefarious cabal of – well, that’s a topic for another day. In fact I was rather surprised to learn that Reagan was showing on the Upper West Side – but I was not at all surprised that in a very large theater there were only seven of us in the entire audience. The average age was about sixty. I could tell from their reactions that I was among Reagan fans – people who’d been there at the time, who’d seen through the media lies, and who’d respected Reagan’s patriotism and optimism, his love of freedom, and his devotion to the welfare of his fellow Americans.

Too bad there weren’t more people – especially people who’ve been brainwashed against Reagan for decades – in that theater. Oh, well. As Mark Tapson pointed out in his brilliantly comprehensive account of the movie, “Reagan has earned an abysmal 19% favorability rating from critics as of this writing – you’d think this was the worst movie ever made – but revealingly, it earned an audience favorability score of 98%.” This lopsided response is a pattern that’s become all too familiar in recent years, with the gulf between the opinions of the professional film critics and amateur moviegoers reflecting perfectly the massive cultural gap between today’s American elites – which includes not only movie reviewers but a million or so Manhattanites – and deplorables.

Sad stuff. Sad, because New York, which in my childhood was by far the world’s largest city (it’s now #35, behind Kinshasa, Delhi, Tokyo, Jakarta, Cairo, and a whole bunch of Chinese metropolises that you’ve never heard of), and which I still like to think of as a great city, is a place where there’s apparently terribly little audience for a film celebrating the staggering achievements of a president whose road to the White House took him not through a purportedly perfect-looking George H.W. Bush-type CV (Phillips Academy, Yale, member of Congress, UN ambassador, CIA director) but through stints as a lifeguard and radio announcer and movie actor – but who, damn it, grasped the essential challenges facing postwar America in a way that few members of the privileged, overly credential Eastern establishment ever did.

The sad fact about New York City (or, again, to put it more precisely, about a particular segment of Manhattan) is that for all the wonderful things it has going for it, there are few places in America where so few people, however expensively educated and sumptuously privileged and suffused with their own sense of importance, comprehend the existential crises that confronted America in Reagan’s time and that face it now – and that call for a president who’s smart enough to get it and gutsy enough to do what needs to be done.