REAGANIZING HOLLYWOOD

...A stroke of genius...

...It is girls and getting into Princeton that rule his dreams, and until his parents leave him alone in their suburban home, he seems likely to miss out on both...

...But in the 1983 world of Ronald Reagan and Hollywood, the government cannot be trusted to act with efficiency or sensitivity...

...The rest, especially the human cost, will take care of itself...

...For a Reagan administration committed to law and order, such a vision of heroism is essential, but in 1983 films its most articulate representative is not the boyish John Glenn of The Right Stuff but the grim Clint Eastwood of the Eastwood-directed Sudden Impact...

...For they show how wasteful and unfeeling the most patriotic of government programs can be, and without even venturing an overt opinion, they raise the next logical question: What can we expect from government programs— urban renewal, welfare, Medicare—tied to ambiguous political goals and subject to federal and local bureaucracies...

...I made $8,000 in one night...

...His old-fashioned views on criminal justice win her heart, and when the two of them go to bed together, it is the union of avenging souls (we don't so much as see a kiss...

...It is an explanation...

...No president could ask for more...

...The 1960s were, we're made to realize, essentially a counterculture event for Kasdan's people: a time of good sex, good feelings, good talk about protest...

...It is the government, especially NASA, that has "the wrong stuff...

...He is not content to be the laconic, macho detective he was in such 1970s films as Dirty Harry and Magnum Force...

...It hamstrings investigations of known mobsters...

...He proves trustworthy where officialdom is not, and in so doing embodies the qualities that give Project Mercury its authentic Americanism...

...They have captured the ideas on which his Administration rests and put them in the best possible light...

...They struggle to answer this question when they come together for the funeral of a friend who has committed suicide...

...They are TV stars, People magazine writers, doctors, lawyers for the rich...

...Reagan's success was more complete than that...

...Like John Sayles's 1980 The Return of the Secaucus Seven, this film takes as its starting point a gathering of '60s friends a decade or so after college...

...most of all, it is oblivious to the human side of the space program...

...Silkwood has the potential for being another Norma Rae in the story it tells about a young woman who becomes a union organizer...

...In miniature it is the battle of a president who cannot bother getting congressional approval to invade a country, who knows we are threatened everywhere by outlaw states, and who knows there is only one way to deal with such nations: get them before they get us...

...Have they sold out...

...In 1983 Hollywood went along with that conviction not in a conservative film but in a film, Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill, that in its musical score and ambience seemed to celebrate the 1960s...

...Her boyfriend leaves her because he thinks she is spending too much time on union business...

...DON'T TRUST YOUR GOVERNMENT: Where do you turn when, like Karen Silkwood, you can't make it on your own...

...He has become, in the words of film critic David Denby, the perfect supply-side hero...

...In Meryl Streep's haunting portrayal of Karen Silkwood, we have a character who combines self-interest and heroism by acting upon her belief that the Kerr-McGee pluto230 nium plant where she works is endangering its workers...

...But most telling about their struggle is that it's undertaken without a clear understanding of what they ever did to make the question valid...

...For them, a smoother kind of hero is needed...

...And above all, they endure inhuman demands with good humor (a request for a sperm specimen is complied with in a scene in which two astronauts masturbate in adjoining toilet stalls while humming The Marine Corps Battle Hymn...

...It is an old habit, and in the years since World War II it has been reflected in films of every political stripe: from Marlon Brando as "friendly witness" in the McCarthy era's On the Waterfront to the government as bloodthirsty killers in the Vietnam era's Bonnie and Clyde...

...But as The Big Chill develops, it becomes clear that the omission is not a fault at all...

...Joel comes up with all the money he needs...

...One of them, in the fashion of Ernest Hemingway's Jake Barnes, has been wounded in Vietnam, but the rest bear no scars...

...1960s IDEALISM WON'T WORK NOW: By suggesting that the 1960s were a fraud—and at the same time glorifying its wit and music—The Big Chill scores the kinds of political points no ideologically conservative film could...

...This time around, he is a philosopher as well...

...They insist that the Mercury spacecraft have manual controls and a window in its capsule...

...He has outsmarted his nagging parents, his dull classmates, and he's off to Princeton with Lana...

...BE A SUPPLY-SIDE HERO: In the age of Reagan, the Harry Callahans will always be admired...

...Her national union is more interested in winning a representation election than in protecting its workers...

...He humiliates gangsters who think their lawyers can protect them, and in the end he know231 ingly sets free a woman who has been systematically murdering (she shoots them in the genitals) the gang who raped her and her sister...

...He delights in being called a dinosaur and in baiting the officials in his department who want results but refuse to do what is "necessary" to get them...

...But unlike Sayles's people—who as social workers, inner-city teachers, and Senate aides have quietly pursued their old battles—Kasdan's characters have made it big since their undergraduate days at the University of Michigan...

...It is big and powerful and elected...

...In his mind the 1960s were a fraud, at best a period of naive idealism...

...For the men and women of The Big Chill, the 1960s were a time to grow out of, and in the end the message the film conveys is a parallel one...

...But the Karen Silkwood of Mike Nichols's film is quickly reduced to a woman who is victimized at every step once she lets her idealism get the best of her...

...Joel becomes involved with Lana, a beautiful Chicago call girl, and when after a series of misadventures they both find themselves desperately in need of money, Joel turns his parents' North Shore home into a brothel...

...Ideas the president has been struggling to get accepted ever since he took office became subjects Hollywood was sure would hold an audience...

...Not that the president got the Reagan equivalent of PT-109 produced or that his constant moralizing forced Hollywood to cut back on its usual amount of sex and violence...

...For Eastwood's Harry it is not, however, enough to be a dispenser of justice...

...Then everything changes...

...At the end we are not surprised when Karen is killed in a car crash en route to meet with a New York Times reporter and tell what she knows about KerrMcGee safety violations...

...As Harry Callahan, a homicide detective with the San Francisco police department, Eastwood lives in a world where law administered in accord with government rules cannot work...

...American film-makers, liberals as well as conservatives, produced a series of films in 1983 that in effect endorsed the premises on which his Administration rests...

...In the film's climactic scene he stands before a high school assembly of Future Enterprisers and smugly announces, "My name is Joel Goodsen...

...THE 1960s WERE A FRAUD: This perspective, more than any other, shapes the president's view of recent American history...

...But nothing so substantial is forthcoming...

...All we have to remember is that where there's a need, there's a profit to be made...

...q 232...

...The Right Stuff, like the Tom Wolfe best-seller on which it is based, is an account of the government's Project Mercury, which in 1962 put John Glenn into orbit and succeeded in wiping out the propaganda advantage the Russians had gained in the late 1950s with Sputnik...

...Not only is it inept in rocketry (we see a montage of Mercury launch failures midway through The Right Stuff...

...In the end, however, what's most telling about Sudden Impact is that Harry never doubts he's right, and we are never given a hint that society could be endangered by his violent brand of justice...

...But in the Risky Business that finally got produced, Joel's Free Enterpriser speech is protrayed as a triumph...

...But what gives The Right Stuff its edge, keeps it from lapsing into a tedious docudrama, is the struggle it depicts between a bungling American government and seven feisty astronauts, doing their best to live up to the image of America's greatest test pilot, Chuck Yeager...

...The antithesis of the questioning figure Dustin Hoffman played more than a decade ago in The Graduate, Joel is a young man unconcerned about self-discovery...

...In Paul Brickman's Risky Business, the teen-age version of that hero emerges as Tom Cruise's Joel Goodsen...

...They defy officials who fail to respect their privacy (notably a buffoonish Lyndon Johnson...

...The 1960s, it implicitly argues, were a period of historical adolescence...

...Even in his romantic scenes with Sondra Locke, the avenging rape victim he lets go free, Eastwood cannot stop talking politics...

...But the moral is the same...

...Only the film's rock music and the pot that gets smoked give a hint of what the 1960s were like for Kasdan's characters...

...It is a moment with all the potential in the world for liberal irony, and in the original script of Risky Business Joel's announcement was to occur after Lana betrayed him and Princeton rejected him...

...Princeton takes him (on the recommendation of an admissions officer who gets serviced by one of Lana's friends), and Joel is changed into a confident young man...

...He must be hip, witty, and at the same time ruled by a desire for money...

...The same is true for the statement Mike Nichols's Silkwood makes about the relevance of 1960s idealism in the 1980s...

...No current film makes this point more emphatically than Philip Kaufman's The Right Stuff...

...Harry is pursuing vigilante justice, and nobody knows it better than he...

...I deal in human fulfillment...

...They have not simply latched on to a corner of the president's thinking...

...To be sure, in Karen's case, where there is an indication that she may have been run off the road by someone from Kerr-McGee, the penalties are far more extreme than those the Reagan administration (with its threats of firings and lie-detector tests) wants to hand out to employees who talk out of turn to reporters...

...It fails to avenge those who are the victims of crime...

...Everything that has occurred up to this point has suggested the futility of acting on one's own best instincts...

...They have, by comparison with their past, finally latched on to something solid...

...Those who go too far are sure to be squashed, and if we look closely at their idealism, we're sure to find it flawed...

...There is no need to mourn its passing, and the lesson to be drawn is that real life means settling for the practical...

...It is at first an omission that seems like a director's oversight...

...By contrast, it's the astronauts who make the Mercury program a success and give it a humanness the public can identify with...

...In an America beset by economic turmoil, Joel has shown that there is always room for venture capitalism...

...He shoots rather than captures robbers...

...But what is so different—and alarming— about Hollywood's 1983 pro-Reagan films is their range...

...No wonder that their uneasiness with their present success comes across as hip modesty they will soon get over...

...THAT HOLLYWOOD should be so attuned to national politics is hardly surprising...

...The government subjects the astronauts to gratuitous stress tests, treats them like lab animals, and when they are successful, exploits them like movie stars...

...TRUST AUTHENTIC POWER: The ultimate heroism of The Right Stuff is summed up by the cool of John Glenn, who in the final scenes of the film behaves with grace and precision when confronted with the possibility that his rocket may have lost its heat shield...

...And her fellow workers resent Karen for putting their jobs in jeopardy by exposing plant mismanagement...

...But they cannot be imitated by ordinary folk, especially the affluent professional class that forms part of President Reagan's constituency...

...Pity is what Silkwood arouses: pity for Karen's trappedness, pity for her "loose" sex life, pity for her getting in over her head...

...A flashback, a vivid memory of the 1960s as a time of turmoil, might cast serious doubt on their current lives...

...In his attacks on poverty programs, environmental controls, the Civil Rights Commission, he has not simply been trying to slow the liberalism of the 1960s—but to eradicate it altogether...

...One logical answer would seem to be the government...

...Karen has gotten what anyone trying alone to buck the system can expect...

...For an Administration desperate to "get the government off our backs," the implications of The Right Stuff are perfect...

...On the contrary, Eastwood as director portrays Harry's fight as the fight of the true American, unafraid to use the power at his disposal...

...In Sudden Impact the only choice for someone committed to law and order is to violate the law in the name of higher justice, and this is what Eastwood's Harry does...

...It sets criminals free on technicalities...