Make My Day by J. Hoberman

Author:J. Hoberman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2019-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

* Spielberg and Capshaw were married in 1991.

Forget John Glenn. Later that summer, Newsweek would compare Ronald Reagan to Indiana Jones and conjure the Conquest of Grenada: “Rather than pretending to present the American people with the complexities of international relations, Reagan presented the invasion in movie terms. He scorned dialectic for drama, discarded fact in favor of fantasy.… His talent for selling illusions to the Indiana Jones generation is the greatest gift a modern president can have.”

A demonstration of American superiority, Indiana Jones was itself number one when President Reagan flew to France to participate in celebrations marking the fortieth anniversary of the Allied invasion of Europe.

June 5, Reagan spoke at Pointe du Hoc, the spot where U.S. Rangers landed on D-Day. Unlike the other Normandy beaches, evidence of war was preserved—a cratered landscape cut by corroded barb wire. On this dramatic site, the president addressed an audience of veterans, hailing them as “the champions who helped free a continent.”

That afternoon, Reagan gave another address, along with French and British dignitaries, at the site of D-Day’s worst carnage, Omaha Beach. Reagan’s biographer Lou Cannon regards these speeches as his strongest overseas performances, in part because they allowed him to relive his own experience of World War II, wearing a uniform and making propaganda films in Hollywood: Reagan “seemed to be returning to Normandy because he had already been there in his mind.”

The D-Day footage would play a significant part in Reagan’s campaign film, A New Beginning, used for a scene in which he not only appeared but narrated—at once a humble participant and the omniscient voice of history, the remembered past, recalling both the war, which he knew only from the movies, and, more importantly, his role in its commemoration.

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