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The Drama Review , (T ), Spring . Copyright ©

New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The King Is a Thing

Bodies of Memory in the Age of Reagan

Tim Raphael

I have some rights of memory in this kingdom which now to claim my

vantage doth invite me.

—William Shakespeare, Fortinbras in Hamlet

Why, I found myself asking repeatedly as the lies, half-truths, and decep-

tions accumulated, was Ronald Reagan universally acclaimed as “the great

communicator”? And why was this accolade almost invariably accompaniedby an ascerbic commentary on his skills as an actor? Was not the linking of

these two propositions at best problematic, and at worst contradictory? What

was the relationship between the negative aesthetic judgment of Reagan’s act-

. Portrait of Ronald

Reagan as a Centaur

( ). By Vitali Komar

and Aleksandr Melamid,oil on canvas, ! .

(Private collection, courtesy

of Ronald Feldman Fine

Arts, New York)



ing ability and the pragmatic assessment of Reagan as a skilled political per-

former? In what follows, I propose that one answer to these questions is sug-

gested by the increasing importance of “performance” in American political

life, and its deployment in the embodied staging of cultural memory by the

nation’s first acting president.

The King’s BodyWhen Polonius is slain, Claudius sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to in-

terrogate Hamlet. “My lord, you must tell us,” entreats Rosencrantz, “where

the body is and go with us to the king.” Hamlet replies: “ The King is with the

body/ But the body is not with the king/ The king is a thing.” Hamlet’s form-

ulation of the thingness of kingness derives its ontic calculus from a represen-

tational economy that traffics in bodies and bodies of memory. The kingdom

of Denmark is at stake and the bodies are not with the king. Apparitions (old

Hamlet), usurpers (Claudius), unwilling heirs (Hamlet), and foreigners

(Fortinbras) contend for a throne whose rightful occupancy is in dispute until

“carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts” eliminate all claimants save Fortinbras

who must “take up the bodies” of the dead in a ritual transference of all legiti-

mate claims to the monarchy. The techniques and processes by which a

would-be king strives to attain this thingness of kingness are intimately con-nected in Hamlet to the credible enactment of the rites of memory—rituals

that invest the performer with the rights of memory—in which the would-be

king embodies or is inhabited by the corporeal memory of the dead.

Beginning with the return of the hostages from Iran on the day of his inau-

guration, the Reagan presidency, too, oriented itself around the reclamation of

bodies. The hostages were a source of national shame, symbols of America’s de-

clining global power, and their return was a propitious augury for a presidency

constituted on the proposition that under its watch “America was back.” Play-

ing Fortinbras to Jimmy Carter’s malaise-ridden Hamlet, Reagan proceeded to

“take up the bodies” from America’s battlefields, movie screens, and collective

memory and re-member them in the service of his political agenda.

The Age of Reagan

. In the closing moments

of his presidency, Jimmy

Carter stares grimly ahead

while Ronald Reagan

gleams with vic tory just be-

fore taking his presidential

oath ( January ).

(Photo by James K.W.

Atherton, courtesy of the

Washington Post )



Tim Raphael

In the Age of Reagan, the performance of the rites/rights of memory as-

sumed the form of strategic technologies of governance. Ronald Reagan’s per-

sonal and political authority as head of state was constructed around these

performances, thematized in the tropes of rebirth and resurrection, and staged

in his own body as the media/medium for re-collecting and incorporating the

damaged body of the American polity. This process of cultural reproduction

and re-creation is described by Joseph Roach as one of “surrogation,” in which

“actual or perceived vacancies occur in the network of relations that constitute

the social fabric,” and a surrogate emerges to replace the missing original. This

“doomed search for originals” requires “selective memory” and “public enact-

ments of forgetting” in order for the sacrificial substitute to successfully, if in-

completely, replace the original. It is this process, Roach contends, that we

most often mean when we use the word “performance” (Roach : – ).

To profess the intimate liaison between performance and the rites of memory

is to nominate the actor as a surrogate for the rights of memory. Ronald

Reagan claimed these prerogatives of the actor in his performances in the the-

atre of memory through the performative (re)construction of an imagined na-

tional past. These performances and their reception reflect a discursive shift in

our contemporary representational economies of memory and history. “Truth,”

as such, cannot be established through appeal to objective criteria. It is a phe-

nomenon of perception, an effect constituted through a performative act. Truthis not discovered, revealed, arrived at: It is performed. As in Hamlet , merely

producing the bodies (empirical evidence, data, credentials, etc.) to support

one’s credibility as a candidate for surrogation is insufficient and often irrel-

evant. The would-be king must act like a king. Fortinbras’s (and Reagan’s)

claim to “have some rights of memory in this kingdom” cannot be evaluated as

a representational truth, but must be assessed by criteria applied to the candidate’s

representational skill in performing the rites of memory.

When Garry Wills asked a group of American business executives their opin-

ion of Reagan’s fraudulent claim to have photographed the Nazi death camps,

“they supported the President for expressing a ‘higher truth’ of concern for the

persecuted. Heads nodded when one executive’s wife said, ‘Even Jesus spoke in

parables’” (:). In the postmodern state, political authority derives from

taking up the bodies the way an actor (or Messiah) takes up a role. By incorpo-

ration and incarnation the presidential performer legitimates his claims, authen-ticates his role, and captivates his audience. The performance is reviewed on

the merits of the fit between actor and role and the mimetic power of the

performative act, not on the representational truth(s) it conveys. Reaganism, to

paraphrase Jean-François Lyotard, was constructed around the massive subordi-

nation of critical memory to the finality of the best possible performance.

The Actor’s Body

Memory is a process that depends crucially on forgetting.

—Joseph Roach ( : )

Where’s the Rest of Me? is the title of Ronald Reagan’s autobiography, pub-

lished in , a year after Reagan’s nationally televised speech during the

Goldwater presidential campaign had established him as a viable political can-didate. The title derives from Reagan’s contention that as an actor “part of

my existence was missing” (Reagan and Hubler [] :), and is taken

from the film King’s Row (), in which Reagan played the role he consid-

ered the biggest and best of his career and “the one that brought me star sta-

tus” (). In King’s Row , Reagan portrays (in his own words) a “gay blade”

named Drake McHugh “who cut a swathe among the ladies.” Drake takes up



The Age of Reagan

with the daughter of a prominent surgeon who is not pleased with the match.

When Drake is injured in a railroad accident the surgeon father unnecessarily

amputates Drake’s legs while he is unconscious.

The scene in which Drake wakes up to discover that his legs are missing

was, in Reagan’s estimation, his greatest test as an actor. “Coming from un-

consciousness to full realization of what had happened in a few seconds, it

presented me with the most challenging acting problem of my career.” In a

humble assessment of his own resources as an actor, Reagan recalls that he

“felt I had neither the experience nor the talent to fake it.” In order to rise to

the challenge of the scene, relying on his acting technique was insufficient. “I

simply had to find out how it really felt, short of actual amputation.” He tried

an ethnographic approach, interviewing doctors and amputees. But this

method got him nowhere. “I was,” he says, “stumped.” In the end, the am-putated actor acknowledges his own limitations and succeeds, in his own esti-

mation, by putting “myself, as best I could, in the body of another fellow”

([] : – ). Ignoring the homoerotic implications of the statement for

the moment, we can observe the performative practice of surrogation at work.

The experience of playing Drake McHugh, close to years prior to launch-

ing his political career, emerges retrospectively as the primal scene of Reagan’s

transformation from actor to politician. In achieving the pinnacle of his success

as an actor, Reagan recounts, “I had become a semi-automaton” (:), an

acting amputee who had been, in Brian Massumi and Kenneth Dean’s charac-

terization, “limping along through life repeating his lines.” As an actor, Reagan

became whole by appropriating “the body of another fellow.” As president, the

body he would have to perform to achieve wholeness would be “everybody”:

The body politic. Reagan verges on saying outright that the politicalmagic he would work is akin to national possession: countless bodies

unified by the same American spirit, one glorious body politic repeating

in unison an old actor’s favorite lines. (Massumi and Dean :)

Although suggestive in regard to the body politics involved in the incarna-

tion of a body politic, what is lacking in Massumi and Dean’s hyperbolic for-

. “Where’s the Rest of

Me?” Ronald Reagan and

Ann Sheridan in King’s

Row ( ), moments be-

fore Reagan utters the line

that will become the title of

his autobiography. (Film still

courtesy of Tim Raphael)



Tim Raphael

mulation is the necessary occlusion of the real in the performative act of

surrogation enacted by Reagan’s parable of the recognition scene. The most

intriguing aspect of Reagan’s memory of the event that ultimately transformed

him from the amputated actor to the wholeness of the presidential performer

is that it recalls a scene that never occurs in the movie . In Reagan’s parable of the

scene of recognition, he is the focus of the shot. But as Garry Wills notes:

[T]he movie does not show Reagan coming to full consciousness in a few

seconds. [...] The whole episode is told from [Ann] Sheridan’s point of

view, through her concern. The camera stays with her. [...] Sheridan, “not

in the shot” according to Reagan, was the shot. [...] We have been set up

to experience the moment [of recognition] through Ann Sheridan’s reac-

tion, which is what we get again after the camera shows him (briefly)

shouting in a hoarse voice, “Where’s the rest of me?” (: – )

Where’s the Rest of Me? depicts Ronald Reagan as a seasoned performer

who, in his greatest feat of screen embodiment, discovers that he is incom-

plete, a discontinuous body. Poised on the brink of a run for governor of

California, the unfulfilled actor constructs a surrogate past in the form of a

damaged body that can only be healed by the actor’s performance in the po-

litical sphere. The generative scene of this invented past is a simulacrum (a re-production for which no original exists), that derives its affective force

through the re-membering of an absent original. It is a memory crucially de-

pendent on the inventive possibilities created by forgetting to remember.

By taking the bullet, Reagan and his administration were born

again, baptized in the river of memory and anointed with the

mimetic power to reproduce his own healing on the damaged

body politic.

“Honey, I forgot to duck,” eyewitnesses recount, were the first wordsReagan spoke to his wife after being shot by John Hinckley. They are cited in

numerous accounts of the Reagan presidency as an example of Reagan’s grace

under fire, courage in the face of adversity, humor under stress. They are a

spin doctor’s dream—John Wayne meets Robin Williams in a Western yuck-

’em-up—the perfect sound bite. But they also serve, in a more ironic vein, as

another cautionary reminder that sometimes what is forgotten is more signifi-

cant than what is remembered.

In On Bended Knee , Mark Hertsgaard details the impact of the assassination

attempt, two months after Reagan took office, on the media’s shocking un-

willingness to critically evaluate his first-term policies. Members of Reagan’s

cabinet provide some of the most illuminating testimony. “The March shoot-

ing,” according to communications director David Gergen, “transformed the

whole thing. We had new capital.” It “gave us a second life” (in Hertsgaard

:). Budget director David Stockman suggests that it allowed the ad-ministration to frame the budget debate in “far more politically compelling

and dramatic terms: Are you for Ronald Reagan or against him?” (). Forget-

ting to duck, like forgetting to remember, lent Ronald Reagan vast amounts

of political capital, but it also paradoxically lent him credibility as the caretaker

of public memory. By taking the bullet, Reagan and his administration were

born again, baptized in the river of memory and anointed with the mimetic

power to reproduce his own healing on the damaged body politic.



The Age of Reagan

The Body Politic

All power silently founde rs on this silent majority, which is neither an en-

tity nor a sociological reality, but the shadow cast by power, its sinking vor-

tex, its form of absorption.

—Jean Baudrillard ( : )

As president, the performer’s skills as memory doctor would be applied toan ailing American body politic reeling from Vietnam, Watergate, the Iranian

hostage crisis, and an “economic affliction of great proportions” (Reagan

:). In his address to a joint session of Congress, his first policy speech

after being shot by John Hinckley, Reagan articulated the interdependence of

his own body and the body politic in economic terms. “I have come to speak

to you tonight about our economic recovery program.” But first he thanked

the millions of Americans who had offered their “expressions of friendship

and, yes, love” after the assassination attempt. “Now let’s talk about getting

spending and inflation under control and cutting your tax rates. Thanks to

some very fine people, my health is much improved. I’d like to be able to say

that with regard to the health of the economy” (in Rogin :). Michael

Rogin suggests that by conflating his own health with that of the economy:

The president was identifying the recovery of his mortal body with the

health of the body politic, his own convalescence with his program to

restore health to the nation. Reagan was presenting himself as the healer,

laying his hands on the sick social body. He was employing a very old

symbolism, one that merges the body of a political leader and the body

of his realm. (: – )

This “doctrine of the king’s two bodies” dates from the th century and

“derived from the two bodies of Christ. Theologically, the death of Christ’s

. Recuperating after the

March assassination

attempt, Reagan reviews a

photo of the White House

staff posing on the steps of

the executive building.

(Photo from Cannon :

n.p.; courtesy of Reagan

Presidential Library)



Tim Raphael

mortal body created a mystic body, the regenerate Christian community. Six-

teenth-century political leaders sought, like divine kings, to reabsorb that

mystic community into their own personal bodies” (Rogin :).

Ironically, Reagan was elected on a pledge to dismantle large segments of

the very government that in its conception initiated the wholesale demise of

divine kingship by challenging the sovereign’s hegemonic prerogative to em-

body his subjects. In place of sovereign authority the American Constitution

asserted the divine right of the people, the body politic, for self-government.

But, as Rogin points out, in the Age of Reagan the locus of sacred value

completed its westward migration from Washington to Hollywood, from

statesmanship to celebrity. John Hinckley did not shoot Ronald Reagan be-

cause he was president of the United States. Hinckley shot Reagan because he

was acting out the plot of a movie, Taxi Driver , in order to win the heart of

the character played by Jodie Foster. To cement his place in movie history,

Hinckley shot Reagan on the day of the Academy Awards. The celluloid ce-

lebrity sought by Hinckley and deployed by Reagan was underlined by the

theme of that year’s awards: “Movies are forever” (Rogin : – ).

In the Age of Reagan the mystic body of Christian theology assumed the

form of the screen body projected from the sanctified domain of Hollywood.

On the evening he was shot, Reagan was scheduled to address the Academy

from the White House. “Film is forever,” the president was to tell the Acad-emy. “It is the motion picture that shows all of us not only how we look and

sound but—more important—how we feel” (in Rogin :). In the church

of the motion picture, how we feel is who we are, and who we are is shafts of

light projected on a blank screen, immaterial bodies cleaving to the celluloid

rock. In the Age of Reagan how we felt was an indice of how invested we

were in what was on that screen, and whether we believed it reflected our au-

thentic feelings, or produced them for us.

The Dead Body

“The kind of body which the current society needs” for the exercise of

power in the hagiographic mode of remembering is a dead one.

—Paige Baty ( : )

Ronald Reagan’s favorite habitation was the silent body, the body that can-

not speak but must be spoken for. In endless photo-ops and sound bites,

Ronald Reagan played more memorials than any president in living memory,

and it is perhaps here, in these silent places, speaking to and for the dead, that

his rememberings were most inventive.

Hagiography traditionally refers to the study or writing of the lives of the

saints. But in the postmodern state all manner of subjects are represented

hagiographically. Ronald Reagan’s favorite hagiographic narrative was what I

will call the parable of the hagioplebe. In this parable, which he evoked in

various forms in numerous presidential performances, an “average” American

embodies an idealized America through a heroic act of self-sacrifice. This in-

dividual is almost always male, and usually dead or fictive. The appeal to the

uncommon virtue of the common man is a hallowed tradition in American

politics, but in Reagan’s employment it takes on the visage of a primary nar-

cissism. The figure in the parable is always Reagan’s own: Zelig Unbound.

In the peroration of his inaugural address, Reagan describes the

mythic domain that he is entering. For the first time in history, Reagan re-

minds his audience, an inaugural ceremony was being performed on the West

Front of the Capitol. “Standing here one faces a magnificent vista,” Reagan



The Age of Reagan

intoned, “[a]t the end of this open mall are those shrines to the giants on

whose shoulders we stand.” With the adjectives “monumental,” “stately,” and

“dignified” he pays homage to the memory of Washington, Jefferson, and

Lincoln respectively. This is the traditional inaugural tipping of the hat to the

founding fathers, shrewdly staged here to encourage the maximum televisual

connection between Reagan and his illustrious predecessors. But this staging

allows Reagan to make an even more innovative geographic and hagiographic

leap. Beyond these “monuments to heroism,” across the Potomac River “on

the far shore” is Arlington National Cemetery, “with its row upon row of

simple white markers.” Across the river from the giants of American history

lie its unsung heroes, anonymous bodies lost in battle.

Reagan’s inaugural address assumes the form of a eulogy in

which he invokes the power of the performer and the corpse

to summon an imagined community into being.

In the final act of his inaugural address, Reagan takes up the body of one of

Arlington’s denizens, Martin Treptow, “a small town barber” killed in WorldWar I. “We’re told,” Reagan tells us, “that on his body was found a diary. On

the flyleaf under the heading ‘My Pledge,’ he had written these words:

‘America must win this war. Therefore I will work, I will save, I will sacrifice,

I will endure, I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost, as if the issue of the

whole struggle depended on me alone” (: – ; emphasis mine).

Treptow’s words are a condensation of Reagan’s credo as expressed in the

body of his address, and enacted during his tenure as president. Reagan liter-

ally reads his credo off Treptow’s body in a commemorative act of incorpora-

tion and embodiment. By taking up Treptow’s body, Reagan casts himself

simultaneously as the rightful heir to Treptow’s legacy and the incarnation of

his pledge. Reagan’s vision for America, outlined earlier in the address, is au-

thoritatively situated in an authentic lineage from both sides of the river—the

stately monuments and the simple white markers. Reagan’s inaugural address

assumes the form of a eulogy in which he invokes the power of the performer and the corpse to summon an imagined community into being.

In discussing the significance of the funeral of the British actor Thomas

Betterton in , Joseph Roach points to “the stimulus of restored behavior

to the production of cultural memory” (:). He suggests that the

hagiographic accounts of Betterton’s life and, most pointedly, his death, enact

a process of surrogation by which Betterton assumes the role of the mimetic

double of the sovereign—a “shadow king, a visible effigy signifying the dual

nature of sovereignty, it’s division between an immortal and an abject body.”

As the shadow king of the “mimic state” of the London stage, Betterton func-

tions as a “performed effigy” interred amidst the royal dead in Westminster

Abbey, whose funeral enacts “the memorial constitution of the body politic.”

Betterton’s funeral, Roach argues, “constitutes an epitomizing event in the

early development of a particular kind of secular devotion” in which:

performers become the caretakers of memory through many kinds of

public action. […] A fiction like “Betterton” defines a cultural trend in

which the body of an actor serves as a medium—an effigy […] — in the

secular rituals through which a modernizing society communicates with

its past. (: – )



Tim Raphael

In a stunning inversion of Roach’s description of how surrogation functions

in a modernizing society, Ronald Reagan, the president, assumes his legiti-

mating authority as the caretaker of cultural memory as the “performed ef-

figy” of Ronald Reagan the actor. The parable of the hagioplebe illustrates

how, in the postmodern state, the techniques of the performer, through the

revisionary deployment of the technologies of restored behavior, supersede

the absolutist claims of the sovereign. The sovereign/president is reconstituted

as the actor/president, the performative medium through which the past

speaks to the present. The actor/president mimetically reproduces a surrogate

past utilizing the techniques and technologies absorbed through years of acting

and living in movies.

The story of Martin Treptow was Reagan’s contribution to the inaugural

address. He felt that Treptow’s words had an almost cinematic quality that

“brought tears to his eyes and that he knew he could use to bring tears to the

eyes of his audience” (Cannon :). To utilize Treptow’s story, however,

it was not enough to have dug it up. It would also require burying the body

anew. Martin Treptow, it turns out, had not been interred under a white

marker at Arlington but beneath a gray granite headstone , miles away in

Bloomer, Wisconsin. When this was revealed to Reagan before the inaugural

he was undeterred. According to Ken Khachigian, who scripted the inaugural

address, “Ronald Reagan has a sense of theatre that propels him to tell storiesin their most theatrically imposing manner. […] He knew it would break up

the story to say that Treptow was buried in Wisconsin” (in Cannon : –

). On January , Martin Treptow was buried at Arlington National

Cemetery by Ronald Wilson Reagan. The old actor staged a funeral for the

old soldier, and a presidency began.

The Mimetic Body

The real skill of the practitioner lies not in skilled concealment but in the

skilled revelation of skilled concealment.

—Michael Taussig ( : )

In the foreword to a collection of his speeches published the year he

stepped down as president, Ronald Reagan downplayed the importance of the techniques of the actor in his performance as president:

Some of my critics over the years have said that I became president be-

cause I was an actor who knew how to give a good speech. I suppose

that’s not too far wrong. Because an actor knows two important things—

to be honest in what he’s doing and to be in touch with the audience.

[...] I don’t believe my speeches took me as far as they did merely be-

cause of my rhetoric or delivery. [...] What I said simply made sense to

the guy on the street, and it’s the guy on the street who elects presidents

of the United States.

And that’s exactly what happened to me. (:)

Reagan suggests that it is not the technical skills (“rhetoric or delivery”) ac-

quired as an actor that brought him success in politics. Instead, he asserts, it isthe actor’s ability “to be honest in what he’s doing and to be in touch with

the audience” in a performance that “made sense to the guy on the street”

that made him a credible performer as the president of the United States. As

in his taking up of Treptow’s corporeal diary, the actor is the medium for the

message of the imagined community through the embodied transmission of



The Age of Reagan

cultural values. The hagioplebe’s approval provides the legitimating stamp on

the performance of the Reagan presidency.

Reagan’s dismissal of the importance of acting techniques in his portrayal of

the president seems somewhat disingenuous in light of the vast resources de-

ployed in the detailed scripting, staging, and rehearsal of his presidency (see

Cannon ; Deaver ; Rogin ). Yet there is some truth to his dis-

avowal. He would often forget his lines when he ventured from his scripted

text, or invent lines that exposed the ghosts in the performative machine.

Similarly, his politically adept evasions of probing questions were often exposed

by a wink, a chuckle, a gleam in the eye that conveyed the shared knowledge

that what he was about to say contained, perhaps, only a kernel of truth, but

that he would do his best to ensure that the inspirational and entertainment

value offset its dubious veracity. This is not to deny that Reagan was capable of

feigning great honesty; more that he understood his audience better than his

critics who, catching him in lies, were shocked that most Americans didn’t

seem to care, supported him anyway, and lamented the negativity of the media.

Perhaps it is true, as Michael Lynch and David Bogen contend in the con-

text of the Iran-Contra hearings, that “[c]ynically understood, political actors

are judged on the engrossing and inspiring qualities of their performances and

not on whether the things they say are true, realistic, or acceptable as policy”

(:). Or maybe it is more relevant, or at least more provocative, to ap-praise Ronald Reagan as a magician, a sorcerer or shaman, a practitioner of

the healing arts whose real skill, in the words of Michael Taussig, “lies not in

skilled concealment but in the skilled revelation of skilled concealment.”

Faith, Taussig suggests, coexists with and may even require skepticism, and

“[m]agic is efficacious not despite the trick but on account of its exposure”

(:). Could the common knowledge, the public secret that Reagan’s

memories were often fraudulent, spun from whole cloth, invented out of thin

air, actually have contributed to his status as caretaker of cultural memory?

Were his fabricated memories instances of what Taussig finds in the shaman’s

performance of healing, “that most elusive trick of all, the magic of mimesis

itself—at heart a fraud, yet most necessary for that ceaseless surfacing of ap-

pearances we defer to as truth” (:)?

Garry Wills suggests that “the power of his appeal is the great joint confes-

sion that we cannot live with our real past, that we not only prefer but need asubstitute” (:). As a performed effigy, Ronald Reagan, the president,

proved a credible surrogate for the film celebrity, the closest contemporary

American equivalent of divine kingship, and keeper of the castle in which the

magic of mimesis most potently resides. During Reagan’s presidency the per-

formance of surrogation assumed the dimensions of a discursive formation in a

representational economy bounded only by the inventive capacities of its traf-

fic in bodies. The quick and the dead alike were fodder for the mimetic ma-

chine that powered Reagan’s political imaginary.

Epilogue

The consumption of phantom images is commonplace in the desert of the

real, since the desert answers dehydration with the excess of mirage.

—Paige Baty ( : )

I will close with a cautionary image for those of us invested in the salutary

effects of performance. To accept the presidential nomination at the Re-

publican Convention, Ronald Reagan appeared on a huge video screen sus-

pended above the podium. Massumi and Dean describe how his larger than



Tim Raphael

life screen presence “created a feeling of imperial aloofness that only high-

lighted Reagan’s bodily absence. [...] The image on the screen was repeated

countless times around the red-white-and-blue bedecked convention hall in

portraits held aloft by the adoring crowd.” Viewers all over America saw

Reagan “diffused to infinity” disappearing into “an infinitely fragmenting

video relay” (:). He was, in the infinitude of his representation, an

image without a body, a projection on a screen. And yet the image, in its

ceaseless dispersion and ever widening gyre never fully slips the orbit of the

body that spawned it. The image re-members the body in an act of “represen-

tation without reproduction,” in Peggy Phelan’s elegant formulation (:).

It is a perfect simulacra. Pure performance:

HAMLET: The body is with the kingBut the king is not with the body

The king is a thing—

ROSENCRANTZ: Of what my lord?

HAMLET: Of nothing. Bring me to him.

The rest is silence.

. Ronald and Nancy

Reagan at the Repub-

lican National Convention.

He was, in the infinitude of

his representation, an image

without a body, a projection

on a screen. (Still from vid-

eotaped television broadcast;

courtesy of Tim Raphael)



The Age of Reagan

Notes

. For questions regarding the role Reagan’s advisers may have played in negotiating the

timing of the hostage’s release see October Surprise: America’s Hostages in Iran and the Elec-

tion of Ronald Reagan by Gary Sick ().

. For an account of how this shift in analytical criteria occurred in the print and broad-

cast media see On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency by Mark Hertsgaard

().

. Lyotard, in The Postmodern Condition, writes of capitalism’s “massive subordination of

cognitive statements to the finality of the best possible performance” (:).

. Although the claim smacks of a delusional self-aggrandizement when assessing his film

career in toto, Garry Wills points out that if the test of Hollywood stardom is salaried

income, then King’s Row qualified Reagan who in , the year it was released,

earned just a little less than Errol Flynn, and more than Rita Hayworth (:).

. Many of the preceding quotations from Where’s the Rest of Me? are cited in Michael

Rogin’s Ronald Reagan, the Movie (), to which this section owes much.

. Zelig, a character portrayed by Woody Allen in the film of the same name, is a

plebeian everyman who is a screen on which others project their personal and historical

memories, fantasies, identity.

. The Treptow story was related to Reagan in a letter from Preston Hotchkiss, the chief

executive officer of the Bixby Ranch in Saugus, California (Cannon :). . Microphone checks before speeches often proved particularly adventurous, providing

infamous improvisations such as, “In three minutes we begin bombing Russia,” or,

preceding his address on the release of U.S. hostages in Beirut, “Boy, I saw Rambo lastnight. Now I know what to do the next time this happens.”

References

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Cannon, Lou

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Deaver, Michael Behind the Scenes: in which the author talks about Ronald and Nancy Reagan ...

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Avery Gordon, – . Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Phelan, Peggy

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Speaking My Mind . New York: Simon and Schuster.



Tim Raphael

Reagan, Ronald, with Richard B. Hubler

[] Where’s the Rest of Me? New York: Karz Publishers.

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Tim Raphael is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Theater at

Wesleyan University. He is also completing his dissertation in the Department of Per-

formance Studies at Northwestern University. As a director, producer, dramaturg, and

adapter, he has worked on the development of over new American plays.

reagan reading

Documents