posted on 2023-08-30, 15:17authored byDouglas E. Forster
As in so many other areas of American society, the political legacy of Ronald
Reagan had an imposing presence in many contemporary American films,
particularly between 1980 and 2000. Six films, which collectively represent the
spectrum of Reaganism’s most popular tropes, demonstrate quite compellingly
that in celebrating nostalgically the blissful pleasantries of family stability and
social order so essential to Reagan’s political philosophy, an unsettling and
unsatisfying mythology has been created about a period in which many
Americans were acutely aware that something was missing, even if they could
not pinpoint it at the time. This leads the critical viewer to largely
unacknowledged subtexts in all six films that begin to reveal the contradictions,
incoherencies, and paradoxes rooted in popular Reaganesque portrayals.
Utilising a detailed qualitative case study methodology, this thesis
incorporates theoretical foundations that expand upon Fairclough’s pathbreaking
research on media discourse and Todorov’s broadly articulated
framework of fantasy in order to explore: 1) Which elements of Fairclough’s
framework for critical discourse analysis can be applied to explore the
discursive structures within these American fantasy films? 2) In how far do the
films follow Reaganist concepts of a ‘new’ American society? 3) In how far do
notions of the ‘fantastic’ and postmodern concepts break with common patterns
of Reaganism reflected in these films? While many critics rightly cite the
numerous elements in these films that appear to reinforce fundamental message
points underlying Reaganism, this study demonstrates how the films’ characters
and plot lines also serve to reveal the inherent and irreconcilable incoherence of
the sociopolitical and sociocultural tenets of Reaganism.