The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America

by Martin Amis

  The time had come for the crucial question, made more ticklish by the fact that De Palma's manner had softened — was bordering, indeed, on outright civility. One could now see traces of his man-management skills, his knack with actors, how he calms and charms them into a confident partisanship. Despite De Palma's indifference to characterisation, there are remarkably few bad performances in his films. 'I always felt that Brian adored me," John Travolta has said. 'He seemed to get pure joy out of watching me work.' But perhaps Travolta feels that way about everybody. De Palma is best with the stock types of lowbrow fiction, as in Carrie. Elsewhere, he is about as penetrating as the studio make-up girl. Even with an award-winning writer (Oliver Stone), an award-winning star (Al Pacino), and an unlimited canvas ($zz million and three hours plus of screen time), De Palma showed no inkling of human complexity: Scarf ace might as well have been called Shitface for all the subtlety he applied to the monotonous turpitude of Tony Montana.

  Girding myself, I asked De Palma why his films made no sense. He bounced back with some eagerness, explaining that Hitchcock was illogical too and that, besides, life didn't make any sense either. 'Hitchcock did it all the time! Didn't anyone look at the corpse in Vertigo? In Blowout the illogic was immense — but it was in Watergate too! I'm not interested in being Agatha Christie! Life is not like a crossword puzzle! I trust my instinct and emotion! I go with that!'‘

  Brian De Palma once described, with typical recklessness, his notion of an ideal viewership: 'I like a real street audience — people who talk during and at a movie, a very unsophisticated Forty-Second Street crowd.' He is right to think that he has an affinity with these cineasts, who have trouble distinguishing filmic life from the real thing. De Palma movies depend, not on a suspension of disbelief, but on a suspension of intelligence such as the Forty-Second Street crowd have already made before they come jabbering into the stalls. Quite simply, you cannot watch his films twice. Reinspect them on video (on the small screen with, the lights up, with the sharply reduced affect) and they disintegrate into strident chaos. Niggling doubts become farcical certainties. Where? When? How? Why? There's hardly a sequitur in sight.

  The illogicality, the reality-blurring, the media-borne cretini-sation of modern life is indeed a great theme, and all De Palma's major contemporaries are on to it. De Paíma is on to it too, but in a different way. He abets and exemplifies it, passively. In the conception of his films De Palma has half-a-dozen big scenes that he knows how to shoot. How he gets from one to the other is a matter of indifference. On some level he realises that the ignorant will not care or notice, and that the over-informed will mistake his wantonness for something else.

  De Palma is regarded as an intellectual. Now it clearly isn't hard to come by such a reputation in the film world, particularly among the present generation of movie-makers. Spielberg, the most popular, is bright and articulate; but his idea of intellection is to skip an hour's TV. And Scorsese, the most brilliant (and the most prescient), is a giggling mute. De Palma isn't an intellectual, though his films, like his conversation, have a patina of smartness. He isn't a cynic either, nor is he the cheerful charlatan I had geared myself to expect. Is he a 'master' (as critics on both sides of the Atlantic claim), or is he a moron? He has no middlebrow following: his fans are to be found either in the street or in the screening-room. Occupying an area rich in double-think, De Palma is simply the innocent beneficiary of a cultural joke. It is an achievement of a kind, to fashion an art that appeals to the purist, the hooligan, and nobody else.

  Vanity Fair 1984

  Here's Ronnie: On the Road with Reagan

  Ronald Reagan's personal jet, which goes by the name of Free Enterprise II, flew in late for a Reagan Rally at the Transient Terminal of El Paso Airport, Texas. Practically everyone in the waiting crowd was either a journalist, a secret-serviceman, or a delegate, one of Reagan's local 'people'. We were all wearing prominent name-tags, something that Americans especially like doing. I strolled among the Skips and Dexters, the Lavernes and Francines, admiring all the bulging Wranglers and stretched stretch-slacks. This felt like Reagan Country all right, where everything is big and fat and fine. This is where you feel slightly homosexual and left-wing if you don't weigh twenty-five stone.

  The blue-jodhpurred Tijuana band fell silent as Reagan climbed up on to the podium. 'Doesn't move like an old man,' I thought to myself; and his hair can't be a day over forty-five. Pretty Nancy Reagan sat down beside her husband. As I was soon to learn, her adoring, damp-eyed expression never changes when she is in public. Bathed in Ronnie's aura, she always looks like Bambi being reunited with her parents. Reagan sat in modest silence as a local Republican bigwig presented him with a pair of El Paso cowboy spurs to go with his 1976 El Paso cowboy boots. Then it happened: 'Ladies and gentlemen! The next President of the United States!' And with a bashful shrug ex-Governor Ronald Reagan stepped up to the lectern.

  'You know, some funny things happen to you on the campaign trail,' Reagan mused into the mike. 'Not so long back a little boy came up to me — he must have been, why, no more than eleven or twelve years of age. He looked up at me and he said, "Mister, you're pretty old." (Forgiving laughter as Reagan cleverly defuses the age issue.) "What was it like when you were a boy?" (Long, wry pause.) And I said... "Well, son. When I was a little boy, America was the strongest country in the world. (Applause and cheers.) When I was a little boy, every working American could expect to buy his own home. (Applause.) When I was a little boy, gasoline was twenty-eight cents a gallon." (Cheers.) ... The little boy looked up at me and he said, "Hey, mister. You ain't so old. Things were like that when I was a little boy too.'" (Laughter, applause, cheers and whoops.)

  Ronald Reagan is quite right. Some funny things do happen to you on the campaign trail.

  Lined up with forty swearing pressmen over the chaotic trench of a hotel reception desk in Fort Worth, Texas, I noticed that the two-faced illuminated sign in the courtyard said, on one side, holiday inn - welcome cov mrs reagan, and, on the other, STEAK AND SHRIMP SPECIAL $6.95.

  In the Chattanooga Room of the Opryland Hotel (z8oo Opryland Drive, Nashville, Tennessee), Governor and Mrs Reagan hosted a $25o-a-plate fund-raising dinner. Ronnie, Nancy and half-a-dozen local dignitaries sat on a raised dais in front of metallic blue drapes. Over cocktails, the entire company swore allegiance to the flag, then listened with heads bowed to the pre-prandial prayer: 'Help us, God, to resolve our economic difficulties', and so on.

  In the foyer restroom of the Holiday Inn, Midland, Texas, the muzak was playing 'My Way'. As I came out into the hall, where Reagan would soon delight an expectant crowd, the Robert E. Lee High School Brass Band was playing 'Hot Stuff". When the applause died after Reagan's speech, the band played 'I Wish I Was in Dixie'.

  As the campaign Braniff jet took off from El Paso, Nancy Reagan rolled an orange down the aisle from the first-class section (where, I imagined, Ronnie was either asleep or completing a course of vitamin injections) to the back of the plane, where the news-cameramen shouted and laughed. Their laughter, like so much American laughter, did not express high spirits or amusement but a willed raucousness. As the plane landed in Dallas, the news-cameramen rolled the orange back to Nancy in the nose. It was a ritual. Half-way through the flight, Nancy1 came by with some chocolates, including one for your reporter. She still looked moist and trusting, even though a violent lightning storm coruscated the evening sky, and Ronnie was at least thirty feet from her side.

  Reagan's stump speech is by now as pat and unvarying as his story about the twelve-year-old boy — an intro which alternates with the tale of how Ronald and Nancy were once mistaken for Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. Both anecdotes serve to mellow the audience for the honest sagacities to come.

  Make America strong again. We don't want our soldiers on food stamps. 'Carter wants to preserve the status quo — that's Latin for the mess we're in.' Tackle inflation by 30 per cent tax cuts over three years (an idea which, incidentally, alarms even the m
ost reactionary economists). Cut federal spending. Less government! We are not energy-profligate: we are an energy-rich nation. Scrap the Department of Energy. Nukes are good. Abortion-on-demand is bad (reagan is pro-life, say several hand-held posters). 'Just because you can't keep guns from criminals, why keep them from honest people?' Able-bodied people on welfare should be put to work on 'useful' community projects. He did it in California — he can do it here. No more Taiwans! No more Vietnams! Carter is afraid that nobody will like us. Reagan doesn't care whether people will like us. He just wants people to respect us!

  It is all delivered with mechanical verve, and with only a few stumbles and slips of the tongue — 'welfare', for instance, has a habit of getting mixed up with 'windfall'. You watch and listen to Ronald Reagan much as you do to Jimmy Carter, marvelling at their spectacular uneasiness in the realm of ideas, language and conviction. As front-runners, all they have to do is avoid, or minimise, the horrendous gaffes that seem ever ready to spring from their mouths. It is as if they can only just stop themselves from yelling out — 'I hate blacks!' or 'Who is Anwar Sadat?' Reagan is justly famous for his howlers, blind spots, mangled statistics and wishful inaccuracies. Each time he goes up to speak, you sense that the pollsters are reaching for their telephones, the aides for their aspirins.

  Reagan likes to end his sessions with a bit of down-home give-and-take with his audience — 'You, the American people'. He points to each raised hand with a jerk of hip and shoulder, like a man drawing six-guns, and he listens to each question with his head shyly inclined. The more personal the question, the more he enjoys his own reply. 'Of all the people in America, sir, why you for President?' Reagan grins. 'Well, I'm not smart enough to tell a lie.' Laughter, applause. 'But why do you want it, sir?' Reagan flexes his worn, snipped, tucked, mottled face. "This country needs a good Republican and I feel I can do the job. Why? I'm happy. I'm feeling good.' Here he turns. 'And I have Nancy to tuck me up at night.' Laughter, applause, hats in the air. Right on! Hot damn.' You got it!

  Then you realise: they love this actor. And I don't mean 'ex-actor'. I mean actor. He would have been one anyway, with or without Hollywood. He may not be smart, but there is plenty of cunning in him; and his ambitions are as tangled and cumbrous as anyone else's. 'I am one of you' is his boast, and the American people blush at his flattery. Watching him talk, his off-centred smile, his frown of concentration, his chest-swelling affirmations, you feel moved in that reluctant way you feel moved by bad art — like coming out of Kramer versus Kramer, denouncing the film with tears drying on your cheeks. Reagan is an affable old ham, no question. He would make a good head waiter, a good 6utlins redcoat, a good host for New Faces. But would he make a good leader of the free world?

  This is serious. How did it happen?

  Reagan grew up in respectable poverty in rural Illinois, the second son of stoical Presbyterian parents. His father Jack worked in a shoe shop; his mother Nelle worked in a dress shop. During the early years of the Depression, the young Ronald attended little-known Eureka College, a Christian Church establishment near Peoria; he moonlighted to supplement his modest scholarship. Reaganites often boast that their man is the only candidate with a degree in economics. Reagan himself sometimes cautiously mentions this fact too. But he was no scholar, to put it mildly (even today his reading consists entirely of the Bible, Reader's Digest and assorted press-clippings). When Eureka gave him an honorary degree in 1957, Reagan cracked, 'I always figured the first one you gave me was honorary.’

  Eureka saw the emergence of the early radical vein in Reagan's political thinking - if that isn't too exalted a phrase for the gruff simplicities he now trades in. When there was talk of a cut-back in the academic courses offered by the college, Reagan organised a student strike. Like his father, Reagan was at this time a faithful devotee or Roosevelt and the New Deal. (He remains an admirer or Roosevelt — and of Ike and Coolidge, partly because they didn't work too hard. 'Show me an executive who works all the time', Reagan is fond of saying, 'and I'll show you a bad executive.') Reagan continued to be a registered Democrat well into his forties. Towards the end of his Hollywood heyday Reagan led another successful strike: as president of the radical Screen Actors Guild. And during the days of the McCarthy witch hunts, he made a tough, shrewd stand against the Committee of Un-American Activities.

  Reagan worked his way into films through sportscasting (for the World of Chiropractic station in Des Monies, Iowa) and through his own natural good fortune. He signed for Warner Brothers in 1937, at the age of twenty-six. He made about sixty films. They include Cowboy from Brooklyn, An Angel from Texas, Sergeant Murphy, Swing Your Lady, Brother Rat, Brother Rat and a Baby, Bedtime for Bonzo (about a baby chimp: Reagan refused to star in the sequel, Bonzo Goes To College — 'Who could believe a chimp could go to college? Lacked credibility,' said Reagan sternly), Hellcats of the Navy, She's Working Her Way Through College, The Winning Team, Law and Order, All American. Towards the end of his career Reagan's looks cragged up and he started playing villains. It was time to quit.

  During the war Reagan served as a captain with the US Air Force, assigned mainly to the production of training films. In 1948 his eight-year marriage to actress Jane Wyman ended. Her career was just taking off at this point, with The Lost Weekend (1945); Reagan was her second husband and she went on to have two more. Reagan was luckier. In 1952 he married another of his leading ladies, Nancy Davis. They met through SAG. Nancy was accused of Un-American Activities and turned to her Guild President for help. It looks as though Nancy might have turned Reagan rightwards, perhaps simply by re-sanctifying the domestic verities. She is well known to be the woman behind the man, but her contribution seems to involve nothing more sinister than tireless idolatry. There is no hint, as yet, of the manipulative power that Rosalyn Carter is said to exercise over the wretched Jimmy.

  At this point Reagan was freelancing with several studios, playing steadily smaller and less attractive parts. His career was temporarily revived by television. After a three-year stint as host of the 'Death Valley Days' Western anthology series, Reagan worked for eight years as MC and occasional guest-star for 'General Electrics Theatre of the Air'. To earn his annual $125,000 he was also obliged to tour the country giving uplift lectures to GE employees. Reagan's high-point was his televised speech in praise of GE's latest product, the nuclear submarine. A trio of rich businessmen were attracted by the way Ronnie carried himself on screen. With their backing, Reagan threw himself into Goldwater's disastrous presidential bid against Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Showing his usual talent for survival, Reagan came through the debacle and in 1966 emerged blinking into the light - as Governor of California.

  'I'll run on my record,' says Reagan these days, and points with pride to his achievements as two-term Governor of the richest state in the Union. 'In real terms California is the eighth richest nation in the world,' he points out, failing to add that California never had much in the way of foreign policy. 'When I took office in Sacramento, California was like America is now: bankrupt!' He fixed things there, he claims, and 'I believe I can do all that on the national level too.’

  How good is Reagan's record? True, Reagan was Governor for eight years, and California was still there when he left. But one thing is clear: Reagan's record is nothing like as good as he keeps saying it is. His chief contentions are that he cut taxes, reined in a profligate government, and reformed welfare. The facts are as follows. Reagan doubled the per capita tax burden — $244 to $488 — and then softened the blow with tax rebates and credits. Similarly, there were 158,404 government employees when he took office and 203,548 when he left. As for the crucial issue of welfare, Reagan says he saved $2 billion with his reforms, turned a 40,000-a-month increase in recipients into an 8,000 decrease, and raised benefits for the 'truly needy'. Several legislators now maintain that the real saving was closer to $40 million. The welfare load was reduced, willy-nilly, by the economic boom, with parallel effects nationwide. And the benefits Reagan c
laims to have increased had been static since 1958. They rose - after liberal federal pressure — two years behind the deadline mandated by Congress. Reagan stonewalled with a series of court actions, and Washington remained conveniently lax. 'I remember it very well,' says Elliot Richardson, who was Nixon's Secretary for Health, Education and Welfare at the time: 'It was made quite clear to me that we should be nice to Reagan. The 1972 election was coming up and Nixon didn't want to upset him.’

  Statistics, of course, are malleable — as Reagan himself has frequently demonstrated. But his governmental style is clear enough. Despite liberal aberrations like ecological control bills, conjugal visits for prison inmates, and a wide-open abortion law (which he now thinks of as his worst legacy), Reagan in California showed steady indifference to the poor, the sick, the dissident — and to the tragic mess of the inner cities. The cities are not his base, as he well knows. And while Reagan is no racist (his remark about 'bucks' in welfare queues can be matched by Carter's gaffe about 'ethnic purity'), he has made no progress whatever in winning the confidence of the blacks. As black leader Aaron Henry said recently, 'With him, any black that can crawl will be finding a place somewhere to vote against him.' The question of Reagan's age may have disappeared as an issue; but his ideas still look very elderly. He is a throw-back, and an undistinguished one.

  Americans are, perforce, getting used to the idea of President Reagan. Wary at first, big business is getting to like him; he is even finding a base in the trade unions. As this piece goes to press, Reagan is ten percentage points ahead in the polls. The force of John Anderson's independent candidacy remains unpredictable: so does John Anderson. As Gore Vidal has pointed out: 'Compared to Carter and Reagan, Anderson looks like Lincoln. Compared to Lincoln, he looks like Anderson.' At this stage of things, ex-President Gerald Ford is being held up as a Bismarck, a Napoleon, an Alexander. The year 1980 has seen the unchallenged ascendancy of the politics of faute de mieux. If Reagan wins this autumn, we will all know where to put the blame: on the bumbling, canting presidency of Jimmy Carter. Carter gave us Tehran. He gave us Afghanistan. He may yet give us President Ronald Reagan.