The President Electric: Ronald Reagan and the Politics of Performance

CHAPTER FOUR: MOVING PICTURES

CHAPTER FOUR Moving Pictures You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? Then who the hell else are you talkin’ to? You talkin’ to me? Well I’m the only one here. Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to? —Travis Bickle, Taxi Driver On 30 March 1981, John Hinckley Jr. ‹red six “Devastator” bullets from a .22 caliber pistol at the president of the United States. Unlike John Wilkes Booth, who after shooting Abraham Lincoln, leaped to the stage of Ford’s Theater crying “Sic semper tyrannis” (Thus always to tyrants), no dramatic political declaration accompanied Hinckley’s act. According to Hinckley, he did it for love . . . and for the movies. He did not shoot 120 Photo: John Hinckley Jr. sits on fence wall in front of the White House. The picture is undated but believed to have been taken less than a year prior to his attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan in 1981. Photo © Bettman/Corbis. [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.] Ronald Reagan because he was the president, but because he was acting out the plot of a movie, Taxi Driver, in which Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro) bids to win the heart of Iris (Jodie Foster), a twelve-year-old prostitute, by attempting to assassinate a political candidate. In a letter to the New York Times, Hinckley clari‹ed his homage: “The shooting outside the Washington Hilton Hotel was the greatest love offering in the history of the world. I sacri‹ced myself and committed the ultimate crime in hopes of winning the heart of a girl.”1 Hinckley took his cue for action and romance from the movies. The rest of us entered the frame by watching the footage of the shooting repeatedly on television and parsing its effects on radio talk shows. As with most of the events that touch our lives, we, like Hinckley, sought understanding through the media that constitute the circuit of electronically relayed stories and images by which we come to know our world and take action in it. When Hinckley told a reporter from Newsweek that assassination attempts are rarely politically motivated, he appeared to con‹rm the consensus view that his actions stemmed from ulterior motives. But the reason Hinckley’s act was dif‹cult to explain in political terms is because the practice of politics in the Age of Reagan bears only a glancing resemblance to any historically recognizable theory of political engagement. Both Reagan and his would-be assassin were products of an electronically massmediated public sphere that has rede‹ned the basis of political representation in the United States. The right to representation, “once a revolutionary insistence in the articulation of an American self,” observed cultural critic Paige Baty, “has been translated under conditions of normative mass mediation into the ‘right to be as representation.’”2 To be in a society saturated with representation is to circulate through the virtual public sphere that forms the crucible of representation for the personal and political subject alike. From this perspective Hinckley’s seemingly apolitical motive for assassination exempli‹es the dominant mode of political engagement at a time when the media that produced both Hinckley ’s fantasy and Reagan’s presidency transformed the way Americans imagine, think about, and practice politics. When Hinckley dropped out of college in 1976 and moved to Los Angeles to become a songwriter he entered the fraternity Ronald Reagan had joined forty years earlier. Exiles from the quotidian world of middle AmerMoving Pictures / 121 ica, these modern-day Pilgrims were chasing a new American dream as far removed from Plymouth Rock as they could travel and still remain within the promised land. Here, in a barren desert crafted into a lush oasis, they each received a new education be‹tting their arti‹cial paradise. While in Hollywood, Hinckley saw Taxi Driver at least ‹fteen times. His strategy for wooing Jodie Foster was not, however, simply a slavish imitation of Travis Bickle’s. It was, as Richard Schechner has written of all performance, “repetition with revision.”3 Before Iris, Travis Bickle is drawn to Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a political campaign worker who rejects him after he takes her to see a pornographic ‹lm. To make amends for the ‹lm’s graphic depiction of his desire for Betsy, Bickle decides to assassinate the candidate she works for. Recombining the plot elements...