The Right Stuff at the Wrong Time: The Space of Nostalgia in the Conservative Ascendancy

In taking account of Hollywood practice during the Reagan era, Douglas Kellner and Michael Ryan, in Camera Politica, make the point that the triumphant conservatism of the 1980s, steeped in "a yearning for redemptive leadership," used the popular arts, especially the cinema, to secure the "return of the hero," who "combines three essential components of the contemporary conservative social agenda: he is a warrior, an entrepreneur, and a patriarch" (219). Unsurprisingly, the film texts that most clearly anticipate this political turn are the violent, hyper-masculine Sylvester Stallone vehicles like the Rocky and Rambo series. But the impulse is also present, if slightly muted, in the George Lucas Star Wars trilogy, particularly The Return of the Jedi (1983), and in the several iterations of Superman (1978-2006) and The Terminator (1984-2009).

What is more interesting, however, is that some sci-fi films of this period, not conspicuously right-wing in tendency, easily assimilate to the ideology of free markets, limited government, and "traditional values" that Donald Critchlow describes in The Conservative Ascendancy. The Right Stuff (1983), Hollywood's adaptation of Tom Wolfe's non-fiction homage to America's Mercury astronauts, fits this somewhat self-contradictory paradigm almost to perfection. More specifically, the film – far more insistently than the book – overcomes the technophobia latent in social conservatism, making it possible to reconcile unemployed steel workers and born-again Christians to the high-tech culture essential to international free-market capitalism. Both rhetorically and visually, the film argues that small town heroes, spiritual cousins of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontiersmen and Hollywood's favorite cowboys, can out-fly Communists, outwit bureaucrats, and make cutting-edge technology fit their individual creative purposes.

Two considerations make it quite ironic that The Right Stuff would tacitly support a right wing political agenda. First, the film's director, Philip Kaufman, is by no means a conservative: he is well known for decidedly anti-establishment films like The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), which critiques commodity capitalism, and Henry and June (1990), which celebrates the eccentric love affair between Anais Nin and Henry Miller. Secondly, The Right Stuff has as one of its principal protagonists astronaut John Glenn, who by the 1980s was Senator John Glenn, a prospective Democratic nominee for president in 1984. So decisive seemed this second fact that Newsweek in October, 1983, put John Glenn's filmic impersonator Ed Harris on its cover, while asking, "Can a movie help make a president?"¹ Reality proved to be the exact opposite of Newweek's implied prediction. Glenn never won the nomination of his party, let alone the presidency, and during the two months following the commercial release of The Right Stuff, President Reagan improved his standing against all Democratic contenders by approximately 7%. In other words, despite Newsweek's conjectures, The Right Stuff either had no impact whatsoever upon national politics or had an impact in a direction exactly opposite to the one the news magazine had imagined.²

My analysis resolves this paradox by arguing that The Right Stuff is really more conservative than it appears, implicitly supporting the ideology of nostalgia crucial to the Reagan administration's political success. But nostalgia, we should quickly add, is a double-sided term, invested with an ambiguity that allows the film to be part of the rebirth of national pride and optimism that President Reagan referred to in his 1984 reelection campaign as "morning in America" without endorsing the more aggressive heroics of right-wing populism.

The word "nostalgia" is derived from two Greek words, nostos (home) and algia (longing), hence literally a "home-longing" or "longing for home." From this composite term, Svetlana Boyn in The Future of Nostalgia derives the two faces of nostalgic emotion, a "restorative" nostalgia, which "puts emphasis on nostos and proposes to rebuild the lost home" and a "reflective" nostalgia," which "dwells in algia, in longing and loss" (41). This first set of nostalgics, according to Boyn, "do not think of themselves as nostalgics. They think their project is about truth. This kind of nostalgia characterizes national and...