Publication: Daedalus
Publication Date: 22-SEP-06
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Doniger, Wendy
Article Excerpt
In both real life and mythology, people set out to become other people but, through a kind of triple cross (1) or double-back, end up as themselves, masquerading as other people who turn out to be masquerading as them. Sometimes entire ethnicities indulge in this self-imitation. The inhabitants of places known for their ethnic charm, where tourism has become a major industry, consciously exaggerate their own stereotypes to please the visitors: the British lay on the 'ye olde' with a shovel, the Irish their blarney, the Parisians their disdain for tourists. The politics of colonialism produced another, more serious sort of self-parody, in this case perhaps unconscious: Edward Said wrote of "the paradox of an Arab regarding himself as an 'Arab' of the sort put out by Hollywood. The modern Orient, in short, participates in its own Orientalizing." (2) Orientalism, like other forms of political domination, has also inspired what James Scott has taught us to recognize as the arts of resistance, the weapons of the weak, (3) which include a kind of apparent self-mockery that actually mocks the mockers. There are so many examples, but in this essay I will consider just those in two broad categories: politics and gender.
Individuals are often driven to self-impersonation through the pressure of public expectations. The sorts of public figures who are nowadays called icons are often famous for nothing but being famous. Politicians, in particular, are great self-imitators. Hillary Rodham Clinton once reported: "Suddenly a woman came up to me. 'You sure look like Hillary Clinton,' she said. 'So I'm told,' I answered." (4) And when an actor actually becomes a politician the felonies are compounded. Consider the self-imitation of film actors who play the parts of politicians who then become actors.
When Ronald Reagan auditioned for the role of the president of the United States in the 1960 Broadway production of Gore Vidal's play "The Best Man," about a presidential election, Vidal turned him down because he didn't think Reagan would be believable as the president. When asked about this in 2002, Vidal said, "Reagan was a first-rate actor as a President." (5)
Indeed he was. Lou Cannon, in his aptly named biography, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, tells how, at the June 6, 1984, celebrations on Omaha Beach, commemorating the Normandy invasion, Reagan, who had never been outside of the United States during World War II, "gave the impression of returning to Normandy," to the utter mystification of the other world leaders, including Queen Elizabeth II of Britain, Queen Beatrix I of the Netherlands, and Francois Mitterand, who had actually been captured by the Germans and escaped from a POW camp. (In fact, more recent evidence of Mitterand's connection with Vichy in the early days of World War II indicates that he, too, could turn and turn about.)
Reagan had conjured up this imaginary war record, the film actor playing the part of a real actor in history. Cannon explains how it happened:
Films are real to Reagan. His performance in Normandy recalled the experiences of Captain Reagan--an actor who wore his uniform to work in Culver City, played the lead role in This Is the Army and participated in a top-secret project used to train U.S. bombing crews for their destructive raids on Tokyo. As Reagan tells the story, "Our special effects men--Hollywood geniuses in uniform--built a complete miniature of Tokyo" (6) on a sound stage, above which they rigged a crane and camera mount. They then photographed the miniature, showing the targets as they would look from planes flying at different altitudes and speeds under varying weather conditions. Reagan was the narrator, guiding pilots onto their targets. (7)
This war game, the antecedent of the computer games that children play, enabled pilots, real pilots, to practice their bomb runs on Tokyo--real bomb runs that Hollywood would then reenact in fictionalized films like Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944). Thus, as Garry Wills argued, Reagan's war service was "based on the principled defense of faking things." (8)
This was Reagan's war. As he told Landon Parvin, "Maybe I had seen too many war movies, the heroics of which I sometimes confused with real life." (9) When Oliver North was exposed and put on trial, Reagan's comment was, "It's going to make a great movie." (10) As an actor, he had helped real fighter pilots bomb a fake Tokyo; as an actor pretending to be a president, walking on a real battlefield with a real war veteran who had become president of France, Reagan could not distinguish his performance in films about World War II from his (nonexistent) performance in World War II. He was narrating the plot of a war film he'd starred in, which--like so much of what passed for his memory--was more real to him than reality, so much simpler, so much more flattering to his vanity. (11)
Vidal always referred to Reagan as "our acting President," (12) which became the title of a book about Reagan in which the following anecdote appears: "His entry into politics inspired a famous utterance by his former studio boss Jack Warner. When told that Reagan was running for governor of California, Warner, always quick to recognize a casting blunder, protested, 'No, no! Jimmy Stewart for governor, Ronald Reagan for best friend.'" (13)
But something even more invidious was accomplished by Reagan's impersonation of a president. The masking and unmasking went in both directions, finally exposing not just Reagan but the part he was playing. Because of Reagan, as David Thompson put it, "The fraudulence of the Presidency was revealed so that the office could never quite be honored again." In retrospect, we saw that other glamorous presidents, like Kennedy, had also been impersonating presidents. And F.D.R.? And Lincoln? Why was the character in The Truman Show (about a person whose life is entirely encased within a television serial that he mistakes for real life) named after a president--indeed, a president famous for his blunt honesty and lack of pretensions?
Arnold Schwarzenegger, governor of California, has been well trained for the part: he starred in three self-imitation movies (Total Recall, True Lies, and The Sixth Day). Many have sighed in relief at the knowledge that, born in Austria, he can't be president. But here's...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.
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