The Body Electric GE, TV, and the Reagan Brand Tim Raphael
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The Body Electric GE, TV, and the Reagan Brand Tim Raphael There’s no business like show business. —Irving Berlin (1946) Ronald Reagan first appeared at the 1984 Republican National Convention on a screen above a stage. From that stage, astride a podium flanked by two American flags, Nancy Reagan raised her eyes to greet the image that dwarfed her. As she turned her notorious gaze upon his celebrated images she extended both her arms upward towards the screen. Rising to their feet Tim Raphael is a theatre director and performance historian, who, as a director, producer, drama- turge, and adapter, has developed over 40 new American plays. He has taught theatre and performance studies at Wesleyan University, Dartmouth College, Northwestern University, Ursinus College, Rutgers- Newark, and the Universidade Aberta in Lisbon, Portugal. He currently teaches at Georgetown University. Recent publications include an experiment in performative writing, published in Oxford Magazine, and an article in a special issue of Transformations documenting his work with students at Rutgers-Newark on a multimedia performance piece devised from recent immigrant narratives. Previous articles on Ronald Reagan have appeared in TDR and Theatre Journal. His book Ronald Reagan: The President Electric is at press with the University of Michigan Press. TDR: The Drama Review 53:2 (T202) Summer 2009. ©2009 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 113 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.2.113 by guest on 25 September 2021 beneath and behind her, Reagan’s delegates held his portrait aloft. Trimmed in the colors of the flag, the convention hall reverberated with their adoration. The rest of us watched him, smiling and waving, on television. We watched as the crowd waved back, while he, “diffused to infinity,” disappeared into “an infinitely fragmenting video relay” (Massumi and Dean 1994:158). We watched our televisions as the cameras watched the conventioneers watch Nancy watch the screen, and it was easy to conclude that Ronald Reagan had indeed become, in Michael Rogin’s apt phrase, “the image that has fixed our gaze” (1987:3). But why were we watchingthis man? What were the qualities he possessed that enabled him to fix our gaze and define our viewing habits? And why did we keep watching as he became—in the infinitude of his representation— an image without a body, a projection on a screen? The theatrical line-of-business from which Reagan’s image derives its lineage is that of the somnipractor—Garry Wills’s term for all the product salesmen who serve as “the arrangers of other’s dreams” (1988:126). Reagan’s re-nomination was a foregone conclusion. His image on the giant video screen was a trailer for the 18-minute film homage to Reagan’s first term that premiered later at the convention, which was itself a preview for an expanded 30-minute “documentary” version broadcast by all three networks. Then there were the “Morning Again in America” and “America is Back” campaign commercials that began airing shortly thereafter. The cumulative effect evoked Guy Debord’s insight that the image had become the final form of commodity reification ([1970] 1995). The convention itself functioned more as a trade show than a coronation. Reagan’s performance was a product launch designed to dazzle the gathered delegates and the consumers watching on TV with the new media campaign for the revamped product line that would be marketed through the Reagan brand. The Reagan presidency was coterminous with a new theory of corporate management that held that the primary focus of an increasingly postindustrial capitalism was no longer the production of material goods but images of their brands. Journalist Naomi Klein (2002) identifies Reagan’s final year in office as the defining moment in this shift in the core business of corporations, when Philip Morris purchased Kraft for $12.6 billion—six times Kraft’s paper value. The premium Philip Morris paid to acquire Kraft’s brand was not a function of its use value; it was the cost of the word “Kraft.” For tobacco-tainted Philip Morris the symbolic value of Kraft’s brand image, it appeared, had a significantly higher value than all of Kraft’s fungible assets put together. The disparity between Kraft’s net worth and the price it fetched at market, like the disparity between popular support for Reagan and his policies, was a function of the mimetic value of the brand—an assessment predicated on the magical capacity of what Walter Benjamin termed “the controllable and transferable image” to increase the commercial worth of any product to which it was attached (1968:247). Addressing the U.S. Association of National Advertisers that same year, the chairman of the global advertising firm of Ogilvy & Mather preached the new gospel: competing in a commodity marketplace “solely on price, promotion, and trade deals, all of which can easily be duplicated by competition” was a sucker’s game (in Klein 2002:7–8). The most effective means of increasing corporate value was branding. In the new calculus of the society of the spectacle, brand promotion was no longer simply a sales strategy but an equity investment. Images of brands were ubiquitous in the 1980s. Brand logos emerged from the inside of clothing to advertise the wearer’s status and the company’s image. Corporate sponsorship branded the built environment from cityscapes to sports stadiums, cultural venues to schools. In the music industry, concert tours were opportunities for what the somnipractors termed “live-action advertising,” and MTV became the paradigm for fully branded media integration. In the movie business, product placement in films was the tip of the iceberg in an industry that increasingly conceptualized the films themselves as branded media properties. Disney, Figure 1. (previous page) “The President Electric.” Ronald Reagan kicks off the branding campaign at the 1984 Republican Convention. (©Bettman/Corbis) TimRaphael 114 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.2.113 by guest on 25 September 2021 the original mega-brand, launched the first brand superstore, branded holidays, and built the ultimate in brand penetration, Celebration, Florida, the first branded town. In sports Michael Jordan established himself as the first celebrity brand.1 And in politics there was Ronald Reagan. By the time he became president there were only a handful of people whose image had circu- lated for as long as or as widely through the communications media, and the Reagan brand was an unparalleled political asset. In the new branded marketplace of the 1980s, Ronald Reagan was the uber-brand. The Body Electric The efficacy of political branding in the United States during the 1980s resulted from the systematic application of the techne¯—the techniques and technologies—of electronic media to time-tested practices linking performance forms and players to political movements and audiences. Politics in the United States has always been a performance art. The first nation to be conceived without historical precedent or pre-existing script, from the outset the task of creating a new nation was intertwined with the process of expressing a persuasive rationale for its existence. As a consequence, the founding documents and rituals of the United States express a shared perception of the unprecedented task of performatively enacting a legitimate and authoritative basis for revolution. Once independence was achieved it was generally understood that in a nation without a king new modes of political authority would need to be constituted for governance. From the beginning the figures who would thrive on the American political stage believed that their status as social actors was inextricably linked to the techne¯ of the theatrical stage, and that proficiency in the elocutionary arts constituted their political capital. Despite a residual antitheatrical prejudice inherited from their Puritan ancestors, American Patriots understood their task in theatrical terms, and emphasized the arts of political rhetoric, oratory, and stagecraft as much as those of political science, philosophy, and statecraft. The utopian social and theological promise of “America” was, in fact, often depicted by Republicans through the trope of the nation as a stage, “designed by Providence,” as John Adams theatrically proclaimed, “on which Man was to make his true figure” ([1765] 1964:282). The theatre to which Adams referred is of course history and not a “real” theatre. Yet the “true figure,” the figuregiven America and its people, was understood by the founders to signify both a historical destiny and a contingent identity. The new national subject was conceived as a role, one that needed to be individually and collectively enacted in order for the national mission to be realized. A century later, determined to restore the nation to its divinely ordained destiny as an Anglo- Saxon republic, John Wilkes Booth, in his melodramatic staging of Abraham Lincoln’s assassina- tion from the balcony of Ford’s Theater, embodied a related understanding of the indissoluble link between the cultural and the political actor. Booth’s action reflected a widespread belief— shared by Lincoln and other avid theatregoers of the 19th century—that the stage was an im- portant forum for negotiating the identity of America and Americans. Reagan’s image on the screen above a stage, like his career prior to politics, reflects the transition from the stage to the screen as the dominant venue for mediating national identity in the 20th century. It also evokes the genealogy of the body electric. “I sing the body electric,” Walt Whitman rhapsodized in Leaves of Grass, extolling the Brand Reagan the and TV, GE, capacity of the human body to electrify others, to “charge them full with the charge of the soul” ([1855] 1900:81).