To look at the 1980s is to look at a decade that is fundamental in understanding not only what neoliberalism has accomplished in the economic and social sphere, but how it has profoundly altered the structure of thought and the character (Sennett 2011) of individuals.
The 1970s marked the beginning of a historical era in which the discourse on democracy, public values, and the common good came crashing to the ground. First, Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, and then Ronald Reagan in the United States—both hardline advocates of market fundamentalism—announced that there was no such thing as society and that government was the problem, not the solution. The neoliberal policies implemented by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s defended laissez-faire capitalism almost theologically and were responsible for cuts in social programs, defense of the business class, deregulation of the financial sector, and a government reduced domestically but aggressive in external policies—measures that became known as “Reaganomics” (Klein 2007).
Former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan took advantage of the ‘American Freedom’ speech to criticize social and economic programs that were targeted for workers and poor citizens, arguing that a country’s prosperity depended on corporate health […]. Successive cuts in social programs aimed at a needy population walked alongside internationally negotiated free trade agreements to abolish restrictions on the expansion of international markets. (58)
The so-called “trickle-down economics” imposed by Reagan propelled the transaction to “hypercapitalism” (Kleinknecht, xi), a period in which self-interest and profit-seeking excused a strong undermining of human values. The sense of community, in which collective issues had been central, gave way to an era of empowered corporations that took their mission to the political stage and virtually disenfranchised people and their participation in the public life.
The American theater did not go unscathed in this process since Reaganism spread in several areas of life. The commercial theater largely reflected the optimism and prosperity voiced by the Great Communicator, Ronald Reagan, in his speeches about the economic and social situation of the country. On the stages were spectacles that favored superstructure productions involving special effects, big settings, songs, and dances.1
Such spectacles and the underlying culture from which they arose tended to exclude from public debate important social issues like poverty, whether on or off stage (Woods 1993). However, looking at the historiography of the American theater, especially when “brushing history against the grain,” using Walter Benjamin’s aphorism, is a revealing exercise. There were playwrights who sought to expose the dynamics behind the optimistic veil of Reagan’s speech. Arthur Miller, David Mamet, Paula Vogel, and Tony Kushner2 remained attentive to the farcical condition of that decade and to the impacts later felt.
In order to make a critique of what was on and off the stages, Arthur Miller, always attuned to the issues of his time, resorted to a familiar theme: the American Dream. Faith in individualism and in materialism emerged again as a fierce primary social force in the Reagan era, filled with a rhetoric of boundless dreams. “Make America Great Again,” the actor-turned-politician’s slogan recently reused by President Donald Trump, showed optimism and confidence in the possibility of slipping free from limitations altogether. This was, after all, a time in which the political orthodoxy absolved individuals of responsibility to and for society. In the words of political theorist Sheldon Wolin (217), the Reagan era was marked by “a political culture in which lying was merely one component in a larger pattern wherein untruthfulness, make-believe, and actuality were seamlessly woven.”
This is exactly what fuels the plot of The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, where Miller masterfully entwines this content with a fascinating formal structure. Miller described Mt. Morgan as “a fluid play which moves in and out of the character’s memory, a bit like ‘Salesman’. It’s very idiotic, almost farcical at times, but it is riding over a tragic tide” (Bigsby, 368). Initially rejected by the Manhattan Theatre Club and by the Seattle Repertory Theatre, Mt. Morgan—on which Miller worked for more than a decade—premiered in 1991 in London. Its U.S. premiere occurred at Williamstown in 1996 and Miller revised it for Broadway in 1998. This essay will analyze how Reaganism is present in the play and how Miller’s critique is articulated in both form and content, pointing out some differences between the two versions, but it is with the revised version—which Miller called definitive—that the analysis is made.
For years now commentators have had lots of fun with Reagan’s inability to distinguish movies he had seen from actual events in which he had participated, but in this as in so much else he was representative of a common perplexity when so much of a person’s experience comes at him through the acting art. (2001, 3)
Miller’s critique of the acting art in politics—the idea of the politician as a mere performer—has been remarkable. In his 2001 Jefferson Lecture, On Politics and the Art of Acting, delivered before an audience of 2500 people, including many members of the political elite, Miller ridiculed politicians but more specifically Ronald Reagan, Al Gore, and George W. Bush, seeing them as actors, desperate to present themselves differently from who they were. Some days before the lecture, the playwright said “Reagan perfected the Stanislavsky method by making a complete fusion of his performance with his personality. He didn’t even know he was acting” (Gussow, 19).
Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy interrupted prime-time shows to tell Americans from the Oval Office why they had ordered troops to desegregate schools. Bill Clinton broke into programming from behind the presidential desk three times in a month to explain military actions in Haiti and Iraq. Ronald Reagan, the telegenic former actor, set the record for evening addresses from the Oval Office desk: 29 over two terms. Even the untelegenic Richard M. Nixon spoke 22 times from the Oval Office in just five years, the last time to resign in disgrace. (July 10, 2013)
Reagan made television a strong tool for the propagation of his government and its neoliberal ideology. Dutch, as the former White House actor was nicknamed, knew how to make use of television for his own benefit, including lying in a nationwide broadcast on the Iran–Contra affair.3 Miller understood well the farcical and tragic nature of such an act and transformed his perception into a dramaturgic critique.
[…] We have a lot of … not material … yes, material … to cover this afternoon, so please take your seats and cross your legs. No-no … (Laughs weakly) … Not cross your legs, just take your seats. (1)
The word material can be understood not only as subjects to be covered but as an ironic reference to materialism (highly praised during the Reagan era) as well as the celebration of masculinity4 when he asks women not to cross their legs.
I want you to look at the whole economic system as one enormous tit. […] So the job of the individual is to get a good place in line for a suck. […] Which gives us the word ‘suckcess’. Or… or not. (1)
Besides its explicit masculinity, this line is also a powerful metaphor that condenses the motto of the conservatism endorsed by the actor who was in the White House from 1981 to 1989: the condemnation of people using the State as a safety net. Lyman’s profoundly anti-Roosevelt rhetoric is also the ultimate neoliberal ideology espoused by Reagan, and Miller presents it by using humor with the word “tit” in reference to people who like to suck things out of the State, therefore having their “suckcess.”5
Lyman finds out his nurse, Logan, is black, and he tells her “I’ve got the biggest training program of any company for you guys. And the first one that ever put them in sales” (2). This not only states that the insertion of black people into higher levels of the labor force is made by Lyman’s company but asserts that it is up to the businessman (one of Reagan’s most privileged figures) and not to the State to play this role. This ironic line finds a wider explanation in Purdy’s words that between the 1980s and 1990s, one-third of the black population was below the poverty line, with no resources available for education and other public services, professional assistance, training, and opportunity (2011, 265).6
Feeling is all I believe in, Leah (…) any decent thing I’ve ever done was out of feeling, and every lousy thing I’m ashamed of came from careful thinking […] I’m going to wrestle down one fear at a time till I’ve dumped them all and I am a free man. (20–21)
The calendar can’t measure America because we were meant to be an endless experiment in freedom, with no limit to our reaches, no boundaries to what we can do, no end point to our hopes. (Qtd. in Conley, 359)
Boredom is a form of deception, isn’t it. And deception has become like my Nazi, my worst horror—I want nothing now but to wear my own face on my face every day till the day I die. (24)
Engaging with his own desires and privileging the ethics of freedom over that of responsibility, Lyman is, after all, a symptomatic result of neoliberalism (unfettered capitalism), whose faith in the philosophy of the laissez-faire had him focusing on personal gain even at the cost of cheating. He acts pretty much like Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, an emperor of himself, and also resembles Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby and his own self-creation.
Lyman’s father, a character present on stage in the first version, but only mentioned in the revised version, is another Reaganesque element in the play. In the first version, he carries around a black cloth, symbolizing death, and pretty much resembles Ben from Salesman (1949), who was always highlighting the importance and advantage of personal success within the system. In both versions of Mt. Morgan, Lyman’s father is evoked as a way to reinforce the importance of work and optimism: “I keep thinking of my father – how connected he was to life; couldn’t wait to open the store every morning and happily count the pickles, rearrange the olive barrels” (26). Lyman’s line displays a nostalgic optimist (which was also the basis of the Reagan conservative rhetoric of “Make America Great Again,”) encompassing what Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman named Retrotopia. Lyman’s trajectory is also symbolic of what success meant in the Reagan era and in current neoliberal times: Lyman was a poet who became a businessman; Reagan, who had once been an actor and President of the Screen Actors Guild, became the spokesperson of businessmen and GE, besides being an informer for the FBI.7
Miller’s use of irony throughout the play is also an element of critique of Reaganism. In a flashback (scene two, act one), Leah expresses her desire to end her pregnancy, and Lyman opposes it by saying that Benjamin, a name chosen by him in honor of his family, “has a horoscope, stars and planets; he has a future!” (29). The idea of a horoscope inserted by Miller reminds us that Reagan himself consulted a Californian astrologer regarding key White House decisions, though the actor denied it had any influence on his policies (Roberts).
Another ironic reference to Reaganism and conservatism is made through Miller’s reference to the theme of abortion, a big issue for conservatives still today, and with an explicit reference to Reagan in the first version. Lyman tries to convince his second wife, Leah, to keep the baby and she says, “Don’t, Lyme, it’s impossible. (Obviously changing the subject – with pain.) Listen, up here they’re all saying Reagan’s just about won it.” Lyman replies, “Well, he’ll probably be good for business. The knuckleheads usually are.—You know if you do this it’s going to change between us” (220).
Another very subtle and apparently trivial dialogue between Lyman and Leah also refers to one of the biggest issues of the 1980s Reagan era, deeply explored by Tony Kushner in Angels in America.8 After making love for the first time with Lyman, Leah asks, “You are really healthy, aren’t you?” and Lyman replies, “You mean for my age? Yes.” Leah, in turn, says “I did not mean that!” (p. 41). Although Miller does not state what the subject is, it is a reference to the anxieties of AIDS, which had in the 1980s a boom as never before. The question whether people were “healthy” or “clean” (a term commonly used in the gay jargon) was and still is common whenever someone wants to know about a person’s HIV status.
Well, insurance is basically comical, isn’t it? – at least pathetic. […] You’re buying immortality, aren’t you? – reaching out of your grave to pay the bills and remind people of your life? It’s poetry. The soul was once immortal, now we’ve got an insurance policy. (42–43)
In earlier times the self-made man took pride in his judgement of character and probity; today he scans the faces of his fellows not so as to evaluate their credit but in order to gauge their susceptibility to his own blandishments. He practices the classic arts of seduction with the same indifference to moral niceties, hoping to win your heart while picking your pocket. (53)
Lyman has indeed used his seduction skills not only through his manliness but also through his money. The common point between Lyman and Loman is that the success and happiness promised by the dream, in the end, are shown to be problematic, since both characters have a tragic fall at the end of the plays.
In the opposite direction of Beckett’s iconic characters Vladimir and Estragon from Waiting for Godot, Lyman does not wait. Moved by self-centered desire and materialism, propagandized as virtues by the neoliberalism, he also is moved by anguish in search of something that promises to fulfill him, which does not happen. His endless appetite for consuming desires, promoted by the American Dream, made Lyman a slave of his own wishes. Lyman, in his imperialistic urge, has it all: money, cars, a company, children, and two wives (commodities). Yet, despite his illusion of fulfillment, he has to confront himself and his actions and painfully realize that his idyllic situation, to which his pursuit of the American Dream apparently has brought him, presents itself more like a nightmare.
Even though he is dealing with this contradiction, Lyman does not realize that the anguish that surrounds him arises because he is engrossed in and defends a culture that intends to be “an endless experiment in freedom” (as President Reagan called it in his 1987 State of the Union Address, see Conley) and which has become a love affair with consumerism. From a historical standpoint, Chris Hedges revealed how the United States systematically began shifting in the second half of the 1970s from a production empire to a consumer empire, which explains not only the decline of the American empire but also the illusion of freedom through slavery—or rather, voluntary servitude, in the terms of Étienne de La Boétie—to consumerism. In this sense, it is time to invoke one of Zygmunt Bauman’s most frighteningly provocative questions: Does ethics have a chance in a world of consumerism? (2009). Responsibility and the sense of guilt become difficult in a society that has individualism and victory at its core.
The sense of guilt, one of Miller’s central themes in many of his plays, appears in connection to Reaganism, too. In a remarkable moment (act 2, scene 2), Lyman faces the lion on a safari and defeats him by saying that he is a happy man and that “I don’t sacrifice one day to things I don’t believe in—including monogamy [...] Maybe lions don’t eat happy people” (85). Despite the comic effect of Lyman’s pathetically trying to convince the lion of his bravery, masculinity, and polygamy through optimism, Miller actually is exposing the absurd logic behind Lyman’s words; he is a man who believes himself invincible.
I was dancing the high wire on the edge of the world … finally risking everything to find myself! Strolling with you past my house, the autumn breeze, the lingerie in the Madison Avenue shop windows, the swish of … wasn’t it a taffeta skirt you wore? … and my new baby coiled in your belly?—I’d beaten guilt forever! (93)
A man can be faithful to himself or to other people – but not to both. At least not happily. We all know this, but it’s immoral to admit that the first law of life is betrayal; why else did those rabbis pick Cain and Abel to open the Bible? (66)
You tolerated me because you loved me, dear, but wasn’t it also the good life I gave you? – Well, what’s wrong with that? Aren’t women people? Don’t people love comfort and power? I don’t understand the disgrace here! (109)
For Lyman, relationship is an extension of capitalism; it functions as a kind of commercial transaction, a relation of mutual exploitation, by the ethics of pleasure and profit, in which happiness is the demigod that rules.
The argument reaches exhaustion when the optimistic rhetoric no longer can be sustained. All strategies collapse, and the sadness that invades the characters comes from the fact that everyone had to “ride down Mt. Morgan.” The descent, absolutely rugged, forced everyone to analyze not only what each one is (or believes himself or herself to be) individually but their relationship with one another. It is in this sense that Miller, with his Humanistic Judaism, reveals his deeper Levinasian side, which is summed up in the axiom that the “ethics of responsibility must precede that of freedom.” Reaganism inaugurated an era that ran in the opposite direction of what Miller stands for. Reagan defended little or no regulatory interference in the domestic life of the country but also sought to expand America’s dominance abroad fighting communism. Similarly, and symbolically speaking, Lyman also defended no regulation in his private life (living a life of endless freedom) and expanded his dominance on the outside, by choosing to have two wives who ultimately became his commodities.
The play ends with Lyman questioning the nurse, Logan, about what she and her family talk about when they are fishing, and she says they talk about shoes. Lyman gets emotional and starts crying. The play ends with a slight difference between the two versions. In the first Lyman begins to cry but holds the cry and faces the suffering that awaits him: “He begins to weep, but quickly catches himself and with a contained suffering stares ahead” (278). In the second version, the mood is of optimism: “He begins to weep, but quickly catches himself. Now learn loneliness. But cheerfully. Because you earned it, Kid, all by yourself. Yes. You have found Lyman at last! So … cheer up!” (116).
I have to consent to him […] and condemn him. He is telling a truth. There is a reptillian mind in us that predates all morality. It is the force of nature … And that is immune to education. It’s what we rely on for a creative act but which has to be disciplined or we will destroy each other. (379)
Lyman’s individual acts, as in all Miller plays, have a deep impact in the collective sphere, and cause-and-effect unravel, in ways similar to those in the plays of his model, Henrik Ibsen.
Using Lyman Felt’s self-serving delusions to depict the irresponsible folly of American culture in the last decades of the twentieth century, Miller shows us how memory and fantasy are interwoven with denials of the past and delusions about the future. Such behavior, which is tragic but at the same time farcical, reminds us of one of Marx’s most famous aphorisms, that history repeats itself, “first as tragedy, and then as farce.” This, by the way, was also a path Miller took by writing first tragedies and in later plays something close to farce. Mt. Morgan is Miller’s portrayal of the absurdity and moral emptiness of America’s love of individualism, and its lethal effects on the collective sphere. The play resonates even more strongly today in an era in which neoliberalism has reemerged triumphant as yet again a model of tough-minded, pragmatic values and rational action in a world bequeathed to us by the actor who occupied the White House in the 1980s.
- 1.
When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1981, he immediately ordered that the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) grants to small—read leftist—theaters be abolished. Reagan’s antidemocratic measure was only the beginning of a series of backlashes against progressive and leftist ideas.
- 2.
The playwrights mentioned fiercely critiqued the Reagan era with Speed-The-Plow (1988), by Mamet; The Oldest Profession (2004), by Vogel; and Angels in America (1991), by Kushner.
- 3.
Reagan’s administration proceeded to violate the law by covertly supplying weapons to Iran and, in further violation, diverted some of the profits derived from the arms sale to the Nicaraguan “Contras,” despite a congressional restriction on such assistance (Wolin, 271).
- 4.
The Reagan era rekindled the status of superheroes and they embodied some of the precepts of Reaganism—through virility, bravery and masculinity—all of them transformed into several movie productions such as Rambo, Terminator, Die Hard and RoboCop. Hollywood was another big propagator of Reaganism through movies.
- 5.
Reagan frequently mentioned a minor case of welfare fraud to criticize the efficiency of the government by citing the “Welfare Queen”. The woman named Linda Taylor, according to him, used 80 names, 30 addresses and 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps. Four decades later, however, it was discovered that Reagan’s shameless racial demagoguery was actually a minor case of fraud, which he used to demonize government efficiency and to highlight how the private sector would take better care of things.
- 6.
The original passage is in Portuguese and has been translated by me. (…) um terço da população negra ficou abaixo da linha da pobreza, sem recursos suficientes para educação e outros serviços públicos, carente de emprego, treinamento e oportunidade (Purdy, 265).
- 7.
Ironically, in an early draft, Miller intended Lyman to be a character who had informed on his business partner, as Joe Keller in All My Sons (1947) did, but he decided not to add this feature in any of the versions of the play.
- 8.
Tony Kushner. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Part one: “Millennium Approaches”. New York: Theatre Communication Group, 1994.
- 9.
Morning in America was a 1984 political campaign television commercial that became famous for its opening line, “It’s Morning Again in America”. The commercial featured common people going to work happily, getting married, and it also stated that they were going to buy new homes and that prosperity had finally come to the country.