In 1983, the United States was a country that looked to its past for inspiration. Nostalgia was a strong cultural force. Older ideas were reworked and recombined into new philosophies and styles. Little was truly original. This was evident in several ways. For example, 1930s-style Art Deco was influential in fashion. Rap music, a burgeoning music form in the 1980s, was often built on samples (recorded snippets) of other artists' music. Some of the decades most popular films, Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, for example, were essentially reworked B-movie serials straight out of the 1930s. Adding to the country's fascination with the entertainment of the past, America's president was a former film star, Ronald Reagan. His populist rhetoric and simplistic, common sense approach to the office hearkened back to the heroic film cowboy attitudes that germinated in the films of the 1930s.

Reagan was...