The most striking observation brought back time and time again in Alexander Horwath’s film Henry Fonda for President is in how the actor’s shyness manifests itself as a concealing of his eyes. This gesture is presented by the actor’s own movements, but also often a sharp chiaroscuro, an effect which Horwath argues emphasizes and finds truth within the opposing ends of contradiction. It’s through this obscuring that Horwath finds a conscience for the American national character, one which he charts all the way from Fonda’s Dutch ancestors first emigrating to the New World in the 17th century, through his portrayals of historic figures (including, in Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk, someone he’s descended from), to his end-of-life anger at Reagan’s ascendency to the White House.
Fonda’s such an extraordinary subject because, as Horwath charts, the American son’s story is so reflexive of what his screen presence comes to represent. The man who Horwath describes as someone “who regards himself as a realist yet seeks to communicate with ghosts,” Fonda was a reluctant film actor, brought to Hollywood to reprise his role from Broadway for a screen adaptation of The Farmer Takes a Wife. The soft-spoken Nebraska boy became a fast star, and was an easy contrast to more ferocious co-stars like Barbara Stanwyck or Margaret Sullavan (who was briefly his first wife). The lanky and bashful Fonda stuck out in one of the most self-assertive places on the planet, and that was the very thing that won him over in the hearts of audiences. As Horwath points out, there are two Fondas, “the man on the run and the representative of a future which is more just,” which he says converge in 1939.
While Fonda had a number of collaborations with John Ford, Young Mr. Lincoln stands out specifically in how loaded the image of its hero is, one which the character hasn’t arrived at being yet. The burgeoning Lincoln, like Fonda, is a friendly if reserved midwestern fellow who’s serious about justice. One could imagine a diverging path for the two boys, where Lincoln took the road that would lead him from being a lawyer up over the hill to seek higher office, whereas Fonda’s political actions would stay in the realm of acting (on screen or as spoken endorsements). Both were simple orators, but one went the route of hard power and the other stayed on the soft side of culture.
Ford summoned Fonda as an image of a pure-hearted leadership, a kind of homely good spirit that the nation can look to by seeing the myth when he was just a man. Ford molds Fonda as simultaneously an embodiment of a simpler, more primordial and transcendentalist image and one of the coming progress that creates the country as we know it. Fonda became the image of nostalgia even as his films subverted their own mythos, an effect which has only grown greater with time; Fonda’s downward gaze which was shaming his own present, retrospectively, becomes a sad reminder of how shameless our times have become.
There’s a fascinating use of Young Mr. Lincoln in the epilogue of Eddington (which premiered a year after Howarth’s film), where the vegetable-ized MAGA-like sheriff has become the mayor and is guided through the motions by his conservative grifter mother-in-law. There’s something quaint about Ari Aster’s prodding of contemporary conservative nostalgia, given that a current Republican is much more likely to watch Landman than anything by Ford. Perhaps they’d delusionally see themselves in Fonda’s Lincoln, like how the party still boasts of being of the 16th president despite its values being anathema to him.
There’s an irony to anyone in lockstep with Trumpism thinking of themselves like that pair given that Lincoln was a proud moderate between the more conservative and radical wings of his nascent party, and Fonda was a liberal, so much so that it would cause serious political division with his more outspokenly left-wing children. Even then, the sharp conservative turns of his times horrified him—Henry Fonda for President uses excerpts from Fonda’s final set of interviews, where he talks about never being about to speak to Ward Bond again after HUAC and how deceitful and damaging he saw Reagan as.
Reagan—in innumerable ways—marked a permanent shift in American culture, but one thing not noted explicitly by Horwath’s film is that Reagan (despite Fonda disputing that the man ever had craft) is the last time an American actor was ascendant in the culture; from his time on, media became more consumptive and less filling, and movies have lost their dominating force within people’s lives. On a mass scale, Americans don’t go to the cinema anymore as a reflex, and even habitual TV-staring is aging along generational lines as younger people stick primarily to media that fits in their pocket.
Henry Fonda the man could become Henry Fonda the symbol because Henry Fonda was in the cinema. Now it’s easy to be nostalgic looking back to a time when Henry Fonda could be Henry Fonda, because (at least in the cinema) we can never have another Henry Fonda again.