THE FILM

Chuck was produced in Britain in coproduction with HBO Romania by Romanian-born director Ilinca Călugăreanu and producer Mara Adina, and was coproduced by Hollywood mogul Brett Ratner.Footnote ⁶ The film's protagonists are Irina Margareta Nistor, a film translator, and Teodor Zamfir, the man who ran one of Romania's black-market networks for VHS tapes, who together worked over the 1980s to bring Hollywood films into communist Romania. We learn that in the early 1980s, Nistor was working for the national television station when she was approached by a colleague with an illicit offer: to dub Romanian-language soundtracks for banned movies from the “imperialist” West (mainly America) that had been smuggled into the country. Nistor agreed and, by 1989, her voice had become part of the soundtrack of hundreds of films that Romanians all over the country watched in group screenings secretly organized in the homes of the lucky few who owned VCRs (Figure 1). The tapes were brought into the country by Zamfir, whom Călugăreanu portrays as a larger-than-life agent of the Romanian commercial underground, complete with gun, a luxurious mansion, white Mafioso-style suits, and billowing black leather coats. Zamfir set up a dubbing studio in the basement of his Bucharest home and, with Nistor's help, his illicit VHS empire grew throughout the second half of the 1980s. The operation had the blessing of the Romanian Secret Service, whose officers and their families also enjoyed Western movies and turned a blind eye to the operation. It was to crumble soon after 1989, when the revolution brought the VHS tape into legality, and video rental places mushroomed everywhere.

Figure 1.

Dubbing the illegal VHS tapes. Image courtesy of Vernon Films.

The plot advances by alternating interviews with Romanians who lived through the decade with a series of reenactments which, as the director herself declares in a 2016 interview for PBS, were treated as feature films in order “to create a cinematic experience, a film that would reach as many people as possible despite the language barrier.”Footnote ⁷ These scenes focus on the communal experience of the screenings, with the added thrill of the segments fictionalizing Zamfir's black-market adventures, invariably shot in dramatic angles, with eerie music, with two professional actors playing the two younger protagonists. The documentary ends with the by-now famous scenes of the Romanian 1989 revolution broadcast live throughout the world, and with cameos featuring the real, aged Nistor and Zamfir, reflecting in 2015 on their historic roles in bringing down communism. The ending superimposes the nonfictional musings of the two talking about the fall of the Ceaușescu regime onto the background of scenes from Rocky III (1982), thus visually and symbolically sealing the parallel between the message of the Hollywood blockbusters of the 1980s and the political changes on the ground in Romania in 1989.

THE AMERICAN RECEPTION

Chuck attracted a great deal of attention in the United States after its release. It was broadcast on PBS in 2016, in April 2017, and in January 2019, and it had a special screening at the South East European Film Festival in Los Angeles in 2017. It was also one of the recipients of the 2016 Liberty in Film Awards, in the category Spirit of Ideas, an award granted by the Moving Picture Institute (MPI), a right-leaning nonprofit that promotes films that support conservative ideology, from small government to entrepreneurship and self-reliance.Footnote ⁸ Furthermore, it is enjoying a surprising career in the American conservative blogosphere, from fringe to relatively middle-of-the-road. In his 2009 The New American Exceptionalism, American studies scholar Donald Pease demonstrated how, as the US defined its role in the world in terms of its global opposition to communism during the Cold War, “only political ideas that presupposed the values of the free market, private property, and the autonomous individual could be exchanged by subjects who had normatively internalized those values.”Footnote ⁹ Amy Kaplan, reflecting on the global imperial reach of the United States, noted the key paradox at the heart of American exceptionalism, namely “its exemplary status as the apotheosis of the nation-form itself and … a model for the rest of the world” which legitimizes American expansion by conflating “national particularism and international universalism.”Footnote ¹⁰ These orthodoxies may have been challenged after 1989 by the rise of a globalized economy and of a multipolar world, but they still inform American conservative political narratives. And, as Chuck's American reception demonstrates, these narratives continue to be rooted in a form of universalism that seeks to justify both America's economic model and its exceptional position in world affairs.

American conservative pundits and blogs quickly picked up the story soon after the film's Sundance release. Ironically, despite the fact that Hollywood's supposed liberal slant is almost dogma in America's conservative circles, Chuck's reviews overwhelmingly uncritically embraced its premise – that American films helped to bring down communism.Footnote ¹¹ The Foundation for Economic Education hailed Chuck as a glorification of entrepreneurial spirit, pointing out that “through … black markets, people living under tyrannical regimes can still see examples of humanity, love, and the promise of a better world beyond their borders.”Footnote ¹² The blog on the site of the Library for Economics and Liberty states that this “film highlights the importance of the exchange of ideas that occurs where markets spring up.”Footnote ¹³ The conservative blog Christ and Pop Culture celebrates the power of stories to inspire political unrest, concluding that “the reason heroes and stories are such powerful provocations of inspiration and reform is that they are shadows of Jesus and the story he came to fulfill.Footnote ¹⁴ Along similar lines, Foxnews.com concludes that “American films helped bring about the revolution in 1989 which paved the way to overthrow the Ceaușescu regime.”Footnote ¹⁵ The conspiracy-theory hub WDN (World Net Daily) explained the film in relation to the story of the defection of a top Romanian spy to America, and paired it with a sales pitch for a book on the topic, trying to make it all relevant to the contemporary political context: “Discover the riveting story of Pacepa's defection and how the propaganda techniques his Soviet bosses perfected are still being used against Americans today.”Footnote ¹⁶ The film is even listed on the website of the libertarian conservative student campus outreach group Students for Liberty along other recommended films.Footnote ¹⁷ In February 2015, Chuck Norris himself weighed in on Townhall.com, a conservative blog and magazine previously published by the Heritage Foundation, and that features conservative pundits such as Ann Coulter:

THE CONTEXT

The dominant metaphor about communist Romania in these conservative reviews of the documentary is that of a “closed society” that was pried open and brought to freedom with the help of American film; Chuck's narrative line recycles these tropes and assumptions, although the reality was far more complex. American popular culture had long been an active participant in the Cold War. The American cultural presence in Europe during the Cold War – books, films, radio broadcasts, jazz and classical concerts, and art events organized at the regional American cultural centers – was due to a concerted US push for cultural diplomacy on the Continent that went back to the final days of World War II. This had initially been carried out by the USIA, whose focus was advocacy, cultural and educational exchange, and news reporting, and which, since its founding in 1953, shared responsibilities with the State Department's division of cultural relations.Footnote ¹⁹ Covertly, the CIA was also involved in a vast program to use culture to improve America's image in Europe via modern art, music, and literature, bankrolling cultural initiatives with the help of nongovernmental organizations and advocacy groups which it secretly funded, one of the most prominent being the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). This unlikely alliance between the CIA and prominent American artists, writers, and journalists – the likes of Jackson Pollock, Lionel Trilling, and Irving Kristol – lasted until 1967, when a scandal erupted and the program was terminated, although some organizations continued.Footnote ²⁰ Eventually, the post-1960s cultural cleavages in American society gradually weakened support for the government's use of culture in public diplomacy, both among the public and among artists.Footnote ²¹

The overt American cultural presence in Romania was due to the specific position of the country vis-à-vis its neighbors and the USSR; in the 1980s, the decade that Chuck chronicles, the country was led by dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, who practiced an aggressively nationalistic brand of communism, and who strictly limited and censored Western entertainment. Yet this was a fairly recent development; upon ascending to power, Nicolae Ceaușescu had striven to assert the country's autonomy from the Soviet Union and distanced himself from Moscow. This made him the darling of the West throughout the 1970s, and led to a variety of official interactions with important Western heads of state, the highlights of which being Richard Nixon's 1969 visit to Romania, followed by four visits by Ceaușescu to Washington, and culminating with Queen Elizabeth II knighting Ceaușescu in 1978.Footnote ²² In Romania, the CCF provided a Fund for Intellectuals between 1968 and 1969, and its successor, the ICF, was active until 1973.Footnote ²³ Another cultural consequence of this political openness was that some Western content was allowed on Romanian screens; in fact, according to internal data from the National Film Archives, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Romanian television was relatively open to foreign imports, from both socialist and capitalist countries. For instance, in 1966, 145 foreign films premiered on Romanian screens, including French, British and Italian works, as well as eleven American films bought for the television – these tended to be older films, like Stagecoach (1939), Casablanca (1942), or High Noon (1952). By 1978, eighteen American films had premiered in Romania, and an astounding eighty-five American films were purchased for the national television network, in addition to films from other Western countries.Footnote ²⁴ In 1979, Dallas (1978–91, CBS) premiered on Romanian television and was broadcast until 1981, when it was terminated, to much popular dismay; Romanians had to wait for the revolution to find out who shot J. R. Ewing. Even some Hollywood blockbusters entered the country, albeit with delays; in April 1981, Superman (1978) premiered in Romania, and a year later Rocky II (1979) was available to local viewers; in their first year on Romanian screens, the films were seen by 4,437,533 and 1,898,859 viewers respectively.Footnote ²⁵ In the case of radio, the very nature of the medium made the Iron Curtain quite permeable, bringing music and news from Europe not only in foreign languages, but also in Romanian. Listening to foreign broadcasters on the shortwave was not impossible in post-1956 Eastern and Central Europe, although it was dangerous and illegal, and local governments tried to jam the Western anticommunist propaganda stations, such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, which broadcast in the languages of the target countries.Footnote ²⁶

Thus the data demonstrate that Romania was never a hermetically closed society as far as media were concerned, although things were to change drastically in the 1980s, particularly for film and television.Footnote ²⁷ After his 1979 visit to North Korea, Ceaușescu reverted to an aggressive policy of media control. By the mid-1980s, due to budget constraints, imports of foreign films were halted and television programming was reduced to two hours a day during the week, and four to five hours at weekends, until the end of 1989. In the face of these restrictions, Romanian viewers, whose appetite for foreign entertainment had been whetted over the previous years, first turned to the television output of neighboring nations. In southern Romania, audiences of six to eight million watched Bulgarian television, while three to four million people in the southwest could receive signals from Yugoslavia.Footnote ²⁸ Romanians in the northwest watched Hungarian television, and the northeast region had access to Soviet television.Footnote ²⁹

The technological developments of the 1980s expanded the venues through which Western culture could enter Romania. The first VCRs and VHS tapes were carried or smuggled in by tourists, by people returning from Western work-related trips, or in more organized smuggling networks: Zamfir got his VCRs by raising Chihuahua dogs and bartering them in East Germany, at a rate of three pups for two VCRs.Footnote ³⁰ The phenomenon was not limited to Romania; in 1988, the Washington Post ran a story on the success of the video player in undermining state monopolies on information throughout Eastern Europe. Despite being prohibitively expensive, it had opened access for millions of people to “long-taboo western products, ranging from pornography and adventure films to uncensored political news and documentaries.”Footnote ³¹ Within years, video players and VHS cassettes became ubiquitous throughout the region, in spite of the almost complete lack of locally produced VCRs and tapes. In Romania, given the cost and difficulty of owning a VCR, those who had them would throw video parties and invite friends and neighbors to share the experience, sometimes charging a small fee, other times for free. The practice became mainstream throughout the country; Chuck starts from the story of these secret film screenings, which by the late 1980s had become an inextricable part of the social fabric of Romanian life. They represented the first encounter with Western film and television for an entire generation of Romanians born in the mid-1970s and the 1980s to which Chuck's director and producer belong. The memory of the shared (and deliciously forbidden) consumption of Western entertainment functions in the documentary as the main trigger of nostalgia in a film whose subject matter would otherwise make it an unlikely candidate for longing for the past.

IMAGES OF AMERICA

The fantasy of destruction of the Evil Empire (as Ronald Reagan famously labeled the Soviet Union and its allies) at the hands of the United States was one of the central ideological tropes of the Cold War. By the 1970s, Hollywood's output outweighed any USIA-sponsored program promoting America abroad. The Reagan era started a trend of private–federal partnerships in public diplomacy, which was only to intensify in the 1980s, as the federal budget for public diplomacy continued to shrink. USIA continued to exist until its demise in 1999, but the corporate entertainment sector had become the main promoter of American values abroad. Hollywood continued to produce stories about America that international audiences clamored for, yet government pressure still shaped the narratives, plots and ideological bent of much of its film output: one of the best-known examples of this relationship involves the cooperation between the Department of Defense Film Liaison Office and Hollywood, which allowed real soldiers, tanks, aircraft, and military locations to be made available for films that met the DoD public-relations requirements.Footnote ³²

While scholars like Martha Bayles lament Hollywood's negative impact on America's image abroad, Chuck offers a sanguine take on the reception of American films in the 1980s and on their efficacy as informal instruments of public diplomacy. Despite the fact that more complex films like Apocalypse Now (1979), The Deer Hunter (1978), Platoon (1986), and Born on the Fourth of July (1989) were brought into Romania by Zamfir and are briefly mentioned, the documentary dwells mostly on the jingoistic and xenophobic Rambo series; Delta Force (1986); the three Chuck Norris Missing in Action (1984–88);Footnote ³³ and other hypermasculine action films starring the likes of Sylvester Stallone, Jean Claude Van Damme, Chuck Norris, Clint Eastwood, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, where the struggle of good over evil echoed in transparent fashion the rhetorical duels of the political world. In a stark (but probably refreshing to Romanian audiences) reversal of the dichotomies that structured communist propaganda, these films offered uncritical stories about America's global involvement from Afghanistan to Beirut and beyond, legitimating US interventions in the proxy conflicts of the Cold War in Central or Southeast Asia or Central America, and casting the world into two clearly defined camps: the US good and victorious versus its soon-to-be-defeated communist enemies, the sheer incarnation of “evil.”Footnote ³⁴ Another group of the films featured in Chuck glamorized American military life and war in general, and included the immensely popular Top Gun (1986) and An Officer and a Gentleman (1982).Footnote ³⁵ These films did not enter the country as part of a US official government plot to shake communism in Romania, nor does Zamfir claim to have built his underground empire for any reason other than financial gain. Yet Chuck presents them as the models of inspiration for an entire generation of Romanians who allegedly learned American-style freedom from their stories.

Despite Chuck's sweeping generalizations, only a relatively small segment of the Romanian population could afford a VCR – members of the middle class or simply people with connections abroad, mostly living in Bucharest or in the bigger cities. The impact of the tapes was therefore limited to the groups who had access to them, but in this context their influence was real; they represented a welcome escape from the drab realities of life under a totalitarian regime characterized not only by political oppression, but also by food and energy shortages, while offering viewers some information about the world outside, despite the existence of more reliable sources such as the radio stations Voice of America or Free Europe. Chuck firmly situates the films’ larger societal impact in their content as well as in the subversive nature of the group screenings themselves. As one of the speakers reflects, these communal screenings offered the potential of a form of organization beyond the reach of the government or of the regime, and were therefore potentially dangerous.

Romanian censors did allow some Western films on Romanian markets, but they favored Italian neorealist dramas or the French New Wave, as well as any film that attacked social injustice in the capitalist bloc.Footnote ³⁶ An early scene from Chuck reveals that, before any Western film made it onto Romanian screens, it was meticulously scrutinized by a commission of censors who eliminated all scenes that would highlight to Romanian audiences the harshness of the economic conditions under which they lived – for instance any scene featuring an abundance of foods or of goods in grocery stores was cut (00:09:07). By contrast, the dazzling kaleidoscope of consumer pleasures of the bootlegged films offered viewers an exhilarating – and supposedly authentic because uncensored – portrayal of the US, contributing to the Romanian awareness of an alternative to the communist realities and lack of consumer pleasures of their day-to-day lives.Footnote ³⁷ To bring this point home, the film cuts back and forth between montages of clips showcasing the opulence of American life, and shots of the drab and gray apartment buildings in which the screenings actually took place, further emphasizing to viewers the dismal economic realities of life in 1980s Romania. The panoramic scenes of glamorous cityscapes (Los Angeles, Acapulco, New York) and the images of lavish shopping venues, designer outfits, and fast cars became the Romanians’ only authentic “window to the West,” through which one person interviewed said he “could see what the free world looked like” (00:36:42).

This was a radically different narrative from the austere and collectivist one that dominated the script of socialist and communist propaganda, devoid of emphasis on personal pleasure; as such the films are described by the subjects of the interviews as transformational alternative models of self-development: the consumption of illegal entertainment becomes an opportunity for personal growth: “They changed your way of thinking … You developed through these films” (0:18). Devoid of any understanding of their cultural background, Dirty Dancing (1987), 9 and ½ Weeks (1986), and even older films like Last Tango in Paris (1972) become lessons in personal sexual liberation, while Working Girl (1988) promised upward mobility via shopping, sex, or marriage, quite a different narrative for Romanian women who, under the puritanical communist regime, were guaranteed equal access to work opportunities but in a much less glamorous context. There is no self-reflexivity in these memories, although those interviewed lived for two more decades in the rocky postcommunist transition, and could potentially have painted a more nuanced picture of what life in a post-1989 Romania had meant for them. In other words, while voicing nostalgia for the experience of the secret screenings, none of the interviews included in the documentary mentions the contrast between the myths and the realities of capitalism, or the social cost of the transition to capitalism. Rather, the interviewees take at face value, and even confess having emulated, the hypermasculine and heteronormative protagonists of the Hollywood blockbusters of the 1980s, since the depicted consumerist pleasures remained out of their reach. The illegal consumption of these Hollywood tapes is framed as one of the few forms of both rebellion and personal gratification possible during the communist regime, particularly at a time when most travel abroad was impossible: the freedom to experiment vicariously – with consumerism, different political ideologies, sex, unfamiliar social practice, but also with a different set of ideas about one's relation to the government.Footnote ³⁸ The resulting conflation of capitalism with freedom and democracy that, as Pease shows, was at the center of the Cold War restructuring of American exceptionalism consistently underpins the larger narrative arc of the documentary.

A significant shift in Hollywood blockbuster films in the 1980s was represented by Reaganism, which Douglas Kellner defines as a “revolutionary conservativism with a strong component of radical conservative individualism and activism.”Footnote ³⁹ This led to the proliferation of vigilante heroes in popular culture – from movies, to television, to comic books – protagonists who operate outside the state and above a legal framework that is perceived as corrupt or inefficient. Reaganism informs some of the most successful franchises of the decade, such as Star Wars and Indiana Jones, as well as blockbuster films like Superman (1979), Superman II (1980), or Conan the Barbarian (1982), as well as comic-book franchises like Captain America. The rise of self-reliant protagonists or of vigilante superheroes that challenged state authority and legitimacy in 1980s America represented a major shift in the strategies of the culture industries towards a valorization of nonconformity and individualistic heroism in a period of antigovernmental rhetoric that shaped other aspects of the Reagan presidency.Footnote ⁴⁰ Various scholars have commented on the relationship between the aggressive masculinity of these Rocky–Rambo films of the 1980s (to which can be added the Chuck Norris films as well as the Jean Claude Van Damme action films of the decade), and the revival of a conservative version of American masculinity rooted in the economic and cultural challenges faced by white American working-class men in the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote ⁴¹ In the conservative blogosphere, the Reaganite version of masculinity articulated in these films represents even today a normative framework, whereby physical strength, masculine agency (independent of the workings of an inept government), and national will are all interconnected.

Chuck suggests that this model of masculinity found a welcoming audience among the young generation of Romanians, teaching them self-reliance and, indirectly, freedom, and therefore taking the Reaganite exceptionalist mythology onto a global level. In a system where recognition and self-affirmation depended upon Party hierarchies and Party decisions, the violent and aggressive self-display of raw masculinity provided by the Rocky–Rambo movies is described by the Romanian young men interviewed in Chuck as a welcome break from the models of masculinity available to them elsewhere in their lives. For example, Sylvester Stallone becomes the inspiration for a speaker who confesses, that, as a young boy, he learned from the protagonist of the film how to cultivate both his body and his resilience. And, to bring the point home, in an eerie blending of worlds, scenes from Rocky III, where Stallone is relentlessly training at 5 a.m. on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (after swallowing a raw egg for extra protein), are followed by reconstituted scenes featuring the Romanian young boy swallowing a raw egg too, and going for a run at 5 a.m. among the drab grey apartment buildings of his nondescript communist hometown. The end of the documentary visually links together the new Romanian “hard body” modeled on Hollywoood's tough guys of the 1980s with the national will violently expressed in the Revolution, effectively reproducing the tropes of the Reaganite narrative of manhood, self-reliance, and Americanness in a Romanian national context. The scenes of the 1989 Romanian revolution that Chuck selectively includes feature footage of happy faces smiling at the camera, chanting “freedom”; communism collapsed when Romanian men learned to be tough like Rambo. The VHS tape, as insignificant as it was believed to be, crushed the system, Zamfir proudly declares in the last scene of the film: “During the revolution, everyone took to the streets because they knew that a better life was possible. Where from? From the movies” (01:10:28).

NOSTALGIA, OSTALGIA

By 1989, Irina Nistor had translated over three thousand films (01:06:53). Her voice was part of the emotional soundtrack of an entire generation, and is repeatedly described by the people interviewed in the film as a symbol of freedom and hope during the 1980s. The interviewees are identified only by their first names, an artistic choice that turns them effectively into symbols of an entire generation of ordinary Romanians. Nevertheless, as a group they represent a very specific demographic – the upper-middle-class and upper-class beneficiaries of the postcommunist era in Romania, public figures whose faces would be familiar to local audiences, but who likely mean nothing to international audiences.Footnote ⁴² In the framework of the documentary, these speakers reflect on the deprivations of life under communism in Ceaușescu's Romania (from food, to fun, to consumer goods), contrasting them with the fantasy of a West that was imagined as a cornucopia of personal freedoms and enjoyments. As stated earlier, they may reminisce wistfully about what the illegal screenings of Hollywood films represented for them personally, but they are not conveying any politically inspired longing for life under socialism. They function solely as vehicles for the triumphalist message of the documentary, particularly as Călugăreanu yokes their reminiscences to Zamfir and Nistor's grand narrative about the collapse of communism in Romania and Hollywood's role in it.

In its optimistic portrayal of the events leading to and following the 1989 revolution in Romania, Chuck is an outlier in national and even regional cinema. Romanian postcommunist film has not been awash in celebratory stories of liberty and democracy, a trait it shares with other film industries in the region. Unlike the triumphalist discourses on globalization, democratization and neoliberalism that emerged in post-1989 Western Europe, the cinema of Eastern Europe in the past two decades has instead chronicled the corruption, violence, isolation and disenfranchisement that followed socialism in the region. The rise of ostalgia was part of this trend. Ostalgia (Ostalgie in German) – nostalgia for the socialist East – started as a phenomenon and topic of academic inquiry in the field of German studies, but has since been exported into the discourse of postcommunist studies in other countries of Eastern Europe. Although the interpretation of the phenomenon varies among scholars, one shared direction of investigation is to discuss ostalgia in the context of memory studies applied to a postcommunist context, taking into consideration national variations. Svetlana Boym defines nostalgia as a form of resistance to progress and an attempt to escape and recapture time, usually after times of rapid change and destruction, which are accompanied by political and cultural manifestations of longing. She distinguishes between restorative and reflective nostalgia; the first is at the heart of all nationalist regimes, the second merely asks questions about the past and its relationship with the present.Footnote ⁴³ Applying this definition to ostalgia, scholars have interpreted the personal and collective mythologies reclaimed by the phenomenon in Eastern Europe as a desire to return to a past (socialist or communist) status quo in some cases, and as a commentary on the postcommunist present and its frustrations in others.Footnote ⁴⁴ Ostalgia, therefore, can be seen as rooted in the various mnemonic performances of ordinary people, who experience the past distinctly from the discourses of official history and politics, although this longing for the past can be instrumentalized for political purposes.

Media play an important role in the creation and consumption of post-Cold War nostalgia. As Ekaterina Kalinina notes, “popular culture and media in particular function as arenas for nostalgia to realise its mobilising and creative potential and challenge dominant historical narratives through its democratisation.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Media become the very space within which nostalgia happens, and the new technologies of the entertainment industry allow in unprecedented ways for a re-creation of past experiences – personal and collective. The communist past is mediated iconically and indexically, either via the rise of a retro-aesthetics expressed in the proliferation of newly manufactured (iconic) images, objects or media productions which evoke the age, or by the popularity of (indexical) fragments originating in the authentic past, whether these are original communist artefacts sold at street corners, or the resurrection of socialist brands, or communist-era entertainment, or simply archival footage, all of which are consumed as “authentic” mementos of a bygone era.Footnote ⁴⁶ At the same time, as media products increasingly function in a global marketplace, are produced in collaborations, and circulate on non-territorial social-media networks, these heavily mediated nostalgic narratives routinely straddle the ideological boundaries that used to divide the world between East and West, activating memories of the old political dichotomies of the Cold War that also resonate with Western viewers.

As such a product of cultural nostalgia, Ilinca Călugăreanu's film mediates the past both iconically and indexically, while remaining firmly located in a neoliberal paradigm which enables the documentary to be simultaneously intelligible to Romanian audiences and successful as a global media product. By blending together interviews, original film footage, and historical reenactments, Călugăreanu engages her viewers as nostalgic subjects on two distinct levels – aesthetic and ideologic; how this engagement is activated depends partly on whether the viewers are Romanian or not. The reenactments use recognizable brands and objects which Romanian audiences who lived through the era would decode as signifiers of the past: doilies; specific brands of cars, cigarettes, or drinks; glass vases filled with carnations; furniture styles; and urban architecture. In a 2016 interview with PBS, Călugăreanu spells out the emotional impetus behind her project: “People are nostalgic for the VHS screenings, the community feeling they had, Irina's unique voice. The VHS screenings were amongst the very few happy experiences of ’80s Romania, so people are keen to re-experience the phenomenon and share memories.”Footnote ⁴⁷ This emphasis on lived memory foregrounds the oppressive dimension of life under communism, while also reflecting the longing for the personal experience of that past in the indexical integration of original clips from the movies dubbed in Irina Nistor's voice, supplemented by the reenacted scenes dramatizing the memories of the people she interviews. The stark contrast between life in the West and the everyday realities of Romania is conveyed visually via the montages of film clips from Hollywood films juxtaposed with the re-created shots of communist urban living, and with the interviews filmed in a studio.

Even the chromatics of the documentary highlight the distinction between the two worlds, as well as between the “then” and the “now” of the story: the interviews are shot in a harsh light against a dark background; the faces of the speakers brightly lit; the outlines sharp; the set, shadows, and image quality clearly locating the segments in the digital present of 2015. By contrast, the muted and somber color palette, the dim lighting, and the outline fuzziness of the re-created segments evoke the mid-1980s look of film, and, as the director points out, were intentionally shot in 16 mm to better re-create the emotional experience of the decade for viewers. Furthermore, the very texture of the movie clips from the Hollywood tapes is altered to fit the feel of the actual experience of watching them in the 1980s. The low-definition of the grainy, flickering film clips evokes the poor quality of the VHS tapes used for these screenings, faded and demagnetized from overuse or simply because they had been copied from other (low-quality) copies. This aesthetic device is seamlessly integrated in the visual fabric of the documentary, and, together with the aural component of the characteristic voice of the woman who had dubbed most of the films for a decade, directly interpellates Romanian viewers who had lived through the period as fellow participants in a nostalgic project.

At the same time, on the ideological level, the overall plotline of the documentary prescribes the conclusion that viewers are encouraged to reach while consuming this story, and in doing so it successfully interpellates a specific subset of Western (particularly American) audiences as subjects of a form of nostalgia about the years of the Cold War. Hayden White suggests that the narration of history – what he terms historical emplotment – can endow the same facts with different meanings, depending on the choice of genre in the mode of historical representation – from tragedy to drama.Footnote ⁴⁸ By adapting White's insights to film productions that deal with historical content, we can identify clear hierarchies of genre that have different levels of legitimacy in relationship with the historical “truth.” Without entering the debate about the objectivity or the constructedness of the documentary as genre, I would simply argue that documentaries emplot facts using narrative techniques similar to those that Hayden White identifies for historical fiction, and as such endow the resulting plots with prescribed meanings, while engaging with, or replicating, the dominant ideological structures.

In “standard” ostalgic dramatic films like Lives of Others (2006), the mechanisms of freedom come from the West, but they were only a technical, enabling presence for East Germans to do what they supposedly would have wanted to do anyway – that is, to release their long-repressed yet “natural” liberal ambitions.Footnote ⁴⁹ Instead, Chuck's framing of the “end of history” speaks to, and validates, an exceptionalist take on America's history; the Romanian population is throughout the film portrayed as an ideological tabula rasa, waiting to be civilized by the didactic stories of Hollywood blockbusters. Overall, Chuck reexoticizes the Cold War and reproduces a Reaganite Western gaze over Eastern Europe, where American ideals and the American role in the conflict are vindicated via a story that dramatizes how Chuck Norris brought liberty to the benighted Romanians. Zamfir's resistance is presented as not solely economic, but also political; a high point in the documentary is the scene when he does not agree to meet with Nicolae Ceaușescu's son, a decision which he emphasizes as the ultimate proof of his credentials as a dissident. The ideological lessons embedded in the film's narrative line span everything from economics to self-reliance: Zamfir is a brave dissident, rather than merely a profiteer among others; his illegal network becomes a celebration of the logic of the free market which is already at work in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, undermining the communist economic system by delivering a commodity for which there is demand, and in the process introducing new ideas behind the Iron Curtain. Individuals learn self-reliance from the films and organize grassroots viewing clubs that teach Romanians how to prepare their bodies and minds for freedom; and finally, the unmitigated success of the enterprise, as conveyed by the Hollywoodian happy ending represented by the 1989 revolution, echoes the Reaganite rhetoric that equated free-market capitalism with political freedom, and which still resonates with American conservatives.

The interviewees embrace the naive American exceptionalism of the films with no critical skills to decode their racism or jingoistic nationalism – not even in retrospect. Even two decades after 1989, they describe the “West” as synonymous with life-changing conspicuous consumption, sexual excesses, or the good-versus-evil struggles of the action movies of the 1980s. If, as Boym argues, nostalgia comes from a sense of loss, and ostalgia as a cultural phenomenon is rooted in a lack of agency or in the dissatisfaction with the realities of post-communist life in Eastern Europe, then Chuck offers no doubt about the fact that life after 1989 is better and more meaningful than life was before, at least for those interviewed, even though they enjoy the memory of the screenings. From this perspective Călugăreanu's project is a product of reflective nostalgia that encourages those who lived through the period to experience its memory again. Yet, in its international, particularly American career, Chuck also reveals the existence of a second strand of nostalgia, one that relates to the memory of the Cold War divisions not from within, but from without, a longing for a world where the US could claim a moral upper hand in the global struggle against communism, and which can and has been instrumentalized politically.

As Larry Wolff has shown, from the Enlightenment to the Cold War, Western Europe's own identity has long depended on a clear-cut division of East/West and on the orientalization of Eastern Europe as a more primitive Other.Footnote ⁵⁰ The destruction of communism in 1989 and the integration into the European Union of most of the states beyond the Iron Curtain have not fully replaced these imaginary constructions; the recent illiberal turn throughout the region only seems to reassert their ongoing relevance. As far as the United States is concerned, Donald Pease demonstrated that the Cold War played a crucial role in American redefinitions of national identity that accommodated a more expansive and aggressive global role in the twentieth century. The clear-cut ideological binaries of the Cold War provided the United States with an external Other whose very existence legitimized America's growing global involvement. “It was the Cold War state that promoted the image of ‘America’ as the fulfillment of the world's desire for an ideal nation into its rationale for imposing and defending the United States model of nationalism across the globe.”Footnote ⁵¹ Dominic Boyer situates the Western discourses of ostalgia within a larger European civilizational discourse of the longue durée which solidifies these implied differences between East and West. Therefore, to Boyer, as to Wolf and Pease, the very identity of the West, European and American, is predicated on the existence of a backward, barbaric and nostalgic East, just beyond the reach of the Western liberal democratic model, or potentially hostile to it.

Thirty years after the fall of communism, in full antiglobalist and nationalist backlash, the conservative blogosphere has welcomed Călugăreanu's documentary as much-needed evidence of the superiority of the American political model and its applicability elsewhere. In recent years, American exceptionalism as a concept has been subject to an increasingly sophisticated critique.Footnote ⁵² The theoretical efforts to “modify the exorbitant celebratory claims of the myth of American exceptionalism” and the subsequent transnationalization of American studies as a discipline have been matched by a paradoxical resurgence of the term in American culture and political discourse.Footnote ⁵³ Print-media references to American exceptionalism increased from two in 1980 to 2,580 in 2012.Footnote ⁵⁴ And, despite the purportedly vast ideological differences that separate both parties, the post-2009 political discourse is more united than ever in the unquestioned assumption of American exceptionalism, with President Obama invoking the term in presidential addresses thirty-one times more than all post-World War II Presidents combined.Footnote ⁵⁵

The end of the Cold War looms large in this theoretical and political reconfiguration of America's exceptional status globally. As Donald Pease pointed out, during the Cold War, the American “state fantasy” depended on the idea of anticommunism. Communism was viewed as a threat to the existence of the nation, which in turn championed its antithesis (free-market economy) as a guarantee of survival and identity.Footnote ⁵⁶ The need for anticommunism disappeared after 1989 in a shifting global environment marred by 9/11, the 2008 economic crisis, and military failures in Afghanistan and Iraq. In this context, references to the Cold War as a bright point in the post-World War II history of the US served to validate an exceptionalist rhetoric that played down the complexity of events that America was facing, and that cast those events again as a deviation from America's otherwise unique trajectory. Building on Sacvan Bercovitch's classic 1978 American Jeremiad, William Spanos noted that this revamped state fantasy fit within the historical genealogy of the term shaped by an onto-political ethos rooted in the Calvinist, providential view of history of the Puritans and in their view of America's global role as necessary hero of an epic battle between good and evil.Footnote ⁵⁷ The end of the Cold War, routinely explained in conservative circles as an American victory, or at least the victory of American ideas, simultaneously confirmed the unique nature of the United States and highlighted America's existential need for another global battle. In George W. Bush's Global War on Terror, the “Evil Empire” was replaced by the “Axis of Evil” as the archenemy whose existence allowed a new state fantasy to emerge.

Nonetheless, the Cold War remains as a key historical landmark in the conservative rhetoric of exceptionalism, a past moment of ideological anxiety and crisis that America successfully overcame, and a golden age of American hegemony associated with Reagan's presidency and created through a revisionist reading of the recent past, whereby the implied and actual violence of the Cold War led to the regeneration of the initial national covenant, strengthening and uniting the American nation again. Chuck conveniently fits this worldview in its embrace of American excesses – military and otherwise – always already legitimized in retrospect by the end of the Cold War. Its success reveals a contemporary vein of conservative American longing for the very existence of an ontological “Other” that is clearly defined – geographically and ideologically. This nostalgic way of looking back upon the years of the Cold War situates the conflict as the historical point where the ahistorical “goodness” of the American nation and the universality of American ideas were proven once and for all. On the eve of the 2016 elections, the improbable conservative enthusiasm towards a Romanian film about how Hollywood helped to end communism in Eastern Europe is a manifestation of a form of restorative nostalgia, in Boym's interpretation, a backward-looking gaze upon an age of unquestioned American greatness. The existence of that past moment can be used to justify a new state of exception in a new global regime of perpetual crisis, and can easily be – and indeed has been – weaponized by nationalist rhetoric. After all, “Make American great again!” was a nostalgic slogan, blending together a Reagan reference with a longing look towards the Cold War and its unchallenged state fantasy.