The year "The Killers" came out, Ronald Reagan was a 53-year-old has-been B-movie actor, the former host of "Death Valley Days," a G.E. spokesman, and a speaker touring the country warning of government intrusion into the private sector. But like Browning, Reagan had another career waiting. In October of 1964 he made a nationally televised speech in support of Barry Goldwater. The speech didn't help Goldwater's trouncing at the hands of LBJ, but it brought Reagan to the attention of a group of conservatives who supported him for governor of California in 1966, a post he held for two terms and the platform for his entree into national politics, a stage on which he would make the extremism of Goldwater the mainstream of American politics.

Ronald Reagan, we are being told by newspapers and television and endless pundits, made America feel good about itself again; he washed away the self-loathing of Vietnam and Watergate and the "malaise" of the Carter years, and allowed Americans to stand tall once more. They never mention his divisiveness, though it was evident in a clip that somehow slipped through the network's nonstop wreath-laying last weekend. In 1967, then-Gov. Reagan tells a crowd about being picketed by a group of young people holding signs that said, "Make Love Not War." The problem, Reagan tells his listeners, is that they appeared capable of neither. This was shown as an example of Reagan's ability to charm an audience with his quick wit, even though he essentially was saying: "Those antiwar fairies can't fuck any better than they can fight."

"America is back," Reagan had said. But where had it gone? To believe in Reagan's proclamation, you had to believe that "America" had gone missing in the years preceding his ascent. You had to believe that an America that allowed for dissent -- that is to say, the very practice of democracy itself -- was not really America. And it wasn't just dissent that was un-American -- it was the regulations on corporations that Reagan had long railed against, the assumption that government had a basic responsibility to aid its citizens.

"America" under Reagan elevated to the realm of pure construct. It became a notion that floated free of not just Americans themselves, the majority of whom grew poorer while a select few grew vastly wealthier. It floated free of the effect of Reagan's policies and the meaning of his words. In his second term he said, "We must never again abuse the trust of working men and women by spending their earnings on a futile chase after the spiraling demands of a bloated federal establishment." And so the earnings of workingmen and -women were no longer spent on the very laws and programs that had allowed them job protection, health insurance, care for their elderly parents and education for their kids. Three hundred thousand people lost Social Security disability benefits in his first term alone.

And finally, Reagan's vision of America floated free of reality itself. Denying that he had exchanged arms for hostages in 1987, Reagan said, in the quote most characteristic of his presidency, "My heart and my best intentions still tell me that is true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not."

Whether you consider that a supreme calculation or the guilelessness of an amiable dunce, it demonstrates Reagan's ability to define reality not by the facts but by what he claimed his intentions were, by the image rather than the substance.

Nothing really damaged Reagan's nice guy image; nothing dirtied his hands. That's why at the end of "The Killers" it's supremely satisfying to watch Lee Marvin's blood leaking over the nice upper-middle-class California suburban home in which Reagan's Jack Browning has taken refuge. Reagan was not stained by the blood of those killed by the "freedom fighters" in Central America or the people who died of AIDS in this country because he ignored the disease.

Reagan's legacy makes it easy, watching "The Killers," to believe in the ruthlessness of his character. Jack Browning seems the dark face of the Gipper; certainly he's the true face of the politicians who followed in Reagan's footsteps -- Dick Armey, Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Trent Lott, George W. Bush, et al. -- not one of whom has ever been able to sell himself believably as a likable guy. Reagan's truest legacy will be as an affable advance man for the thugs who came after him.

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