Cold War Fantasies: Film, Fiction, and Foreign Policy

As memories of the Cold War recede, it becomes more and more difficult to remember what it was about and why it evoked such feelings of intensity and fatalism. However, there is a gold mine of movies and novels to help recall why an entire generation of Americans grew up ducking under school desks in air raid drills and stocking the family bomb shelter. The Cold War Fantasies retrieves those times and is based on the idea that a nation’s history, self-concept and collective anxiety are reflected in its popular culture. Ronnie Lipschutz combines an historical account of foreign and domestic politics from 1945 to 1995 with summaries and analyses of 30 novels and films of the times. He critically examines the impacts and effects of language and images on politics. Viewing those films and reading those novels enables the reader to come away with a clearer sense of how people felt during the Cold War period - about themselves, about the enemy and about the world while living in the shadow of the atomic bomb.