Cold War in American Film and Literature: 1950s–1980s

The Cold War as Cultural and Ideological Framework

The Cold War dominated American culture, consciousness, politics, and policy for most of the twentieth century. Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall—which symbolized the end of the Iron Curtain and therefore the finale of the Cold War—Cold War rhetoric and politics continued, especially in the War on Terror. Depictions of the Cold War in American literature and film parallel the changes that took place in American ways of thinking about domestic policy as well as American perceptions of the alien enemy, or "Other."

Tracing the evolution of American film and literature from the end of World War II until the 1980s reveals clear trends in thought. Early depictions of the Cold War were modernist in their approach, with clear distinctions between good and evil and no moral ambiguity whatsoever. Clear delineations between right and wrong prevailed—a form of political propaganda and even brainwashing that prepared the American public to perceive a mortal enemy and existential threat in a monolithic force known as Communism. These early depictions can be labeled as the Red Scare era, during which science fiction provided an apt vehicle for myth- and message-making. The culture and consciousness shifted dramatically in the 1960s, when a greater willingness to critique American domestic and foreign policy prevailed in both film and literature. A significant degree of Red Scare remained, but it was combined with an equally powerful fear of American bureaucratic structures, propaganda machines, and the military-industrial complex. Cynicism, satire, and absurdity became the prevalent literary and film tropes during this phase. Close to the end of the Cold War, another shift toward the postmodern mentality emerged, providing the lens through which to better understand metanarratives and global perspectives. Depictions of the Cold War in American film and literature thus changed from initially simplistic binaries to increasingly complex social and political critiques.

Red Scare Science Fiction and the Alien Other

At the end of the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union established themselves as the binary global superpowers. Their status was bolstered by other nations—particularly in Western Europe but throughout Asia as well—which looked to one or the other superpower as helping to maintain law and order in the world. Projecting universal principles of good and evil onto the Soviet Union and the United States made science fiction the most apt of all literary genres for depicting the Cold War. From the perspective of the United States, the world was under threat of invasion from an alien civilization characterized by its lack of human emotion, annihilation of individuality, and penchant for brainwashing and homogenization. At this stage, the irony of projecting these very qualities onto the enemy and "Other" was lost on America, not to emerge until decades later.

The Red Scare era capitalized on fear-mongering by presenting the Soviets as existential threats and evil incarnate. Much as animation can enable hyperbole and exaggeration, science fiction allowed writers to explore the full extent of their apocalyptic visions without being constrained by realism. The 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a quintessential Cold War science fiction drama in which brainwashing features prominently. The title refers to the appropriation of bodies by an alien life form, which then inhabits those bodies and turns their hosts into emotionless beings. The aliens "display familiar communist traits: above all, they are deprived of emotion (except rage) and dedicated to the common cause—converting everyone into their likes" (Shcherbenok, 2010, p. 1). Invasion of the Body Snatchers was only the most famous of many science fiction films and novels that bore direct comparisons with Cold War politics. Others include both film and novel versions of The Puppet Master, as well as Them, and the more obviously titled Red Planet Mars.

A proliferation of science fiction movies in which aliens bore strong resemblances to depictions of communists signaled an age of "hysteria" in America, paralleling the McCarthy-led witch hunts of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (Booker, 2001; Pearson, 1998). Film thus had the power to shape American perceptions of Russians, of communists in general, and of communism as a social, economic, and political movement. Essentially, communism was everything capitalism was not, and capitalism represented all that was healthy, wholesome, and good in America. The 1950s therefore witnessed the "Golden Age of Television," in which sitcoms presented idealized and unrealistic portrayals of the American nuclear family in its white suburban bliss (Booker, 2001). Also during this time, consumerism and mass marketing grew to epic proportions in America, in part as a reaction against fear of communist economic systems. The Golden Age of Television thus coincided with the "Golden Age of Nuclear Fear" (Booker, 2001, p. 5). In this early Red Scare era, fear of Soviet expansionism prevailed and led to American interventionist foreign policies. The Korean War and the Vietnam War were escalations representing hot spots in the Cold War—hot spots that signaled the potential for actual nuclear war, which was presented as a means by which to destroy the entire planet. Science fiction was an ideal vehicle for communicating the absolute, extreme, and paranoid existential threats represented by the encroachment of communism throughout Asia and the rest of the world. As Booker (2001) also points out, the perception of communist expansionism as a form of colonialism or imperialism shows that this era was firmly entrenched in the modern age. The 1960s would become a bridge between the modern and the postmodern, when literalism faded into irony and sarcasm.

Humanizing the Enemy: Satire and Moral Ambiguity in the 1960s

During the height of Red Scare hysteria, Russians were depicted "as foreign as possible," to the point of being non-human alien beings in science fiction (Booker, 2001). That science fiction trope would end by the mid-1960s, when Russians were actually humanized in ways that injected moral ambiguity into film and literature. Pearson (1998) credits Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 film North by Northwest as the "beginning of the end of Red Scare melodrama" (p. 1). Other notable works produced during the early 1960s included Richard Condon's 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate, made into a film in 1962. In The Manchurian Candidate, Americans are depicted as being just as complicit in Cold War absolutism through the use of brainwashing techniques. Yet the moral constructs remain binary in nature, with the communist scare remaining salient.

Shcherbenok (2010) also credits Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe (1964), Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964), and Norman Jewison's The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966) as notable film examples of how Cold War depictions were changing, as Russians were becoming humanized characters rather than a force of monolithic aliens. Prior to 1964 and Dr. Strangelove, satire had not become a tool in the arsenal of fictionalized Cold War accounts. Dr. Strangelove was a pivotal production because it used satire to critique the American anti-communist Red Scare. Other films, such as The Manchurian Candidate, criticized the hypocritical tactics of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the use of propaganda. Films and literature about double-crossing and double agents revealed a deeper fear of not knowing who to trust.