Diploma Thesis from the year 2021 in the subject American Studies - Miscellaneous, grade: 1, University of Graz (Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: This thesis investigates the relationship between apocalyptic fiction and reality during the Cold War era. By exploring the zeitgeist and media landscape of the American Cold War culture, this thesis demonstrates that apocalyptic fiction had a significant bilateral role during those times and influenced the contemporary nuclear discourse. This is illustrated by analyzing two popular apocalyptic movies, "On the Beach" (1959) and "The Day After" (1983). Both films portray a worst-case scenario in which the protagonists are confronted with the disastrous consequences of a nuclear war. These movies are not just blockbusters for entertainment but fuel and contribute to the ongoing nuclear discourse about the Cold War era and its politics of deterrence. In its theoretical part, this thesis provides an overview of the Cold War era and reveals how the beginning of the Atomic Age changed the dynamics of power and politics forever. It focuses on the international cultural discourse concerned with nuclear weaponry and illustrates how the politics of deterrence came into being. Afterwards, this thesis focuses on the US- specific nuclear discourse and how it was portrayed in US mainstream media. Additionally, this thesis engages with the Cold War as a concept of thought. It aims at providing a deeper understanding of its intrinsic mechanisms and explains why the Cold War can be classified as a war against people’s imagination. Therefore, this thesis provides an overview of modern apocalypticism research and investigates the role of narratives in the Atomic Age. In its analytical part, the films On the Beach (1959) and The Day After (1983) are interpreted as crisis texts according to the paradigm of apocalypticism. According to this analytical approach, this film analysis focuses on the films’ contemporary cultural context and investigates how their narratives are related to the political and cultural events of the Cold War. Furthermore, this thesis investigates how the bilateral relationship between fiction and reality impact the films and their public reception. Thus, this thesis demonstrates how the films serve as an example of how and why the Cold War can be classified as a war against people’s imagination.

The impact of The Late Great Planet Earth cannot be overstated. The New York Times called it the "no. 1 non-fiction bestseller of the decade." For Christians and non-Christians of the 1970s, Hal Lindsey's blockbuster served as a wake-up call on events soon to come and events already unfolding -- all leading up to the greatest event of all: the return of Jesus Christ. The years since have confirmed Lindsey's insights into what biblical prophecy says about the times we live in. Whether you're a church-going believer or someone who wouldn't darken the door of a Christian institution, the Bible has much to tell you about the imminent future of this planet. In the midst of an out-of-control generation, it reveals a grand design that's unfolding exactly according to plan. The rebirth of Israel. The threat of war in the Middle East. An increase in natural catastrophes. The revival of Satanism and witchcraft. These and other signs, foreseen by prophets from Moses to Jesus, portend the coming of an antichrist . . . of a war which will bring humanity to the brink of destruction . . . and of incredible deliverance for a desperate, dying planet.

The Religious Right came to prominence in the early 1980s, but it was born during the early Cold War. Evangelical leaders like Billy Graham, driven by a fierce opposition to communism, led evangelicals out of the political wilderness they'd inhabited since the Scopes trial and into a much more active engagement with the important issues of the day. How did the conservative evangelical culture move into the political mainstream? Angela Lahr seeks to answer this important question. She shows how evangelicals, who had felt marginalized by American culture, drew upon their eschatological belief in the Second Coming of Christ and a subsequent glorious millennium to find common cause with more mainstream Americans who also feared a a 'soon-coming end,' albeit from nuclear war. In the early postwar climate of nuclear fear and anticommunism, the apocalyptic eschatology of premillennial dispensationalism embraced by many evangelicals meshed very well with the "secular apocalyptic" mood of a society equally terrified of the Bomb and of communism. She argues that the development of the bomb, the creation of the state of Israel, and the Cuban Missile Crisis combined with evangelical end-times theology to shape conservative evangelical political identity and to influence secular views. Millennial beliefs influenced evangelical interpretation of these events, repeatedly energized evangelical efforts, and helped evangelicals view themselves and be viewed by others as a vital and legitimate segment of American culture, even when it raised its voice in sharp criticism of aspects of that culture. Conservative Protestants were able to take advantage of this situation to carve out a new space for their subculture within the national arena. The greater legitimacy that evangelicals gained in the early Cold War provided the foundation of a power-base in the national political culture that the religious right would draw on in the late seventies and early eighties. The result, she demonstrates, was the alliance of religious and political conservatives that holds power today.

This book asks the reader to reassess the Cold War not just as superpower conflict and high diplomacy, but as social and cultural history. It makes cross-cultural comparisons of the socio cultural aspects of the Cold War across the East/West block divide, dealing with issues including broadcasting, public opinion, and the production and consumption of popular culture.

Filmmakers employ various images to suggest the strangeness of outer space, but protective spacesuits most powerfully communicate its dangers and the frailty of humans beyond the cradle of Earth. (Many films set in space, however, forgo spacesuits altogether, reluctant to hide famous faces behind bulky helmets and ill-fitting jumpsuits.) This critical history comprehensively examines science fiction films that portray space travel realistically (and sometimes not quite so) by having characters wear spacesuits. Beginning [A] with the pioneering Himmelskibet (1918) and Woman on the Moon (1929), it discusses [B] other classics in this tradition, including Destination Moon (1950), Riders to the Stars (1954), and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); [C] films that gesture toward realism but betray that goal with melodramatic villains, low comedy, or improbable monsters; [D] the distinctive spacesuit films of Western Europe, Russia and Japan; and [E] America's spectacular real-life spacesuit film, the televised Apollo 11 moon landing (1969).

There are certain films and shows that resonate with audiences everywhere—they generate discussion and debate about everything from gender, class, citizenship and race, to consumerism and social identity. This new 'teachable canon' of film and television introduces students to alternative classics that range from silent film to CSI. Magnolia is one of those films students know and love. From the over-the-top performances by male and female leads to the "ripped from the pages of the Old Testament" conclusion, it is a cult favorite in American cinema This is the first book to examine the diverse themes, performances, and influences on this polarizing film, encouraging students to look beyond the film's style in order to fully engage with questions about its substance Lane develops a careful analysis of the film, its director, as well as the contemporary context in which it was produced - exploring topics including the role of the auteur, what constitutes cinema / media literacy in the digital age, the politics of postmodernism, and the film's critique of the mass media - in order to challenge students to ask themselves why they are so riveted by this controversial and unusual film

This collection offers a fresh interpretation of the Cold War as an imaginary war, a conflict that had imaginations of nuclear devastation as one of its main battlegrounds. The book includes survey chapters and case studies on Western Europe, the USSR, Japan and the USA. Looking at various strands of intellectual debate and at different media, from documentary film to fiction, the chapters demonstrate the difficulties to make the unthinkable and unimaginable - nuclear apocalypse - imaginable. The book will be required reading for everyone who wants to understand the cultural dynamics of the Cold War through the angle of its core ingredient, nuclear weapons.

Explores the intersection of the vampire and zombie with 21st Century dystopian and post-apocalyptic cinemaTwenty-first century film and television is overwhelmed with images of the undead. Vampires and zombies have often been seen as oppositional: one alluring, the other repellant; one seductive, the other infectious. With case studies of films like I Am Legend and 28 Days Later, as well as TV programmes like Angel and The Walking Dead, this book challenges these popular assumptions and reveals the increasing interconnection of undead genres. Exploring how the figure of the vampire has been infused with the language of science, disease and apocalypse, while the zombie text has increasingly been influenced by the trope of the areluctant vampire, Stacey Abbott shows how both archetypes are actually two sides of the same undead coin. When considered together they present a dystopian, sometimes apocalyptic, vision of twenty-first century existence.Key featuresRather than seeing them as separate or oppositional, this book explores the intersection and dialogue between the vampire and zombie across film and televisionMuch contemporary scholarship on the vampire focuses on Dark Romance, while this book explores the more horror-based end of the genreOffers a detailed discussion of the development of zombie televisionProvides a detailed examination of Richard Mathesons I Am Legend, including the novel, the script, the adaptations and the BBFCs response to Mathesons script

The time is right for a critical reassessment of Cold War culture both because its full cultural impact remains unprocessed and because some of the chief paradigms for understanding that culture confuse rather than clarify. A collection of the work of some of the best cultural critics writing about the period, American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War reveals a broad range of ways that American cultural production from the late 1940s to the present might be understood in relation to the Cold War. Critically engaging the reigning paradigms that equate postwar U.S. culture with containment culture, the authors present suggestive revisionist claims. Their essays draw on a literary archive—including the works of John Updike, Joan Didion, Richard E. Kim, Allen Ginsberg, Edwin Denby, Alice Childress, Frank Herbert, and others—strikingly different from the one typically presented in accounts of the period. Likewise, the authors describe phenomena—such as the FBI’s surveillance of writers (especially African Americans), biopolitics, development theory, struggles over the centralization and decentralization of government, and the cultural work of Reaganism—that open up new contexts for discussing postwar culture. Extending the timeline and expanding the geographic scope of Cold War culture, this book reveals both the literature and the culture of the time to be more dynamic and complex than has been generally supposed.