Peter Biskind's
The Sky is Falling: How Vampires, Zombies, Androids, and Superheroes Made America Great for Extremism (New York: New Press, 2018) is a sequel to his
Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us To Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York: Henry Holt, 1983). In
Seeing is Believing Biskind argued that analysts can categorise and classify films culturally along ideological lines. There are, he claims, the films of the consensual centre (corporate liberal
or pluralist and conservative), films of the extremist right, and films of the extremist
left. Corporate liberal or pluralist films, Biskind contends, emphasise science and technology and make
heroes of its scientists. Conservative films tend
to praise the
forces of order and make heroes of its soldiers and cops.
Left wing films tend to
break down the us versus them binary and try to understand and even side with the "alien", the other, someone or something that is often ultimately a metaphor or allegory for us, we humans. Right wing films tend to make heroes of those seeking revenge and valorise individualism.
In the years between 1950 and the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, America changed, argues Biskind, particularly after the elections of Richard Nixon in 1968 and Ronald Reagan in 1980. Those years saw the transformation of the United States from an America dominated by a New Deal political culture and practise to one dominated by neoliberal ideologies and practises. During those years the era of end of ideology ended and American political culture was transformed, thanks to the reaction of the "silent majority" to the counterculture and the civil rights movement, the advent of neoliberalism, deindustrialisation, globalisation, hyperindividualism or narcissism, from an America with a supposed consensus on politics, economics, and culture, the New Deal-Great Society political culture, to an America fighting seemingly never ending cold wars over economics, politics, and culture. By the 1970s America, with its cities burning, its students being shot on college campuses, its rageholism resulting from busing for integration and equal education, the Vietnam War, and Watergate, and the increasing Repulicanisation of some White Northern ethnics and many of the South's Dixiecrats, among other things, seemed on the verge of the end of days. By the end of the century, fin-de-siecle American films and television screens were filled not with end of history fantasies about the triumph of American liberalism, but instead with science fiction and horror fantasies about vampire apocalypses, zombie apocalypses, superhero apocalypses (a category that would include the cop superhero we are good they are evil propaganda common on US television), and even those good old time if ever changing with the times right wing White Christian apocalypses.
This fraying of the United States's cultural and ideological consensus and the "rebirth" of culture or ideological wars wasn't only, according to Biskind, reflected in the ideologies of American political culture. They were also mirrored in American films and on American television where the liberal and conservative consensus in so many of the films of the 1950s began to break down. The films of the centre, the films of the old consensus of the 1950s, are still being made, notes Biskind, and they still preach the gospel of good old end of ideology civility, pluralism (though this has moved beyond the supposed 1950s Catholic/Protestant/Jewish pluralism of the era), the progressive nature of science, that American political and economic institutions still work, and that the forces of order can and will keep anarchy at bay. The HBO centrist television show Game of Thrones, for instance, privileges the pluralistic coalition of Jon Snow over the tribalism of Cersei Lannister while still placing that old Victorian warhorse, the family, and that other centrist Victorian warhorse, home, at the heart of the show.
Many of these centrist films are no longer what they used to be, however, notes Biskind. Some of them reflect Hollywoods hedging of its bets by incorporating--Hollywood does love to paint by demographic numbers for fun and profit--elements of the left and right into them making them, in the process, a cultural and ideological hybrid, a jingle and jangle, a yin and yang of cultural and ideological discourses. As a consequence these having your cake and eating it too films and television shows have built in something for anyone whether centre, left, or right. Star Wars, for instance, hid its anti-imperialist message behind a fog of Hollywood serial nostalgia and popular culture intertextuality and helped create passive consumers drugged up on the spectacle of bread and circuses special effects and romance, something that would soon expand the fan boy culture of comic books, creating, in the process, a fan culture in which fans identified with and simulated the characters in the film and television shows they worshipped at the many comic cons that arose and expanded in the era. This fan culture of identity simulation was quite different from the craze for films as films and the directors who made them that characterised the cinephile culture of the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. This paint by the demographic numbers strategy has given us, for instance, the AMC television show The Walking Dead and the HBO show True Blood, television shows that provide viewers with right wing bleed the hearts--and we see a lot of hearts bleeding in these two shows--those on right can identity with and, at the same time, bleeding hearts those on the left can identity with.
In parallel to these developments in the films of the consensual centre, the era from Nixon to George W. Bush also saw the the increasing importance of "extremist" films of the right and the left, claims Biskind. Films and television shows that were once marginal B level Hollywood films and films made by independent filmmakers like American International, have, claims Biskind, become more prominent and even, in some cases, gone mainstream. Right wing films are of two types, argues Biskind. The films of the secular right and the films of the religious right. The secular right films and television programmes today are less John Wayne, one of the most beloved actors of the 1950s and 60s and the premier example of the independent loner cowboy fated to pass away along with American frontier in such movies as The Seekers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, than those of that prime example of the 1970s and post 1970s bleeder of hearts, Clint Eastwood of Dirty Harry and The Outlaw Josie Wales fame. Jack Bauer, the Clint Eastwood stand in in the television show 24, for example, violates the law and engages in torture to keep America safe again and again from a host of Snidely Whiplash terrorists of mostly Islamic, Eastern European, and Chinese persuasion. Deceased former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was so taken with Dirty Jack and his act that he asked how any prosecutor in his right mind could bring charges against the man who saved America again again, something that tells us, Biskind argues, about the increasing prominence and influence of secular right wing films and television shows in American political and ideological culture since Nixon, and something that may tell us something about how important simulacra have become in a media saturated world and an America where film and television celebrities are often elected to political office.
The other strand of right wing films are those of the religious right according to Biskind. The films and television programmes (and literary forbearers) of the religious right, such as the seemingly endless Left Behind series of sixteen books and four films, trods trails that emerged in the Victorian era in mainstream and hegemonic Protestantism, ideologies in which the end times are coming thanks to secular humanism and urban decadence and decay. In these religious horror films good Christians are raptured, bad secularists are up fire creek without a paddle, and those secularists somewhere in between have a choice to make: either get born again and become a bride of Christ or suffer the pain and torments of a world become hellish and await the day of judgement. Speaking of hell, the secularists have their own mundane versions of hell such as the Wessex of ITV's Broadchurch and the Yorkshire of the BBC's Happy Valley where murderers, predators, rapists, and serial killers walk and stalk the streets of the small towns in which the story takes place.
Like the films and television shows of the once extremist right, secular and religious, the films and television shows of the extremist left, though they are more marginal and lesser in numbers than those of the centre and right in post-Nixonian America, also moved away from the consensual centre, writes Biskind. Avatar, for instance, condemns imperialism, including American imperialism, and celebrates the other, in Aviator's case the Na'vi, the natives of the planet that is being invaded by the military, industrial, and scientific forces of the centre. They also challenge, maintains Biskind, the essentialism of the consensual centre, In Avatar, for example, some of the scientists who have landed on the planet to help the military-industrial-governmental exploit the planets natural resource, go rogue from the establishment once they realise what the oligarchic complex is up to. Eventually, two of the rogues join with the Na'vi to fight the exploitative imperialism of the invaders and at least one of the rebels goes native by becoming Na'vi, making them us and us them, if limitedly, in the process, something that has been common in leftist films since the 1950s, claims Biskind.
In his conclusion to the The Sky is Falling, Biskind argues that the demise of the centre, to paraphrase Mark Twain, may have been somewhat exaggerated after the 1970s. Biskind suggests that the centre has revived thanks to the Jack Bauer meets Mort Downey Jr. meets WWE wrestling regime of Donald Trump, a man who has been married multiple times, publicly brags about his sexual conquests, and who publicly makes fun of the disabled. Keep your eyes on the trailer skies for coming film and television attractions of left, right, and centre, or perhaps on the writings of Peter Biskind so we can ascertain whether Biskind's hypothesis about the reviving centre has merit. Perhaps with the 2022 repudiation of elements of the delusional right wing notion that Democrats stole the election of 2020 Hollywood will tack increasingly back toward the centre, assuming, of course, that there is profit to be made by doing so.
Biskind's book should be read by anyone interested in the history of American film and television in the post-Nixon era of American history. Its textual approach, one that takes culture seriously, shows what can be done with the history of cinema and television when one puts films and television shows in the context of history, society, and culture rather than in the context of psychoanalysis with all its accompanying problems as does the crystal ball school of textualism that dominates so much film and television studies these days. While largely grounded in textual analysis with references to interviews with directors, actors, creators, and some polling data, The Sky is Falling is, because it is grounded in history and broadly focused on economic, cultural, and political forces, Biskind's approach to film and television, which finds culture war battles on the surface of filmic and televisual texts, seems, at least to me, far more valuable, valid, fruitful, and compelling than that of cult of crystal ball textualism, which finds ahistorical culture wars devouring texts from beneath them. Another thing The Sky is Falling nicely does is point up the problems associated with the polemical discourse of American conservatives and the American right, namely that Hollywood is a den and web of internationalist and traitorous leftists who are trying to brainwash the masses with their anti-American hogwash. It isn't, as The Sky is Falling nicely shows by isolating centre, right wing, and left wing variants of Hollywood cinema. Hollywood, contrary to the socially and culturally constructed fantasies of the paranoid and conspiratorial right, makes a lot of right wing films as Biskind shows. Very highly recommended.
