Dr. Strangelove's America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age

by Margot A. Henriksen

Overview

Did America really learn to "stop worrying and love the bomb," as the title of Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove, would have us believe? Does that darkly satirical comedy have anything in common with Martin Luther King Jr.'s impassioned "I Have a Dream" speech or with Elvis Presley's throbbing "I'm All Shook Up"? In Margot Henriksen's vivid depiction of the decades after World War II, all three are expressions of a cultural revolution directly related to the atomic bomb. Although many scientists and other Americans protested the pursuit of nuclear superiority after World War II ended, they were drowned out by Cold War rhetoric that encouraged a "culture of consensus." Nonetheless, Henriksen says, a "culture of dissent" arose, and she traces this rebellion through all forms of popular culture.

At first, artists expressed their anger, anxiety, and despair in familiar terms that addressed nuclear reality only indirectly. But Henriksen focuses primarily on new modes of expression that emerged, discussing the disturbing themes of film noir (with extended attention to Alfred Hitchcock) and science fiction films, Beat poetry, rock 'n' roll, and Pop Art. Black humor became a primary weapon in the cultural revolution while literature, movies, and music gave free rein to every possible expression of the generation gap. Cultural upheavals from "flower power" to the civil rights movement accentuated the failure of old values.

Filled with fascinating examples of cultural responses to the Atomic Age, Henriksen's book is a must-read for anyone interested in the United States at mid-twentieth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520340909
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	04/28/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	469
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Margot A. Henriksen is Associate Professor of History at the University of Hawaii.

Editorial Reviews

Provocative and penetrating. . . .An acute analysis of the powerful impact f unconscious and repressed cultural forces during the early stages of the Cold War, Dr. Strangelove's America is a significant edition to our understanding of American life during the most formative decades of our time. — San Francisco Chronicle

San Francisco Chronicle

In a cultural study of the 25 years following Hiroshima, Henriksen begins by examining (though never neatly defining) the 1950s "culture of dissent." Henriksen, who teaches history at the University of Hawaii, argues that in response to the technological revolution of the atomic bomb there emerged an equally revolutionary development in artistic expression that challenged the moral complacency and brutal ethics of the cold war. Together these new formsshe discusses at length film noir, science fiction movies, pulp crime, beat poetry and rock 'n' roll amounted to a kind of "cultural `chaos'" that "mirrored the disruption of matter achieved in the technology of the atomic bomb." Henriksen pays special attention to the new black humor including detailed synopses of Dr. Strangelove, Catch-22, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and The Manchurian Candidate. She ultimately concludes that the "comic-apocalyptic sensibility" and raucous parodying of cold-war society set the tone for the more extremist cultural rebellion of the 1960s and, moreover, that throughout those upheavals, the bomb functioned as the "preeminent and preexisting symbol of America's ills." If the insistence on the centrality of the bomb at times seems strainedperhaps most notably in the suggestion that fear of nuclear annihilation fueled the civil rights movementthe cultural terrain itself is compelling enough to engage the reader and to inspire re-reading or re-viewing the works discussed here. (July)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Henriksen (history, Univ. of Hawaii) has written a savvy study of the transformation of American mass culture in the 1950s and 1960s. She focuses here on the domestic consequences of the atomic bomb and the shift from a culture of anxiety to one of rebellion. Her narrative moves from war studies to teenage delinquency and mental illness to film commentary and back again, with impressive agility. One of the book's best features is its understated, uncomplicated prose, which should make it accessible to a general audience. Another is its emphasis on "coarser" forms of popular culture. Henriksen writes, "It was in particular the new cultural products and genresfilm noir and roman noir, science fiction films, pulp crime literature, beat poetry, rock'n'roll, and black humorthat illustrated the revolutionary and explosive cultural impact of the atomic bomb." She goes on to analyze these forms with considerable insight, applying her specific critiques to her larger argument. Recommended for academic cultural studies collections and larger public libraries.Kent Worcester, Social Science Research Council, New York

Library Journal

A historian bites off more than she can chew in this look at America in the shadow of the bomb from Los Alamos to the early 1970s.

Henriksen (History/Univ. of Hawaii) attempts to show how America's obsession with the atomic bomb produced a "culture of dissent" that affected most kinds of artistic expression. Although several forms of art are addressed (popular music, including such hits as Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction"; the visual arts, as represented by such figures as Jackson Pollock; the novel, as in the works of Thomas Pynchon), film is the primary medium with which Henriksen concerns herself. She examines films that explore a variety of themes, including chemical destruction (White Heat), youth in revolt (Rebel Without a Cause), and, of course, the bomb itself, most notably in the film of the book's title. But it is the work of Alfred Hitchcock that weighs most heavily in her analysis; his film Psycho figures, for instance, in a chapter on the rise of mental illness in America during the postwar period, while Vertigo expresses the pervasive guilt and confusion of the era. Indeed, the narrative often seems bogged down by extraneous material, by a proliferation of examples incompletely explored. Furthermore, while the study is clearly defined as cultural history, there is far too little actual history to hold the book coherently together. The most important historical event in postwar America relating directly to the atomic bomb—the Cuban missile crisis—is disposed of by Henriksen in a mere five pages.

Henriksen really seems to have two books in one: the first about Hitchcock and post-war America, the other about the "culture of dissent" as expressed in the arts of the last five decades.

Kirkus Reviews