A renewable reserve army of villains: Nostalgia and memory of the communist other in American Cold War cinema

The present dissertation revisits the Cold War on film from the official start of the conflict with the Truman Doctrine in 1947 to the contemporary moment. It argues that in order to understand and account for the continued proliferation of Cold War films with recognizable stereotypes and motifs, it is necessary to apply a critical lens of nostalgia and memory to their analysis. Drawing on previous work on Cold War cinema, Hollywood’s production of films that engage with the subject is periodized according to the central chapters of the conflict as well as the main stages of development of the Hollywood film industry. Analysis of films from the “propaganda cycle” of the late 40s and early 50s according to an analytic of memory shows that an imperative to remember a hegemonic conception of the nation is a recurring theme. While the decades of the 60s and the 70s are generally regarded as a period of Cold War thaw, analysis of films from that period reveals that idiomatic stereotypes established in previous decades continued to find application even in films of the “New Hollywood,” which were more morally ambiguous and broadly regarded as politically critical. The present study argues that the 80s conservative turn and the “New Cold War” that brought about the second cycle of Cold War films are best understood through Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory, which turns the focus of analysis to how the conflict had become overdetermined by that point. Lastly, more recent Cold War cinema is analyzed through Svetlana Boym’s concepts of reflective and restorative nostalgia and their imbrications with the logic of multicultural neoliberalism. This dissertation concludes that an analytic of memory illuminates not only the continued relevance of Cold War cinema, but also processes of the maintenance of U.S. global hegemony as well as the integration of the post-Cold War Russian state into the global neoliberal order.U of I OnlyAuthor requested U of Illinois access only (OA after 2yrs) in Vireo ETD syste