Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us
to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (1983) (selections)

In Seeing is Believing, film critic Peter Biskind, who is editor-in-chif of American Film, examines film and Cold War America. Drawing on the predominant genres of the time--including "space invasion" films, westerns, "J.D." films, exploitation cinema, war movies, and film noir--Biskind provides an overview of American culture during the period as it played out across movie screens.

We will be reading the following selections from Biskind's (tragically) out-of-print book: "Introduction: It's Only a Movie" (pp. 2-6); "We The Jury: 12 Angry Men and the Anatomy of Consensus" (pp. 10-20); "The Outside: High Noon and the Conspiracy of the Center" (pp. 44-49; "The Mind Managers: Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the Paranoid Style in American Movies" (pp. 137-144); "Wild in the Streets: Juvenile Deliquency" (pp. 197-217); "Bringing Up Father: Red River and the Feminization of American Men" (pp. 278-284; and "Coming Apart" (pp. 336-348).


Questions to Think About:

1) What is Biskind's thesis in Seeing is Believing? What is the distinctive contribution his study makes to our understanding of Cold War culture? (See the Elements of a Monograph for information about identifying thesis.)

2) How does Biskind's study interact with the historiography that preceded it? What are the weaknesses he identifies in earlier studies of Cold War culture? To what can one attribute these weaknesses?

3) According to Biskind, what has the content of popular films indicated about the thought and culture of the society which produced them?

4) Compare Boyer's assessment of the impact of the bomb with Fussell's assessment in "Thank God for the Atom Bomb." To what do you attribute their differing perspectives?

5) Examine Biskind's method in this study. What sorts of sources does he employ, and how does he "read" them? What sorts of materials does he use to supplement his analysis of these films? Does he use both internal and external textual criticism in this study? Does this method have strengths or weaknesses which seem important to you? (See the Elements of a Monograph for information about identifying method.)

Further resources and readings:
David Seed, American Science Fiction and the Cold War: Literature and Film (1999)
Peter Roffman and Jim Purdy, "The Red Scare in Hollywood: HUAC and the End of an Era," in Steven Mintz and Randy Roberts, eds., Hollywood's America: United States History Through Its Films (1993)
Stuart Samuels, "The Age of Conspiracy and Conformity: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)," Richard Slotkin, "Gunfighters and Green Berets: The Magnificent Seven and the Myth of Counterinsurgency," in Steven Mintz and Randy Roberts, eds., Hollywood's America: United States History Through Its Films (1993)
Robert J. Corber, Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity (1997)
Peter Roffman and Jim Purdy, The Hollywood Social Problem Film: Madness, Despair, and Politics from the Depression to the Fifties (1981)
Christopher Anderson, Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties (1994)
Nina C. Leibman, Living Room Lectures: The Fifties Family in Film and Television (1995)
David Halberstam, The Fifties (1993)
J. Ronald Oakley, God's Country: America in the Fifties (1986)
Joel Foreman, ed., The Other Fifties: Interrogating Midcentury American Icons (1997)
Prepared by Professor Catherine Lavender for HST 622 (Cold War America), at The College of Staten Island of The City University of New York, Summer Semester 2000. Send email to lavender@postbox.csi.cuny.edu
Last modified: Thursday 15 June 2000.