Cold War II: Hollywood's Renewed Obsession with Russia
H-USA Edited Collection: Cold War II: Hollywood’s Renewed Obsession with Russia Discussion published by Tatiana Konrad on Monday, August 13, 2018 Date: October 1, 2018 The Cold War, with its bald confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, has been widely depicted in film. Starting even before the conflict actually began with Ernst Lubitsch’s portrayals of communism in Ninotschka (1939), and ranging from Stanley Kubrick’s openly “Cold War” Dr. Strangelove (1963) to Fred Schepisi’s The Russia House (1990), Hollywood’s obsession with the Cold War, the Soviets/Russians, communism, and the political and ideological differences between the U.S. and Russia were pronounced. This obsession has persisted even after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union. Cold War tropes continue to be (ab)used, as can be seen in multiple representations of evil Russians on screen, including Wolfgang Petersen’s Air Force One (1997), Jon Favreau’s Iron Man 2 (2010), Phillip Noyce’s Salt (2010), Brad Bird’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011), John Moore’s A Good Day to Die Hard (2013), and Antoine Fuqua’s The Equalizer (2014), to name just a few. All these films portray Russians in a rather similar manner: as members of the mafia or as plain criminals. Yet recently Hollywood cinema has made a striking turn regarding its portrayals of Russians, returning to the images of the Cold War. This turn and the films that resulted from it are what the collection proposes to examine. The sanctions imposed on Russia during the Ukrainian crisis in 2014 by several Western countries, including the United States, along with Trump’s admiration for Putin, Russian attempts to influence the 2016 American election, the fatal poisoning in the UK, etc., have led to a tense relationship between Russia and the Western world.
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