Title: ‘All that Zombies Allow’ Re-Imagining the Fifties in Far from Heaven and Fido
Abstract: In her 2005 book, A Kindler, Gentler America: Melancholia and the Mythical 1950s, Mary Caputi discussed the way in which neoconservative politicians and thinkers have, since the Reagan administration, consciously and consistently looked back to that era as a kind of 'Golden' period in American life. According to neoconservative ideology the decade is seen as 'a time span that has acquired a dense layering of mythological meanings and metaphoric overtones, an era freighted with encoded references that play upon America's self-understanding' and as a result, 'even Americans who never experienced the historical 1950s seem to understand that this time frame somehow correlates with America's definition of itself, and that the decade's denning attributes partake of a narrative about who we are and what we stand for'.1 Of course, this sense that the 1950s are somehow a 'special', uniquely privileged (and significant) time in American political, social and cultural history is not restricted to ideological conservatives, even if they did (and do) continue to promote a particularly dewy-eyed vision of the era that, as Caputi provocatively observes, allows for 'virtually no slippage between what actually happened and what they wish had happened, between the television version of 1950s reality and everyday life during the decade'.2KeywordsPopular CultureReagan AdministrationTelevision VersionIdeological ConservativeAmerican CinemaThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Publication Year: 2011
Publication Date: 2011-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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