Biskind - The sky is falling: how vampires, zombies, androids, and superheroes made America great for extremism

Table of Contents

Also by Peter Biskind

My Lunches with Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles

Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America

Gods and Monsters: Thirty Years of Writing on Film and Culture from One of Americas Most Incisive Writers

Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock n Roll Generation Saved Hollywood

The Godfather Companion: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About All Three Godfather Films

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2018 by Peter Biskind

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No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

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Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2018

Distributed by Two Rivers Distribution

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Biskind, Peter, author.

Title: The sky is falling: how vampires, zombies, androids, and superheroes made America great for extremism / Peter Biskind.

Description: New York: The New Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018017585| ISBN 9781620974308 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: United StatesCivilization21st century. | Popular cultureUnited StatesHistory21st century. | Popular culturePolitical aspectsUnited StatesHistory21st century. | RadicalismSocial aspectsUnited StatesHistory21st century. | RadicalismPolitical aspectsUnited StatesHistory21st century. | Political cultureUnited StatesHistory21st century. | Right and left (Political science) | Polarization (Social sciences)United States.

Classification: LCC E169.12 B57 2018 | DDC 973.93dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018017585

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This book was set in Garamond Premier Pro, Impact, and Oswold

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Betsy and Kate, with love, as ever, and to Richard Brick.

I only wish I was still able to take advantage of his street smarts and laugh at his wiseass antics.

CONTENTS

The end of the world stalks the center, threatening its valuesdiversity, inclusion, and faith in the authoritiesby creating extreme circumstances that call for extreme measures.

The left blames Us, not Them, for the apocalypse. Luddite shows like Avatar look to nature to save us from ourselves, while Dotcom shows like The Imitation Game look to machines.

For the secular right, the apocalypse is democracys assault on excellence and individualism, while the evangelical right welcomes the final days because they offer personal salvation.

Faced with vampires and zombies, mainstream authorities are either missing in action, as in True Blood, or just collapse in the face of the Other, as in The Walking Dead.

On the left, the authorities are not just derelict or inept, theyre fools and knaves, turning on heroes and superheroes who are helping humans by seeking justice.

On the right, Jack Bauer, Batman, and evangelicals declare war on aliens and mainstream authoritiesterrorists and atheists allin the name of God, family, and country.

Despite extreme circumstances, centrists do their best to make their mothers proud, minding their manners and behaving in accordance with the dos and donts of mainstream morality.

If the center frets because its heroes sometimes behave like beasts, the left doesnt care. It embraces Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, because the Romantics taught that savages are noble.

Even harsher than the left, in the World According to Clint Eastwood and James Bond, its an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Murder, torture, and revenge are all in a days work.

The mainstream traditionally doubled down on humans, but as the clouds gather and the sky darkens, the extremes come to regard them as the problem, not the solution.

If the human species is fatally flawed, the heroes and heroines of Avatar, The Shape of Water, and the Twilight Saga just want to get the hell out. They take refuge in the post-human.

Although the far left and far right think no more of jumping from one species to another than of playing hopscotch, they might have saved themselves the trouble, because theyre in for a big surprise.

Are things getting more simplistic, and therefore more right and more left? Yeah!

Joss Whedon, writer-director, The Avengers

This book is about American popular culture in the age of extremism. Extremism is a broad-stroke term that covers a myriad of sinsor virtuesdepending on your point of view. Extremist has long been a dirty word in the national lexicon, particularly over the course of the two-decade-long summer that lasted, give or take a few interruptions, from the end of World War II to the mid-1960s. Those who dissented from the prevailing ideology of American exceptionalismthat is, America is special, better, greater than any other nation on the planetor who called attention to the discrepancy between our leaders lofty rhetoric and the conduct of one administration after another were branded with the e word.

Extremists came in two flavors, right and left. Both were routinely vilified, the former as the lunatic fringe with their tinfoil hats and tales of alien abduction, the latter as un-Americans, laying the groundwork for Uncle Joe Stalins imminent takeover of the United States. But right or left, they were excluded from the mainstreamfrom its practices, its discourse or, as we now say, the national conversation.

Today, the battered centrists who are still walking and talking continue to use the term as a derogatory epithet, along with cognates like divisive and controversial, or, more colorfully, wackos, as Senator John McCain called Donald Trumps supporters during the 2016 presidential primary.

As the subsequent election suggested, however, the joke was on them. Extremism, as it turned out, had been undergoing a makeover since long before the results were in. It had been invested with a tangy sizzle of daring and excitement, become the go-to term for characterizing whatever was new and different, ahead of the curve, cooler than cool, morewhat? Everything. Extremists were praised as disrupters, envelope pushers, out of the boxers. A random sampling turns up extreme combat, extreme medicine, extreme rendition. Extreme products abound, from flash drives (SanDisk Extreme) to toothpaste (Aquafresh Extreme Clean). The Showtime Extreme channel specializes in martial arts, boxing, and thrillers, that is, action that never, ever stops. Seeking eyeballs that have wondered elsewhere, even todays reality shows have scrambled aboard the extremist bandwagon. According to the