Tag: Bela Lugosi

How Vampires, Zombies, Androids, and Superheroes Made America Great for Extremism By Peter Biskind 252 pp. The New Press. Peter Biskind has previously explored pop culture and film history in fizzy, captivating works, including “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” and “Down and Dirty Pictures.” But those were written from hindsight — the eras he dissected had formed, plateaued and ebbed. Biskind illuminated facets of those eras that until his books came along had remained outside the light source of accepted opinion. He excelled at this task, peppering film analysis with gossip, empathy and playfulness. America’s current crisis of fracture and extremism can’t be clearly explored through the lens of pop culture — especially if that lens is focused even more narrowly on superhero, fantasy, science fiction and apocalyptic horror. If you also think of culture — and, more to the point of this book, pop culture — in the same way, then you’re probably thinking “Pass.” Image For those who agree to take it, the journey in “The Sky Is Falling” isn’t as propulsive or as fun as in Biskind’s other books. Each section describes iconic pop culture “shows” — Biskind’s umbrella phrase for films and TV series — as expressions of a particular political worldview. After a while it feels like being led through plodding, 4/4 time dance steps. Biskind, despite his journalistic élan, is not as sure-footed a guide through 21st-century nerd culture as he was through the fascinating minefield of cocaine, conflict and creativity in “Easy Riders.” It’s alarming how many things he flat-out whiffs in these pages — and not just textual misreadings (of the failed “social experiment” at the end of Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight,” for example, and of a crucial speech by the district attorney Harvey “Two-Face” Dent in the same film).

I’m not going to apologize for this column. I find it necessary due to a rhetorical trend in politics that’s gotten out of hand over the last few years: The indignant demand for apologies by “outraged” political leaders regarding some “outrageous” statement made or vote taken by a political opponent. We’ve seen more than our share of this annoying phenomenon here in this enchanted land during this enchanted election cycle. This year, it seems that crying “apologize!” has replaced crying wolf among our politicos. Last week, we saw it after a gubernatorial candidate debate, during which the state Republican Party tweeted that Democratic nominee Michelle Lujan Grisham looked like she’d hired “Richard Nixon’s makeup artist from the 1960 debate? At least they didn’t call her “Horseface.” But seriously, I can see how women, Democrats and anyone old enough to remember when Republicans defended Nixon’s every move, would be upset. And not long afterward, the Republican Governors Association unleashed an attack ad on Lujan Grisham. On Sept. 26, Rich responded, “I will not apologize. “Steve Bannon is a global thought leader for economic populism,” Rich said in an email. So it’s no surprise that the party of my opponent, Sen. Martin Heinrich, hates Steve Bannon.