Tag: The New Press

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).