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Today, Hollywood cinema has made a striking turn regarding its portrayals of Russians, returning to the images of the Cold War. To explore the reasons for this sudden renewed interest in the Cold War, this book examines, among others, Guy Ritchie’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015), Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies (2015), Ethan Coen and Joel Coen’s Hail, Caesar! (2016), David Leitch’s Atomic Blonde (2017), Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017), Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018), and Francis Lawrence’s Red Sparrow (2018), as well as such TV shows as Comrade Detective (2017) and The Americans (2013-2018). Are these recent films and series attempting to interpret the tightened political relations between the United States and Russia, suggesting the beginning of “Cold War II”? The chapters in this collection investigate the revival of the Cold War movie genre under multiple angles, including questions of patriotism, national identity, otherness, gender, and corruption. They are sensitive to the cinematic aesthetics and ethics of these representations as they reveal how these new images of the Cold War shape audiences’ understanding of the Cold War in general as well as of the relationship between the U.S. and Russia in particular. This collection defies the traditional definitions of the Cold War film and invites readers to discover the new phase in the Cold War movie genre: Cold War II.

In September of 1941, a handful of isolationist senators set out to tarnish Hollywood for war-mongering. The United States was largely divided on the possibility of entering the European War, yet the immigrant moguls in Hollywood were acutely aware of the conditions in Europe. After Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), the gloves came off. Warner Bros. released the first directly anti-Nazi film in 1939 with Confessions of a Nazi Spy. Other studios followed with films such as The Mortal Storm (MGM), Man Hunt (Fox), The Man I Married (Fox), and The Great Dictator (United Artists). While these films represented a small percentage of Hollywood’s output, senators took aim at the Jews in Hollywood who were supposedly “agitating us for war” and launched an investigation that resulted in Senate Resolution 152. The resolution was aimed at both radio and movies that “have been extensively used for propaganda purposes designed to influence the public mind in the direction of participation in the European war.” When the Senate approved a subcommittee to investigate the intentions of these films, studio bosses were ready and willing to stand up against the government to defend their beloved industry. What followed was a complete embarrassment of the United States Senate and a large victory for Hollywood as well as freedom of speech.

SEE! HEAR! CUT! KILL!: Experiencing Friday the 13^th, is the first book entirely devoted to the analysis of the Friday the 13^th franchise. The story a film tells is usually filtered through a particular perspective, or point of view. This book argues that slasher films, and the Friday the 13^th movies particularly, use all the stylistic tools at their disposal to create a complex and emotionally intense approach to perspective, which develops and shifts across the decades. Chapter one discusses the history of perspective in horror, and the different critical conversations around this. Chapter two looks at the use of camerawork, specifically point-of-view camerawork in the way these films visually communicate perspective. The fourth chapter talks about the way sound and editing work together to communicate perspective and experience in the death sequences these movies capitalize upon. The fourth chapter considers the perspective of viewers, and how each movie speaks to viewers who are either familiar or unfamiliar with the ongoing story in the series. The final chapter first explains how these trends look across a chronological timeline, and what this tells us about the historical development of perspective before looking at the influence these stylistic approaches have had on ‘serious’ film, particularly those recognized by the Hollywood critical establishment.

This volume takes an interdisciplinary perspective when positioning the impact of hypermasculinity on toxic masculinity and the vilification of identities outside of hypermasculinity through several mediums and genres, including film, TV and print comic book literature. The focus lies on heroes within popular culture, and the book argues for a reconsideration of the hero in popular media through an analysis of representation of masculinity, the demonization of femininity, and LGBTQIA+ identities, providing examples of progress and new ways to conceptualise superheroism. By unpicking toxic masculinity and its effect on others, and comparing it to more positive forms of masculinity, the volume will help develop a broader understanding of how the sociological phenomenon of toxic masculinity and its participation in hegemonic masculinity presents itself in our culture, providing a platform on which calls for a more diverse presentation of creators, characters, and actors can be ideologically supported. This volume contributes to wider discourses concerning popular media’s advances and shortcomings in accommodating diversity.