Overview

As the miscreant Detective McNulty applies bite marks to a deceased man’s posterior with a set of dentures in Season Five of The Wire, so are the viewers introduced to the topic of ‘fake news’ and the wider contemporary problems with mainstream media representations of reality. The Wire brilliantly details the manner in which neoliberal market fundamentalism trades in fabrication and falsity. ‘Juking the stats’ is the phrase used throughout the show to signal this corruption but it refers specifically to a quantified method for measuring success that was developed during the Cold War. Doctor Strangelove lovingly describes the essence of the ‘doomsday machine’ as free from “human meddling,” while the machine begins the inexorable process of destroying the world with nuclear bombs. The film’s comedy derives from the absurdity of placing the requirements of systems and institutions above moral human considerations, a common theme of Stanley Kubrick’s films. This problem is central, perhaps, to human survival, as a system which seems beyond our control renders our environment more hostile to our continued existence with each passing day. Harkness and ‘Ballard,’ the novels’ protagonists seek a spiritual or sublime meaning in a world shadowed by a man-made god, one that now contains the power of the apocalypse. The former seeks it in the jargon of Cold War technocracy but finds only death without meaning; a void at the heart of the culture signified by the bomb. The latter in blood sacrifices to the new technological god, in staged car crashes offered up as miniature apocalypses. The Cold War profoundly shaped neoliberalism in ways that are as yet not fully realised. Herein is a careful and extensively researched look at the narratives that pierce the heart of the Cold War zeitgeist and its aftermath and reveal to us that we may be living in a post-Cold War world.

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9781476664668

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Niall Heffernan is an early career researcher and teacher at University College Cork in Ireland. He teaches on subjects including American literature, film and culture, contemporary literature and dystopian fiction.

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