![]() ![]() Moving beyond a snapshot of television history, Citizen Spy provides a contemporary lens to analyze the nature-and implications-of American nationalism in practice. Spy/Master is a well-written Cold War espionage potboiler that promises to build tension as the danger to its main character increases. For years, he provided top-secret Russian intelligence to the British, but he is best remembered for risking his life in 1983 to pull the world back from the brink of nuclear annihilation. Distrust and resentment continued to fester between the two superpowers in the wake of World War II. The finest agents this side of the Berlin Wall were pitted against KGB spies determined to steal our secrets. Increasingly exclusive definitions of legitimate citizenship, heroism, and dissent have been evident through popular accounts of the Iraq war. The European chapter of World War Two was over, and the US and the USSR were pondering their future relationship. At a time when the Cold War spying game was in full swing, Oleg Gordievsky was one of the KGBs rising stars.and biggest traitors. 2/1944: Stalin enlisted American scientists, including Oppenhemier, Borh, Fermi, and Szillard, to serve as Russian Spies. During the darkest years of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union played a nuclear game of cat and mouse. For years, Germany seemed to tolerate even flagrant Russian operations on its soil. Yet, even as spy shows introduced African American and female characters, they continued to reinforce racial and sexual stereotypes.īringing these concerns to the political and cultural landscape of the twenty-first century, Kackman asserts that the roles of race and gender in national identity have become acutely contentious. Discreetly, Berlin Confronts Russian Spies Hiding in Plain Sight. and Get Smart to the more complicated global and political situations of I Spy and Mission: Impossible, Kackman situates espionage television within the tumultuous culture of the civil rights and women’s movements and the war in Vietnam. ![]() From parodies such as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. These “documentary melodramas” were, Kackman argues, vehicles for the fledgling television industry to proclaim its loyalty to the government, and they came stocked with appeals to patriotism and anti-Communist vigilance.Īs the rigid cultural logic of the Red Scare began to collapse, spy shows became more playful, self-referential, and even critical of the ideals professed in their own scripts. The intelligence arms of the Army and Navy had noticed increased activity by German and Japanese spies in the late 1930s and began. Looking at secret agents on television and the relationships among networks, producers, government bureaus, and the viewing public in the 1950s and 1960s, Kackman explores how Americans see themselves in times of political and cultural crisis.ĭuring the first decade of the Cold War, Hollywood developed such shows as I Led 3 Lives and Behind Closed Doors with the approval of federal intelligence agencies, even basing episodes on actual case files. In Citizen Spy, Michael Kackman investigates how media depictions of the slick, smart, and resolute spy have been embedded in the American imagination.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |