American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War: A Critical Reassessment

Introduction

1 term undercover Russian spy operation in the United States, the media had their summer blockbuster. Nearly every news story or radio broadcast featured some variation of “not since the Cold War,” mused about whether the conflict had ever really ended, and commented on the oddity of this espionage ring.The television critic for the NewYorkTimes, for one, noted the aesthetic shape of the “quaint,” “Cold War–style” spy operation, and joked that there would soon be a “Real Russian Spies of New Jersey” reality show.1 The story soon emerged: nearly a dozen Russian agents had been under deep cover in the United States, tasked with integrating themselves into American society. Some did so by becoming average members of the American middle class, and in some cases so complete was their transformation that their identity started to seem the end, rather than the means, of their mission. It was all textbook Cold War thriller, if indeed a bit quaint-seeming: hadn’t we seen this all before? The Rosenbergs. Klaus Fuchs. Aldrich Ames. Weren’t spies supposed to be from a bygone era? And yet there was the espionage ring in all its pulp glory—the Newsweek headline announced that it was “Part John le Carré, Part Austin Powers.” It was as if the Russian spies were taking their cues from film, rather than the other way around: as the employer of one of the accused noted, the story seemed “straight from a movie.”2 The whole affair could indeed have been straight from the film Salt, released just a few weeks later, which featured Angelina Jolie as a Russian mole inside the CIA. (Despite half-serious speculation in the blogosphere, it turned out that the real Russian spy ring was not in fact an elaborate marketing campaign by Sony Studios.)3 Directed by Phillip Noyce, who brought Tom Clancy’s Clear and Present Danger and Patriot Games to the silver screen in the 1990s, Salt seemed almost too fitting in the summer of 2010. Part seat-of-the-pants thriller, part feminized reworking of Bond ingenuity, part kitsch (there is a secret introduCtion Culture and Cold ConfliCt steven belletto And dAniel GrAusAm What Is Cold War Culture? When in June of 2010 news broke concerning a long- stev en Bel l et to and dani e l GraU sam 2 Russian castle where child agents train in isolation), the film paralleled the real spy ring: on the one hand it was deadly serious, on the other it was too campy to be believable.The frightening possibility of losing control of the American nuclear arsenal coexisted with scenes of children lining up to kiss the ring of their grizzled Soviet spymaster. The point of a tour through Salt is not, of course, to suggest that we should take our historiographic cues from Hollywood, or that we should necessarily seek to extend the Cold War’s descriptive reach past 1989 or 1991 (although there may be good reasons to do so).4 Rather, what Salt exemplifies is a confusion about just what the Cold War and its culture were and are. Indeed, the real story of the spy ring seemed less an example of contemporary espionage than an assemblage of the classic features of high Cold War cinema. There was the striking female lead Anna Chapman , described in the media as if she were a Bond Girl (the New York Post headline read, inevitably, “From Russia With Love”) along with reports of invisible ink and secret communication networks. Capping it all off was the reason one person simply couldn’t believe that her neighbors were foreign agents: they had perfect hydrangeas in their front yard.5 For the neighbor, the mundane fact of the well-kept hydrangeas invalidates the fantastically romantic possibility that spies live on the block; for the cultural critic, this screams of the cinematic Cold War, in which the humble hydrangea played a key role as a Communist cover. In a famous early scene of The Manchurian Candidate (1962), arguably the classic film of American Cold War culture, U.S. troops being brainwashed in Manchuria are tricked into believing that they are in New Jersey listening to a Ladies’ Club presentation on the growing of hydrangeas. Once again, the quotidian crashes against the improbable, and there seems a profound confusion of realms—just where does history end, and imaginative aesthetic production begin? Anna Chapman, for instance, could populate the pages of a Don DeLillo novel: since her...