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Epilogue, 1962–1992 Cold war theater in the United States did not end in the early 1960s, of course. Although new modes of theatrical production proliferated after 1962—with the success of off- then off-off-Broadway, the rise of festival and regional theaters, the growing professionalism of educational theater , and the continuation of road companies—the Empty Boys, Family Circles, and Fragmented Heroes that had dominated the Broadway theater of the 1950s continued to people the American stage for the next thirty years. Likewise, the cognitive dynamics of containment and compulsion , plus the other primary metaphors that organized the narratives of containment culture, endured to attract audiences to the rhetoric and aesthetics of similar representations in fiction, films, and television programming . From a cognitive perspective, it is not surprising that modes of theater popular during the early Cold War should persist in the culture ; the near universality of cognitive processes and the generally conservative nature of cultural perception make continuity more likely than change in any culture. Rather, the persistence of cold war theater after 1962 throws into sharper relief the formative alterations that had already occurred between the mid 1930s and 1950. The conjunction of photography , radio, political paranoia, capitalistic consumerism, and the Bomb in the late 1940s had produced a geologic shift in the plate tectonics of American culture; its structural effects would outlast the political Cold War that ended in 1989. At the same time, significant structural changes were occurring in the 1962–1992 period that altered some of the cognitive dynamics of the era. As before, it was primarily new modes of communication that powered these changes. The generation that had dominated the culture of the 1950s had grown up with photographs and radio; their historicist and materialist or Platonic and metonymic effects had shaped that generation ’s understanding of the real. By the mid 1960s the first television generation came to maturity; and the cognitive dynamics of TV, which was already reshaping the culture faster than had any earlier media, challenged older perceptions of reality. In brief, television induced viewers to activate and privilege three pri- mary metaphors of cognition that had not been a major part of the containment liberalism before the 1960s: “iteration,” “surface,” and “link.” Similar to radio but more so, commercial television was and remains enormously repetitious. Viewers become comfortable with the same faces, the same advertisements, and the same program genres while also looking for and taking pleasure in small changes that vary but rarely break the iterative quality of nearly all broadcasts. Somewhat like photographs , television emphasized the different surfaces of its images, a necessity for legibility in the early black-and-white days of the medium, but one that continues to be important because of the small size of the screen. Unlike still and moving photography, the television camera has more difficulty creating illusions of depth; hence the proliferation of medium shots and close-ups on TV, which rely on contrasts in surface and the pleasure viewers take in reading those differences, especially differences in facial expressions. Finally, the diagetic flow of television linked numerous images in webs of causation and similitude. Television advertisers take advantage of the ontology of the medium when they rely on viewers’ ability to create links between juxtaposed images—between, say, a sexy smile or a rippling brook and the toothpaste they are selling. Earlier visual modes of communication also educated the public in such associations; but television, through its fragmentation of viewing and proliferation of programming genre, offers greater complexity and a wider range of linking conventions than any previous medium. As with photography and radio, television requires and rewards modes of cognition that have played a part in the biological and ecological situation of humankind for centuries. But TV’s dominance in the late twentieth century elevated these modes over others to structural prominence in the culture of the period.1 The primacy of “iteration,” “surface,” and “link” in television viewing played out in the 1962–1992 culture in several of the ways that many commentators have identified as postmodernist. Because the perception of the speed of historical change is always relative for a spectator, television viewers, inured to the repetitive sameness of TV images, exaggerated minor changes in their everyday lives and came to believe that American history and culture were in constant flux. Attuned to the surface qualities of phenomena rather than looking for depth and essence, Americans became even more conscious of glamour, packaging...

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