What movies and other bits of popular culture are about the Cold War?

January 29, 2011 10:25 PM

What movies and other bits of popular culture are about the Cold War?

What movies are Cold War classics? And not necessarily the outright in-your-face Dr. Strangelove, War Games, The Day After type movie (although a list of those would be welcome, too). I'm interested in allegorical movies, or even bestselling fiction or pop hits that reference the Cold War.

I'm trying to explain to my kids how it permeated pop culture when I was growing up. I sort of feel like Frannie in The Stand, writing down "Things to Remember" in her diary for her child.

posted by Addlepated to media & arts (65 answers total)

Red Dawn!
posted by iamabot at 10:27 PM on January 29, 2011 [4 favorites]

Wikipedia has a list that would probably for a good start for films.

It also has a list of Cold War novels.
posted by SNWidget at 10:29 PM on January 29, 2011

Top Gun.
posted by blaneyphoto at 10:30 PM on January 29, 2011

Not a movie, but 99 Red Balloons comes to mind.
posted by i_am_a_fiesta at 10:36 PM on January 29, 2011

A few I don't see on the Wikipedia list: Ice Station Zebra, From Russia with Love, The Manchurian Candidate, No Way Out, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, In Like Flint.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 10:36 PM on January 29, 2011 [2 favorites]

Matinee is a neat little movie about the Cuban missile crisis...
posted by HuronBob at 10:39 PM on January 29, 2011

Some songs:
"Russians" - Sting
"99 Luftballons" - Nena (or "99 Red Balloons" if you prefer)
"Lawyers In Love" - Jackson Browne
"Party At Ground Zero" - Fishbone
posted by SisterHavana at 10:42 PM on January 29, 2011

I feel like the biggest dork for knowing/suggesting this, but Grease 2 has a bomb shelter and people freaking out about the bomb. There was even a bomb drill mentioned.
posted by angelchrys at 10:42 PM on January 29, 2011 [1 favorite]

War Games
posted by spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints at 10:43 PM on January 29, 2011

Pop hits: I always felt that Sting's "Russians" captured the zeitgeist really well.
posted by gemmy at 10:44 PM on January 29, 2011

Dr. Seuss' The Butter Battle Book.
posted by puritycontrol at 10:45 PM on January 29, 2011 [1 favorite]

oh god, how did i miss war games in your question

Stripes
Rambo III
posted by spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints at 10:45 PM on January 29, 2011

Fail-safe. It's "Dr. Strangelove" without any laughs, and it scared the pants off of me when I was a kid.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 10:50 PM on January 29, 2011 [1 favorite]

Sonnenallee.
posted by nasreddin at 10:56 PM on January 29, 2011

That Rocky with the blond dude.
posted by Sys Rq at 11:00 PM on January 29, 2011

There are entire genres about the Cold War; James Bond has been retargeted to terrorists or organized crime, but I don't know what Tom Clancy writes about these days.
posted by hattifattener at 11:01 PM on January 29, 2011

but I don't know what Tom Clancy writes about these days.

I think his novels have been ghostwritten since around the time the Berlin Wall came down. That having been said, it was Islamic terrorists who precipitated the European war in Red Storm Rising, and Clancy continued to deploy terrorists of various flavors throughout his early corpus. Either he was amazingly prescient about the role of terrorism in geopolitical events, or his books had enough impact to cause political elites to overplay the impact of terrorism.

An interesting cultural studies project would be to pick movies and novels at random from the various decades of the cold war and look for cold war influences and references. You'd have to calibrate your analysis carefully, a sufficiently motivated person could probably read a cold war angle into just about anything.
posted by b1tr0t at 11:12 PM on January 29, 2011

The Lives of Others
Telefon
Wings of Desire uses the Berlin Wall to great poetic advantage.
posted by Crane Shot at 11:13 PM on January 29, 2011 [1 favorite]

My 8th grader is learning about the cold war in school, so we've been watching related movies at home. Last weekend we watched 13 Days; next up, The Atomic Cafe. But they are both very "in your face." Sci fi movies from the 50s and 60s may be what you're looking for: The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Or go with Star Wars - isn't that a Cold War allegory?
posted by kbar1 at 11:14 PM on January 29, 2011 [3 favorites]

Gorky park, both film and book.

Len Deighton's harry palmer series, both books and film (with michael caine!)

Graham Greene's later fiction, esp The Human Factor.

Le Carre's novels, films and the Smiley tv series.
posted by smoke at 11:18 PM on January 29, 2011 [1 favorite]

According to some cultural theorists, all the UFO movies (It Came From Outer Space, etc) were consciously or unconsciously based on the fear of the Soviets and their 'otherness', just as all the Godzilla type movies from Japan were allegories of the atomic bombs.
posted by UbuRoivas at 11:18 PM on January 29, 2011 [1 favorite]

The Fallout video game series take place in an alternate past where the US and the USSR nuked each other and Red China invaded the US as well.
posted by bardic at 11:18 PM on January 29, 2011

From the very early part of the cold war would be Four in a Jeep.

Here's a tiny bit of anecdata for you. During the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, my father was working for the U.S. Civil Service on a U.S. Air Force base in France and we were living in housing on the base. We little kids used to run around singing "Khrushchev the red nosed Russian" to the tune of "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer." (I was only 5. We kids really had little idea what it all meant at the time, but we had heard Krushchev's name enough to know it meant *something*.)
posted by gudrun at 11:19 PM on January 29, 2011

Kiss Me Deadly, and The Manchurian Candidate, naturally. I'm not sure I entirely understand your question, though. Do you want examples of works that directly reference the Cold War (thus placing themselves in the midst of it) or do you want works influenced and shaped by the Cold War. I studied a lot of American Cold War lit in university, but most of it didn't explicitly state 'This is a Novel about the Cold War' but rather engaged with ideas/problems/etc that came to the forefront in post-war America. (That in itself brings up another question -- are you interested in the Bay of Pigs Cold War or the later Pulling Down the Wall Cold War? The beginnings or the end? When were you growing up?)

Check out The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (it's both a movie and a book). I'd also search for 'Mental Hygiene' instructional videos, as well.
posted by Felicity Rilke at 11:22 PM on January 29, 2011

Spies Like Us
posted by Rhomboid at 11:32 PM on January 29, 2011 [1 favorite]

When I think of the Cold War, there's one album that comes to mind immediately: Dazzle Ships by Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark. This is the kind of music people make when they know they're in the crosshairs of several megatons worth of nuclear warheads.

A few previous songs make references to the Cold War, but I think this style of music in general reminds me of that time period. It's futuristic, cold, distant and paranoid, just like I remember feeling when I was in school listening to my teachers explain how the big red blob on the map was pure, destructive evil.
posted by TrialByMedia at 11:35 PM on January 29, 2011 [1 favorite]

The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming
posted by kbar1 at 11:36 PM on January 29, 2011 [1 favorite]

Oh, one more movie I forgot to mention - The Boy with Green Hair.
posted by gudrun at 11:41 PM on January 29, 2011

There are a number of early to mid 70's films— I don't know if the genre has a name— like 3 Days of the Condor, The Parallax View or even All the President's Men that are all about paranoia and hidden agendas and shadowy agencies playing the great game. Ludlom built a career writing this stuff. If not expressly about the Cold War, it certainly seems a product of it (and also, obviously, domestic assassination, the Vietnam War, Kent State, and other worldview-shaping events of the times), and exists against a backdrop of it.

Also, The Falcon and the Snowman and Cloak and Dagger come to mind, strangely, as 80s-era Cold War movies.
posted by mumkin at 11:43 PM on January 29, 2011

XTC's "Living Through Another Cuba" and "Generals and Majors"
posted by bardic at 12:05 AM on January 30, 2011

For me, U2's War sums up that pervasive sense of '80s cold war dread when I was in my early teens. I remember sitting around with friends listening to it (particularly the song Seconds) and quite seriously discussing what we thought our chances were of making it to college before the bomb was dropped.

Speaking of dying in a nuclear holocaust, the Ultravox song Dancing With Tears in My Eyes was all about running home to be with your lover in the final minutes before the world ended. We all thought it was terribly romantic (if a bit overwrought, even for a bunch of 14-year-olds).
posted by scody at 12:11 AM on January 30, 2011 [2 favorites]

I Dream of Jeannie.
posted by rhizome at 12:14 AM on January 30, 2011 [2 favorites]

The Doomsday Clock on the cover of every issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1947.
posted by marsha56 at 12:43 AM on January 30, 2011

I can't find it, but someone here on AskMefi asked people to help them understand the 80s - where the crazy multicoloured clothes and hairstyles and glitter and everything came from. They felt they had a grasp of the spirit of other decades, but the 80s eluded them.

One the answers marked best (I think), was about the cold war - the brightness was a reaction to the knowledge that everything could end in nuclear fire at any time. People didn't really know if they really had a future. If civilization itself had a future. Best not to think about things like that, better to paint a bright happy world for the present.

The explanation made a bit more sense than what I've written above, but the point is, in looking for the subtle signs of the cold war being everywhere in pop culture, you might be overlooking the fact that the cold war was EVERYWHERE. It was beyond permeation, it was a defining factor, the mindset of the era.

Pop culture didn't just refer to it, pop culture was its product. Happy escapism, nihilism, carpe diem, military fetishization, etc etc.

It may be a bit hyperbolic, but explain to your kids that people wore bright happy clothes and glitter because they didn't know if they'd still have a world the next day. It may be only partly true, but I think it would get them closer to understanding the 80s than pointing out pop culture references.
posted by -harlequin- at 12:43 AM on January 30, 2011 [4 favorites]

Hitchock's Torn Curtain -- I saw this for the first time this week and it made me think "how to explain the cold war to the kids". And Get Smart!!
posted by bwonder2 at 1:22 AM on January 30, 2011

Citizen X
posted by dougrayrankin at 2:02 AM on January 30, 2011

The Daisy Ad (1964)
posted by marsha56 at 2:10 AM on January 30, 2011 [1 favorite]

There's definitely a strong strand in science-fiction, as others have mentioned: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (analogy for the fear of Communist infiltration/McCarthyism); Day the Earth Stood Still (fear of nuclear war). The first Battlestar Galactica had an episode where Galactica encounters Earth humans - but they turn out to be the bad guys from the Eastern Alliance...Star Trek is a utopian reaction to the Cold War.

A lot of print SF deals with the same issues - Asimov had short stories about the evils of nuclear weapons/war; PK Dick had a lot of stories that were set in, or after, a major war between the US and Soviet Union; Pohl had 'The Cool War' (more recently (MeFi's own) Stross has a number of Cold War-themed stories). I'm sure there's many more.
posted by Infinite Jest at 2:15 AM on January 30, 2011

The Hunt For Red October
David Bowie's Heros
posted by Devils Rancher at 4:28 AM on January 30, 2011

Firefox
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:39 AM on January 30, 2011

Ice Station Zebra - starring Rock Hudson and Ernest Borgenine
posted by Flood at 4:41 AM on January 30, 2011

Chekhov in the original Star Trek. His character makes no sense outside a Cold War context.
posted by five toed sloth at 5:20 AM on January 30, 2011

Red Zone Cuba!
Berlin Game, Mexico Set, London Match by Len Deighton.
posted by scalefree at 5:26 AM on January 30, 2011

Seconding Fail Safe. I think in some ways it is better than Dr. Strangelove. So tense! Colossus: The Forbin Project is a great movie about a computer that makes contact with its Russian equivalent and holds the world hostage. The Cold War is not the main theme but it does play a part.
posted by Calzephyr at 5:40 AM on January 30, 2011

Oh, if you wanted to venture into old time radio, I Was A Communist for the FBI is really good and super jingoistic. Dangerous Assignment often has Cold War plots, usually in Europe and South America. Other programs like Suspense often had plots like these too. OTR is a fascinating treasure trove, you might get to hear anti-Communist or NATO ads. I once heard a radio program from 1939 that described the Spanish Civil War without actually naming it.
posted by Calzephyr at 5:49 AM on January 30, 2011

Lots and lots of Twilight Zone episodes. Both in the 1960's and 1980's versions.

The essay "Late Night Thoughts While LIstening To Mahler's Ninth's Symphony" by Lewis Thomas is all about Thomas comparing the kind of thoughts that was in his head as a teen and what he realized was probably going on in the heads of 1980's teens, and how sad it was that we were growing up in a time so pervaded with the imminent threat of death; I remember I read that as a teenager in the 80's and being impressed that "yeah, he gets it".

Bruce Cockburn's song "Lovers In A Dangerous Time" was his own reaction to the same kinds of thoughts -- seeing this kind of insanity everywhere and knowing his daughters also saw it, but then seeing that his daughters were going on to get crushes on boys and want to go on dates anyway and he found it heartbreakingly hopeful.

A lot of Douglas Copland's Generation X is more about being in your 20's in the 90's, but the segments they get into about being alive in the Cold War get it dead-on -- a couple sections in particular have the main character talking about how "everyone" had this fantasy about what the bomb dropping would "be like". And he's right, and that in itself is just insane when you think about it.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:39 AM on January 30, 2011 [3 favorites]

Dear Mister President - 4 Non Blondes.
posted by cashman at 7:18 AM on January 30, 2011

There are a number of early to mid 70's films— I don't know if the genre has a name— like 3 Days of the Condor, The Parallax View or even All the President's Men that are all about paranoia and hidden agendas and shadowy agencies playing the great game

They're usually called "paranoid thrillers."
posted by kirkaracha at 7:18 AM on January 30, 2011

The Right Stuff, book and movie. Really, everything about the space race.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 10:46 AM on January 30, 2011

Watchmen, the comic book and movie.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 10:48 AM on January 30, 2011 [1 favorite]

Another interesting comic book anecdote. Batman, the character, underwent a renaissance in the 80s, largely as a result of The Dark Knight comic book miniseries. You can draw a straight line from this series to the 1988 Batman movie, with Michael Keaton, all the way to the current Batman movie series.

Well, the Cold War was a big theme of that Batman miniseries...
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 10:52 AM on January 30, 2011

Seriously? I'm the first to say The Man From Uncle? I'm on my phone our I'd provide a link. features a very young, very attractive "Ducky" from NCIS. God, I feel old.
posted by BoscosMom at 1:03 PM on January 30, 2011

Oh, and Get Smart, the TV series, not the recent movie. I think Mel Brooks produced it.
posted by BoscosMom at 1:15 PM on January 30, 2011

The Iron Giant.
posted by giraffe at 2:09 PM on January 30, 2011

Real Genius.
posted by infinitewindow at 2:35 PM on January 30, 2011

So much stuff -- you should be all over the Conelrad website.

As for movies I can't believe haven't yet been mentioned, how about
On The Beach from the 1950s, Seven Days in May from the 1960s,
Twilight's Last Gleaming from the 1970s and
Threads and The Atomic Cafe from the 1980s.

@Gudrun -- "The Boy With the Green Hair" was made just before the Cold War (I saw it not long ago). He's an allegory for refugees, not Communists.
posted by Rash at 2:49 PM on January 30, 2011

Sorry about the busted link -- find Conelrad here. Also, from 1962, Panic n the Year Zero!
posted by Rash at 2:53 PM on January 30, 2011

Fascinating - thanks to all of you for your answers. I'm particularly interested in the non-outright, allegorical works, but as someone mentioned, the Cold War did permeate so many facets of society that maybe it's hard to find pop culture from, say, the 80s that doesn't have a Cold War flair.

I did some Googling and saw that someone claimed that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is full of Cold War symbology, down to the names (George - for George Washington - and Nick - for Nikita Kruschev). That's what fascinates me and what I'm looking for, not only to teach my kids about how the Cold War affected society, but how symbology in and of itself can function.
posted by Addlepated at 5:25 PM on January 30, 2011

"Lovers In A Dangerous Time" always gives me goosebumps for the very reason that EmpressCallipygos mentions.
The first Terminator movie strikes me as a product of the Cold War years.
posted by arcticseal at 5:45 PM on January 30, 2011

The play/movie "A Walk in the Woods" was about the nuclear disarmament talks.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 8:08 PM on January 30, 2011

The Crucible.
posted by Sys Rq at 10:48 PM on January 30, 2011 [1 favorite]

The Butter Battle Book - actually I think you can connect a lot of Dr. Seuss stuff to the Cold War.
posted by yarrow at 8:05 AM on January 31, 2011

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold based on a John Le Carre novel. Most anything by or based on Le Carre for that matter.
posted by doctor_negative at 10:50 AM on January 31, 2011

The Mouse That Roared
posted by The World Famous at 11:30 AM on January 31, 2011

Twilight Struggle (The definitive Cold War board game)
posted by Skyanth at 1:57 AM on December 14, 2011