Margot A. Henriksen

In Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age, Margot A. Henriksen writes of the historiography, “The initial scholarly recognition of American sensitivity to the bomb located this sensitivity almost exclusively in the 1980s, when atomic apathy apparently evaporated” (pg. xix). Contrary to these studies, including Boyer’s By the Bomb’s Early Light, which treated atomic fears of the 1980s as part of a recurring pattern, Henriksen “focuses not on the most visible evidence of the American atomic awakening in the 1980s but on the previously established and often less visible but nonetheless ‘revolutionary’ connection between the bomb and the culture which set the patterns of response later seen in the 1980s” (pg. xix). Henriksen argues, “While more traditional forms and means of communications, whether film, television, novels, or essays, also exhibited cultural dissent, it was in particular the new cultural products and genres – film noir and roman noir, science fiction films, pulp crime literature, beat poetry, rock ’n’ roll, and black humor – that illustrated the revolutionary and explosive cultural impact of the atomic bomb” (pg. xxii). She concludes, “no metaphoric images of death, insanity, and decay were necessary in the sixties to revise the cultural understanding of the cold war and its consequences” (pg. xxv). Henriksen draws extensively upon film and popular print media, both novels and magazines, to explore American culture during this period.
Describing the American narrative, Henriksen writes, “Throughout their history Americans have shown an uncanny ability to overlook, overcome, or absorb those disturbing elements in their midst which more dispassionate observers might have used to pierce the armor of American innocence and optimism” (pg. 3). Henriksen writes of the early years following the first atomic bomb detonations, “Filtering through the products of popular culture in these years was a vague sense that the search for security entailed corruption of American ideals and traditions” (pg. 20). This reflected the public’s fear of the American military and government’s newfound power to shape, or destroy, the world. According the Henriksen, “Cold war America witnessed the growth of a new film genre – science fiction – that centered much attention on atomic age concerns about the political morality and apocalyptic potential of atomic and hydrogen bombs” (pg. 50).
Henriksen engages with the role of gender in the historiography, addressing the work of Elaine Tyler May, “whose Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988) demonstrated the connection between the personal and the political during this time period, particularly between family ideology and cold war ideology” (pg. 113-114). Further, “Given the political difficulties associated with expressing fear and discontent in cold war America, Americans often turned to experts – particularly in the field of psychiatry – for help with the discontent and anxiety that they believed they should not be feeling” (pg. 114). This filtered through to popular culture.
Henriksen writes, “The knowledge of what man had deeded to himself in the atomic age was coming into focus: death. The culture of dissent also began to reflect on the malaise connected with the death wish in America” (pg. 197). Moving toward her conclusion, Henriksen writes, “While the Cuban missile crisis and Kennedy’s assassination made palpable America’s proximity to Armageddon and America’s climate of hate, it is somewhat ironic that the cultural catharsis of the atomic age took place during and after these events” (pg. 305). The gallows humor of Dr. Strangelove and novels like Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle offered the means for Americans to process and discuss the reality of the atomic and hydrogen bombs. Henriksen concludes, “The history and culture of recent America is then to a significant degree the history and culture of Dr. Strangelove’s America. The central and historical dynamic tension between cultural dissent and the atomic age political status quo, aroused and openly expressed in the cultural revolution of the sixties and early seventies, has persisted in keeping a tenuous balance between American dreams and myths of life and American nightmares and visions of apocalypse” (pg. 388).… (mehr)