The Sky Is Falling: How Vampires, Zombies, Androids, and Superheroes Made America Great for Extremism

A Sunday Times (London), Best Book of 2018

“A thoughtful, entertaining, and occasionally profound critical study of the texts that entertain, move and, sometimes, shape us.”
—The Spectator (London)

“A bold, witty, and brilliantly argued analysis of the role pop culture has played in the rise of American extremism.”
—Ruth Reichl

“You’ll never look at your favorite movies and TV shows the same way again. And you shouldn’t.”
—Steven Soderbergh

A bestselling cultural journalist shows how pop culture prepared Americans to embrace extreme politics

Almost everything has been invoked to account for Trump’s victory and the rise of the alt-right, from job loss to racism to demography—everything, that is, except popular culture. In The Sky Is Falling bestselling cultural journalist Peter Biskind dives headlong into two decades of popular culture—from superhero franchises such as the Dark Knight, X-Men, and the Avengers and series like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones to thrillers like Homeland and 24—and emerges to argue that these shows are saturated with the values that are currently animating our extreme politics.

Where once centrist institutions and their agents—cops and docs, soldiers and scientists, as well as educators, politicians, and “experts” of every stripe—were glorified by mainstream Hollywood, the heroes of today’s movies and TV, whether far right or far left, have overthrown this quaint ideological consensus. Many of our shows dramatize extreme circumstances—an apocalypse of one sort or another—that require extreme behavior to deal with, behavior such as revenge, torture, lying, and even the vigilante violence traditionally discouraged in mainstream entertainment.

In this bold, provocative, and witty investigation, Biskind shows how extreme culture now calls the shots. It has become, in effect, the new mainstream.

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