Tremendous number of "positiver projection of power" films created in the 80s-00s in the US, propaganda flicks, or action flicks featuring bad actors using one positive element of state power against bad actors or bad parts of state power, but there were positive aspects of state
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oh wait were action movies a response to the cold war???
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oh absolutely, everything from james bond to the original top gun to the rambo films (after first blood), anything that featured the russkies as enemy, we still have films that featuring red chinese or red koreans, but you had shit like Red Dawn, Rocky, Manchurian Candidate, etc
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Literally Rocky IV (if I recall) was a cold war thing. Rocky, the last hope of America, vs. Ivan Drago, an analogy to the super soldier concept - apex genetics (might have been genetically enhanced, if I'm not mistaken).
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yeah huh the russians were a big deal for awhile there as a stock enemy, that makes sense. but i'm wondering if even stuff like, say, the terminator movies still broadly falls under this kind of umbrella - america needing to prove its masculinity to itself or sth
Nah, Terminator is definitely a clearly on the nose AI horror movie. Unabashed masculinity isn't really the major ingredient to cold war media. Like, nobody would say Harrsion Ford is the pinnacle of masculinity in the Tom Clancy movirs he was in, for example.
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And more broadly, masculinity is expressed in different ways across media. I'd think that it's most unabashed in action movies, but drama absolutely brings out some insanely masculine sides that don't get expressed though sheer violence.
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