Violence as Politics: Hollywood and a New Cold War Paradigm

This paper will demonstrate that the unprecedented rise of representations of violence in Hollywood film occurred with the rise of Cold War culture after World War II.  Ever since the path breaking work of Richard Slotkin and others, historians have seen that violence, as a means to resolve social problems, has been central to a nation expanding west, conquering Indians, enslaving blacks and subordinating immigrants.  This paper builds on that scholarship to argue that a major break in this pattern occurred after World War II.  Drawing on a random sampling of plot summaries over the entire twentieth century, I will demonstrate that violence was only a minor theme in Hollywood films prior to World War II, but became a central means of plot resolution during the Cold War era, regardless of the film genre.  How and why this occurred, and its implications for national and political culture, is the subject of this paper.