Citizen Spy: Television, Espionage, And Cold War CultureU of Minnesota Press - 236 pages In Citizen Spy, Michael Kackman investigates how media depictions of the slick, smart, and resolute spy have been embedded in the American imagination. Looking at secret agents on television and the relationships among networks, producers, government bureaus, and the viewing public in the 1950s and 1960s, Kackman explores how Americans see themselves in times of political and cultural crisis. During the first decade of the Cold War, Hollywood developed such shows as I Led 3 Lives and Behind Closed Doors with the approval of federal intelligence agencies, even basing episodes on actual case files. These “documentary melodramas” were, Kackman argues, vehicles for the fledgling television industry to proclaim its loyalty to the government, and they came stocked with appeals to patriotism and anti-Communist vigilance. As the rigid cultural logic of the Red Scare began to collapse, spy shows became more playful, self-referential, and even critical of the ideals professed in their own scripts. From parodies such as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Get Smart to the more complicated global and political situations of I Spy and Mission: Impossible, Kackman situates espionage television within the tumultuous culture of the civil rights and women’s movements and the war in Vietnam. Yet, even as spy shows introduced African-American and female characters, they continued to reinforce racial and sexual stereotypes. Bringing these concerns to the political and cultural landscape of the twenty-first century, Kackman asserts that the roles of race and gender in national identity have become acutely contentious. Increasingly exclusive definitions of legitimate citizenship, heroism, and dissent have been evident through popular accounts of the Iraq war. Moving beyond a snapshot of television history, Citizen Spy provides a contemporary lens to analyze the nature—and implications—of American nationalism in practice. Michael Kackman is assistant professor in Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas, Austin. |
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Page vii
... Americans and the Citizen-Subject 6. Agents or Technocrats: 113 Mission: Impossible and the International Other 144 Conclusion: Spies Are Back 176 Notes 191 Index 221 Preface : Doing Television History This project was sparked by Contents.
... Americans and the Citizen-Subject 6. Agents or Technocrats: 113 Mission: Impossible and the International Other 144 Conclusion: Spies Are Back 176 Notes 191 Index 221 Preface : Doing Television History This project was sparked by Contents.
Page xi
... impossible , in this history or any other , to gather compre- hensive data that are completely consistent from program to program , producer to producer , and network to network . It's also impossible to make a singular unified argument ...
... impossible , in this history or any other , to gather compre- hensive data that are completely consistent from program to program , producer to producer , and network to network . It's also impossible to make a singular unified argument ...
Page xxii
... Impossible ( CBS , – ) , longest running and last of the period's spy dramas , the notion of individual agency is nearly completely evac- uated ; its agents are anonymous mercenaries in service to the bureaucratic state ...
... Impossible ( CBS , – ) , longest running and last of the period's spy dramas , the notion of individual agency is nearly completely evac- uated ; its agents are anonymous mercenaries in service to the bureaucratic state ...
Page xxix
... Impossible ( its agents were , after all , little more than soldiers of fortune ) could not be farther from the forthright moral logic of I Led 3 Lives and its contemporaries The Man Called X and Behind Closed Doors . The Man from ...
... Impossible ( its agents were , after all , little more than soldiers of fortune ) could not be farther from the forthright moral logic of I Led 3 Lives and its contemporaries The Man Called X and Behind Closed Doors . The Man from ...
Page xxxiii
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Contents
Homegrown Spies and the Red Scare | 1 |
2 I Led 3 Lives and the Agent of History | 26 |
3 The Irrelevant Expert and the Incredible Shrinking Spy | 49 |
4 Parody and the Limits of Agency | 73 |
African Americans and the CitizenSubject | 113 |
Mission Impossible and the International Other | 144 |
Spies Are Back | 176 |
Notes | 191 |
Index | 221 |
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Common terms and phrases
Ackerman Papers African American agency American national American spy audiences Batman Bruce Geller Called citizen citizenship civic civil rights movement Closed Doors Cold Cold War Communist conflict Cosby critical discourses domestic drama episode espionage espionage programs Farago federal fictional Folder Geller Papers gender Girl from U.N.C.L.E. global Harry Ackerman Herb Herbert Philbrick historical Hollywood Ibid ideal ideological Illya Impossible increasingly Led 3 Lives masculine Mission narrative national identity NBC Collection Newsweek norms official parody patriotism Philbrick political popular culture producers protagonist racial Ralph Cohn realism Red Scare representations Robert Vaughn Scotty Screen Gems script secret agent semidocumentary sexual show's SHSW Smart social Solo Soviet spies Sports Illustrated spy programs spy shows story studio subversion syndication television program tensions tion Treasury United University Press Vaughn Vietnam viewers World of Giants York Zacharias
Popular passages
Page xxii - From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe.
Page 77 - Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody's ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic.
Page 190 - Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); and WJT Mitchell, ed., On Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
Page 21 - Nothing will ruin the country, if the people themselves will undertake its safety; and nothing can save it, if they leave that safety in any hands but their own.