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A lit cigarette glows in the dark. A faceless voice describes sinister forces that are hard at work behind the scenes-a hidden conspiracy that controls our lives and perhaps even our thoughts. Then, like a ghost in the night, the voice is gone, leaving a residue of unease and a whisper of paranoia.

As emblematic as "Deep Throat" in All the President's Men or the "Cigarette Smoking Man" in the wildly popular X-Files, that ghostly presence stands in for numerous other "voices" in a wide range of American films from the classic era of film noir through Oliver Stone's JFK and Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential. In this sweeping and idiosyncratic synthesis of film and politics, Ray Pratt shows us how such movies are deeply rooted in postwar American culture and continue to exert an enormous influence on the national imagination.

For decades American cinema has mirrored and promoted the postmodern anxieties and paranoid perceptions embedded in our society. Tapping into the moviegoing audience's own projected fears, many Hollywood films seem to confirm our belief that there are indeed secret sinister forces at work and that our lives are at risk because of them.

Pratt revisits blockbusters and cult favorites alike and shows how their images of conspiracy have been fostered by the public's increasing distrust of large organizations, producing in turn a cinematic "narrative of resistance" that challenges the status quo. He offers Seven Days in May and Dr. Strangelove as signposts of Cold War hysteria; Chinatown, The Conversation, and Missing as clear reflections of our distrust of political and corporate elites in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate; and Blue Velvet and The Stepfather as dark countermyths to the "family values" touted by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. He also considers gender paranoia in films like Klute, Fatal Attraction, and Silence of the Lambs and reminds us that sometimes, as in Serpico, our guardian police forces need a bit of guarding themselves.

Deftly interweaving cultural, political, and film theory with fresh insights into film noir detectives, nuclear angst, sexual predators, and government conspiracies, Projecting Paranoia is essential reading for anyone interested in the American psyche or great moviemaking.

This book is part of the CultureAmerica series..
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In this book Melinda Zook examines the political culture of England during the 1670s and 1680s. She singles out an underground network of radical conspirators and propagandists who have been virtually ignored by historians. These men, and some women, were working to ensure a Protestant succession of the monarchy. In the course of their struggles with the government, their ideas became ever more radical and their tactics all the more violent. Their ideas reached an increasingly sympathetic and receptive audience, preparing the way for the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Scholars of political history have traditionally associated the creation of liberal political thought with the elite genesis of John Locke and the triumphant, bloodless, glorious Revolution of 1688. Radical Whigs and Conspiratorial Politics in Late Stuart England brings to life the true creators and disseminators of a liberal ideology based on contract and consent. Zook offers convincing biographical sketches of five popular polemicists whose ideas and actions influenced the goals of the Rye House conspirators in 1683, the Monmouth rebels in 1685, and Revolutionaries in 1688-89. She argues that liberalism was not forged in the philosopher's study in the peaceful country manor, but in noisy London taverns and coffeehouses, street corners and rented rooms, to be defended on the scaffold and battlefield..
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