I fear ike

...It is, rather, a collection of critical vignettes that tells us more about the 1990s than the 1950s...

...Salinger's Catcher in the Rye was not, as the author maintains, a cry for world peace, and Rebel Without a Cause and The Wild One were not in the least concerned with atomic-age perils...

...Judging from a number of books that have appeared in the 1990s, it is the popular culture of past decades— in particular, that of the 1950s—that our current age finds worthy of note...

...Thus, in the author's opinion, it is telling that the Cleavers and the Nelsons were knocked out of prime time by "mutated" families like the Addamses and the Munsters...

...The burgeoning middle class that Henriksen so reviles was justifiably tired of gloom...

...This is contemporary cultural criticism, where artistic intent takes a back seat to the Zeitgeist of whatever era one happens to be examining...

...It is far more interesting, in fact, than would be a simple accounting of how Hollywood sought to capitalize on a period of social unrest that had little to do with fear of the atom bomb...

...After Dr...

...Thankfully, the banality of evil was recognized by a select few, most of whom happened to be Hollywood producers...

...Thus was born a "culture of dissent," which would conflict with, and eventually overpower, the period's "culture of consensus...

...Typically, in her discussion of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, Henrik-sen writes, "The microcosmic world of the Bates Motel suggested the triumph of despair and death in an insane age...

...Hen-riksen's culture of dissent features the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Ker-ouac, and Rod Serling, as well as films that allegedly suggest a fear of nuclear Armageddon, like The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Thing...

...Like most other recent volumes of cultural history, this book does not properly qualify as a work of history...

...In the 1950s, the economy surged, people bought houses, and they trusted their president...

...The rise of "cultural studies," with its decon-structionist baggage, impenetrable jargon, and postmodern contempt for the historical method, has crippled a once-vibrant subdiscipline...

...Yet that is plain history, not cultural history...

...Strangelove...

...The culture of dissent went mainstream not because of a heightened sensitivity to the dangers of the arms race—the specter of atomic war had receded considerably by the late '60s—but because of the war in Vietnam...

...The film captured "a higher and perhaps surreal truth about life in the atomic age...

...Strangelove betokened an era of catharsis and awakening in which cultural dissent enlivened its response to match the equally enlivened thermonuclear activism of the consensus culture...

...So what if they preferred Father Knows Best to The Naked and the Dead...

...By depicting the former decade as "bad" and the latter as "good," Henriksen merely reverses the equally facile tendency to cast the '50s as a utopian age...

...Henriksen writes, "The subversive laughter of Dr...

...Neither did the explosion of the dissenting culture in the 1960s owe much to a fear of nuclear Armageddon...

...Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver provide an escape for many from the unpleasant realities of life in the atomic age...

...Henriksen's 1950s fits comfortably into the Hula-Hoops-and-howitzers mold, all too familiar by now...

...And beginning with 1967's Bonnie and Clyde, it did so in an increasingly frank manner...

...The story, as we already know, ends happily...

...Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs are forced "to bear the brunt of America's atomic paranoia," while Elia Kazan and Edward Teller are cast as villains...

...No such work would be complete without the requisite discussion of similarities between the United States ("a criminal and immoral state") and Nazi Germany, and Margot A. Henriksen does not disappoint: She devotes the better part of her chapter "Attacking the Menace of the American System" to an examination of their many parallels...

...The latest addition to this catalogue is Margot A. Henriksen's Dr...

...Like Norman Bates's split personality, . . . 1950's America revealed a conflict that could not remain trapped in an underground culture of dissent...

...Marion Crane's murder recalled the terms and language of the civil defense warning about being 'virtually naked' to enemy attack, about avoiding the 'deadly shower' of radioactive fallout...

...Life Under a Cloud, By the Bomb's Early Light, In the Shadow of War, The Way We Never Were, Young, White, and Mis-Lawrence F. Kaplan is a fellow in strategic studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C...

...As the Eisenhower decade drags on, efforts by the dissenting culture to break through the "cold and inhuman rationalism" of Cold War America gain steam...

...But the optimistic flavor of the era's pop culture cannot fully mask what Henriksen describes as the "increasingly horrific quality of life in America...

...erable—these are but a few of the titles that seek to debunk the popular image of the '50s as an idyllic era...

...It is an interesting contention, if by now a conventional one...

...It may also be the silliest...

...Nor was the optimism of the culture that the dissenters tweaked necessarily a consequence of "atomic anxiety...

...If these films and others described by Henriksen tell us anything about the era's youth culture, it is that its dissent was a product of boredom and, for the most part, aimless...

...The United States had just emerged from a depression and a decade of wars in which 350,000 of its sons perished...

...Though a genuine counterculture did exist during the 1950s, it is not at all clear that its dissent extended beyond a restlessness with middle-class norms to a sustained protest against atomic weapons...

...By the late 1960s, the pop culture of dissent has triumphed...

...The weakness of the Henriksen book is the weakness of cultural history as it is conceived today...

...In Henriksen's version of the 1960s, life imitates art...

...For the most part, however, the two cultures—the Abstract Expressionists, Sylvia Plath, and Playhouse 90 in one camp, Norman Rockwell, Herman Wouk, and Make Room for Daddy in the other—coexisted quite nicely...

...Strangelove, our culture could freely acknowledge America's "reality of death and violence...

...Seeking "safety and security through material comfort and mental conformity," in Henrik-sen's words, American families decamp for Levittown and settle into the saccharine spirit of the times...

...Yet Hen-riksen, herself a member of a consensus culture, prefers not to dissent from current scholarly wisdom in her field...

...Nor did television remain immune to a recognition that the arrogant complacency of the atomic age could not be sustained...

...The author's insufferable didacticism leads her to vastly oversimplify the contrasting tempers of the '50s and '60s...

...The Ozzies and Harriets of today's academia will surely approve...

...That conflict finally bubbles to the surface of the American psyche with the release of Stanley Kubrick's masterly 1963 film, Dr...

...If its children were not, that is only because they had not endured the suffering of their elders...

...Says an inquirer to Marlon Brando in The Wild One, "What are you rebelling against...

...Answers Brando, "What do you got...

...That Hitchcock never ascribed such a meaning to the scene matters little to the author...

...In turn, what little history Henriksen does present reads like scholastic film theory...

...Strangelove's America...

...But the author also identifies pop icons such as Elvis Presley, James Dean, and Jerry Lee Lewis as participants in the revolt against "atomic age values...

...The recent literature on the 1950s combines an enduring interest in that decade's pop culture with yet another aspect of American history to which our age is attached: the presence of injustice and oppression...

...Students protesting the war in Vietnam "put themselves in danger in order to expose the violence of the system," while American soldiers spend their days killing women and children...

...It is an age of anxiety and repression, in which fear of the atom bomb addicts the middle class to a steady diet of candy-coated cultural fare...

...The culture of dissent frees itself from its atomic-age shackles, and society follows suit...

...She defines culture as "a battle between order and disorder" and clings to the image of the '50s as a titanic struggle between righteous dissenters and a conformist pop culture...

...Others cope by mowing the lawn, donning 3-D glasses, and stuffing themselves into telephone booths...

...Even during the period itself, critics like David Ries-man and Lewis Mumford could be heard attacking the "sleepwalker's insulation from reality that characterizes our collective conduct," as Mumford put it...