The Sky Is Falling: How Vampires, Zombies, Androids, and Superheroes Made America Great for Extremism

by Peter Biskind

'You'll never look at your favourite movies and TV shows the same way again. And you shouldn't' Steven Soderbergh
'Insanely readable' Slavoj Zizek
'Your book was ... like a bag of pot, with me saying, 'I'm not gonna smoke.' But I was insatiable' Quentin Tarantino on Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

In The Sky is Falling! bestselling cultural critic Peter Biskind takes us on a dizzying ride across two decades of pop culture to show how the TV and movies we love - from Game of Thrones and 24 to Homeland and Iron Man - have taught us to love political extremism. Welcome to a darkly pessimistic, apocalyptic world where winter has come, the dead are walking, and ultra violence, revenge and torture are all in a day's work. Welcome to the new normal.

• ISBN10: 1620974304
• ISBN13: 9781620974308
• Publish Date: 11 September 2018
• Publish Status: Active
• Imprint: New Press
• Format: eBook
• Language: English

Reviews

[Jeff Sexton]

Left-Central Elite Doesn't Get Movies. I wanted to like this one, I *really* did. The title and description sounded *awesome*. Unfortunately, the book itself was a gold mine - the single *worst* description of a book I've ever used. Meaning you have to sift through a LOT of detritus to find even a single good flake, and an actual nugget worth of goodness is even more rare. Biskind looks at movies as old as WWII and as recent as Black Panther, all in service of a central premise that is so fatally flawed as to be laughable. This subject could have been handled very differently and a compelling case could have been made, but Biskind failed to really even make an attempt to make it. That said, his publisher has their stated goal of "sparking conversations", and in *that* regard, this book may be at least somewhat successful... though maybe in the "any press is better than no press" kind of way.