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

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

• 
  Scott

  I really wanted to like it - parts were interesting - but ultimately I was disappointed by The Sky is Falling. Call it an unfair apples-and-oranges comparison, but it's no Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.
  
  Biskind discusses a fair amount of sci-fi / action-themed movies and TV series and their relation to political extremism, but he leans most heavily on Avatar, 24, and The Walking Dead in his text. Though I'm superficially familiar with those three offerings I have not watched them (*no, I don't live under a rock . . . or have them in my head), so there was a 'behind the eight-ball' feeling at times.
  
  Also, it got to be a repetitious, especially with Biskind's personal political stance (in a nutshell, it sort of felt like Left = kind and honorable, Right = evil and untrustworthy) repeatedly hammered home throughout the chapters. Yes, I get it - he's not fond of the current administration. Certainly he is allowed his opinions in his own book, but really -- each side of the spectrum has its good and bad.
• 
  Katie

  In the new book, The Sky Is Falling: How Vampires, Zombies, Androids, and Superheroes Made America Great for Extremism, best-selling cultural journalist Peter Beskind gives myriad and detailed examples of how TV shows and movies can either be left, right or centrist in overall theme and in plotlines. After reading the book, I feel more confident that I could analyze media in that way. However, he does not offer any proof that mass media caused America to be great for extremism in the right or left. Rather, he did a great job showing how extremism (and centrism) in certain television shows and movies correspond to certain historical and current events. The two go hand in hand. Worthwhile read. I found myself a little frustrated while reading it because it seemed to jump around but I am glad I persevered until the end.
  
  Thanks to NetGalley, New Press Publishers and the author Peter Beskind for an advanced electronic reading copy.
• 
  Leann Moore

  **rounded down from 2.5 stars**
  Great potential, a decent start at thought-provoking prose, but doesn't follow through with in-depth analysis. The entire novel seems like a collection of piecemeal movie reviews. While Biskind starts to relate these reviews to a (very partisian) political commentary, he just doesn't quite get to the level of investigatory conclusion I'd expect. However, as a liberal, some of Biskind's snarky remarks about the right were rather hilarious! On the other hand, still as a liberal, his extremely pessimistic and presumptive views are extreme generalizations, with very little if any evidence tying the movies to real life.
• 
  Jeff

  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.
• 
  Mike

  If you think Martin Scorsese had some damning things to say about comic book movies, you should read this book, which is an analysis and takedown of the television and movie content of the early 21st Century, and how it feeds on America's fears and paranoia and promotes reactionary thinking. Biskind makes a very compelling (and highly readable) case.
• 
  David Wineberg

  It’s an old truism that there are little more than a dozen stories in the world, told with endless variations in Hollywood movies. Peter Biskind is here to update that. In The Sky is Falling, films have taken on political aspects. They have entered an entirely new era of revenge (which used to be outlawed in movies). Common Good has been replaced by self-interest. And of course, the advent of posthumanism can be seen in various and sundry superheroes and accidental tourists. They absolutely dominate the industry. It’s a whole new universe for film.
  
  Biskind sees films as reflecting ideology. Be they science fiction, horror or adventure, they represent extremes. Extremes of both left and right. The left features and favors victims, and uses scientists and doctors to save the city or country or planet. The right favors the military and police over caregivers and scientists, beating back enemies that all seem to want to own it all and annihilate us in the process of grabbing it. Basically, the left embraces the new, the right wants to restore the good old days.
  
  We have abandoned human stories for ever more extreme situations. Everything seems to be based on superheroes lifted from 1950s comic books for 15 year old white boys. To attribute left or right wing political expressions to these setups is a bit of a stretch, but there are enough films out there for Biskind to fill the book with examples backing his thesis. Personally, I see the Hollywood machine as anything for a buck, not having a clue as to what will sell, and copying whatever does. Left and right are out of scope. But Biskind successfully makes the case that films exhibit these properties, consistently and thoroughly, intentionally or not. And he has great fun doing it.
  
  Peter Biskind is very entertaining himself. He swerves in and out of Trump, Bush, Reagan and Nixon criticism. This is not mere Hollywood gossip. Biskind references the likes of Chomsky, Locke and Shakespeare in his comparisons and analyses. He describes films in loving detail so that even though I have not seen many of them (to my own satisfaction after reading this), I have a total handle on the plot and the characters (without having to sit through 11 years of the tv series). The book never sags, but there isn’t a crying need for so much reconfirmation. I got it, early on. For example, I don’t think any of the 12 chapters doesn’t focus on Avatar, clearly the most important film in Biskind’s life. Star Wars and The Walking Dead are not far behind. He is a zombie lover, which by his account, makes him a leftist.
  
  Towards the end, Biskind admits things aren’t necessarily so clear cut, as The Hunger Games is claimed by both left (environmentalists, anti-growth and Luddites) and the right (pioneer frontier women “like Sarah Palin, suckled by wolves”, states disabled by central government, etc.). Similar left-right interpretations are made for Avatar and Star Wars. Movies it seems, can be designed to attract varied audiences. What a surprise.
  
  I particularly like Biskind’s habit of changing endings. If a film is centrist, the character in question would necessarily end up a certain way, but if the same film were extremist, his/her fate would have been much different, and Biskind describes it perfectly. The political positioning changes the story, and story is everything, unless you’re in it for the blood and gore alone.
  
  Peter Biskind has thought more about this, more than any post-human ought to. Analyzed it up and down. Attached great significance to everything, particularly the horror genre. And given a lot of B movies and tv series heavy credibility.
  
  Needs to get out more.
  
  David Wineberg
  
• 
  Nathan

  Biskind is out to explain here just how various TV shows and movies have helped to inform extremism with detailed explanations (some zoomed in to the nth degree), and others in a passing swipe.
  
  It's likely no surprise that movies and shows of their respective eras can serve as a divining rod for the cultural happenings of that period, but here we're shown that this truly occurs more often than you may realize---not just in the more overt shows like 24 or Homeland, but in almost the entirety of James Cameron's oeuvre, in an array of Marvel superhero films, and yeah, even in the Twilight series.
  
  This book is definitely at its strongest when it's comparing and contrasting pro-Trump ideals with science fiction and horror classics, linking some shows/movies; that isn't to say that they're made specifically for the hard right, but that there is ample reason to believe that the message (or, at least, motivations of characters within a particular film or show) shares a common ground with the current GOP/Tea Party/hard right, its mirrored opposite on the liberal side, or somewhere in between. Equally interesting is the posing of evidence regarding movies and shows that, on the surface, might appear as a tool for either the far left or right, but end up being something else altogether.
  
  If the book has a weakness, it's that sometimes the information is so expansive and the book's pace is so frenetic that it's easy to lose track of just what exactly is being covered. I was in for some considerable backtracking, as much of the book's punch relies on the recollection and familiarity of the numerous affiliations across the political/value spectrum. I must also mention that I found several of his assertions of characters within examples to be a stretch (two that come to mind are from The Revenant and 2014's Robocop), but it didn't undermine the overall point he was trying to make (I should note that, while maybe not as exciting or thematically rich as its two successors, there is no way that Batman Begins is the weakest of Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy, as Biskind suggests).
  
  It's always interesting to analyze the thematic aspects of film, and Biskind's book automatically causes one to look into themselves and take notice as to how their values stack up against the movies and shows they may hold dear (and what those shows may really be trying to say). There are also some low-key benefits to reading this: I now feel like I have no need to tackle the Left Behind or Twilight book series. Biskind's done the heavy lifting.
  
  If you're even remotely intrigued by the title of this book, do yourself a favor and read it. It'll enrich many films and shows you're familiar with, and help you keep your mind open to these themes from here on out.
  
  Many thanks to NetGalley and The New Press for the advance read.
• 
  Cat

  Disappointing.
  The idea was good. But the author spent too much time detailing the films he was citing and not enough analysing them in my opinion.
• 
  Mariah Bliss

  I agree with other reviewers - this would have worked better as a long opinion piece. Repetitive and oddly snarky in some places (this author does NOT like Christopher Nolan)
• 
  Ryan Dell

  Not really the cultural history I expected. Just a book of hot takes. I agreed with most of them, but still
• 
  Jenn Morgans

  Overall I enjoyed this a lot, but I want to mention that referring to things that happened in real people’s lives - because they’ve been dramatised into movies - and comparing them to fictional characters/shows felt tasteless. For example, I don’t think Alan Turing’s chemical castration or Stephen Hawking’s ALS occurred because of the narrative trope that demands stronger minds occur because of the weakening of the body.
• 
  Petty Lisbon

  This was a middle of the road book. I thought it would be more like those fan maps the NY Times put out in 2017 for musicians and where their fans are located but it was divided more by theme. This was an issue because I thought that the book would be more divided by the divisions in the subtitle, but you would just have a back and forth for one work throughout the entire book. For example, you would have the show 24 as an "us vs them" show, a show where the main character loses their humanity, a show about modern warfare turning people into robots... and so on. The book would have a lot of different examples close to each other where it felt more like a list than an essay. I liked learning about The Walking Dead and how they treat different morals in different characters but I think not making each chapter focus on a specific show hurt the book.
  
  I would also like to have a part for audience reaction. Sure, 24 was popular because it premiered so close to 9/11, but did other projects get ignored or badly reviewed because they were too dark? Avatar was very successful but nobody felt strongly about it. Were some shows supposed to be interpreted in one way but the wrong people picked up the show and the entire meaning was retooled?
  I think it also didn't really connect how things are more extremist in the political landscape now. He compares quotes from shows to things politicians have said but there's not enough of a correlation for me. Although I agree with what he said, he could compare today's biggest media pieces to things from more centrist times, like when NBC's Must See TV was at its peak and connect the socioeconomic landscape to the movies and shows that are getting made today.
• 
  Belaraniel

  Лучшее на тему— и это с учетом того, как все ускакало вперед после публикации книги. Остроумно, с аргументами и фирменным стилем автора.
• 
  Biblio Files (takingadayoff)

  The Sky Is Falling: How Vampires, Zombies, Androids, and Superheroes Made America Great for Extremism
  
  In The Sky Is Falling Peter Biskind analyzes current styles in mass-market pop culture films and TV shows and discusses how they're connected to political attitudes, extremist and mainstream.
  
  Sometimes these movies and television series present a particular philosophy and sometimes they act as a battleground where contending ideologies fight it out.
  
  Biskind identifies centrist, left-wing, and right-wing attitudes, and some in between.
  
  Among many other films and television series, Biskind looks at Star Wars and what Biskind calls the anti-Star Wars, Avatar.
  
  George Lucas has said how important the Vietnam War was to him and filmmakers of his generation. The war for the planet Pandora in the movie Avatar plays out like a rerun (to put it in TV terms) of the Vietnam conflict.
  
  The television series Falling Skies, about an alien invasion of Earth, is a right-wing explanation about how America has let itself deteriorate. It even includes an American version of the stab-in-the-back theory right-wing Germans used to explain why they lost the first world war.
  
  The explanation “They didn't let us win” is often quoted by Rambo-type characters to explain how America could have lost in Vietnam.
  
  An example of one type of story, presented by the evangelical right, is the film God's Not Dead. Stories of the “rapture,” such as the television series Left Behind, may be popular with a religious audience, but they're also interesting to fans of fantasy or science fiction in general. (Unfortunately, many rapture stories are just bad on an artistic level.)
  
  The TV show True Blood, about vampires on the bayou, and the X-Men films both present allegories against homophobia.
  
  The Walking Dead, a television series about zombies, must be one of the most violent shows on the air. One look at the baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire was enough for me. I don't care what the zombies symbolize.
  
  Biskind looks at revenge heroes (if there can be such a thing): The Matrix, Jack Bauer, and Christopher Nolan's Batman.
  
  Like most of Peter Biskind's books, The Sky is Falling is carefully thought out history and an interesting read.
  
  (Thanks to NetGalley and The New Press for a digital review copy.)
• 
  Samantha

  Word salad of the iceberg variety. Here’s a book that should’ve just been an article. It’s bogged down by info dumps and minutiae; I craved more analysis and less references. It was chaotic to read and I wished it had been edited and condensed because I think it’s a fascinating premise with potential. Blinkered viewpoint with presumptions and prejudice—Biskind appears to have only met caricature conservatives/libertarians. I would have cruised past his biases if he offered a more coherent analysis, but it was too muddled. Sloppy, smug, reckless, pedantic.
• 
  Torey

  I equate this book to an ill-fated viewing of the Princess Bride I experienced in the sense that I wish I had approached it with different expectations. To explain, before viewing the Princess Bride for the first time I was told it was "just like Monty Python" which as you can imagine led to disappointment due to false expectations. Similarly, with this book, I picked it up in a bookstore believing it was a political analysis with a cinematic slant when that is far from the case.
  
  This book is altogether difficult to describe. The book switches so often between discussion current events and film reviews that I can never tell if I really know what the author is trying to argue. It is bogged down with endless cinematic and television examples, which since one cannot assume the reader has seen all of the titles listed, must be summarized which leads to arguments getting lost in page-long descriptions of scenes from the most recent season of the Walking Dead. There never seems to be a consistent thesis or argument except for the author constantly explaining how there is a political slant to most movies, which is unfortunately not a very hot take.
• 
  James

  I loved Biskind's book about the 50s so I thought he would be able to bring the fire here, but he's just too close to the material I think. He wrote that book about the 50s three decades after all of those movies, but some of these tv shows are still on and black panther came out last year. I agree with many of his takes, but they are just takes; the structures he is building around them are so much flimsier than his examinations of genre, gender, race, and politics in the 50s.
• 
  Shawn Conner

  Interesting but sometimes confusing. Maybe that’s just me... skipped over the analysis of some of the stuff he uses as examples, but there was enough good stuff here to keep me reading ‘til the end.
• 
  Tue Le

  This book could have been condensed into a long essay. It is a stressful and whiny read, no better than the movies and television series it criticizes.
• 
  Kevin

  Vanity Fair contributing editor Peter Biskind has written juicy exposés on the birth of new Hollywood in the 1970s ("Easy Riders, Raging Bulls") and the rise of indie filmmakers in the 1990s ("Down and Dirty Pictures"). He now turns his sights on how extremism in politics has affected 21st-century films and TV shows. Abandoning the oral history format of his previous books, THE SKY IS FALLING is a dizzying ideological treatise on how extremist politics has changed films and TV shows. It has "normalized the extremes so that they become the new mainstream... behavior that was once beyond the pale--violence, lying, revenge--have become the new norm as the public good is replaced by self-interest."
  
  The TV espionage thriller 24, which ran during George W. Bush's two terms as president, "used the war on terror as a pretext for the establishment of the surveillance state. Were it not for Jack [Bauer]'s aversion to bureaucracy, 24 would have rung every note in the neocon songbook." Each season had audiences rooting for a hero who used torture to gain information.
  
  Biskind also criticizes left-leaning productions (chiefly "Avatar" and the TV series "Lost"), demonstrating that many highlight "the Luddite-left's distrust of machines." Extreme gore on shows like "True Blood" and "The Walking Dea"d has desensitized TV viewers. The final chapter checks in on films that were green-lit before the #MeToo movement but came out at exactly the right time (including "Wonder Woman", "The Post" and "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri"). THE SKY IS FALLING eloquently chronicles pop culture's pervasive role in mainstreaming extremism.
  
  Biskind's THE SKY IS FALLING is a fast-paced and eloquent (but somewhat repetitious) ideological treatise on how radical politics has normalized extreme behaviors in films and TV shows.
• 
  John

  MAKE FILMS GREAT AGAIN --Five Star "Intent/Thesis" yet Three Star Execution.
  
  Peter Biskind's books; "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls", "Down and Dirty Pictures" and "Rebels on the Backlot" (Sharon Waxman) were hugely influential books for me while I was in high school, and got me into a better appreciation of the film medium and the industry it occurs in.
  
  My tastes grew and so my interest in his critcisn changed. However, I'd been hearing about this book for several years now--and thought it was going to largely be a long-essay form of "All of This Used to Be Fields". Really, I thought he was going to write the book that Big Fritz wrote, "The Big Picture" about how franchises and superheroes were strangling the medium.
  
  Instead this book come off as a bit of a "center left" manifesto on how films are what to blame (at least partially) regarding the polarization of the political landscape. I'll candidly buy into the idea that superheroes really aren't too good for public consumption. They're often dumb, fascist and tie up the priorities of studies. It's easy to armchair intellectualize and psychoanalyze this ad naseaum--I know I have. So I was ultimately hoping for a literate book explaining this in detail.
  
  Instead There seems to be little method or cohesive definition to "centrist era" and what he means by "left wing" and "right wing" film. The flow is a bit awkward and I don't always agree with the choices he makes--they sometimes seem to be grasps, cherry pickings, misunderstandings or really dated choices.
  
  Well maybe not inherently wrong--but this is really a book that will preaching to the choir, but you might get embarrassed by your side stumbling in their delivery. It's just not as strong and as academic work as it could have been. Could have been a real canary in a coal-mine.
• 
  John Bleasdale

  I read this in one go during a long haul flight and I found it a refreshingly political take on contemporary movies and specifically how mainstream Hollywood is dealing with the loss of consensus ideology and the desertion of the middle ground. The apocalyptic imagination is one such example as well as the championing of the post human from superheroes to Planet of the Apes. At times some of the taxonomy can be restrictive. For example “the Luddite left” seems to cover anyone who isn’t all yippeee about technology. But in a way Biskind’s crudity is his power. I’ve never really thought of Nolan as a right wing filmmaker but a good argument is made. What’s also interesting is how these films and tv shows - no distinction is made - are entering a new phase falling back to the human and the reconstructed middle.
• 
  Molly

  This book wasn’t bad. It made some good points about politics and popular culture, but I feel like it rambled some. It was hard to find a coherent direction for the book as a whole. I think it could have done with a bit more editing, but the meat was there, so to speak.
  
  One of the best quotes:
  
  “The secular right tends to be identified with small government Tea Party values when out of office, but once in office, it is by no means allergic to a robust state, if its powers are confined to strengthening the police and the military, protecting our global interests, and ensuring its own grip on power... The secular right’s portrayal of mainstream authority and its institutions is as harsh if not harsher than it is on the left.”