Personal and Political consequences of the Cold War period Anonymous 12th Grade

Texts written in the After the Bomb period represent the personal and political consequences of an era. George Clooney’s Good Night And Good Luck, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road, and Oliver Stone’s film, Platoon represent this in light of their differing perceptions of the period, but each ultimately foreshadows a diminishing of the self and a challenging of values. These texts foreshadow the politically unstable era where the threat of Communism and the breakdown of government systems engenders a sense of destruction and creates ideologically conflicting situations.

Good night and Good luck represents these personal consequences through the challenging of an individuals integrity, and the anxiety generated as a result. This is depicted by Don Hollenbeck’s suicide after he is routinely accused of being a Communist sympathizer. In portraying his suicide the mournful tone of the music followed by the subsequent absence of music speaks to the human cost of this hunt for communist sympathizers. Richard Lippe states in ‘History Replays Itself’; “McCarthy’s tactics were…making often outrageous accusations…McCarthy had instilled fear into the media”. Clooney reflects this by capturing the...