Cold War Media Mythologies: Conspiracy Myth, “Red Scare” and Blacklisting in The Front

Myths, as essential narrative structures and patterns, are massively recycled in contemporary media, from advertising to cinema. As a contemporary storyteller, the media found in traditional mythologies a great source of narrative structures, values and behavioural models. The myth recycling strategies used by various media are also to be found in political discourse, being used to legitimise leaders and policies, to persuade electors and offer convincing models. The current paper focuses on the early Cold War period, dominated by the conspiracy myth, first discussed by Hazlehurst (1968), Girardet (1986) and others. While I dealt elsewhere (2013) with the shape taken by the anxieties in anti-American propaganda, this paper analyses its counterpart. The study focuses on the “Red Scare” that marked, through McCarthyism and blacklisting, the late 1940s and 1950s in the United States, affecting the media implicitly and explicitly: the film industry and television. Films like The Front (1976), starring Woody Allen and representing the case study discussed by the paper, tell the story of the blacklisted film and television professionals and try to rehabilitate them fully. The Front describes one of the most dramatic and disturbing effects of what started as a conspiracy myth or theory, moving from a psychological or emotional issue to its coercive materialisation.