Men’s Action Fictions

Abstract

No genre explored the escapist lure of apocalypse more fully than the new pulp genre of men’s action fiction, where the 1960s-style fallout shelter serves as a measure of the faith of the hero in the structure of government and authority and the society it underpins. The more elaborate the shelter and the accoutrements of survival that surround it, the more likely is nuclear war to have been a good war. For rightwing writers, the distinct probability of urban apocalypse afforded a new political equation for the 1980s: eliminating the densely packed blue-state populations, especially on the coasts, was a quick way to imagine changing the electoral balance. Nevertheless, men’s action fiction takes pains to frame its heroes’ choices in rational rather than ideological terms. The heroic protagonists recognizably follow in the hard-boiled noir tradition of antisocial guardians of society in a fallen world threatened by criminal nihilists from the right and ineffectual liberals from the left. The bunker fantasies of men’s action fiction, in the dialectic they stage between survival and survivalism, posit in pulp form the hard questions that had plagued policymakers since Harry Truman first made the decision to use the bomb. That their cartoonishly excessive qualities neatly mirror the extreme rhetoric of the Cold Warriors in the Reagan White House should also remind us that the contradictory impulses they so exuberantly narrativize remain deeply rooted in the contradictions of American identity and American history.