ar, an almost postcard perfectpicture. However, the 1950s, despite this facade of bliss, hid huge blistering problems thatsurmount the 1990s difficulties and permanently cloud over the generation. Teenagersformed huge gangs. A scenario plays our beautifully in the Movie Matinee as a gangterrorizes the town, over a backdrop of missiles pointed at the Untied States from Cuba.The movie is disturbing because this movie is a recreation of an actual event (Matinee). Following World War II, Americans fell into the cold war. The cold war lacked the openfighting and bloodshed; instead the cold war stirred a constant background stress. Nuclearweapons proliferated exponentially in Russia and the United States, and the respectiveleaders wove them around hoping the other country would back down. Instead both theUnited States and Russia pulled new technology from their pocketbooks and forcing theother to reciprocate (Raasch). As the technology race continued, Americans geared for the aftermath and tried not tothink of the inevitable, utter, and complete annihilation of both the United States and theUSSR. Families spent weekends building a bomb shelter. Schools periodically heldpractice drills where kids slipped under their desks, undoubtedly all wondering how thethin sheet of plywood over their heads would save them from the destruction of thenuclear bomb, a bomb that in Japan reduced great edifices to crumbles and threw thepermanent shadows of ashen-reduced people onto walls (Raasch). Meanwhile in the South a civil rights battle loomed as blacks, tired of the apartheidimposed by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and average white citizens struggled to gain equalrights, a guarantee under the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the constitution. Mostminorities struggled with oppression in a white male dominated society, an oftenoverlooked condition in the desire to switch back to the 1950s (Raasch). Progress to 1999, the last year before the zeros roll around on ...
