Excerpt: Tricia Jenkins’s The CIA in Hollywood: How the Agency Shapes Film and Television is a thorough study of the agency’s efforts to spin its image in the hopes of recruiting new talent, buttressing agency morale, courting Congressional funding, counteracting negative portrayals, and intimidating would-be terrorists. Jenkins is forthright with her readers that her research is constrained by an ingrained culture of secrecy. This is, after all, the CIA. Although she ultimately sheds light on Langley’s publicity machine in Hollywood, large shadows remain.

Excerpt: Dark Borders utilizes a pluralistic and intermedia methodology in order to investigate the complex issues involving boundary setting in highly significant areas of American culture. Of course, an underlying yet unacknowledged truth is that these same areas are problematic today. Therefore, there is much to learn about American ideology in Dark Borders. Further, of course, the historical, formal, and varied perspectives Auerbach investigates bring valuable insight into the genre (I have no such anxiety over seeing it a genre no matter the porous boundaries) of Cold War noir. Whether or not the boundaries of the uncanny, the un-American, or noir are able to be made more determinate without falsifying them is unclear. In any case, the anxieties raised in attempting such a clarification, and the question of what might motivate such an attempt, are important to note, and Dark Borders leaves me, at least, with a proper and appreciative sense of mystery about these subjects.