In America Noir David Cochran details how ten writers and filmmakers probed the Cold War's cultural contradictions and indirectly challenged its social pieties: the superiority of American democracy, the benevolence of free enterprise, and the sanctity of the suburban family." "Cochran argues that these artists pioneered a detached, ironic sensibility in fictions that radically juxtaposed cultural references and blurred the distinctions between "high" and "low" art. Their works would play a crucial role in the emergence of not only a 1960s counterculture but also the postmodernism of a later era.