In “Red Sparrow”, Francis Lawrence’s 2018 adaptation of the Jason Matthews novel, Charlotte Rampling’s Matron reminds her Russian Intelligence Service (SVR) protégés in training, including former ballerina Dominika (Jennifer Lawrence), that the Cold War is alive and well. It is an entreaty that Hollywood movies took increasingly to heart in the course of the 2010s. In addition to reviving traditional Cold War narratives, movies and television were busy initiating a whole set of new storylines about infiltration and subterfuge, typified by Matthews’ book and Lawrence’s cinematic realization. This restoration was predicated upon a wider 21st-century reevaluation of the old East/ West rivalries, conceived out of the mass technological extension of spying and surveillance that had allowed for a perpetuation of observation well beyond the confines of the previous Cold War. That surveillance and infiltration were made alarmingly real by revelations about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the capabilities of Russian hackers especially for wider online systems meddling. And the result of that election produced the wildly quixotic relationship between celebrity businessman turned president Donald Trump and arguably the most dominant leader of Russia since the days of Leonid Brezhnev, Vladimir Putin.
The Daily Beast: Inside Hollywood’s renewed obsession with Russia
A red flag is seen above a bust of the Soviet state founder and revolutionary leader Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov aka Lenin as Russian Communist party members and supporters attend a flower-laying ceremony marking the 149th anniversary of his birth, on Red Square in Moscow, April 22, 2019.
