Heading to the Past

I'm afraid I'm hitting a roadblock. Finding examples of movies from the Post-9/11 era and ideas about how they reflect contemporary culture is pretty easy, considering it's a very "current" issue. However, finding examples of movies from the WWII, Vietnam War and Cold War eras is proving difficult because the only things I'm able to find are examples of movies about WWII, the Vietnam War and the Cold War, or examples of cinematic propaganda released during those times, neither of which are exactly what I'm looking for. The propaganda is at least slightly more useful, but again, off target.

I think to remedy this I might have to do some specific movie-watching. Because this is a topic that is, apparently, not very often written about, I think I might have to find some popular/successful movies and/or TV series from these eras and watch them myself to see what I can find. Skimming the box office successes from each of these eras (http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/#YearIndex), I'm not seeing nearly as clear a pattern as I was with the Post-9/11 years. But since I'm supposed to use the research to form my thesis and not the other way around, I'll simply have to incorporate these findings into my final product. Perhaps the fact that there is no distinct pattern or trend is significant in itself. I have books at home that will hopefully be able to shed some more light on this (unless they too only cover movies about the wars and/or propaganda), so there's still some hope.

The reason I don't want to focus on propaganda film is because A) somebody else is already covering propaganda for their own seminar, and B) I'm looking for more natural trends and patterns to see how they reflect the culture of the times - propaganda is by nature forced and not an accurate reflection of how the people feel, but how the government wants them to feel. Propaganda certainly has its significance, but it is only marginally relevant to my topic (I will explore briefly how well propagandistic films fare at the box office), so I don't want to focus in too much on it.

I also found this interesting article, following up on the Oscar angle, about how the Best Picture nominees all follow a "reassuring" trend. I still haven't decided whether to incorporate the Oscars into my research (their relevance is...questionable), but it's an interesting read nonetheless: http://www.avclub.com/articles/how-all-nine-best-picture-nominees-reassure-us-abo,69629/