In the 2018 Academy Award nominated movie Cold War (Best Foreign Film), the U.S. dollar comes up in one of many arguments between Zula and Wiktor, the troubled couple at the center of the story. In a communist country, use of the greenback plainly signaled dissent from state-decreed collectivist misery precisely because the dollar, unlike the Polish zloty, was uniquely exchangeable for goods and services produced in the capitalist world.
In the post-WWII communist era that Cold War chronicles, the dollar had golden qualities. Not only was its value fixed at 1/35th of a gold ounce, the bigger story about the dollar was that it was the world's currency no matter the barriers put up by governments. Backed by the most powerful nation on earth, the dollar could summon goods and services anywhere, including in Soviet satellite states. That the dollar long ago liquefied exchange of black market capitalist goods behind the Iron Curtain, and liquefies black market exchange in “enemy” countries like Iran, North Kore and Venezuela today, is and was a statement of the obvious.
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