In this paper, I examine the reproduction of national discourse in Egypt in the years following the defeat in the 1967 war with Israel through the tensions between the state's demand for “purposeful culture, which the state encouraged as a mean to overcome the national crisis, and the "trivial" culture, which dominated the cultural scene at that time. I analyze two satirical movies, al-‘Ataba Gazaz (1969) [The doorstep is Grass] and Safah al-Nisa’ (1970) [The Women’s Assassin] and situate them within their historical context of collective trauma. I explore the significance of satire in Egyptian political discourse in comparison to the official high discourse reflected in that time’s Egyptian intellectual debates. Both movies, as well as many others produced at that time, center on one (or more) “anti-hero,” a poor clumsy man, who suddenly finds himself in charge of a “special” mission to restore national pride. The disoriented anti-hero experiences a traumatic experience that interrupts him from fulfilling his desire. Through a series of reenactments and repetition of the traumatic experience, the anti-hero’s fantasy finally gets fulfilled. My paper engages with the limited available scholarship on Nasserism – the term usually used to refer to Nasser’s project as ideology – and tries to understand the dynamics through which this ideology functioned pre- and post-1967. My analysis will show how the two movies express collective feelings of anxiety, disorientation, and questioning of the 12 years of Nasserist anti-colonial project while seemingly still adhering to the nationalist call for reforms. Through analyzing these movies and the cultural debates at that time, I argue that these movies expose the shortcomings of the Nasserist populist project and reflect state’s anxiety and preoccupation to sustain its popularity and stability.