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The Nightmare On Film: Nuclear War by E Lindh 
The Nightmare On Film Eric Lindh Looking back on the body of film produced since the end of World War II, a subject distinctly avoided is that of nuclear war. While it would seem to be a subject having a lot of visually appealing and timely subject matter, the Industry didn't do much with it. It wasn't until the TV breakthrough of the 1980's that the full force of the Unreality Factory was brought to bear on the Bomb. The history of nuclear war in film gives some tantalizing clues to the psychological aspects of the Cold War and the spctre of imminent destruction on civilian society. The earliest overt use of nuclear war and weapons in a cinematic venue was the science fiction films of the 1950's. There were two main thematic cycles. The first, epitomized in the Japanese Godzilla movies, was the inadvertant awakening of dangerous and often primal forces by atomic explosions. Monsters would arise, or perhaps the world would crack in two (scientists at the first nuclear test seriously wondered if they would ignite the atmosphere). This theme was a kind of genie-in-a-bottle story of the difficulty of stepping back to a normal world and normal war after nuclear weapons had appeared on the scene. It also portrayed nuclear weapons as a divine/cosmic punishment for monkeying around with the forces of nature. The second theme was the mutation of nature, be it Giant Insects menacing folks or bizarre effects on humans, an example being Richard Matheson's surprisingly good The Incredible Shrinking Man. This was nuclear war as Disease, a new plague whose conceptual creation grew out of the fear of nuclear fallout and radiation (and good common sense). The most interesting thng about these two threads is their indirectness. No one was making movies about being blown into particles in a nuclear war; rather, the Bad came as a secondary result of nuclear explosions, particulary nuclear testing. This speaks to a great uneasiness about nuclear weapons, without any unpatriotic denouncing of the Bomb in and of itself. Hollywood, like the civilian population it mirrors, found nuclear weapons ambiguous, possibly neccesary (if you bought what the government was telling you) but fraught with peril. 1960's filmakers attempted to produce a more realistic portrayal of nuclear war, and actually tried to make films about nuclear war itself. Much was made of the concept of an "accidental" nuclear exchange. This conceit, born of the denial that nuclear weapons sat ready on a hair-trigger of alert in a world locked into ideological confrontation, comforted the audience that the only way nukes would come to be used would be if someone made a Big Mistake. Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe worked this idea. Since rationally sending off nuclear weapons is oxymoronic, the dodge of using an "accident" as the thing to worry about is a feel-better idea. The same year, Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb dealt a deft and humorous blow to the whole structure built by Herman Kahn and his nuclear war-planning think tank boys. Featuring a very thinly disguised Henry Kissinger in the title role, it was comedy in the truest sense, as well as a savage satire on the intellectual hoakum and propaganda which surrounded the concepts of deterrence and nuclear weapons. Kubrick took on everything, from the questionable wisdom of putting the Ultimate Weapon in the hands of military guys ( a recent commentator pointed out that a cabal of three or four officers on a nuclear sub could start a war) to the potentially catastrophic myths of Mutual Assured Destruction and rationally managing a "limited" nuclear war. Dr. Strangelove subverted through laughter (dark though it was) years of careful conditioning and fear-mongering and hammered the final nail in the coffin of the lies and false logic of government nuclear war "theory". . From 1945 till 1983, the Hollywood movie machine produced only two real nuclear war movies. In 1983, it was television that picked up the ball, with a series of made-for-TV films addressing a wide variety of issues in the context of movies about nuclear war. 1983 gave us Nicholas Meyer's The Day After, a film considered risky and disturbing by the networks. They went on a campaign of warning ("do not watch this alone...") that of course built up a huge audience, and had a calming post-game panel show featuring, I kid you not, Henry Kissinger, Dr. Strangelove himself. The panel attempted to reassure the audience that what they had just seen, the destruction of the United States by nuclear war, could NOT HAPPEN, because the government took the threat of nuclear obliteration very seriously, and anyway would never resort to it because it probably couldn't be won, etc., etc. The Day After was a truly disturbing film, portraying the helplessness of the civilian population in the face of world events spinning out of control and a government locked into a path of self-destruction that couldn't be stopped, once it was initiated. The same year, Lynne Littman's Testament offered a shattering portrayal of the death of a small town down wind from a nuclear attack. There were no bombs going off, no mushroom clouds, just the slow wasting from invisible poisons in a community suddenly alone in the world. This dark film was reminiscent of Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka's book War Day, a story of quiet power that chronicled the destruction of the United States and its descent into third world destitution by a near miss of a nuclear war. The public had clearly grasped that nuclear war was not manageable or survivable, and television was telling us what we already believed. British TV, also in 1983, screened Mick Jackson's Threads, a film that took The Day After's story a step further by portraying an England medievalized and slowly dying in a brutality of mutation and squalor. It was an unsettling and unforgettable picture. 1983's final offering was another made-for-TV film, Edward Zwick's Special Bulletin, which featured a crazed anti-nuke college professor who built himself a Bomb and threatened to blow up Charleston unless the US unilaterally disarmed. Filmed in a sort of War of the Worlds faux reality/news broadcast format, it offered poignant moments and real jeopardy in a simple and believable tale. The last film of note was 1989's By Dawn's Early Light, another made-for-TV movie which remains the only exhaustive portrayal of the prosecution of a nuclear war. In the midst of lots of network TV bunk (crazed hillbilly Cabinet members, dewy-eyed female B-52 pilots, etc.) was an interesting exploration of the sheer complexity of life during nuclear wartime, and the utter difficulty of turning the nuclear war process off, once it has begun. Medium good special effects and an excellent cast made this a war movie like every other, but with an interesting take (not altogether simple-minded) on the intricacies of the war of the nukes. As a gauge of how the public feels about nuclear warfare, what it fears and what it believes, these films offer a source of some validity. Some, particuarly Dr. Strangelove and The Day After, had an important impact on the evolution of the public's ideas concerning nuclear war. A salient point is how little nuclear war entered the entertainment sphere, how difficult it was for us to fictionalize a horror of such magnitude. It is hard to see how we could assimilate any critical view of a subject we find so hard to look at. Perhaps it is that nuclear war is a terror too powerful for puny humans, a genie of impossible evil unleashed into a world unprepared to address the many issues brought along with it. Perhaps we can't tell stories about the greatest mistake of human history, and perhaps we are ashamed of the horror we have wrought. |