September 05, 2004
Stories like Stanislav Petrov's have a fantastic glow to them, like events in an alternate universe; we weren't really that close to being wiped out, were we? The history of apocalyptic cinema is long and storied, but arguably Threads and The Day After are the best of the bunch, not necessarily because they are great movies, but because of when they aired, at the peak of nuclear hysteria in 1983 and 1984. The Day After still holds the honour of garnering one of the largest American television audiences in history. Its story of a devastated Lawrence, Kansas was a horrifying portrait of a "winnable nuclear war," a world where even the most basic infrastructure must be rebuilt, the government powerless to do anything but declare a useless ceasefire with Russia. But as terrifying as the ABC TV-movie was, Threads "makes The Day After look like a Sunday luncheon at a rest home for old ladies." Threads was the British entrant in the nuclear holocaust sweepstakes. Directed by Mick Jackson (he of later bombs The Bodyguard and Volcano, natch) and aired a year later on the BBC, it was one of the most heavily-researched movies about nuclear war ever made, and introduced into the collective consciousness the idea of nuclear winter. Even 20 years later, Threads has the power to shock. As someone who was born just before these movies were released, I can still say that Threads kept me up for weeks. A devastatingly traumatic movie, but required viewing. An interesting side note: both ABC and the BBC aired news specials after the first showings of The Day After and Threads discussing the nuclear threat. ABC's special edition of Nightline included Carl Sagan and then-Secretary of State George Schultz among its guests. It's sad to know that in this day and age of around-the-clock news channels, we will nevertheless never see such a concerted effort to address both the hearts and the minds of the television-watching public today.
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!!! Links no work! I'm a bad monkey. The Metafilter thread about Petrov; the BBC info page on Threads; the NPR report on The Day After, 20 years later. (Also, why do I have to re-enter URLs in the preview window? grr.)
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Boo!
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Ok. We all of us live on sufferance from one instant to the next. This planet exists the same way, too. /buzzes off, seeking more flowers
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I'd never heard of this story before last week (thanks, smallish bear). The fact that I should have been dead before I even started school is a little fucking frightening. And exhilirating, too. Thank you, reagan and thatcher and kruschev and brezhnev and all our other glorious leaders
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Sorry. Forgot to mention the Mefi thread inspired the movie references. Also, I bow down to smallish bear.
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Ugh, I remember having to watch Threads when I was 14 or 15, at school. It gave me nightmares. I can't actually remember the content of the movie - perhaps some repressed memories - except that it had some sort of horrific ending to do with the main character's baby. Here's a site with various references to the British "Protect and Survive" leaflets that were printed and distributed in the 1980s, including Raymond Briggs' When the Wind Blows, which I re-read just recently for the first time since I was 10 or so.
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Chrominance, the reason Monkeyfilter is stripping out your URLs is probably that you are putting in a space after "href." For some reason, the Metaphilter software will understand href="http://www.foobar.com but be flummoxed by href = "http://www.foobar.com". This drove me crazy until I finally figured out what was going on!
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Not to detract from the Petrov story, but in my mind there's a difference between a near-miss with accidental war due to a technical glitch and the conscious decision of a leader not to drop the bombs. Wanna really scary story? Read up on the Ussuri River incident, 1969. Kosygin had his Tu-95's on the runways with the props turning. Kosygin's restraint is to be applauded, sure, but in that case so is Nixon's steadfastness.