Actually Never

As a kid, I remember being fascinated by nuclear war. Not GOOD fascinated, you understand. I was terrified – like, sobbing in bed while the adults listened to the news in other room level terrified. But also fascinated.

I remember a book in grade school about a kid whose house had a fallout shelter, and the neighbourhood kids would play in it because it was after the cold war and what else would you use a bomb shelter for, right? Except there was a nuclear strike – I think it was accidental but I don’t really remember that much about the specifics – and the kid was spared because he was in the bunker when it happened. Really, it’s only in writing about this now that I’m considering what a fucked up topic that is for a book aimed at grade schoolers.

And that wasn’t even the only one! There was a French book about people living underground in a post-war Fallout-type scenario. And nobody could ever leave because of radiation, but someone was determined to get out. I recall the big twist at the end was the discovery that the bunker had been open to the outside all along.

I dig Fallout. If I could make this entry play I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire on loop, I would. I came on board, like many, with Fallout 3. I haven’t played nearly as much of the Fallout games as I would like to because I get so frustrated in any video game where you move around in 3D space. One time I was doing laps around Megaton, the starting town in Fallout 3. Just wandering in circles for the longest time. Finally, Mika asked “what ARE you doing” and I had to admit that I couldn’t find my house. She knew where it was, of course. She wasn’t even paying attention and she still knew.

I also made us go to Ottawa for vacation one summer mainly so I could go to the Diefenbunker. I had a great time going stories underground, seeing where the Prime Minister and top officials would be coordinating our nuclear war response from. It got decommissioned and became a museum in part because the new missiles are so much faster and the bombs so much stronger that the PM would never make it there in time and it wouldn’t likely withstand a modern bombing if he did. So that part was, y’know. Unsettling.

Oh my god, I’m looking at the website now and you can do a Diefenbunker escape room. “Choose from two experiences — one takes place over an entire floor (that’s 25,000 square feet) of this massive underground bunker.” Yes. I want to do this. We have to go back.

Anyway. More recently, I read Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen, and that’s also good and frightening. It is exactly what it says it is: a way that a nuclear war could start and how it could play out. I don’t believe that every book needs to be a movie, but this one does. Have everything shown in real time. The entire scenario in the book from first missile launch to the destruction of most life on Earth only takes about 90 minutes. And we all enjoy a shorter movie, right?

How’s this for a quote from that Wikipedia article?

Jacobsen has said “You would want to have a commander-in-chief who is of sound mind, who is fully in control of his mental capacity, who is not volatile, who is not subject to anger. These are significant character qualities that should be thought about when people vote for president, for the simple reason that the president has sole authority to launch nuclear weapons.”

Well, shit.

What I knew

Threads was a British TV movie showing what would happen following a nuclear war. If you saw The Day After (I wasn’t allowed to watch it as an 8-year-old, for reasons I certainly cannot fathom), it’s pretty similar, but has the reputation for being even more unsparing and bleak.

What I know

Unsparing and bleak works, sure.

The film starts with a focus on a family drama – a guy knocks up his girlfriend, they decide they’re going to get married, the two families meet despite neither thinking that this is the best plan. All the while, TV and radio reports, mostly in the background, talk up increasing tension between the US and the Soviet Union. Things escalate. People pay more attention to the news. Soon they’re making preparations. There’s panic shopping. And then the bombs hit.

Not only is everything as horrifying as promised, but we even end by jumping years into the future to see that things haven’t gotten any better.

I don’t know how to review this. It was awful, but in the way that was intended, I guess? Recommended if you feel like giving yourself nightmares?

So of course, I had to follow it up by watching The Day After to see how they compared. They’re very similar in structure, with an initial focus on day-to-day life in a smaller city changing as the news becomes more serious. We get to see the missiles launch from the nearby base, letting the citizens sit with the realization that either the Russians have already launched theirs, or will be retaliating. I do think Threads winds up going a little darker – which here probably just means “more honest” – but the fact that this got made at all, much less aired on Sunday night prime time broadcast TV is amazing. I don’t think you could do it now.

Given that The Day After features a young Steve Guttenberg, was it made by the Stonecutters? They’d have the power to pull it off. Something to think about.

Having now watched two nuclear war movies in three days, an animated film called When the Wind Blows showed up in my recommendations. I’d never heard of it, so good job, algorithm. Like Threads, it’s British and from the early 80s. It follows a couple as the husband makes preparations for possible war and the wife more or less thinks he’s an idiot for doing so and warns him to not scuff up the wallpaper. The bomb comes, of course, and the rest of the film shows the aftermath. You get much less of the impact on society as a whole as the focus is kept to just this one couple, who despite the husband’s efforts were naively unprepared for what would happen. They’re still waiting for mail service and newspaper delivery even as they weaken from radiation poisoning.

Really, all these have taught me is that if the bombs do fall, hope they take you out because surviving the initial attack won’t be a blessing.

I also watched a bunch of nuclear war preparation films from the 50s and 60s. Weird to think of this as being lighter entertainment but by these standards, they are. They’re much more hopeful and encouraging than the movies I watched. This means that they’re really only useful as entertainment. I haven’t seen one in this batch that actually says “duck and cover” but Periscope Film has a pretty sizable collection on YouTube so it’s only a matter of time.

They have thousands of historical videos on all kinds of topics, in case Banff in the 1940s, house flies, or what you can do with steel plates is more your speed.

Finally, I wrapped up my two weeks of nuclear war movies the appropriate way, with a viewing of Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour. It was initially suggested as a joke, then recommended as something that wouldn’t require the most attention from me while I played around on my phone, and finally watched, in part, because it would make my four most recently watched films on Letterboxd be funny.

I probably knew roughly as many Taylor Swift songs going into this as I did Talking Heads songs going into Stop Making Sense. This… maybe didn’t wow me in the same way. But it was fine. I enjoyed it enough. Not really made for me. Needed more flash blinding and radiation sickness.