“Hast du etwas Zeit für mich?
Dann singe ich ein Lied für dich
Von 99 Luftballons…”
Let’s go back forty years to ’83—put on some Devo or New Order, and think on those times when the world very nearly came to an end. And here’s a film which, so the story goes, might’ve just well saved the world in turn.
To set the scene—the world is divided between two power blocs, one headed in Moscow by half-mummified old cadavers like Brezhnev and Andropov, whose power in effect is largely ceded to paranoid Politburo officials and KGB apparatchiks (the latter of which, well, never really went anywhere unfortunately…). On the other side, we have Ronald Reagan going all-in on rather breakneck military growth and flexing, fuelled by a very black and white worldview that the Cold Warrior mindset was building to. Is it any wonder why around this time so much media pondered then on the seemingly imminent onset of nuclear war and its consequences, when the clock really did seem a minute away from midnight?
As opposed to, say, modern fears of climate change, the zeitgeist around the nuclear specter was largely bipartisan—while there was debate over stockpiling itself, more or less everyone agreed what the consequences of pushing the red button would be, and it would end with the grim reaper taking his röntgen-flavored toll. With this in mind, the ABC network commissioned a TV movie that held nothing back in illustrating exactly what this would look like, with The Day After.
The film has quite the ensemble cast, following several families around Kansas City, Missouri—we have Jason Robards, Lori Lothin, and even John Lithgow. Director Nicolas Meyer, known for his work on the Star Trek films, seemed to go largely for unknowns, likely to give a more realistic feel of everyday Americans soon to be caught up in cataclysm. You might recognize more of the players now, but either way, the apparent job is done with the casting.
We have a slow burn at first with folks going around their everyday lives and dramas, even as background news reports paint a picture of a disastrously escalating situation in Europe—one that was chillingly close to home in ’83, what with major NATO exercises spiking Soviet paranoia. Even as folks go about their daily business, we soon start to feel the anxiety rise as tensions escalate to skirmishes and shooting—and then we know what’s coming.
Everything starts when suddenly electronics start failing, and panic starts to rise. This signals high-altitude nuclear bursts creating electromagnetic pulses to blackout communications and more. It’s rather unnerving to think how this would feel in our even more digitally-addicted society—essentially rendering everyone deaf, dumb, and blind. And then the bombs fall. With the effects budget being rather limited, Meyer nevertheless applied his experiences in complex productions aptly, as we’re spared nothing of the resulting infernos.
Around this time, many a viewer might feel a rather spiritual sense of dread, the one that has spurred all the fixations on the likes of Armageddon or Ragnarok—that, of course, only proves that they’re still human.
The rest is people desperately trying to survive as fallout descends, with hospitals crammed, people almost certainly to die in pain, and others just trying to survive. It hits just as hard now, and in ’83, it was a hammer to any sense that there was ‘winning’ any armed conflict between the superpowers.
In fact, such was its starkness, that Reagan himself supposedly was hit very hard, and became far less enthused about the very idea of nuclear buildup. It sounds like a bit of a story, and perhaps it might be—but Reagan was a man who had come about in Hollywood, so it figures that he would still be influenced by what he saw on the screen. Not to mention, of course, him namedropping this very picture in his memoirs—so, yes, The Day After has a unique distinction of being a movie that perhaps saved us all from going over the brink.
That itself speaks to the ultimate power of the moving picture, and how it only can hold up a mirror to our world, but oftentimes, very much should. There were other films like this at the time—in the UK, there was the perhaps even more depressing Threads, which went even further into depicting a nuclear aftermath, and was itself something of a rebuttal to the rhetoric of the Thatcher government.
Some lessons do need to be remembered. The power of the atom, like any technology, is one that needs great responsibility behind it—and, well, those lessons and that responsibility have, in recent times, felt a little less kept in mind than they should be…
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