T Green Dorros THE DAY AFTER · 2019-12-06 · By Sybilla Green Dorros THE nuclear devastation of Kansas City, ~lissouri, as depicted in the television movie The Day After, lasted

-

By Sybilla Green Dorros

THE nuclear devastation of Kansas City, ~lissouri, as depicted in the television movie The Day After,

lasted only four minutes but the "fallout" from the movie is still being felt. It is estimated that more than 100-million people in the United States viewed the first public broadcast of the movie on Sunday, November 20th. How­ever, pirated copies of the movie had been circulating m<?nths in advance and Bel.c1ulciA tapes were available in -:"!1':: Philippines within less than a week from the day it was shown in the U.S. Not only was it one of the most widely viewed television programs i., American history (second only to the final episode of M.A.S.1l. shown in March of this year), but it was also undoubtedly the most controversial one.

At the center of the con­troversy surrounding The Day After was the potentia! !...oost the movie could give to the anti­nuclear movement in the U.S. and elsewhere. Indeed even before the movie was released, antinuclear groups, such as the Campaign Against Nuclear War, were using leaked copies of the movie in their ' campaigns. In April Josh Baran, a disarmament activist, set up an ad Iwe group called The Day Before, which worked with 17 national antinuclear groups to set up seminars throughout the U.S. Another group, Ground Zero, mailed _ ou t 100,000 viewing guides. Antinuclear groups also staged candlelight vigils, seminars and petition drives.

Although The Day After has been exploited by antinuclear groups, ABC executives who produced the movie claim that it is apolitical. "\\te never intended the film to be a political statement," said Brandon Stod­dard, president of ABC Motion Pictures and the initiator of the project. However, William P. Buckley, Jr. in a recent editorial, quoted the writer of the script, Edward Hume, ~ ';uying, "I would like to see people starting ~o question the value of defending this country with a nuclear arsenal. What troubles me is that there's no dialogue on the subject. I hope this film will wrench the dialogue back to the surface. To that extent, it is a

32

THE DAY AFTER "THE DAY AFfER"

Kansas citizens watching their city set nuked in "The Day After."

political film." Indeed it would seem almost

impossible to make a realistic movie about nuclear war without making some sort of political statement. Although there have been some disaster movies which were not intended to be political statements, such as The Tower­ing Inferno, these movies were mos'tly about accidents or natural disasters (earthquakes, floods, etc.). Many of the recent disaster movies, _especially those dealing with man-made accidents like The China Syndrome, have been blatantly more political, both in the treatment of the subject and in the casting of the actors. In fact, The China Syndrv me was the inspiration for The Day After: after seeing 11Le China Syndrome, Brandon Stoddard wondered (what the consequences of nuclear war would be and set out to make the movie. Despite the implicit disarmament message

of the movie, it does not a9¥ocafe any specific nuclear policies, such ~ build-down or freeze. The viewer is left to draw his own interpretations about the best way to avoid such a war.

President Reagan was quick to react to the sho.wing of The Day After" (he saw it twice) and to try to deflect any criticisms of his present nuclear policies. At a pre-Thanksgiving turkey cere­mony, President Reagan told newsmen that the movie "didn't say anything that we didn't already know". There had been some debate as to whether he should appear on television before or after the movie but, in the end, it was decided that Secretary of State Shultz would make a statement on his behalf during the 45-minute edition of ABC News Nightline after the movie. A week after the show, however, White House aides admitted they had over·reacted: they received less than 600 calls about The Day After and most of the calls were not nearly as critical of the administration as they had expected.

The timing of the release of the movie was as controversial as its m~ss~c. Just days after the movie was shown, the deploy­ment of new U.S. nuclear missiles began in Europe and the Soviet representatives to ' the Geneva arms talks walked out in protest. These events only served to heighten the fear .of the pos­sibility of a nuclear War. As Newsweek put it, " ... last week life imitated art in a way that made it impossible, at least for the moment, to ignore the threat of extinction that has hung over the planet for J more than a generation" (December 5, 1983). Although there were demons­trations against the deployment of these missiles, notably in West Germany where 108 Pershing II missiles were deployed, there may be an even greater reaction once The Day After is shown in Europe. (The' movie is scheduled for distribution to 40 countries and will be shown in movie theaters in some countries, rather than on television.)

Despite all tqe. controversy The Day After , has generated, it is not a very good movie. With the exception or' Jason Robards, most of the actors are relatively unknown. Not only are the actors unpolished, but the cha-

WHO, DECEMBER 28, 1983

racters they play are superficial and undeveloped. In the words of one critic, they are "a collection of cardboa.rd caricatures in a sketchy, melodramatic script". Almost a full hour of the slightly more than 2-hour movie is devoted to introducing the characters-a heart surgeon doing rounds, a farm family preparing for a daughter's wedding, college students registering for class. The only interest generated in this part of the movie is through the various news bulletins on radio and T. V.: East German soldiers rebel, the Soviets seal off West Berlin, Washington vigorously protests, the Soviets invade West Germany, the p.S. airbursts three tactical warheads over Soviet Troops, Moscow anr.ihilates NATO headquarters, then each superpower nukes a ship. But the pace of the movie is so slow that one ~most begins to look forward to the nuking of Kansas City! At least the producers were neutral in their treatment of this chain of events: the viewer does not know who started the confrc!!tation.

The scenes of the nuking of I<' anR?.S City ' and environs are gruesome but relatively tame -by today's disaster movie standards. More horrifying to me 'than the images of bodies being irradiated was the savagery of the people, both before and after the attack. As the tension · builds before the attack, people rush into the supermarkets and grab every item they can get their hands on. After the attack, the people become even more savage as they compete for scarce resources:

there are numerous scenes of looting, pillaging and even killing for food.

Mter watching the savagery of the people under such cir­cumstances and the awful effects of radiation (loss of hair, etc.), one would pray not to survive such a nuclear attack. The movie thus questions one of the basic premises of the Reagan adX¢n­istration, namely that a nuclear war is "winable". Although perhaps technically winable ( or better, survivable), the costs to society would be far too great. The s\lrvivors in the movie wey;e robbed of an essential ingredients of humanity: hope. This was beautifully portrayed by a preg­nant woman who didn't want to give birth. 'Lying in the make­shift hospital in Lawrence, Kansas, she couldn't find a single reason for ' bringing another human being into what was left of the world.

Fortunately there are a few such redeeming scenes in an otherwise uninteresting melo­drama. One of the best parts of the tJ'I.()vj~ takes place before the attack: the heart surgeon (Jason Robards) and his wife are lying in bed, discussing the latest T. V. bulletins. His wife I reminisces about a similar time twenty years earlier: the Cuban Missile crisis. This and a couple of other scenes help to put The Day A/ter in an historical context, especially for those viewers who were too young to remember Hiroshima, the air-raid shelters of the 1950s and the Cuban Missile crisis. (One of the ironies of history is that the German Bundestag gave its

The night after: Lawrence residents stage candle light vigil against nuclear war.

approval for the deployment of the Pershing II missiles on the 20th anniversary of President Kennedy's death. And yet the movie reaffirmed one of Ken­nedy's famou:; Ii""'3, "if mankind didn't abolish nuclear weapons, they would abolish mankind".)

Although I am too young to remember Hiroshima, the movie jolted it lot of memories of my childhood: the air-raid alerts· in our elementary school in su­burban Washington, D.C., my eldest sister briefing me on what we should do in case of an attaCK at home (our family was one of the few in our neighborhood that did not have a backyard underground shelte.~, as well as the horrible nightmares all of this fear generated. In the 1960s the tensions were "reflected in the lyrics of one of the songs of Tom Lehrer, a favorite singer of my parents: "First we got the bomb and that was good 'cause we love peace and motherhood. Then Russia got the bomb but that's okay -2cause the balance of power's maintained that way ... Then France got the bomb but don't you grieve 'cause they're on our side (I believe) ... Who's next? ... "

I realize that our household , was not necessary typical in that

there was more than the usual interest in disarmament. As early as his college days at Yale, my father was sent as a represent­ative of the Intercollegiate Dis· armament Council to what has been termed the "precedent­setting" World Disarmament Con­ference held in Geneva in February 1932. For over fifty years, disarmament has been one of his concerns. For this reason, the movie The: /Juy /lfter was a limely reminder to me of what little progress has been made to slow down or stop the dangerous proliferation of nuclear weapons,

President Reagan was correct in saying that the movie didn't teach us anything we didn't already know. Even those of us who were not alive during the period of Hiroshima have read about and seen pictures of the awful devastation that took place there and in NagasaKi. Although we do know how awful it was, what 11w Day After did was to personalize the effects of a nuclear attack: the movie showed the trauma to particular in-

Continued on page 37

33

images of deat4 by instantaneous irradiation.

, ,iViduals and not to some nknown masses of people. ecause of this, ' perhaps. the ng (55-minute) intro~uction of e characters was justified. By

sing this technique, the pro-ucers of the movie made the ffects of a nuclear attack seem ore realistic. But the movie did

ot teach us any new' lessons out nuclear weapons. To quote

ne of the characters in 11ll' Day Iter, "Truth? We have known e truth about nuclear weapons r 40 years". If there was any lesson in the

ovie it was that we should now more about how to survive

nuclear attack. The characters the movie were utterly

nprepared: children were blind-by looking directly at the

ushroom-shaped cloud, people ot sick from eating con­laminated food and the farmers . d not know how to dispose of he contaminated top soil in their lelds. I was not the only one ho got that message: in the eek after the movie was shown ore tiiafl 50,000 people called e toll-free number, 800-UCLEAR, to get more in-rmation. And most of the

lrvival-goods store, such as ftermath" in Detroit, reported

at their sales of such items as 'ilitary clothes, blankets and

eeze-dried foods doubled on e day after the movie.

- Although people din respond the movie, the attitudes of

ost of the viewers remained nchanged by it. In a poll quoted y Time (December 5, 1983), the

number of viewers who thought a nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was not likely by the year 2000 actually rOlSe slightly after the movie, from 32% to 35%. At the same time, the minuscule minority who

WHO, DECEMBER 28, 1983

believed they could survive an atomic blast dipped from 7% to 5%. Those who felt that the U.S. was doing all it could to avoid a nuclear conflict rose from 37% to 41%, while 58%, up from 54% before th~ movie, approved of Washington's defense policies. Despite the lack of fundamental change in attitudes, the anti­nuclear groups have been trying to channel the .-.emotional re­actions ta the movie into political action. How successful they will be remains to be seen.

It is not known at this time whether 1'h<.' nay A Jt.a will be shown in the Philippines, either on television or in movie theaters. The reason it might not be shown is because, like in the United States, it could be used to help boost the burgeoning anti­nuclear ' movement in this coun­try. In the Philippines, however, the situation is more complicate~ because of the implicit con­nection between the antinuclear movement and the political opposition , groups. The nuclear movement here is closely tied to the Anti-Bases Coalition (ABC) and ut}ler anti-American/ anti-Marcos groups. This was clearly demonstrated during the Anti-Bases Coalition's march on the U.S. Errbassy on October 26th: the 0 protesters carried placards which expressed sen­timents such as "NO to Nuclear War" and exhibited photos of P lroshima. Dp$pite this con­nection, I think that Tile Day After should be shown publicly in the Philippines. The elite, with access to Betamax and other video cassette recorders, should not be the only ones to see this movie.

If the movie is shown in the Philippines, hopefully it will be without commercial interruption.

During the movie, I found it absolutely incredible to watch an ad for Orville Redenbacker's Gourmet microwave popcurn (I didn't even know one could make popcorn in a microwave oven! ). Other products ad­vertised during the movie were Commodore computers, Soloflex home e~cr.::ise system, English Leather cologne, Bonjour jeans, diet aids Dexatrim and Slim fast, Maybelline cosmetics and Dollar Rent-A-Car. As columnist David Broder pointed out, "A country that can choke down a fake nuclear war between ads for Gourmet Pop Corn and Dexatrim Appetite Cont.rol capsules can swallow a1'11ost anything." The ads were not only incongruous but extrerrely disruptive to the con­tinuity of ' the movie. I was pleased with two things related' to the ads: first, whoever made the Betamax tape I watched stopped taping them after the first set and second, ABC in an unusual move, put all the ads before the nuclear attack. The second hour of the movie was uninterrupted.

Needless to say, The nay A Jter ~oe3 not have a happy ending. In the" last scene, the heart surgeon leaves the make­shift hospital where he has been working to go back to his home for the last time. There, .in the ashes of what was once his house, he sees a family of squatters. He shouts at them, "Get out of my house! " An old man walks toward him and sadly places a hand on the surgeon's shoulder. As the two embrace, the oamera moves back to show the decimated landscape. In a silent coda to the movie, a printed message is given to the viewers: "The catastrophic events you have just witnessed are in all

likelihood less severe than what would actually occur in the event of a full nuclear strike against the United States ... "

. Before the final fade, another message is given: "It is hoped that the images of this film will inspire !he !!2.tions of this earth, their people and leaders, to find the means to avert the fateful day". Since the ' movie was shown, the debate about the best means to avert a nuclear has intensified. Although there are no quick answers, there is some solace in the first reading during the masses on the Sunday following the showing of the movie:

"They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks:

One nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again." (Isaiah, 2:4)

As repo! ted on the CBS .Viglttl·y Nl'w.\' on November 21st, an aide to President Reagan optimistically predicted that the "fallout" from the movie, 11u' I.ast nay would be shoTt-lived. He compareu the movie to a Chinese dinner (a rather strange analogy): "All will be ' forgotten in less than a week". While it is true that the American public has an incredibly short memory, the images of the movie are not likely to fade quite that quickly. The antinuclear groups have been given a "shot in the arm" by the movie and the subsequent dis­cussions about it, At the very least, L~." movie has reached the objective of the scriptwrite!, Edward Hume, to "wrench the dialogue back to the surface". It can only be hoped that this dialogue will lead, not to ine::-eased fears, but to greater efforts towards peace. l!!J

37