Time Out London’s 100 Best Horror Movies # 93. ) “Threads” (1984) The first Science Fiction film to address the horrors of nuclear war was the leaden and prosaic “Five;” that was 1951, a full six years after Hiroshima. It’s most lasting influence was that it never addressed the realities of the science it didn’t understand, never asked tough questions about the consequences of societal break-down, but instead chose to hide behind religious allegory as camouflage for its ignorance. With very few exceptions, the next decade’s filmmakers addressing our fears about the consequences of nuclear war refused to treat the subject as anything but alchemy – generally we got radioactive monster movies. There were rare occasions they tried to be less medieval in their approach, but for every triumph, like “On the Beach” (1959), there were at least five that degenerated into self-indulgent and self-congratulating bathos and/or sadism, like “Panic in the Tear Zero” (1962). Part of the cowardliness of Hollywood and other film capitals was that our fearless leaders were lying through their teeth about the consequences of our arsenals; in 1982 a documentary was released, “Atomic Café,” which hilariously and chillingly detailed the absurd transparency of the lies of government sponsored PSA’s produced through the 1950s and early 1960s. “Panic” came out the same year as the Cuban Missile crisis, and those terrifying 13 days forced a few more filmmakers to sober-up. Google “Best films about nuclear war” and you’ll get several lists, and you’ll notice clustering of dates and themes for the more mature films. For the rest of the 1960s the best focused on the political crisis aspect of the conflict, like “Dr. Strangelove” and “Fail Safe” were both released 1964. Important to this essay, but far removed from its contemporaries, was 1965’s semi-documentary “War Game;” it detailed the plight of the people in several towns in Kent England in the immediate aftermath of a limited nuclear exchange. It was the first film to try and address the potential holocaust with complete realism and was intended as an educational television program, but was banned because it was too horrifying. This led to it being released theatrically and winning an Oscar. In the 1970s there wasn’t much in the way of mature filmmaking on the subject. Then came the 1980s, and a bumper crop intelligent and compelling films focusing on the street-level human tragedy of the world getting blown away. What suddenly changed? Well, Ronald Reagan was elected President. It’s hard to appreciate in retrospect the terror that Reagan inspired with his wholly nonsensical, profoundly dishonest, provocative, and seemingly Armageddon-desiring, public statements and policy rhetoric. I lived through it, and it still is hard to align with what was said with what actually happened; the events of history have washed all his words away. To make an impossibly complicated, and still not fully compensable, story short, Reagan was saying one thing, and doing another. Few in the US, Europe, or the USSR, could see the full, more than somewhat contradictory, story; but one of those who did was Mikhail Gorbachev. These two men developed an unlikely, but deeply personal, friendship which changed the course of human history. When it looked like we were rushing to the brink, we were in fact stepping back from it. Too bad none of us kids could see that until 1988. Before that, in 1983, the US Television produced three devastating human dramas of the apocalypse, “Special Bulletin,” “Testament,” and most significantly, “The Day After,” which was America’s closest heir to “War Game.” The next year, 1984, director Mick Jackson and screenwriter Barry Hines produced “Threads” for BBC television. It was hyper-conscious of its role as the heir to “War Game,” and with that came the heavy responsibility. By the 1980s we knew that however horrible “War Games” was, it was a walk in the park compared to what the apocalypse would really be like. It’s the hardest to watch of the four dramas of 1983-1984, it’s a horror film of unflinching realism. It opens with a shot of crisscrossing telephone lines, and a short narration explaining that a society is bound together be intertwining threads of association, institution, division of labor, and mutual dependency and responsibility. Most of these threads are invisible, generally minor tears in the fabric are self-correctable; but it can be rended and torn so badly it will never again function in a recognizable form. This was a slap at the increasingly popular action-dramas that envisioned a broken future as a kind of Psychotic-Libertarian wonderland, where men are men, violence had a stylized beauty and those who deserved to rise up to be masters of the landscape (the “Mad Max” franchise started in 1979). This film starts before the war, take us through it, its immediate aftermath, and then reaches beyond any of its immediate kin, across years and years of a shrinking population and increasing degeneracy. It is set in Sheffield, and focused on two families who very conventional lives are about to be sucked into the maelstrom; the Kemps and the Becketts about to be joined by a marriage that not quite everyone is thrilled about. Though their eyes we will see the medical, economic, social and environmental consequences of nuclear war (it was the first film to depict a nuclear winter in a serious manner). The eye for detail is extraordinary and allowed this low-budget film achieve a harrowing realism greater than “The Day After,” which could employ state-of-the-art FX to explicitly demonstrate everything. A shocked woman wets herself when she sees the mushroom cloud. Another man, trapped in a toilet, can see nothing at all. A cat rolls in agony as it is consumed in the firestorm, executed with a quick-cut. Many deaths are demonstrated simply, but effectively, with a quick cut to a white flash, then another quick cut to flames. After the bombs, the production design takes over -- and no post-apocalypse film ever displayed such ruin, the conditions in what remains of one hospital are especially shocking. Before the film is half over, its focus has narrowed to Ruth Beckett, who learned she pregnant in the first scenes and is now raising her daughter alone – everyone else she knew is dead. The films ends 13 years after the war, and Ruth has expired, leaving her unnamed daughter nothing but a life of illiterate, medieval subsistence, her position in the world barely better than that of chattel. It ends with the girl giving birth, the product of a rape, and a cut away before we see what the child had become – there are some things even to terrible for this film. To create the script the filmmakers consulted scientists, psychologists, doctors, defense specialists and strategic experts. Source material included ‘Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions,’ by Carl Sagan and James B. Pollack, which had been published in the journal “Science” just the year before; “Doomsday: Britain After Nuclear Attack ” by Stan Openshaw, also 1983; “Nuclear Destruction of Britain” by Magus Clarke, 1982; and Duncan Campbells 1982 exposé “War Plan UK” was the basis of the filmmakers case that the UK’s war-planning was hopelessly inadequate. Both “Threads” and “The Day After” were hyper-political in intent, the filmmakers in both cases stated they were specifically challenging Reagan’s policies and seeming lack of realistic perspective on what he could unleash. It has been reported that Reagan saw both films, so the message appeared to have been delivered. It’s very hard to explain how we got from where we were in 1982 to where we arrived in 1988. It would be absurd to suggest that these films “saved the world.” But is it really so unrealistic to suggest that these honest and impassioned statements were at least a part of the process? https://youtube/watch?v=s_s8CrRN76M
Posted on: Tue, 07 Oct 2014 12:55:41 +0000
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