The Time Is Always The Time

Tom Nichols is a big fan of a 1983 made-for-TV movie:

With all that said, any American who wants to understand the cultural environment of that time should watch "The Day After." It's a true achievement, and I'm amazed that Meyer was able to make the film *at all*. This one moment chilled my blood and still does.

He does an 8 tweet thread and says he’s used the film as part of his Cold War pop culture class. He is obviously younger than me. There is obviously a generation gap between us.

I vaguely remember when this film was broadcast. I was 28. I’d been married for 6 years, I was soon to be in law school; my daughter’s birth was 9 years in the future. I remember ABC made a big news story out of audience reactions: people shocked, young girls crying (another example of the cultural environment of that time), etc. I remember thinking “Meh, kids.” Because I grew up in the shadow of the bomb: duck ‘n’ cover in school; CONELRAD marked on every car radio dial (yes, “dial”); fallout shelters advertised for sale; Civil Air Defense shelters in public buildings; tests of civil air defense warning sirens. 

I grew up in the era of  “The Twilight Zone.” I’m surprised now how many episodes (everything is in re-runs somewhere) Rod Serling wrote about a post-nuclear war world. It must have been one a season, if not two or more a season. None of them were terribly realistic (30 minutes of the camera panning a dead landscape would be realistic, but not compelling drama). Still, they were frightening and disturbing and never promised a happy ending. I remember asking my mother, when I was about 8, why we didn’t have a fallout shelter. She said she didn’t want to survive such a war. Serling’s stories gave good reasons to agree with her. That kind of thing has much more impact on you than a TV movie.

By 1983 I had no illusions what a nuclear war would be like. I was more surprised at younger people (those audience reactions) who didn’t know. I knew, by then, that even fallout shelters would be useless, unless you were far enough away from a blast to avoid the immediate burst of radiation. But the idea of riding that out in shelter for even several weeks was absurd, given what the radiation would destroy and how long it would linger. The living might envy the dead, but they couldn’t do it for long.

Nor, after our recent pandemic experience, would some people stay sheltered long.

If you still think this is all moldy history, remember that post nuclear war movies started in the’50’s, and weren’t all about mutant giant animals. The “life after war” genre began then, too. And there’s a direct line from those movies to the apocalypse genre that still echoes in our entertainment today. Boomers made us think in terms of labeled generations (not their fault; they were pasted with it), and one of their legacies (also not their fault) is the end-of-the-world as a genre.  I kind of thought that was done by 1983. Oh, well.

I suppose the most important cultural lesson of “The Day After” is how quickly the lessons of the ‘60’s were forgotten. I’m sure “The Day After” was as realistic as TV could be at the time. Then again “Dr. Strangelove” had the only realistic ending to a movie about nuclear holocaust there could be. And that was 1964.

I just found the reality of my childhood under the shadow of the Bomb was more instructive than that movie. I suppose it’s a matter of what time was your time.