KABOOM!
DOOMSDAY UPDATE: I hadn’t planned on watching Threads, the British The Day After which had its American TV premiere on WTBS, Atlanta’s cable “superstation” (they ran it a few times, adhering to the cable law “never show anything only once”—it’ll probably show up on non-cable TV before the year is out) for a number of reasons, not the least being that it was the British The Day After, i.e., we’ve seen all this already, right?
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KABOOM!
Prime Time
Richard C. Walls
DOOMSDAY UPDATE: I hadn’t planned on watching Threads, the British The Day After which had its American TV premiere on WTBS, Atlanta’s cable “superstation” (they ran it a few times, adhering to the cable law “never show anything only once”—it’ll probably show up on non-cable TV before the year is out) for a number of reasons, not the least being that it was the British The Day After, i.e., we’ve seen all this already, right? Besides, I’m old enough to have already lived through one cold war cycle of WWIII flicks and though they were grand entertainments, all of ’em, from the rubber monsters of The Day The World Ended through the soapy seriousness of On The Beach to the right-on absurdism of Dr. Strangelove (surely one of the 10 finest movies ever made), they failed to have the intended impact on the national consciousness — the arms race has marched on unabated. It would be foolish to have too much faith in the effectiveness of this current batch of well-meaning warnings—if Strangelove couldn’t make a difference, then a wimpy weeper like Testimony isn’t about to either. And if The Day After was a 10 day wonder, then Threads, being a British import and all, would probably sink without a sigh. But then, a few days before one of the show's airings, there appeared in our local reactionary rag (The Detroit News if you must know — and any opinions expressed in this column, etc.) an editorial attacking it, making the usual argument that sure, nuclear war is horrible, nobody wants it, but we shouldn’t wallow in these horrors too much ’cause then we might lose our taste for a “strong defense.”
Having seen it now, I think the News' concern was justified. Threads is the horror movie The Day After should have been. Not only is it effective in terms of sheer melted-corpse awfulness with more repulsive and convincinglooking special effects than its American counterpart, but it also manages to revitalize this tired SF sub-genre to the point of forcing the viewer to respond, hopefully with anger. After the expected (but minimally soapy) pre-kaboom plotting (especially unmissed was that stateside weirdness that afflicts almost all our “controversial” TVmovies where they try to temper the unpleasantness of the subject matter by framing it in the context of what passes on American TV for normalcy—and which makes the films seem pitched exclusively to white affluent suburban professionals and their families), the movie plunged into a graphic depiction of Britain reduced to Dark Ages savagery. The war’s survivors, wearing Dickensian threads and slowly dying from radiation poisoning, scrounged among the rubble for edibles while periodically the screen flashed ironically cool computer print-outs of relevant statistics — the number of millions dead, the depth and length of the wintry post-bomb temperatures...
As the Reagan administration approaches the arms talks with all the enthusiasm of someone bobbing for turds (now there’s an image you won’t find in the daily press) the message of Threads takes on a new urgency. It may come to your sector soon. Watch it. Decide for yourself.
NEW HOPE FOR THE INSANE: When Senator Jessie Helms suggested that rich conservatives buy up enough shares of CBS stock to become Dan Rather’s boss and so be able to squelch what they see as his rampant anti-Reaganism, I waited in vain for someone to take up the satirical cudgel. I mean, if ever there was a premise that cried out for a bit...but the only taker I came across during my diligent tube watching, the only one who saw the potential humor in the idea that if Helms’s scheme worked (not that anyone seriously believes it would) the New Right would not only be Dan Rather’s boss but actually own a network and be responsible for everything on it was David Brinkley, who took a few minutes at the end of his Sunday morning show to do a little whimsical speculating. It was a game try but, while imitating Brinkley is always a hoot, Brinkley’s own delivery is death to comedy (“...and what about Dallas...now there’s a show with a distinct anticapitalist bias...what about that?’’). Meanwhile, nobody’s made any jokes about the prospect of Roberto D’ Aubbison’s A Death Squad Christmas or the possibility of Kate And Allie being replaced by a show about two women who are totally satisfied being human placemats or the odds of us seeing Jerry Falwell’s touching brotherhood week documentary Jews You Can Trust. Why, in the old days... (to be continued)
