40 Years Ago: The Day After

Oh, fiddlesticks, the most important movie ever made is The Wizard of Oz.

Anyway, thanks, Kevin Maher, for reminding me that today marks the 40th anniversary of the original broadcast of the TV movie The Day After. I watched that first broadcast in real time, along with a literal 100 million other people, an astounding 62% share of the viewing audience. It was one of those increasingly rare occasions when most of America was watching the same thing.

Two decades after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Ronald Reagan had revived the existential terror of nuclear annihilation among all those whose heads weren’t full of cement (then, as now, amounting to about half the country). It was among the key topics of conversation of the day. Of course, those missiles and submarines had been there my entire life (in fact, my father worked at a nuclear sub shipyard in nearby New London) but Reagan’s public saber rattling and expansion of the arsenal put it on the news every night. Carl Sagan wrote and spoke of a “Nuclear Winter”. Protests were staged. Reagan was widely spoken of as a madman. As a teenager I vividly recall arguing with an uncle who didn’t see the folly of a nation being so well armed it could destroy all life on earth many times over. The conversations, reflective of the national debate, went something like this:

“But we’ll all be dead!”

“But we gotta beat the Russians!”

“But we’ll all be dead!”

“But we gotta beat the Russians!”

Et cetera, ad nauseam, ad infinitum. It’s very confusing to me that the same people now LOVE the Russians, but as I believe I stated quite clearly earlier, their heads are full of cement.

Anyway, into this climate walked certain opportunistic producers. No one ever went broke exploiting the fears of a terrified public. And truth to tell this was a fear that predated Reagan. Jimmy Carter was still President in 1979, the year of the Three Mile Island accident, the No Nukes concert, and the movie The China Syndrome. In early 1983 came the movie Wargames, which smashed together the then-new vogue for video games with a nightmare scenario wherein a teenaged hacker (Matthew Broderick) accidentally takes the world to DEFCON 1. (You’ll find it referred to in the cheesy slug in the poster shown above). November 4 saw the premiere of Testament, a film about a group of neighbors in suburban San Francisco slowly dying of radiation sickness after a nuclear war. I recall learning about this film from Siskel and Ebert. Its cast included Jane Alexander, William Devane, a pre-WitnessLuka Haas,Leon Ames,Lurene Tuttle, and a not-yet-famous Kevin Costner and Rebecca de Mornay. Originally developed by PBS for American Playhouse, its small budget made it a gripping piece of filmed theatre.

The genre, by the way, is older even than this. There are very few such films, because nothing is more depressing, but some dated back to the Eisenhower era. They included Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach (1959), Ray Milland’s Panic in the Year Zero (1962), Sidney Lumet’s Failsafe (1964), and of course one of the darkest of all comedies, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964).

Just over two weeks after Testament‘s release came the premiere broadcast of ABC’s The Day After. This telefilm had a much bigger budget than Testament. It did not stint on the mushroom clouds or the dystopian aftermath. The cast included several up-and-coming stars from recent hit movies like JoBeth Williams from Poltergeist and The Big Chill, Steve Guttenbergfrom Diner, and John Lithgow from The World According to Garp and Terms of Endearment. Amy Madigan would soon show up in Places in the Heart and Streets of Fire. Veterans in the cast included Jason Robards,George Petrie, and John Cullum. For comic relief you can catch glimpses of Stephen Furst and Wayne Knight.

But as you can imagine there’s next to no comedy in this grim exercise. In fact, part of the power, part of the horror, is derived from seeing the likes of Steve Guttenberg — Steve Guttenberg! a likeable mainstay of light comedy — waste away to a bald skeleton after heroically exposing himself to radiation to save an upset teenager. Robards is essentially the main character, a doctor who also becomes fatally sick after doing what he can to treat survivors.

The film also provides a good deal more context and preamble prior to the disaster, resulting in loads of accumulated tension. In the opening beats of the film, people are just living their lives, planning weddings, and so forth, and in the background we’re made constantly aware of escalating tension in Europe. This will be the most alien aspect of the film for young people, I imagine. A divided Germany, a blockaded West Berlin. The idea of the Warsaw Pact being so insane as to attempt to swallow up West Germany in 1983 seemed one of the more far-fetched premises in the screenplay. 20 years earlier it had indeed seemed a real danger. In the Reagan era it would have been suicide. Even more far-fetched was the concept of a limited nuclear war like the one we see in the film. Most of the experts were saying that the two sides were primed for all-out war, the whole thing would escalate within seconds, and all life would be wiped out. But it’s kind of hard to tell a story when the only characters are smoldering piles of cinders.

I found the movie very effective when I watched that first broadcast. I found the actual explosion so unnerving I alarmed my dad by yelping involuntarily. It was that disturbing. I watched it just a few months ago during Covid lockdown and it still packed a wallop. Incidentally, most of the movie was shot in Lawrence, Kansas, where the story is set. I got to visit that town a few years back. It was reassuring to find it still there.

As we all know, Hollywood is not full of saints. They follow the money. Almost right after this movie aired is when Hollywood started making pro-Reagan propaganda movies, horse shit like Red Dawn (1984), Rocky IV (1985), and Top Gun (1986). (Yeah, I said it! Top Gun is war-mongering horse shit).

But this seems like the perfect time to let you know about some anti-nuclear events being planned by friends and favorite Marx Brothers impressionists Noah Diamond and Seth Selden starting one week from now:

It’s sponsored by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. And the keystone event is this:

Details about the concert are here.

Because, you know, um… the bombs are still there.