I just watched "The Atomic Cafe"

[ForrestGump]

If you haven't seen it, it's definitely worth a viewing. It was released in 1982 but I didn't see it 'til just now, courtesy of the immense DVD holdings of my local library. It's basically told through compilation of old newsreels and television and film clips from the '40s through the '60s, with no voiceover or linking dramatization. It's incredible, at times, beyond words. Some of the stuff's just jaw-dropping, and not always as overtly as the film of GIs dug in at the Nevada Test Site as part of a test to determine how soldiers would do in a nuclear war...

The film starts with the Trinity test and the destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, complete with later interviews with Paul Tibbets and an after-mission soundbite from the pilot of the second bomb's B-29, who described the release of the bomb as a "thrill" (hey...it's easy to judge, but I'm not going to because he was an adrealine-soaked combat pilot in a different time on a mission that was billed as the way to peace after years of devastating war...I'm sure he'd long since dehumanized the enemy that he never saw from his high-altitude platform, having had to for his own protection). It's undeniable that the films of atomic explosions are compelling, and the technology that enabled them is amazing...I think this is probably especially so for any of us who are close to my age or older, who may have seen newsreel or TV documentaries about nuclear war, who lived with the threat of it every day, and who were freaked out by The Day After when it aired (or, 20 years earlier, by school films featuring Bert the Ducking And Covering Turtle), not so many years before the threat -- at least of full-scale nuclear exchange among superpowers -- seemed to largely diminish. Still, seeing Truman talk (in 1945) about how grateful he is that the US had this technology (and not its enemies) and that he was hopeful we could use it in God's service has some rather chilling echoes down to the divine mission of today's Republican wackos, who just happen to control our nuclear and other arsenals.

One sequence that disgusts me on many levels, not least because of my background in the region, is that dealing with the US treatment of Marshall Islanders, those living on Bikini Atoll. US imperial activity in Micronesia is something that is a national shame and that more people should know about and be disgusted by -- they were absolutely heinous, in what may be the worst colonial behavior of the supposedly anti-colonial US. The staged newsreel scenes are sickening, too, painting the "natives" as happy, "simple," and grateful to the US for shipping them off their islands (now they live in the Micronesian equivalent of a ghetto, being in exile way longer than they ever anticipated). There's a revisiting of the Marshalls when a later test goes awry and islanders in the region got contaminated. If you want to be disgusted about American imperialism for convenience's sake (which is just about what Iraq is all about), read a bit about the nuclear testing in the Marshalls.

From today's perspective, some of the clips of civilian preparations for nuclear war (once those pesky Russkies got hold of the A-bomb) seem undeniably funny, and outright ridiculous. One showed some kid dressed up by his father in an NBC suit that included shredded lead within its matrix (the poor little tyke didn't get nuked but could well have come down with lead poisoning).

There was even a US Army propaganda training film (starring Jack Warden?) that tried to debunk ideas such that war is a racket for the benefit of US corporations, the key component of which (in the excerpt selected) being for servicemen to respond to a (female) anti-war protester with "if you like it there so much, why don't you go live there?"

Another US Army training film compares passing through a nuked city to some overweight dude slipping on a bar of soap in a shower. It also assures its viewers that they won't lose their hair and, if they did, it'd grow back.

Even Tricky Dick appears, first in the context of McCarthy's witchhunt (my favorite Dick appearance here is when Khrushchev tears him a new orifice in a pretty funny exchange that ends with "you know nothing of communism, except fear of it"...though Nixon's role as a spokesman bellringer for Mental Health Week was kind of ironic), that leads up to a visibly disturbed spokesperson recounting the execution of the Rosenbergs in grisly detail -- no professional actor could have conveyed the reality and the emotion of that event as perfectly as this man did.

I never realized that there were so many stupid jingoistic country songs about nukes and communists and the whole "love it or leave it" mentality that's apparently been a staple in this country. Toby Keith and the like are hardly a new thing, I guess.

Neither is hucksterism and slick selling under the guise of patriotism. Check out the proponent of fallout shelters who tells a (British) interviewer, in response to his question about what the point was of emerging from the shelter to find out Los Angeles had been destroyed and its people dead, that there'd be more food and resources to go around because of fewer people competing for them. He had a point, I guess. If you're into eating food contaminated with fallout, anyway. He was the ultimate capitalist, a social Darwinist who'd probably feel right at home in Freeperville.

In another clip a voiceover suggests taking a bottle of 100 tranquilizers into the fallout shelter if the nukes start falling. He assured us that they are not habit-forming.

It's interesting that the first glimmer of any kind of sense in this timeline comes with Eisenhower's presidential cautions against running wild, as cowboy America now is. What's so interesting is that he was career military, yet the first non-militaristic voice heard. Obviously the film is edited for practical and message reasons, but I get the distinct feeling that this was pretty much the case in real time, too -- he even talks about "social consciousness" and, in the context of the explosion of the first H-bomb, his concern over the gap between US technology and the intellectual and emotional readiness of the US people to assume such awesome responsibility. I just can't help but like Ike. Soon after, in a clip from 1953, two talking heads are stunned into silence when they're told, live on the air, that the Russians had just detonated a hydrogen bomb. Whoever dug up all this footage deserves all sorts of awards -- there's no better way to get across the real gravity of the arms race that kept up throughout the Cold War.

What's perhaps most chilling about this film is that much of what it includes in rustic black-and-white film clips is out there today. The talking head who discusses the evils of communism before taking a short break to wax rhapsodic about two shopping centers in California and speak glowingly of all the cars parked there, "those cars we capitalists tend to accumulate." The ideologue who pushes for the US to nuke North Korea and the people-on-the-street who have no real opinion or clue. And, of course, the propaganda films and the public who buy their messages. The US has apparently been f***ed up, in various ways, for a very, very long time. Maybe it always was, right from the start.

There are so many ironies piled upon ironies in this film, and so many parts that are simultaneously anachronistic and current events. The whole is a fascinating, very well executed survey of an aspect of the recent American past, and of its present. It's future, too, most likely.



P.S.: Don't forget to wash thoroughly, afterward, if you're caught out in the open during a nuclear war.













EDIT: incomplete sentence...left it in mid-thought

[Gormy Cuss]

1. Here's something more about that film

Two of the film makers, Kevin and Pierce Rafferty, are W's first cousins. Their mother was Barbara's sister.