Editorials
THOUGHTS AFTER 'THE DAY AFTER' SHOULD WE GET emotional about the bomb? That was the question posed by ABC's "The Day After." In fact, the emotional power of "The Day After" was not in its graphic...
...The editorial is moving in its evocations of the cross and the cross's radical message...
...We must realize fully the fix the world is in...
...Roaring fireballs and eroding flesh are nothing shocking to the habitues of towering infernos, crashing spaceships, and the lonely graveyards of horror movies...
...What is eventually made of an event like this will depend largely on the case that proponents of one or another approach to arms negotiations, international affairs, and deterrence can bring to an awakened and receptive public...
...It is like the West German peace movement's significant shift from opposing Euromissiles to opposing NATO...
...Sometimes the "we" in this proposition is everyone...
...but it was, just as surely, a real public service...
...There is no evidence that the viewers of "The Day After" have been swept away into irrational excesses...
...It was a fitting representation of the cords of destruction and irreversibility binding the superpowers together...
...So much has been said and written about the terrible consequences of nuclear war that any brief characterization of the problem seems strangely banal," wrote two authors in the Winter 1981-82 Foreign Affairs...
...Had the movie entered into the politics of nuclear armaments or the responsibilities of decision making in a nuclear crisis, it would have been accused of propagandizing, with all the power of network TV, for the viewpoints that could hardly have been avoided in such a production...
...No one would want a surgeon who approaches his responsibilities as though his patients were not humans but only organic machines...
...Not a few voices have said no...
...ABC certainly put itself in the position of being damned if it did, damned if it didn't...
...East-West relations and the role of military power are matters of strong feeling to most citizens...
...We all know full well the horrors of nuclear war...
...Nevertheless, the entire package at least represented to the nation the process that is called for...
...we must confront unblinkingly the complexity of getting out...
...Not long ago it was standard for "war-fighting" nuclear strategists to make their scenarios "realistic" by referring to the twenty million casualties the USSR had sustained in World War II...
...There is a temptation to make revulsion and denunciation do the work of analysis and solution seeking...
...Nor is the public's ideological landscape exactly a cool garden of careful analysis...
...The editorial says this "is time for basic questions and responses," but it evades both...
...The emphasis has been added, but the real emphasis of this statement derives from the fact that its authors were quite familiar with the highest circles of nuclear planning...
...There is a mindless fear...
...The danger of nuclear war is not apt to get equal time in their consideration if it alone, once escaping from the cabinet of psychological denial, must be immediately anesthetized and rendered inert for political analysis...
...And the question, whatever its provenance, is not a trivial one...
...To hear some critics of "The Day After" tell it, feeling is no problem at all, except for the danger of an excess...
...presumably the Soviets would risk as much in a nuclear exchange today, and the U.S...
...But not all the critics have a record of such selective dispassion...
...Other than that, "The Day After" was seldom inspired, although one must allow that even a competent effort like this one cuts hard against the ingrained American idea that nuclear war, for all its terrors, will be followed by intact American families popping out of rural hideaways, where they have fortunately found shelter, to begin life anew in a raw but fresh wilderness...
...But it is no good sounding the note that we detected in not a few of the criticisms of ABC - that, in the end, this is simply not an issue you can trust people to understand...
...The validity of exposing ourselves emotionally to the meaning of a nuclear war, indeed the necessity of doing so, does not remove the burden of thought, however...
...Ted Koppel, despite his obvious intelligence and reliable performance as one of the few television figures who can actually follow a line of argument, was obliged to parcel out the discussion in little bits for reasons of a somewhat mechanical fairness, even, at one point, turning to Elie Wiesel for a ' 'humanistic touch.'' If the movie was the stick that was meant to wake the public up, the panel may have been the soporific to put the public back to sleep...
...No doubt ABC operated from a bag of mixed motives, zigged and zagged between many pressures...
...Well, we - the editors of this journal - don't quite believe the proposition in either case...
...It called for new reliance on God, throwing "our crises back at our Creator," and building "a radical Christian order...
...There was a lot lacking in the ABC discussion that followed the film...
...As for the public itself, the emotional impact of a film like ' 'The Day After'' is clearly only one among many emotional factors filling up the horizon of everyday life - the fear of drugs in the schools or of inflation at the supermarket are much more immediate...
...It also had the merit of recalling to us something that the TV film did not-that this issue turns on what we do to others and to creation, and not just on our own survival...
...nor, if rejecting the deterrent altogether is not the editorial's intention, does it indicate what kind of a deterrent might be retained or how it might be reconciled with such sweeping condemnations...
...But finally the editorial does not have the courage of its rhetorical convictions...
...threatening God...
...but no one wants a surgeon who has not calmed and disciplined and channeled the normal human response to open body cavities and throbbing hearts and spurting blood: In a democracy, all the citizens must learn something of the surgeon's control in regard to nuclear war, or at least value that control in others...
...Nothing tries our capacity to keep thought and feeling in some kind of supporting relationship like contemplation of nuclear war - which seems so much beyond either thought or feeling...
...It is deeply felt, certainly, but also deeply ambiguous-and deeply dangerous...
...That is the same arrogance of the insiders - whether governmental or journalistic - which greeted the Catholic bishops' pastoral...
...Yet it does not mention unilateral disarmament...
...Others complain that the network bowed to political pressures by capping the movie with a reassuring message from Secretary of State Shultz and a neatly balanced panel discussion...
...they were not heard demanding calm analysis when the president was denouncing the shooting down of flight 007...
...sometimes it is only the nuclear experts and policy makers...
...nor does it justify everything that is currently being said and done in the cause of opposing nuclear destruction...
...Not long ago, in a front-page editorial mentioning the potential impact of the "The Day After," the National Catholic Reporter described nuclear armament as "the supreme act of human arrogance...
...Having chosen to limit itself and scrupulously eschew the political dimension, it stands accused of indulging in an "orgy" of presenting casualties without causes...
...had to be ready to match them...
...Yet on no other issue is an approach at once wholehearted and wholeminded so essential...
...It is a little difficult to take some of these critics seriously...
...It was, they maintain, essentially an exercise in mindless emotion, stirring up fear when what is despa-rately needed is calm and constructive analysis...
...What began as a visceral repulsion from what looked like both emotionalism and coldbloodedness in the White House is growing into a worrisome force for instability in its own right...
...No, the public cannot assume that its leaders have fully absorbed the reality of the terrible powers they could unleash...
...There is an understandable impulse to channel distress and frustration into whatever solution seems simplest or closest to hand...
...So much the better for mixed motives and many pressures...
...Its whole drift is not toward rejection, say, of the Euromissiles alone but of the deterrent altogether...
...Nations must rid themselves of these weapons...
...the problem is pursuing means to prevent it, which cannot be done while we're scared out of our wits...
...they were ready enough to exploit emotion when medical students were televised kissing the tarmac...
...Possibly the only unique and lasting image viewers might take away from "The Day After" was that of Americans observing our missiles rocketing into the sky and being sickened with the realization that this act was inextricably linked to a similar scene on the other side of the globe...
...In fact, the emotional power of "The Day After" was not in its graphic recreation of an atomic attack and its consequences...
...The director of the film was right when he admitted he had never aspired to art: "I look on the movie as a giant public-service announcement...
...Yet it is not clear how deeply the horror of such an event has penetrated the public consciousness or even the thinking of knowledgeable policy makers who in theory have access to the relevant information...
...the last blasphemous act...
...But was it a public service...
...The Day After" was not art, surely...
...If this kind of talk isn't heard as much today (perhaps thanks to some of the emotion that's been getting around), it nonetheless played a role in the formative period of Reagan administration defense policy...
...The result, it seems to us, was not a minor thing for a democracy: a kind of national event in which the drama needed to draw 106 million viewers was followed by both televised and local exchanges of opinion...
...Yes, many of our leaders have thought long and hard about nuclear conflict, but there is plenty of evidence that others have not, and that even those who have may frequently numb themselves to the human reality involved...
...If anything, the film only showed how sated we are on the visual vocabulary of catastrophe...
...it does not address the question of whether widespread unilateralism might make ' 'The Day After'' an even greater likelihood...
Vol. 110 • December 1983 • No. 21
