Blown Away
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television BLOWN AWAY BY MARVIN KITMAN The beginning of Threads, the latest nuclear-disaster TV movie, was so upsetting I thought I'd start paying the bills. Since I was already miserable, I...
...In fact, I still haven't truly been able to discuss the feelings I had while watching what is an extraordinary achievement for television...
...The performers seem very real, and they really are real...
...Edward Friedman, physicist and vice president of New Jersey's Stevens Institute of Technology...
...But this merely led to another deceit of The Day After...
...EST...
...they have more in common with network news graphics...
...But the World War II mentality of the citizens came across as bonkers...
...Its two hours may be the longest two hours in the history of entertainment...
...They found it hard to believe I was truly shocked by what looked like file footage of suburban structures enduring a Nevada range test...
...In the case of Threads there was the additional bonus of its being the sort of diversion that puts life in perspective...
...A $10,000 debt definitely didn't matter in its context...
...The message was clear: Bad as your problems look now, mate, you never had it so good...
...The story was mostly an argument for civil defense, especially for shooting first if you have a cellar...
...You can pick up WTBS at various times on different cable systems around the country, on an earth satellite, and probably even on your electric toaster...
...Rather than being zapped immediately, its members die off slowly, one at a time, from radiation sickness and other after-effects...
...But in Threads, it is finally not enough...
...That was somewhere else...
...I myself found it "riveting," as I explained at length in these pages ("In Defense of 'The Day After,'" NL, November 28, 1983...
...It also is a metaphor for links between human beings...
...As for the sheer spectacle, the movie's main event, albeit amazing enough to me in 1983, in retrospect appears a relatively cheesy effort...
...Instead, the story continues, long enough for the baby to grow up, be raped and have her own baby—stillborn...
...Have you ever tried...
...the young ones grunt...
...The movie starts prosaically, by now a tradition of the genre...
...Starring Jane Alexander, it told basically the same tale as its forerunner far more movingly and in a shorter time: Less was more...
...Threads is too disturbing for them...
...The Day After could be the most emotionally involving show ever to appear on TV," I said...
...How do you know you can't...
...But no, that is Berenger's (NBC, Saturday, 10 p.m...
...Yet perhaps I am being too sanguine again about the impact of television on human behavior...
...I should have listened to the kids, it seems...
...Nuclear war, the plot seems to say, is not simply another war, and there is no sense pretending...
...It was totally unscientific, dangerously implying that the current generation of nuclear bombs are the Hiroshima-sized variety shown hitting Lawrence, Kansas...
...Littman concentrated on the human side of doomsday —on a mother trying to keep her family together in the face of the unknown of a nuclear attack...
...My notes run out about here...
...According to a BBC documentary about the making of Threads, on the 11 th day the participants in the project saw the final product...
...They're forgetting how to talk...
...I think there were great special effects, but I couldn't look very often...
...One reason for that was the focus of the two shows...
...the chap asks...
...While the lucky stiff is sitting around in the pub, the TV set in the background talks about ministers hurling ultimatums around conference tables...
...When I received my preview cassette, I thought Threads was the new series about a clothing store...
...I bet the commercial networks bid all of $ 10 or $ 15 against him...
...Dynasty, Falcon Crest and Berrenger's offer sufficient crisis for me...
...Having the set on while balancing the books is usually a good strategy, anyway...
...The technique has long fascinated me...
...The result is a Walt Disneyesque scenario complete with moral: Never never take your loved ones for granted, and it's always the pesky child who is the first to die in your arms...
...One could argue that Threads is not a television masterpiece...
...Threads seems particularly timely as the arms-control season approaches...
...The TV film's title, I soon learned, actually refers to what is left after a bomb lands on Sheffield, England...
...As the relationship grows, the film contrapuntally shows the international situation becoming increasingly tense through the telly news...
...After viewing Threads I even started to forget Testament, which opened the fourth season of WNET/13's American Playhouse last November 26 (Monday, 9 p.m...
...I hate to admit I was wrong, yet there comes a time when even a man in debt has to face facts...
...The usual family and building incineration sequence unfolds...
...blah, blah, blah...
...Compared with Threads, though, it could have been portraying a Sunday in the country...
...I would like to see each session of the big East-West negotiations start off byplay-ing the film following the national anthems...
...Nobody would be left alive in a 12-state area if one of the bombs being stockpiled at present hit the U.S...
...It was absolutely sickening...
...Who would think that the same woman who impatiently dumped breakfast cereal on her husband's head in frustration would, with the help of ionizing radiation, become a saintly model of selflessness, a cistern of patience...
...The film should have ended with the birth of the Kemp-Beckett baby, the first immigrant in the new world, such as it is...
...You don't talk during the first hour, or the second hour either...
...Red tanks go into Iran," the British newscaster says...
...Nothing could get me down now that I've seen this show—except, of course, nuclear war...
...A group of punk filmmakers led by Mick Jackson, with a script by playwright Barry Hines, put it together in 10 days...
...They are very thin...
...Winnie called for pluck and courage last time, and the British muddled through...
...An important trade union guy calls for a general strike...
...Since I was already miserable, I figured, overdrawing my account couldn't make me feel any worse...
...We owe its crossing the ocean to Ted Turner and WTBS, his so-called super-station in Atlanta...
...submarine in Los Angeles...
...Nothing ever happens in Hamlin...
...Before nuclear devastation family life was frivolous...
...Sure, the film had been retouched with fire colors, and printed from negatives rather than "internegatives," or so my technical adviser, Peter Manchester, surmised...
...The right-to-life-goes-on folks merrily roll on until their interruption by an 80 megaton boom over Sheffield...
...There's naught we can do about it, is there now...
...The photographs and newsreel footage of Nazi death camps have had scant impact on anti-Semitism...
...Because of the alleged survivors, it was able to portray the dangers of radiation for the first time...
...just ask the young people...
...The American Playhouse production was a major disappointment to nuclear Armageddon freaks, the new electronic voyeurs who get a charge out of seeing the earth as we know it destroyed on television...
...ABC's fiction did have at least one advantage, according to Dr...
...To begin with, it goes on too long—13 years after the bomb drops...
...Even they were horrified...
...What finally undid me were the hospital operations without anesthesia...
...Similarly, life goes on in Sheffield...
...It took a different approach to the greatest horror story ever imagined, however, if only by being a pretty good movie—especially considering that it was made for the tube...
...They are dedicated, determined to carry on...
...Were I directly involved, I'm sure I would try to ignore the end of the world like the average person...
...For them nothing less will do, thrillwise, and the blast that night was merely a sort of yellowish light, as if the film had been underexposed in the lab...
...Today those firecrackers are regarded as useful only for triggering the real stuff, sort of cleaning the battleground before the battle...
...That is exactly what the ABC presentation did not do...
...The elders die off...
...I tried to concentrate on some constructive aspect of the day after in Sheffield, particularly the way the emergency civil defense was attempting to run the city...
...The two kids have to get married because "she's preggers" as they say in the UK...
...Moreover, all of its premises— concerning how long organized medical treatment by people calling each other "doctor" and "nurse" would be available, how quickly heavy radiation overdoses would take their toll, how fast alarming environmental effects would begin to become apparent—were recklessly optimistic and highly unlikely, my authorities tell me...
...Their teenagers are dating...
...SinkU.S...
...Except for a few major characters, they are residents of Sheffield, England, the British Lawrence, Kansas...
...The movie made its initial appearance last fall on BBC-2, the source of serious British programming, and created a furor throughout the United Kingdom...
...So the family was among the fortunate ones...
...Good soldiers all, they go to their posts as ordered by the appropriate manuals...
...They can handle a few less crumpets with their tea, make do without kippers, and that sort of rot...
...All of this, I confess, had to be pointed out to me by my friend Miranda Gatewood...
...The ABC offering was preoccupied with the monster from out-erspace—the bomb...
...Sheffield is ready...
...It required a mere 10 minutes for Testament to sketch in its Walton-look-alike family before the Big One went off...
...But Hamlin, California, where the Testament family lived, was not the center of the explosion...
...EST...
...Indeed, the Brits are famous for stiff upper lips in times of adversity...
...Nonetheless, those vaporization x-rays wouldn't make a good video...
...Meanwhile, the Sheffield-for-Peace Movement is having a field day protesting in the streets...
...There are two major threads: the experiences of a mid-die-class family, the Becketts, and a lower-class family, the Kemps...
...In Testament, contrary to normal fatalistic notions, the bomb had a highly civilizing effect...
...People were killed by playing around in the white stuff, the snow falling from the sky...
...I was too busy crying...
...Threads combines the best, so to speak, of the "nuke us" genre...
...That production, my kids warned me the morning after, was about as frightening as The Poseidon Adventure or Towering Inferno, only more boring...
...Television tends to take your mind off personal matters...
...I had seen enough 13 years before, when the people rummaging for rats to eat made me question our basic assumptions—for example, "You're lucky to be alive...
...Some people have all the luck...
...Why should Threads alter anyone's view of nuclear war...
...The survivors have a wonderful nuclear winter...
...Although originally done for public TV by the independent filmmaker Lynne Littman, this film was previously unveiled in movie theaters trying to cash in on the disaster appeal of The Day After...
...It almost made me forget ABC's unforgettable The Day After...
...In any event, Turner got himself a real stomach-turner...
Vol. 67 • December 1984 • No. 22
