The fear
March 21, 2018 2:31 AM Subscribe
Yeah, very few things have ever fucked me up as badly as Threads, thanks. Even after having seen it a bunch, I have to stifle sobs at even the shortest segment of footage from it. (I was glad to see this piece discussing the "Protect and Survive" anti-jingle, too, which similarly has the power to ice my veins at a single hearing.)
To this day, I've still never seen When The Wind Blows. I'm not sure I have the strength for it, TBH.
posted by adamgreenfield at 4:59 AM on March 21, 2018 [5 favorites]
To this day, I've still never seen When The Wind Blows. I'm not sure I have the strength for it, TBH.
posted by adamgreenfield at 4:59 AM on March 21, 2018 [5 favorites]
The more I think about it, the more I think there should be a movement to rent out theaters and have a public screening of THREADS.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:00 AM on March 21, 2018 [12 favorites]
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:00 AM on March 21, 2018 [12 favorites]
I keep hoping we don't all die now. I've seen enough, but I can't bear to think of my little time voyager not making it. He should be good until at least 2100 if he eats his dinner and brushes his teeth and remembers how much we love him.
posted by pracowity at 5:33 AM on March 21, 2018 [12 favorites]
posted by pracowity at 5:33 AM on March 21, 2018 [12 favorites]
I've only seen Threads once, when it was first shown on the BBC, but I still remember the effect it had on me. I was friends at the time with another boy at my school (in the UK), whose father was one of the local post-nuclear-attack planners for our town, who let slip that our town actually had a nuclear bunker. In that same conversation he also mentioned, rather shamefaced, that only a chosen few (not including me and my family) had been made aware of it and told they'd be allowed in, if the time ever came.
That, together with his father's huge stock of canned food under the stairs, made it all seem more immediate and chilling, in a way that "The Day After Tomorrow" wasn't.
Threads should be required viewing for anyone with access to nuclear launch codes.
posted by faceplantingcheetah at 6:03 AM on March 21, 2018 [4 favorites]
That, together with his father's huge stock of canned food under the stairs, made it all seem more immediate and chilling, in a way that "The Day After Tomorrow" wasn't.
Threads should be required viewing for anyone with access to nuclear launch codes.
posted by faceplantingcheetah at 6:03 AM on March 21, 2018 [4 favorites]
When The Wind Blows is interesting as a historical work, but I find it frustratingly darkly comical. Keep faith in authority as the world literally disintegrates around you. As an animated piece, I think The Big Snit works better, its absurdity a more useful depiction of nuclear holocaust.
I don't recall Threads ever being available for a viewing at the time in the US. The Day After made waves, but honestly was a yawn for me, playing like the made-for-tv movie it was. Being an avid sci fi fan since a little tyke, I felt there was absolutely nothing new or any more horrifying than I'd encountered in fiction before. In retrospect, Threads works much better because its presentation is so unflinching for the medium. Though it wouldn't have been shocking to me, having been exposed to a variety of fictional depictions, and having given thought about the aftermath of how a nuclear strike would play out in real life. Terror had long yielded to nihilism with me, and among many in my generation, I suspect.
posted by 2N2222 at 6:13 AM on March 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
I don't recall Threads ever being available for a viewing at the time in the US. The Day After made waves, but honestly was a yawn for me, playing like the made-for-tv movie it was. Being an avid sci fi fan since a little tyke, I felt there was absolutely nothing new or any more horrifying than I'd encountered in fiction before. In retrospect, Threads works much better because its presentation is so unflinching for the medium. Though it wouldn't have been shocking to me, having been exposed to a variety of fictional depictions, and having given thought about the aftermath of how a nuclear strike would play out in real life. Terror had long yielded to nihilism with me, and among many in my generation, I suspect.
posted by 2N2222 at 6:13 AM on March 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
I don't recall Threads ever being available for a viewing at the time in the US.
Threads did air in the US a few months after The Day After, though it may not have been national. I definitely recall watching it on WTTW (PBS) in Chicago while I was in college. While The Day After is definitely less brutally honest than Threads, it really shook me up for a few days afterward, and I was reluctant at first to even watch Threads but gritted my teeth through it, since I felt it was important to watch.
posted by briank at 6:27 AM on March 21, 2018 [2 favorites]
Threads did air in the US a few months after The Day After, though it may not have been national. I definitely recall watching it on WTTW (PBS) in Chicago while I was in college. While The Day After is definitely less brutally honest than Threads, it really shook me up for a few days afterward, and I was reluctant at first to even watch Threads but gritted my teeth through it, since I felt it was important to watch.
posted by briank at 6:27 AM on March 21, 2018 [2 favorites]
I saw at least part of Threads on WNET New York in the '80s.
posted by octothorpe at 7:12 AM on March 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by octothorpe at 7:12 AM on March 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
what I like about Threads, Day After and The War Game which preceded them all by almost two decades (not to be confused with War Games) is how effectively their horrors branded themselves on my psyche. Whatever unformed notions I may have had beforehand about atomic-nuclear war, they were quickly eviscerated. Which, for instance, has forever left unable to get entertainment value out of pretty much any post-apocalyptic novel, film, long running TV series (and that includes zombie shit). They all just end up feeling bereft of imagination -- deluded juvenile fantasies.
To extrapolate on a Hunter S Thompson notion, forget what happens afterward, we're living in the Apocalypse, right now right here. That's more than enough entertainment value for any lifetime, and work.
posted by philip-random at 8:08 AM on March 21, 2018 [5 favorites]
To extrapolate on a Hunter S Thompson notion, forget what happens afterward, we're living in the Apocalypse, right now right here. That's more than enough entertainment value for any lifetime, and work.
posted by philip-random at 8:08 AM on March 21, 2018 [5 favorites]
Peter Watkins' The War Game was made for the BBC in the mid sixties. It was never shown in Britain until something like twenty years later. It won an Oscar for best documentary in 1968 I think. Why was it repressed? It painted the British government as being unprepared, misleading the public about nuclear war, and that this kind of war was more terrible than you could imagine. In around 58 minutes, using amateur actors, shot in 16 mm, and with a small budget, it will stay with you and haunt you forever. I saw it in 68 or 69. I can still see the scenes in that film in my mind. There can be great power in presenting information like this via film. It's not propaganda. It's telling us what we need to know. And given what's going on now, maybe we need to revive some of these films.
As a side note, I would recommend Watkins other films as good lessons in politics.
posted by njohnson23 at 8:52 AM on March 21, 2018 [4 favorites]
As a side note, I would recommend Watkins other films as good lessons in politics.
posted by njohnson23 at 8:52 AM on March 21, 2018 [4 favorites]
These films are unbearable, and then I think about the days, weeks, and months after bombs were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
What do we know about that time? What was it like for survivors? It's ... shameful and heartbreaking.
posted by allthinky at 9:30 AM on March 21, 2018 [3 favorites]
What do we know about that time? What was it like for survivors? It's ... shameful and heartbreaking.
posted by allthinky at 9:30 AM on March 21, 2018 [3 favorites]
These films are unbearable, and then I think about the days, weeks, and months after bombs were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And the bombs we have now are far, FAR more powerful than the bombs used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:45 AM on March 21, 2018 [2 favorites]
And the bombs we have now are far, FAR more powerful than the bombs used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:45 AM on March 21, 2018 [2 favorites]
Right, but the horror of living through those days after the bombs still had to have been unimaginable.
posted by allthinky at 9:49 AM on March 21, 2018
posted by allthinky at 9:49 AM on March 21, 2018
In around 58 minutes, using amateur actors, shot in 16 mm, and with a small budget, it will stay with you and haunt you forever. I saw it in 68 or 69.
Cosigned. The War Game is almost as harrowing as Threads, and loses out to it as nightmare fuel only for its relative lack of attention to the small intimate details of family loss and reminiscence — the clutched video game with its inane jingle, surviving into the unimaginable time after and so on.
posted by adamgreenfield at 9:59 AM on March 21, 2018
Cosigned. The War Game is almost as harrowing as Threads, and loses out to it as nightmare fuel only for its relative lack of attention to the small intimate details of family loss and reminiscence — the clutched video game with its inane jingle, surviving into the unimaginable time after and so on.
posted by adamgreenfield at 9:59 AM on March 21, 2018
And the bombs we have now are far, FAR more powerful than the bombs used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
By the time the US dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many Japanese cities had already been virtually destroyed by conventional bombing; Dresden was incinerated not by nuclear fire but by a multitude of incendiary bombs that created a similar firestorm. The terror of the A-bomb was not so much the end result -- a conventional bombing raid might have been more destructive, especially as Japan had virtually no air defense -- but that a single bomb did it.
Ironically, further development of nuclear weapons resulted in more warheads of smaller yields that could be packed onto a single missile (MIRV). It's one thing to hit a city with a monster 100 megaton bomb; it's worst to put it in a pattern of overlapping blast zones.
Pat Conroy's book Alas, Babylon was shocking at the time in depicting severe damage done to the mainland US as the result of a nuclear exchange at roughly the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But the residents of the small Florida town in which it's set, far removed from the bombing, have successfully re-established order by the time what's left of the US authorities make contact. The only peril from radiation comes from those who looted contaminated jewelry in the ruins of bombed-out Miami. Nuclear war was seen as horrible but survivable. (Part of the black comedy of Doctor Strangelove is that the authorities never quite believe the use of nuclear weapons means The End.)
Proliferation did away with that and gave rise to the world-ending bleakness of On The Beach and its like. Part of the impact of The Day After was the post-show panel that warned of nuclear winter; coupled with the movie's point that universal destruction meant that help is not coming, from anywhere, my own A-bomb paranoia was greatly enhanced. I sometimes still marvel we made it this far, and that I made it to adulthood.
posted by Gelatin at 10:00 AM on March 21, 2018 [6 favorites]
By the time the US dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many Japanese cities had already been virtually destroyed by conventional bombing; Dresden was incinerated not by nuclear fire but by a multitude of incendiary bombs that created a similar firestorm. The terror of the A-bomb was not so much the end result -- a conventional bombing raid might have been more destructive, especially as Japan had virtually no air defense -- but that a single bomb did it.
Ironically, further development of nuclear weapons resulted in more warheads of smaller yields that could be packed onto a single missile (MIRV). It's one thing to hit a city with a monster 100 megaton bomb; it's worst to put it in a pattern of overlapping blast zones.
Pat Conroy's book Alas, Babylon was shocking at the time in depicting severe damage done to the mainland US as the result of a nuclear exchange at roughly the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But the residents of the small Florida town in which it's set, far removed from the bombing, have successfully re-established order by the time what's left of the US authorities make contact. The only peril from radiation comes from those who looted contaminated jewelry in the ruins of bombed-out Miami. Nuclear war was seen as horrible but survivable. (Part of the black comedy of Doctor Strangelove is that the authorities never quite believe the use of nuclear weapons means The End.)
Proliferation did away with that and gave rise to the world-ending bleakness of On The Beach and its like. Part of the impact of The Day After was the post-show panel that warned of nuclear winter; coupled with the movie's point that universal destruction meant that help is not coming, from anywhere, my own A-bomb paranoia was greatly enhanced. I sometimes still marvel we made it this far, and that I made it to adulthood.
posted by Gelatin at 10:00 AM on March 21, 2018 [6 favorites]
allthinky, you might be interested in Keiji Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen. ( ...the manga series Barefoot Gen tells the story of a family wiped out by the atomic bomb, with a young boy and his mother the only survivors. Author Keiji Nakazawa loosely based these comics on his own life: growing up, Nakazawa watched a sister die several weeks after birth from radiation sickness, and witnessed his mother’s health quickly deteriorate in the years after the war.)
posted by Iris Gambol at 10:37 AM on March 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Iris Gambol at 10:37 AM on March 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
Ah, Threads. Only saw it once in the US, and it did the nightmare job. That and Day After.
(Time for a Generation X flashback: marching on Washington to protest nuclear weapons. Reading a CIA-published list of Soviet nuclear warhead targets, one of which was across the street from my house. Chuckling at Baby Boomers, who had duck and cover; by my time, it was assumed we'd just all be incinerated. And so on.)
My children are around 20 now, and are grimly fascinated by the Cold War.
Good to see Threads available again. It's been hard to find.
posted by doctornemo at 11:16 AM on March 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
(Time for a Generation X flashback: marching on Washington to protest nuclear weapons. Reading a CIA-published list of Soviet nuclear warhead targets, one of which was across the street from my house. Chuckling at Baby Boomers, who had duck and cover; by my time, it was assumed we'd just all be incinerated. And so on.)
My children are around 20 now, and are grimly fascinated by the Cold War.
Good to see Threads available again. It's been hard to find.
posted by doctornemo at 11:16 AM on March 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
then I think about the days, weeks, and months after bombs were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Do you like Studio Ghibli films? Cute cat busses and magical Shinto bathhouses and Princess Mononoke?
Because Grave of the Fireflies is a hell of a movie. It's not Miyazaki and it's definitely not a happy fun kid's film. It's a depressing story about the horror of life for two orphans in post-WW2 Japan. It's not even about the nuclear bombs, just famine and destruction and misery. Beautifully animated.
posted by Nelson at 11:17 AM on March 21, 2018 [5 favorites]
Do you like Studio Ghibli films? Cute cat busses and magical Shinto bathhouses and Princess Mononoke?
Because Grave of the Fireflies is a hell of a movie. It's not Miyazaki and it's definitely not a happy fun kid's film. It's a depressing story about the horror of life for two orphans in post-WW2 Japan. It's not even about the nuclear bombs, just famine and destruction and misery. Beautifully animated.
posted by Nelson at 11:17 AM on March 21, 2018 [5 favorites]
Not mentioned so far is Testament, which was released in 1983. Here is Roger Ebert's review, and one in the NYTimes.
Great cast, with a female director, it haunted me for a good 15 years after I first saw it at the Baronet.
posted by 6thsense at 11:33 AM on March 21, 2018 [7 favorites]
Great cast, with a female director, it haunted me for a good 15 years after I first saw it at the Baronet.
posted by 6thsense at 11:33 AM on March 21, 2018 [7 favorites]
> And the bombs we have now are far, FAR more powerful than the bombs used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Right, but the horror of living through those days after the bombs still had to have been unimaginable.
That was the point I was getting at - living through the aftermath of Hiroshima must have been nigh-unbearable, even though the bomb itself was comparatively piddly. So if Hiroshima's aftermath was that bad, then after an even bigger bomb....
(Time for a Generation X flashback: marching on Washington to protest nuclear weapons. Reading a CIA-published list of Soviet nuclear warhead targets, one of which was across the street from my house. Chuckling at Baby Boomers, who had duck and cover; by my time, it was assumed we'd just all be incinerated. And so on.)
Some friends and I made an anti-war sci-fi movie for my friend's TV production class my senior year in high school. I showed it to someone in college and she described it as "a post-apocalyptic Breakfast Club," which isn't too far off - except with every so often one of the characters in the shelter where they all were kept deciding "fuck it" and going outside to certain death.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:35 AM on March 21, 2018 [2 favorites]
Right, but the horror of living through those days after the bombs still had to have been unimaginable.
That was the point I was getting at - living through the aftermath of Hiroshima must have been nigh-unbearable, even though the bomb itself was comparatively piddly. So if Hiroshima's aftermath was that bad, then after an even bigger bomb....
(Time for a Generation X flashback: marching on Washington to protest nuclear weapons. Reading a CIA-published list of Soviet nuclear warhead targets, one of which was across the street from my house. Chuckling at Baby Boomers, who had duck and cover; by my time, it was assumed we'd just all be incinerated. And so on.)
Some friends and I made an anti-war sci-fi movie for my friend's TV production class my senior year in high school. I showed it to someone in college and she described it as "a post-apocalyptic Breakfast Club," which isn't too far off - except with every so often one of the characters in the shelter where they all were kept deciding "fuck it" and going outside to certain death.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:35 AM on March 21, 2018 [2 favorites]
The Day After made a big impression on me when I was a kid--our family gathered around to watch it together when I was 11. My daughter is 8 right now and it makes me want to scream to think of having to show it to her. I don't think I have ever seen Threads, beyond clips here and there, but I remember seeing When the Wind Blows. Even thinking of it makes me choke up.
posted by Kafkaesque at 12:02 PM on March 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Kafkaesque at 12:02 PM on March 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
The Day After gave me nuke nightmares for years when I watched it at age 10. I only know about Threads from Metafilter, and I read the summary of the plot, and I will never watch it. I picked up the graphic novel When the Wind Blows in a bookstore, sped through it, put it down and walked away.
The only time I didn't have post-nuke fears was when I lived in NYC because I knew I'd be vaporized. I worry more now when I'm just in suburban Texas. There is no point to surviving a nuclear war, and I'm a coward who does not want to suffer and die slowly or have loved ones do the same.
Maybe we invented zombie apocalypses because nuclear ones were no fun at all.
posted by emjaybee at 12:23 PM on March 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
The only time I didn't have post-nuke fears was when I lived in NYC because I knew I'd be vaporized. I worry more now when I'm just in suburban Texas. There is no point to surviving a nuclear war, and I'm a coward who does not want to suffer and die slowly or have loved ones do the same.
Maybe we invented zombie apocalypses because nuclear ones were no fun at all.
posted by emjaybee at 12:23 PM on March 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
Pat Conroy's book Alas, Babylon was shocking at the time in depicting severe damage done to the mainland US as the result of a nuclear exchange at roughly the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But the residents of the small Florida town in which it's set, far removed from the bombing, have successfully re-established order by the time what's left of the US authorities make contact. The only peril from radiation comes from those who looted contaminated jewelry in the ruins of bombed-out Miami. Nuclear war was seen as horrible but survivable.
I read that when I was a kid, and there are two scenes that stand out in my memory. One is the town's survivors catching a civil defense broadcast, which starts listing the contaminated areas around the country... including the entire state of Florida. (Obviously, since they didn't all die, that was an oversimplification. The real horror for them is the idea that they've all been written off.) The other is at the end, when the government guy has given the town's leader a rundown of the world situation (the US is a fourth or fifth-tier world power, things are worse in the Soviet Union, etc.), and he's getting in his helicopter when the town leader asks who won. "Oh. We did." The nuke-apocalypse book that I'm most fond of, though, is James Morrow's This Is the Way the World Ends, which has a more surreal take on the situation.
As far as movies go, the only one that I've seen is Testament, which was quite fine.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:39 PM on March 21, 2018 [2 favorites]
I read that when I was a kid, and there are two scenes that stand out in my memory. One is the town's survivors catching a civil defense broadcast, which starts listing the contaminated areas around the country... including the entire state of Florida. (Obviously, since they didn't all die, that was an oversimplification. The real horror for them is the idea that they've all been written off.) The other is at the end, when the government guy has given the town's leader a rundown of the world situation (the US is a fourth or fifth-tier world power, things are worse in the Soviet Union, etc.), and he's getting in his helicopter when the town leader asks who won. "Oh. We did." The nuke-apocalypse book that I'm most fond of, though, is James Morrow's This Is the Way the World Ends, which has a more surreal take on the situation.
As far as movies go, the only one that I've seen is Testament, which was quite fine.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:39 PM on March 21, 2018 [2 favorites]
I forgot to mention that The War Game is shot like a live action news story. Not a drama, a documentary.
posted by njohnson23 at 12:58 PM on March 21, 2018
posted by njohnson23 at 12:58 PM on March 21, 2018
I am glad that others here remember Testament. That left a searing mark in my memory.
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 5:36 PM on March 21, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 5:36 PM on March 21, 2018 [2 favorites]
I definitely remember seeing “Threads”, even though I had completely forgotten about it until the article mentioned it. I don’t know where I would have seen it, since we didn’t have cable. “Testament” was the heavy hitter as I recall.
This YouTube video simulates an EBS warning (in Australia) and evokes a very similar feeling that those movies do—surprisingly so, considering it’s basically text on a screen.
posted by Autumnheart at 6:16 PM on March 21, 2018
This YouTube video simulates an EBS warning (in Australia) and evokes a very similar feeling that those movies do—surprisingly so, considering it’s basically text on a screen.
posted by Autumnheart at 6:16 PM on March 21, 2018
EmpressCallipygos, your "post-apocalyptic Breakfast Club" sounds just right.
posted by doctornemo at 7:00 PM on March 21, 2018
posted by doctornemo at 7:00 PM on March 21, 2018
*snaps fingers* Now I remember where I saw “Threads”. We rented it at the video store! Of course.
posted by Autumnheart at 7:16 PM on March 21, 2018
posted by Autumnheart at 7:16 PM on March 21, 2018
Alas, Babylon was written by Pat Frank, not Pat Conroy. I also read it when I was a kid - it made quite an impression.
posted by rfs at 8:03 PM on March 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by rfs at 8:03 PM on March 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
6thsence - thank you for mentioning Testament!
For years I've been haunted by that scene with the nuclear blast seen lighting up beyond the sliding glass door, the resigned sadness of people slowly dying of radiation with no remedy, and a vivid image of a dying baby being bathed in a bathroom sink. I had dreams of that bright flash for years.
BUT - I've always thought it was The Day After... which I've apparently never seen.
I doubt I'll watch the others though. One was a enough.
posted by Measured Out my Life in Coffeespoons at 8:26 PM on March 21, 2018
For years I've been haunted by that scene with the nuclear blast seen lighting up beyond the sliding glass door, the resigned sadness of people slowly dying of radiation with no remedy, and a vivid image of a dying baby being bathed in a bathroom sink. I had dreams of that bright flash for years.
BUT - I've always thought it was The Day After... which I've apparently never seen.
I doubt I'll watch the others though. One was a enough.
posted by Measured Out my Life in Coffeespoons at 8:26 PM on March 21, 2018
your "post-apocalyptic Breakfast Club" sounds just right.
Well, there was also a sci-fi element...the set-up in the first scene was that this bunch of teenagers, strangers to each other, all wake up and find themselves in this windowless room, and as they're all going "what the fuck" this disembodied voice tells them: the voice is that of an alien race which has a symbiotic connection to humans, and that nuclear war just broke out and so the aliens rescued some humans to save themselves as well. But they don't want to keep anyone against their will, so they have 24 hours to decide whether they want to stay in the shelter, or to leave and guaranteed go to their death.
That's the first 10 minutes; the remaining hour or so is them each figuring out "okay, am I gonna stay or go".
....We had some pretty intense conversations, those of us in it, while we were writing it. My then-best friend came up with the idea and came to me to write it; we hammered together the storyline over a weekend, and then I wrote up the script from that and turned it over to her. She directed and produced it - with a cast made up of me and some other kids, and the crew made up of "whichever one of the kids in the cast was playing someone whose character had already died". At one point we sat down with our friends who were all in the cast for this mass group rap session about nukes, which I recorded for story ideas - I came across the transcription a couple years back, and it is a fascinating document, listening to all of us painfully earnest teenagers in the 1980s, all angry and scared and cracking cynical jokes.
I will also absolutely never forget something that happened while I was writing it. I was working on the script at about the time Sting's album Nothing Like the Sun came out, and I was mainlining that while writing (we ended up using Fragile for the film's theme song, and borrowed a lyric for the title). I would play that whole album over and over while writing, as background noise.
As I got into each writing session, I'd try to put myself into the characters' mindset - "okay, it's War. Stuff is gone. There is no more Hartford, no more New York, no more Los Angeles. Cape Cod is gone. England is gone. Ireland is gone..." you know, just reminding myself of big things and places that were gone.
And once, as I was writing, and reminding myself "France is gone, Japan is gone...." and listening to Sting, the album started up with the song "They Dance Alone", which I liked a lot. My favorite part of that song was towards the end, when the slowish song suddenly picks up and gets lively. And that time, when it hit that part, it suddenly hit me - my characters were never going to be able to hear that song again. It wasn't just England and France and San Francisco that were going to be gone, but also chocolate and corn flakes and puppies and Sting albums and poppies and violets and Christmas stockings and, and and and and....
And that was this huge dose of reality that suddenly hit me in the face, the totality of loss that we were facing. I sat there stunned a minute, then I put down the pen, picked up the needle on the record player and put it back to the beginning of the song, turned the speakers in towards me and turned the volume up as loud as I could bear it - and burst out crying as I listened, because I was literally mourning the world.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:43 PM on March 21, 2018 [7 favorites]
Well, there was also a sci-fi element...the set-up in the first scene was that this bunch of teenagers, strangers to each other, all wake up and find themselves in this windowless room, and as they're all going "what the fuck" this disembodied voice tells them: the voice is that of an alien race which has a symbiotic connection to humans, and that nuclear war just broke out and so the aliens rescued some humans to save themselves as well. But they don't want to keep anyone against their will, so they have 24 hours to decide whether they want to stay in the shelter, or to leave and guaranteed go to their death.
That's the first 10 minutes; the remaining hour or so is them each figuring out "okay, am I gonna stay or go".
....We had some pretty intense conversations, those of us in it, while we were writing it. My then-best friend came up with the idea and came to me to write it; we hammered together the storyline over a weekend, and then I wrote up the script from that and turned it over to her. She directed and produced it - with a cast made up of me and some other kids, and the crew made up of "whichever one of the kids in the cast was playing someone whose character had already died". At one point we sat down with our friends who were all in the cast for this mass group rap session about nukes, which I recorded for story ideas - I came across the transcription a couple years back, and it is a fascinating document, listening to all of us painfully earnest teenagers in the 1980s, all angry and scared and cracking cynical jokes.
I will also absolutely never forget something that happened while I was writing it. I was working on the script at about the time Sting's album Nothing Like the Sun came out, and I was mainlining that while writing (we ended up using Fragile for the film's theme song, and borrowed a lyric for the title). I would play that whole album over and over while writing, as background noise.
As I got into each writing session, I'd try to put myself into the characters' mindset - "okay, it's War. Stuff is gone. There is no more Hartford, no more New York, no more Los Angeles. Cape Cod is gone. England is gone. Ireland is gone..." you know, just reminding myself of big things and places that were gone.
And once, as I was writing, and reminding myself "France is gone, Japan is gone...." and listening to Sting, the album started up with the song "They Dance Alone", which I liked a lot. My favorite part of that song was towards the end, when the slowish song suddenly picks up and gets lively. And that time, when it hit that part, it suddenly hit me - my characters were never going to be able to hear that song again. It wasn't just England and France and San Francisco that were going to be gone, but also chocolate and corn flakes and puppies and Sting albums and poppies and violets and Christmas stockings and, and and and and....
And that was this huge dose of reality that suddenly hit me in the face, the totality of loss that we were facing. I sat there stunned a minute, then I put down the pen, picked up the needle on the record player and put it back to the beginning of the song, turned the speakers in towards me and turned the volume up as loud as I could bear it - and burst out crying as I listened, because I was literally mourning the world.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:43 PM on March 21, 2018 [7 favorites]
if u "like" threads you'll love the short story:
The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged)
posted by lalochezia at 10:29 PM on March 21, 2018 [2 favorites]
The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged)
posted by lalochezia at 10:29 PM on March 21, 2018 [2 favorites]
Given the news about Bolton, it looks like I picked the wrong week to start watching Threads again.
posted by mollweide at 6:06 PM on March 22, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by mollweide at 6:06 PM on March 22, 2018 [1 favorite]
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posted by MartinWisse at 4:37 AM on March 21, 2018 [2 favorites]