We interrupt this broadcast

November 5, 2023 10:50 AM

CBN, RBS, and not really the BBC Mockumentary or pseudodocumentary Nuclear Confrontation between Russia and NATO (2018) uses fake/semiplausible BBC news programs and archival footage to tell the story of how such a conflict might occur.

It's the latest example of the genre.

Every few years a new mockumentary example has appeared, using a fictitious tv news format to tell a story about geopolitics, nuclear weapons, the supernatural, or suspicious aliens. German, British, Canadian, and American programs have explored this genre since the 1970s:

Alternative 3 (1977) ponders Britain's brain drain, then finds a surprising explanation for it. (Brian Eno's soundtrack; a book version)

Special Bulletin (1983) depicts a group threatening to blow up Charleston, South Carolina with an atomic bomb. (YouTube)

Countdown To Looking Glass (1984) starts with a banking crisis, then a Middle Eastern crisis, and then it builds atomically from there. It's mostly tv news, but has some more traditional scenes as well. (YouTube)

Ghostwatch (1992) has a British tv news program exploring a haunted flat, while exploring the supernatural more... broadly. (Internet Archive)

Without Warning (1994) concerns unusual earthquakes, which appear to be connected to meteor strikes. (YouTube)

Der Dritte Weltkrieg (World War III) (1998) is an alternate history, starting with Mikhail Gorbachev being deposed in 1989 and things escalating from there. (YouTube)

CW: dread, terror, threatened families, physical suffering, lots of destruction unto the end of the world.

(Previously)

posted by doctornemo (35 comments total)

Yeah this is a no from me, dawg.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:03 AM on November 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

.....Sorry, my earlier comment was a bit glib....

I have just learned that my threshhold for "nuclear war depictions" is pretty low. I went to see OPPENHEIMER with a film lovers' meetup group, with Gen Z kids making up about 95% of our group. The movie showed the test blast at Trinity, and it had a stylized scene in which Oppenheimer is speaking to a people in a crowd after the Hiroshima blast and has a sort of hallucination where he imagines one woman gradually crumbling into ash as she stands there clapping for him. That's it. And that still messed with me. We were all chatting a bit after the film, and none of the people I'd spoken to had either seen or heard of The Day After or Threads, and were fascinated to hear of them. I bowed out of the post-movie taco run because I was pretty shaken up still, and instead went to a bar near my house to have a drink alone.

I did take a peek despite myself, and at one point the broadcast switches to a fake "emergency broadcast alert" and that was enough for me to go NOPE OUTTA HERE and go search for puppy videos.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:14 AM on November 5, 2023 [12 favorites]

wow. had no idea there were so many of these! mostly interested in Without Warning for earthquake content.

for those of you upset by this very upsetting content, I give you:

20 Minutes of Adorable Puppies
posted by supermedusa at 11:18 AM on November 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

I always thought one of the memorable bits in "Special Bulletin" was the turn in the broadcast with about a minute to go: "And in other news...." All this apocalyptic stuff happens, and broadcast media just keep grinding out the grind.
posted by gimonca at 11:38 AM on November 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

I remember when Special Bulletin was broadcast, because it was maybe the first of these "fake news makes up a fake story told in a fake-true way" things to be allowed in the US after the famous/infamous War Of The Worlds radio broadcast that caused some amount of nationwide panic.

There were all kinds of announcements made before the broadcast that they were going to be airing this, they announced several times during it that this was fake and not to be mistaken for actual events. I seem to remember that TV Guide devoted much space to the issue that week about how Special Bulletin was made and how it was a movie etc etc.

Weirdly, Special Bulletin was written and directed by Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick who would just a few years later go on to create the television series thirtysomething and after that My So-Called Life.
posted by hippybear at 11:54 AM on November 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

I get this vibe aplenty just watching TV news any day of the week. We hardly need mockumentaries when we've got [waves hand] all this...
posted by chavenet at 11:58 AM on November 5, 2023 [5 favorites]

Peter Watkin’s film, The War Game (1966), was, I think, the first of these films. It depicts a nuclear blast over a small town near London. Using local people as actors and extras, it presents a frightening series of scenes, surrounded by government notices and proclamations, showing how naive and unprepared everyone was then and is still now. Made for the BBC, who refused to show it in Britain until the 80’s. It won an Academy Award for Best Documentary in the 60’s. It’s only about 50 minutes long. Shot on 16mm in B&W, it creatively uses low budget special effects to create a highly realistic view of what happens. Highly recommended to those willing to subject themselves to view a reality under which we are still living. I grew up with duck and cover drills during the Cuban Missle Crisis, and got my father to take me to see this film in 1967. Over 50 years later, I can still see this film. It does not leave you.
posted by njohnson23 at 12:49 PM on November 5, 2023 [5 favorites]

Great post! I thought I knew about a lot of this type of video, but many of these are surprises.
posted by penduluum at 1:39 PM on November 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

I remember Without Warning airing on TV, stuffed with warnings at every commercial break and a crawl on the screen that it was a work of fiction. The ending/reveal gave it a fun sci-fi twist.
posted by dr_dank at 2:48 PM on November 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

I remember special bulletin.
I taped it back when we had VCRs and was watching it in an afternoon that my sister came home from her guard weekend. so I put the VCR cover on and just sat there staring at the screen and she walked in and said what the hell's going on!

bad, bad little brother.
posted by clavdivs at 3:08 PM on November 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

njohnson23, I was trying to get Watkins in there for War Game but also Cullodon and La Commune, as the latter have contemporary tv reporters interviewing historical figures "live." But I couldn't find copies on the open web and am not sure if they are the same genre. Can't check.
posted by doctornemo at 3:24 PM on November 5, 2023

I'm sorry the several nuclear attack stories from the group triggered you, EmpressCallipygos.

As a GenXer I am contantly finding younger folks without any nuclear war media experience. *Maybe* some will have seen bits in Terminator movies.
posted by doctornemo at 3:27 PM on November 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

Doctornemo - Oh man, the nuclear blast nightmare from “Terminator 2” messed me up for years.
posted by Mr. Excellent at 4:28 PM on November 5, 2023

Indeed, Mr. Excellent. Now imagine whole films about that, anchored in daily reality.
posted by doctornemo at 4:41 PM on November 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

The Cold War in the Eighties was so ridiculously globally tense and fucked up it's basically impossible to communicate to people who didn't live through it what it was like. I've tried, I really have.

And yes, now imagine the news every night being about the things those films were inspired by, not based on fiction but on conjecture based on truly awfully possible choices that could be made next week.

My favorite moment in the Cold War was arriving in [then West] Germany as an exchange student for high school and one of the first things happening to me at school was being cornered in the common area by a group of students demanding I explain to them and defend to them Reagan's basing of nuclear missiles in Germany and whether the SDI missile defense shield might work.

I was eighteen years old. I was from the US. I was a news junkie, but not to this level. Plus, jeebus! Leave me alone! I'm not my government!
posted by hippybear at 4:51 PM on November 5, 2023 [5 favorites]

Oh man, the nuclear blast nightmare from “Terminator 2” messed me up for years.

I'd already been having variations of that nightmare for at least two years prior to seeing Terminator 2. When I saw T2 I had ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA that such a scene was in it. Imagine for a moment - you are watching an action movie, enjoying yourself amongst the rest of the crowd, and suddenly your worst-ever nightmare unspools on the 50-foot screen before you, complete with technicolor and THX sound.

I completely panicked, all but crawling across three people's laps as I scrambled out of my seat and to the aisle and then fled for the lobby, where I sat huddled on a bench somewhere wide-eyed and panting as the one concession worker gave me funny looks, for about 20 minutes before I dared go back in. ....I can deal with it today, but for a full year after, any time I was at someone's house and they showed it on the VCR or something, that would be about the point I would suddenly say I had to go to the bathroom or something.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:53 PM on November 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

I was in Europe in 1988 and I remember seeing graffiti that said "Reagan assassinismo." Pretty sure I got the drift....
posted by wenestvedt at 4:54 PM on November 5, 2023

Deutschland 83 s1, e1

episode includes content warning.
posted by clavdivs at 5:18 PM on November 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

I did take a peek despite myself, and at one point the broadcast switches to a fake "emergency broadcast alert" and that was enough for me to go NOPE OUTTA HERE and go search for puppy videos.

I will say, as someone who's watched more than my fair share of nuclear apocalypse media and enjoyed/"enjoyed" multiple movies in the OP (both Special Bulletin and Countdown to Looking Glass are very well done), the fake emergency broadcast alert near the end of the YouTube video from 2018 linked first in the OP is indeed very scary and seems very likely to be triggering in ways that the other movies, which are products of the 80s and 90s and thus obviously dated and therefore not addressing current events, are not. Viewer discretion is definitely advised for that part, especially when it kicks into its second phase with one of the more intense alert sounds I've ever heard.
posted by chrominance at 6:07 PM on November 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

So, this is a bit of a fan mix, but basically the extended mix of Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Two Tribes contains the entire cold war for me.

This may not be the most haunting version of any of this material, but it's all here.

I should sit down and do a survey of how hard we were trying to dance away our fears in the Eighties. Or trying to ballad them into universal acknowledgement and therefore solve the problems. Because we sang about this shit a fuckton back in those days.
posted by hippybear at 6:18 PM on November 5, 2023 [5 favorites]

my brothers taped Special Bulletin off the broadcast, played it constantly, and would quote liberally from it for years after. which is why it is surprising i am only now learning that David Rasche played the terrorist with all the best lines.

'John. John Woodley. Good anglo-saxon name. I hope it's his own.'
posted by logicpunk at 6:25 PM on November 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

I love this post. This is extremely my shit. Thank you.
posted by capnsue at 8:59 PM on November 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

I should sit down and do a survey of how hard we were trying to dance away our fears in the Eighties. Or trying to ballad them into universal acknowledgement and therefore solve the problems. Because we sang about this shit a fuckton back in those days.

I've posted it before, but you could also throw in the video for Tears for Fears' "Mother's Talk (US remix) (portraying a family naively preparing themselves for a nuclear weapon bombardment).

Seriously, while they're works of fiction, you could probably show The Day After and/or Threads (or Special Bulletin for that matter) in a history class as examples of the Nuclear Fears we went through up to the late 80's. (The fact that so many people responded to Special Bulletin as if it was real instead of fiction should tell folks where our heads were at back then).
posted by gtrwolf at 9:10 PM on November 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

The Day After was filmed in my hometown and was released when I was 10 years old. I had nightmares about a nuclear holocaust for years afterwards--- right up until the Berlin Wall came down then those nightmares stopped but I had another one not too long ago after a pause of nearly 40 years.
posted by drstrangelove at 3:43 AM on November 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

doctornemo — Yes, both those films are in the same style as Watkin’s War Game. And were made in the same way. I have a bunch of his films on DVD when they were released in the early 2000s. Not so much mockumentaries, as they don’t mock anything. They use documentary style to create a more immediate effect on the viewer. Check out his website, I don’t have the link handy. He has loads of writings there outlining his theory of film making. His main goal is that he wants to create films that help people to think about things, not just absorb some message.
posted by njohnson23 at 6:38 AM on November 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

I woke up in the middle of the night, as I do, on Halloween, and I thought I'd watch a Local 58 video to go to sleep with something spooky on. I picked "Contingency" (3:06).

Mistake. That is a fucking terrifying false-document film from somewhere in the 1970s, "to be used only in the event of complete surrender to insurmountable enemy forces."
posted by Countess Elena at 6:45 AM on November 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

The Times They Are Not A-Changin'

In the mid-fifties, I was in the fifth grade in central California. We practiced getting under our desks and holding our textbooks over our heads to protect us against a nuclear blast. We'd be fine, they told us, as long as we didn't look at the blast and faced away from the windows.

Looking back on those days, I believe I'd have been happier if I'd run screaming down the road.

6/40 12/40 Conalrad, y'all.

Bonus points: for those who watched the movie, those "buildings" with slanted walls are called BMEWS radars (doubleplus bonus points if you can flesh out the acronym). The wall itself is the radar thingie. The movie didn't mention the one out toward the end of the Aleutian chain. I sang along with him while working the 98J job on Hokkaido. He sang with a 49cps prf, give or take a few zeros to the right of the decimal point.
posted by mule98J at 1:37 PM on November 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

I never found any of those movies to be terribly accurate - I always thought they were kind of cheesy in the same way apocalypse movies are today - always so focused on the wrong thing and just manly fantasies of shooting men with pistols and S U R V I V A L instead of hardscrabble surviving and having to reinvent the 1840s on the way to the 2040s. So they didn't particularly frighten me, but I do appreciate the work of art and music spreading the word at preventing actual nuclear war.

I honestly find the likelihood of a local shooter far more frightening, even though I don't know anyone directly involved in a school shooting.

Given what has happened in Ukraine, I don't find the UK mockumentary terribly accurate either. Russia wouldn't use tactical nukes against any forces short of Moscow being encircled, because there is no value to their use. The response of nuclear weapons requires it to be so severe that only end-game scenarios (everybody dies) are likely, and troop movements are so spread that you are basically just firing nukes at the ground. It's not valuable except as a last-ditch effort.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:57 PM on November 6, 2023

never found any of those movies to be terribly accurate - I always thought they were kind of cheesy in the same way apocalypse movies are today - always so focused on the wrong thing and just manly fantasies of shooting men with pistols and S U R V I V A L

I don't think that describes any one of the movies in the post.
Except maybe Special Bulletin, which has some shooting and machismo, but those aren't celebrated, and they precede the catastrophe.

Or were you referring to Mad Max etc?
posted by doctornemo at 7:42 AM on November 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

Russia wouldn't use tactical nukes against any forces short of Moscow being encircled,

Assuming the President of Russia is rational. Anyhow, Putin has stated that he feels threatened--surrounded by NATO and former Soviet countries drifting toward the West.

The mocumentaries above had the fatal flaw of time compression. While individual segments were chilling, taken as a whole, it's not likely that you can get from WTF? to nukes in half an hour.

Also, a single missile strike on a base anywhere in North America was not likely to succeed. But still, if you buy the premise, then the dynamics seem to me to be reasonable. The NATO alliance will act after the war has been happening for far too long. We are bound by reactionism. Proactivity is impossible because we are bound to honor sovereignty. The aftermath of WWI showed that suppression leads to a bad result.
posted by mule98J at 9:23 AM on November 7, 2023

had nightmares about a nuclear holocaust for years afterwards--- right up until the Berlin Wall came down then those nightmares stopped but I had another one not too long ago after a pause of nearly 40 years.

Same here. And my "flashback" instance of a nuke dream came shortly after Trump's inauguration; I wasn't as terrified when I woke up as I'd been in the past, but when I considered the timing I wryly thought, "yeah, that figures I guess".
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:19 PM on November 7, 2023

mocumentaries above had the fatal flaw of time compression. While individual segments were chilling, taken as a whole, it's not likely that you can get from WTF? to nukes in half an hour.

Very good point. Each example finesses this in a different way, sometimes by skipping ahead without notice. Other times they'll formally announce a temporal jump ("It's been a month since The Incident occurred...")
posted by doctornemo at 2:35 PM on November 7, 2023

"RBMK reactors don't explode"
posted by clavdivs at 4:04 PM on November 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

clavdivs, comparing some of these nuclear tv pseudodocumentaries to HBO's excellent Chernobyl is instructive.
posted by doctornemo at 11:55 AM on November 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

I guess this thread is the current home for nuclear discussions (let's hope things remain subcritical), so: Just in case anyone needs a grim conversation starter while traveling to grandma's for Thanksgiving, Scientific American is running a special report on America's nuclear renovation project, including a 5 part podcast The Missiles on Our Rez. I don't think it has a dedicated landing page, but its being put into the Science, Quickly feed.

One of the themes likely to come up is the difference between counterforce and counter value. Of the few films I've watched focused on the horrors of nuclear war, all focus on the countervalue strategy-- we watch LA or the Superbowl get nuked, but Wyoming is only maybe mentioned in the news alongside a brief from the governor about iodine tablet distribution.
posted by pwnguin at 9:18 PM on November 19, 2023 [1 favorite]