2008-12-16»
comment: threadsยปI’ve moved up in the world, at least geographically. I now live on top of Bernal Heights, rather than skulking at the bottom of it. I am now sitting in a little corner studio that exactly fits my remaining belongings. I am going to stay up this hill for the rest of the recession, hoping that even the fittest of the Darwinian food-rioters won’t have the puff to get up here. This will only work after all the petrol runs out of course: currently they could just drive up and run me over when I go to get coffee, and drive off to feast on my bagel. I need to think this through.
I wish I could say the new place has bought me peace of mind. Actually, I totally could (it’s lovely), but I’m trying to make this post about the scare I gave myself this weekend, and I needed a segue.
So.
It was my own fault. I was reading a thread on Metafilter about the 1983 post-nuclear portrayal “The Day After”. Many people scoffed at the fear shown at this TV movie, directed Nicholas Meyer (later to direct deathless classic Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan). For really scary, they agreed, the British equivalent, 1984’s Threads would be hard to beat.
Now, I didn’t watch Threads at the time, I don’t think because it was banned in my house, but more because I was locked upstairs nailing my brain to a ZX Spectrum. Also I don’t think I needed to be scared any further on the topic of nuclear annihilation at the time: aged 15, I was probably already maxed-out on long semi auto-biographical poems about its grim inevitability. My quota would not have been raised.
Nowadays, I’m a man however, and have put childish things like nuclear winters behind me. I’m all about the global warming now. Also, it’s pretty hard to watch anything the BBC drama department put out in the eighties without giggling a bit at the forced moralising and the peculiar mannerisms (and *cue* radiophonic workshop!). So, in a sort of shared dare with my fifteen-year old self, I kicked up the show on Google Video, and fast-forwarded to what everyone agreed was the really creepiest bits, about ten minutes from the end.
Argh. I had completely forgotten how into your bones all-out nuclear war got. On a conscious level, I was critiquing the postnuclear horrorfest as hard as I could, but damn it mashed all my buttons. I was seeing the scenarios play out under my eyelids every time I tried to get to sleep for the next few days. It was very, very, well done.
Over my many hours spent awake, I started forming a protective defensive sheath of narrative criticism. In terms of the realism of postwar life, my first thought was it played to a theory of a studied helplessness of individuals without a society around to protect them. If they’re just left alone, without the threads that the play uses as its key metaphor, things will just fall apart.
Now, I don’t think that’s true: societies are far better at rebooting themselves than this, even I’d suspect under the enormous stresses of a nuclear winter. The first impression you get from these minutes, is that humanity has just descended into brute-hood completely. They’d either do better than this, or die a lot quicker. (At this point you’re going to go and watch the movie, right? If so, I am in no way responsible for your nightmares, and I certainly don’t want to hear about how hard you laughed at it. Spoilers ahead: a bomb goes off, etc).
But actually, looking closer at those final minutes, far closer than anyone should, there’s also an off-screen implication that there is some kind of postnuclear society. It’s just that the people we are watching, Ruth and her daughter, aren’t part of it. There are hospitals, and law and order, and education: but they are minimal, the resources are closely hoarded, and Ruth and her daughter aren’t part of that society.
That makes more sense, and also fits in with how I remember lots of British serious drama at the time. It concentrated on the horrific lives of the underclass or disenfranchised in some way, lingering over its horror, and then basically screamed at you at the end. Extra marks for implying that your nice middle-class family might end up that way, Tess of the D’Urbervilles style.
I’m not saying that is a bad thing. It’s one of the functions of drama to expose what happens to the worst off. But at least in recognising the trope I, possibly horribly, got a bit less scared by the scenario in this case. You can feel pity for the individual living in a medieval world, but then you can sneak out and imagine some King Henry VIII-type revelling in his single roast two-headed chicken.
Or maybe that increases your horror at the injustice. But, for me (who always tried to guess how long Ingsoc would actually last before collapsing), I’m more optimistic knowing somebody is better off offscreen. I guess, given the horrible choice, I’d rather somebody was left holding the canticles than the whole world be echoing the experience of Ruth’s daughter.
It’s also because I am radioactively burned by all of those dramas that take you down the line of depicting the nether regions of depressing experience. I think concern drama pretty much shot all its wad at us in the 70s and 80s, when lots and lots of horrible scenarios (mostly involving no money, disability, or drug abuse) played out in predictably horrific yet inevitable way.
Because you can’t actually end that particular fictional device with someone coming out of it okay, you end up turning your watchers into more voyeurs than activists, and also narratively reinforcing that everybody below a certain income level (or number of nuclear winters) is always helpless or thick. (Threads has the extra twist, because everyone in it was individually helpless to stop a nuclear war, and the implication is that everyone became even more thick as a result of society collapsing into Ibsen-like horror.)
I do not think this form of artistic agit-prop had the right effect. It lead, I think, to horrible right wing people deciding that topics of concern deserve what they get because they are helpless and thick, and horrible left wing people deciding that these people can be treated like children because they are helpless and thick. I clutch what threads I do of individual libertarianism, because the bits I like don’t actually assume those things, although I do think it is often over-optimistic about how useful local intelligence and ability can be in many situations. Frankly, after gnawing my knuckles over the premises and depiction of Threads twenty-five years later, I can do with all the over-optimism I can get.