The Atomic Café
The duck-and-cover thing still shocks me a little bit. I’ve seen it before, of course — that footage is a staple now, used to point up the naiveté of the fifties or the sheep-like qualities of the American people in that era — and it’s played for laughs: “How silly to think hiding your face in a curb will protect you from a nuclear blast!”
But: really! It is A CURB. It is A SCHOOL DESK. If the bomb gets dropped near your wholesome mid-century picnic, you know what isn’t going to do fuck-all?THE BASKET. “Oh, fudge, the bomb. And I hadn’t even unpacked the deviled eggs. Nothing for it but to hide under this plate!” And nobody knew any better — or they did, but they just went along with the bomb-shelter hoo-rah, because if everyone’s doomed, why quibble over the particulars — and you have to laugh at it now because what else can you do, watching the soldiers at the test site talking about how exciting it is and the beauty of the cloud, but the footage of all of them in their foxholes is just depressing. “Well, it’s fine if we just duck down.” Oh, honey, no. No, it isn’t.
The movie is entertaining, not just because of the willfully cheery “Meet Mr. Atom”-type propaganda dressed in high-waisted pants that seems so vintage-y now, its retro-ness neutering it to a harmless hallmark of a bygone era like cabinet-style TVs or “Operator, get me Maple Grove 3774!” It parallels the U.S.’s situation today rather neatly as well, and I confess that I wouldn’t necessarily have articulated that thought if the Netflix sleeve hadn’t mentioned it — that it’s still timely, when you look at all the decisions getting made now that we won’t know the true, full effect of for decades yet. Hiroshima, and Nagasaki even more so, looks from here, to me, like a terrible cruelty, just out-of-scale gratuitous atrocity visited on civilians, but I have to admit that I don’t know very much about World War II except for the major basics, and you can see from the footage in The Atomic Café that decimating those cities was considered necessary and just at that time. And it “worked,” I suppose, in that it got the desired result. But we have the benefit of hindsight now, that that means is way too extreme for that end, that that end might have come about in any case.
The Cold War is a similar thing, as far as the perspective. As a kid in the early eighties, sure, I thought the Cold War could end, in that I could conceive of it ending, but the idea existed in the realm of daydreams; it could end, but it wouldn’t, because it had always been. And then…it wasn’t, anymore.
I liked that about the movie, even though it made me a bit nervous to contemplate what we’ll see about our lives now when we look back in twenty-five years, or fifty — the “oh, you think it’s bad now” future it forced me to contemplate. “Why the hell didn’t those aughties people switch to solar power? I mean, come on!” I commented somewhere recently that Joe McCarthy is hard for us to understand from here, the panic, the ridiculous lengths gone to in the name of quarantining Communism; he’s an antique, like patent medicine. Quaint. But at the time, he ruined lives; in its time, patent medicine contained ingredients like lead paint, and it killed people. I would love to see what Cheney is in 2068, which inscrutable relic he’s equated with: a sanitary belt? an unfiltered Pall Mall?
Tags: Bikini Atoll Dick Cheney ethical dilemmae Joe McCarthy movies
Now that I think about it, I guess our school did the whole “duck and cover” thing because it was still the end of the cold war era, I just was too young to realize it. I was in early elementary school at the time. But I remember going through many tornado drills (every month we had them) but then actually having tornados come through and sitting in the hallway for over an hour while we waited them out. There was a town near where I grew up in SC that had to rebuild the same fast food joint three times because of tornado damages. We also had fire drills occasionally. Then I hit high school and the bomb threats came and we had the whole “file outside calmly and report to your teachers” deal. It was all fun until the day we had a bomb threat called in and it was actually snowing. We don’t normally get snow here people. It was cold and we had to stand around outside with nothing to do for over an hour while they “cleared” the building. I couldn’t go home because I didn’t drive yet and it was too far to walk. At least I didn’t have to worry about drills for “in case crazed gun-man comes in school.” Things to look forward to when I have kids.
Here in CA, we did duck and cover for earthquakes and also during the air raid sirens. The school is catty-corner from my folks and that air siren continued to test every day at noon until the 80s. We were close enough to Moffett to figure we’d be gone if the nukes came.
Go to any craft fair and chances are you’ll see kid fingerprinting and dna sampling kits from one of the service organizations and/or police. They do the fingerprinting/photographing there, print it out and attach a little envelope to hold a fingernail clipping and/or hair with root attached.
Also regarding DNA, blood cord banking is big business.
My sis is a teacher, those invasion drills scare the crap out of me.
Regarding those soldiers in the trenches, they are called atomic veterans and my FIL was one. He was at Yucca Flats. He was given a rainjacket to put over his uniform, given some type of device to use after the blast, and told to not look directly at the blast. After he dug himself out of the debris that fell on him, he took readings. He died from a presumptive cancer (i.e. presumed to be caused by exposure to the nuclear blast).
My generation (graduated high school in ’85) was supposedly anxiety-plagued over the nuke issue, but I was much more traumatized over the “Stranger Danger” film they showed us first-grade girls back in 1973; it was a dramatization of a Bad Man snatching two little girls, followed by ACTUAL MORGUE AND CRIME-SCENE PHOTOS of murdered children (B&W, but still). I still have flashbacks if I can’t locate one of my kids in our own yard within fifteen seconds or so.
The Bay Area did “duck and cover” drills because of Onizuka AFB, down here in Sunnyvale. Up until about last year it was the command center for the USAF’s communications satellites; it was a Priority One “multiple city-buster” target.
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I can’t help but wonder if the Baby Boomer paranoia about nuclear power plants could be traced back to “Duck And Cover” and other scare-’em-straight movies about nuclear war. If it weren’t for Jane Fonda and company, we wouldn’t even be TALKING about global warming–we’d all have been running 100% nuclear since 1982. Instead we’re burning coal, like it’s the nineteenth century, and people STILL fret about building nuclear plants.
Joe Mama – I think incidents such as the one at Chernobyl may have helped to put people off nuclear power.
Turns out it’s not so much the power itself, as the people in charge of it, we have to worry about. And past events have proved that, yes, we should worry.
I’m hoping we won’t have a chance to use what we’ve practiced. Russia pushing into Georgia doesn’t encourage optimism.
No drills here, but I first learned about nuclear weapons at a really impressionable age and they became my boogeyman instead of spiders or werewolves of what-not. Seriously, the thing that made me afraid of the dark was that I thought a looming mushroom cloud would be waiting for me in my closet.
But then when I got older they were still scary — I did an independant project with a friend for a study hall; we made a movie about nuclear war our senior year in high school (ca. 1988). We watched “The Day After” and “Threads” for “research,” and it freaked the crap out of all of us. But we pressed on.
And for the next TEN SOLID YEARS I would have occasional nightmares about nuclear war — seriously vivid, scare-you-so-bad-you-can’t-fall-back-to-sleep nightmares. They could be anything from watchng the bombs drop to dreaming I was watching Jane Pauley break down while delivering the news of a missle attack. They started fading in 1989, and I haven’t had one in about 9 years.
But on a tangent, those dreams made it COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE for me to sit through TERMINATOR II for a good year and a half — when there’s that scene where Linda Hamilton is watching L.A. get nuked? THAT WAS MY EXACT DREAM. I saw the film in the theater, and when we got up to that scene, I was watching the contents of my own head on a 60-foot screen with technicolor and THX sound, and I had to get up and go sit in the lobby for 20 minutes to fend off a completely hysterical panic attack. For a solid year, any time my friends rented it, or whatever, I’d go sit in another room until that scene was over and come back becuase it was just too eerie a coincidence.