The Day After The Day After

The Day After (1983)
Directed by Nicholas Meyer
Screenplay by Edward Hume

A Late Cold War Classic, this film is a good reminder to people traumatized by recent history what real apocalyptic destruction looks like--or at least could look like. You see, there was a time when “national threat” meant complete and utter destruction. This is one of the last great Cold War atomic destruction movies and as such it is a vital piece of history.

Oh, and it was directed by the guy who directed Wrath of Khan. Chew on that for a second.

Dr. Russell Oakes....Jason Robards (You know it’s serious when you’ve got Jason Robards.)
Helen Oakes, his wife....Georgann Johnson (Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman’s mother)
Marilyn Oakes, their daughter....Kyle Aletter (would go on to be a model on The Price is Right)
Nurse Nancy Bauer, a nurse in Lawrence, Kansas....JoBeth Williams (THE JoBeth Williams, fresh out of Poltergeist and The Big Chill two other scary post-apocalyptic films.)
Dr. Sam Hachiya....Calvin Jung (The guy from the Calgon commercials)
Dr. Austin....Lin McCarthy
Dr. Wallenberg...Rosanna Huffman (Murder One)
Dr. Landowska...George Petrie (Dallas, Mad About You, Herman’s Head)
Jim Dahlberg, a farmer....John Cullum (Holling from Northern Exposure)
Eve Dahlberg, Jim’s wife....Bibi Besch (Dr. Carol Marcus from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)
Denise Dahlberg, the farmer's daughter.....Lori Lethin
Bruce Gallatin, Denise’s fiance....Jeff East
Danny Dahlberg....Doug Scott
Joleen Dahlberg....Ellen Anthony
Reverend Walker....Dennis Lipscomb (Wiseguy, The Famous Teddy Z and that other 1983 nuclear war film Wargames.)
Farmer Jenkins...Herk Harvey (director of the cult classic Carnival of Souls)
Dennis Hendry....Clayton Day
Ellen Hendry....Antonie Becker
Joe Huxley, a science professor at the University of Kansas....John Lithgow (Take a sip, you’ve been Lithgowed.)
Stephen Klein, a University of Kansas Student.....Steven Guttenberg (That’s right, before he became our nation’s laughingstock and well before his inexplicable rise, he was young Steven Guttenberg.)
Alison Ransom....Amy Madigan (And take another sip for Mrs. Ed Harris)
Cynthia....Alston Ahern (The Jerk, Private Benjamin)
Aldo, a Kansas student....Stephen Furst (Flounder!, Vir!)
Professor, a college professor with no name....William Allyn
Airman Billy McCoy.....William Allen Young (CSI, CSI: Miami, District 9)
Tom Cooper....Arliss Howard (Full Metal Jacket, Anistad, Medium, Rubicon)
Cleo Mackey....Barbara Iley aka Barbara Harris (Now a voice caster)
TV Host....Madison Mason (You’d think with a name like that he’d be a she and she’d be an adult actress)
Mack...Vahan Moosekian (Executive Producer of Lie to Me)
Barber #1....Tom Spratley (He was in The Sting. Enough said.)
Barber #2...Glenn Robards (Do you think they hired him before or after they got Jason Robards?)
Vinnie Conrad...Stan Wilson (roomed at Juillard with Robin Williams and Christopher Reeve and later shacked up with Shelley Duvall.)
Man at Phone, a man at a telephone booth...Harry Bugin (Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Big Lebowski)
Man in Hospital, a man in the hospital....Wayne Knight (Newman...)
Guard #1....Alex Van (American Gothic, The Crazies remake)
Hospital Patient....Eugene Jackson (Pineapple from the Our Gang films.)
Radiologist...John Lafayette (Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger)
Boy in Barn, a boy in a barn...David Kaufman (The animated voice of Stuart Little and Marty McFly)
Football Fan Dad....Hugh Gillin (Between 1980 and 1985 this guy was in everything.)
Newcaster....Arthur Ashe (The tennis great? Take one last sip for that.)

Cinematography by Gayne Rescher (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)
Music by David Raksin (much of Raksin’s score was replaced by music written by Virgil Thomson for the 1938 documentary The River.)

There’s a good argument to be made that The Day After (and some other films like it) should be required viewing for every new generation, kind of like films about the Holocaust, only with a special kind of urgency because atomic scare movies are about an apocalypse that never happened but which is still possible at a moment’s notice.
In the past decade people in the good old United States went a little crazy about seeing danger in every explosive shoe or specially rigged underwear. Obviously those threats are real, but I think the asymmetric fear we show in the face of those threats are in some way a long-term result of the complacency we felt at the end of the cold war. When the imminent threat of worldwide nuclear destruction subsided we lost a sense of perspective. We fooled ourselves into believing that all threats were gone, and when some new threats showed up we behaved like a retired beekeeper being stung by a mosquito. Also, I think there were some of us who were starting to believe that there was only one nuclear power left in the world and that we could conceive of potentially using our nukes with impugnity if we wanted to. It’s like we decided to forget the entirety of the cold war. And somewhere along the line we also seemed to believe that the definition of peace was the complete disarmament and elimination of our enemies. Well, that’s certainly not how the cold war ended and it’s not how most conflicts end.

Which brings us to The Day After. It’s a film that posits the Cold War heating up into a full scale nuclear conflict.
The Department of Defense refused to cooperate with the filmmakers unless they made it clear in the script that the Soviet Union launched the first strike. This is what we call soft-censorship, or “the encouragement of proper thinking.” To their credit, the filmmakers opted for something in between moral complexity and ambiguity by deliberately obfuscating the question of culpability for the fictional war. In the film the conflict starts with the Soviets trying to squeeze Berlin (again), a NATO ultimatum and then a small scale war that is rapidly followed with NATO making a nuclear strike on Warsaw Pact forces which is followed by a Soviet Nuclear strike on NATO HQ in Brussels. Then comes the near simultaneous launch of ICBMs that is the focus of the film. Just to remind you that the USSR is bad they are reported at one point to have launched an air strike in Germany that bombed a school and a hospital--you know, because that’s what evil people do on purpose and the good guys do accidentally because they can’t tell the difference. At any rate, the point of the film is that once the mushroom clouds hit Missouri and Kansas it really doesn’t matter which idiot started it, because the whole world is grey, dusty and very poisonous.

The film drives its points home by starting us off with a nice innocent day in innocent Kansas City and Lawrence and points in between and surrounding. People are living their normal lives on “The Day Before” doing ordinary things like going to art museums to discuss their decisions to follow their boyfriends up to Boston or having premarital sex on the day before their weddings or having marital relations upstairs while their kid is glued to a television watching the scary news reports. But all is not so innocent, even in middle America, because all of these civilians are living next door to ICBM silos, one of which we see is located right next door to a quite innocent farm in what looks like an innocuous ranch style house where only the fencing looks suspicious unless you’re close enough to read the sign.
You have to sympathize with the farmers who are neighbors with the Minuteman ICBM. That’s a pretty uneasy place to be growing corn.

Before we get too wrapped up in the innocence of middle America I should note that this film features the first (and I believe last) representation of two sisters playing a game of keep away with a diaphragm. The first time I saw this film I was 9 years old and I had no idea what was going on, but it’s hard to escape its presence. That’s right, they snuck that one past everyone back in 1983, but it’s there. The Dahlberg girl is getting married the next day, but she and her fiance aren’t exactly Promise Keepers, unless the “promise” is the promise to use a diaphragm. When the elder girl goes back upstairs to retrieve her diaphragm before riding off with her husband-to-be on his motorcycle she discovers that her little sister has taken the diaphragm and when pressed to give it back she blackmails the older sister by threatening to reveal the diaphragm to their parents. I am going to repeat this point--there is a whole subplot related to the use of a diaphragm in this movie. In a way, you could think of that diaphragm as a metaphor for something related to the Cold War...but that’s a bit of sophistry that even I won’t do even if I’m not attempting to keep a straight face while doing it. The point is, later on when the whole country has been nuked, Denise regrets having used the diaphragm the night before because if she hadn’t she would at least have been able to get pregnant with her now most certainly vaporized fiance. The other characters in the basement have the good sense to not tell her that it was still possible for her fiance to have been shooting blanks in which case dispensing with the diaphragm wouldn’t have done her much good in getting pregnant even if she’d had the foresight to foresee the impending nuclear doom. This whole diaphragm business is a good example of the kind of thing that drove later Kansans and Missouristanis into more extreme puritanism in subsequent years. The idea of kids riding around the farms on their motorcycles with their diaphragm probably triggered the reactionary movement that has culminated in the neo-purity movement.

Meanwhile, in Lawrence, Kansas we see a bunch of University students and this is where we see Steve Guttenberg and that’s how we know that the world is bound to end in an apocalyptic furnace. Does anything else matter once you’ve seen that Steve Guttenberg is in this movie? Even if you absolutely loathe Steve Guttenberg (though I can’t imagine anyone having that strong a reaction to him one way or another) you can’t take much satisfaction in watching him die (slowly) of radiation poisoning in a way that pretty much foreshadowed his subsequent career.

Guttenberg’s character is a student who is going home...to Joplin, Missouri. Before he can make it Joplin it is destroyed along with Kansas City and other places by the nuclear strike. I was watching this just a few days after the recent tornadoes hit Joplin. It was a bit disturbing.

FEMA is thoroughly ridiculed in this film as they are the source of a lecture a local leader has to give to his fellow farmers about how they have to scrape off the top layer of their soil in order to plant which prompts the other farmers to wonder just how they’re supposed to do that and where the contaminated soil is supposed to go as it will likely form a pretty giant mount for each of their farms.

This is nothing compared to the chaos and breakdown of society. When Jim Dahlberg goes back home he finds a bunch of random people camped out in front of his home and when he tells them to leave they simply shoot him. Even after you've watched whole cities vaporized this seems a bit cold. Come on man, he's got a dying daughter and his little boy is in a hospital blinded for life because he looked right into a nuclear explosion. Give him a break. With his elder daughter dying with Steve Guttenberg in Lawrence (which is a fear many of us in this country still live with) that leaves his wife and younger daughter at the mercy of the armed yokels who just killed him. Thankfully the film doesn't show us what else happens, but the very thought of the possibilities should give you some chills. (Unless you're just a cold-blooded twerp.)

As Dr. Oakes, who is dying of radiation poisoning, leaves Lawrence to go die in the rubble of Kansas City he sees soldiers forming a firing squad shooting people. No trial, no judges. It’s real martial law, now. (Though we were earlier treated to the complete breakdown of military discipline outside a missile silo where the folks on the outside rightly questioned the need to guard the outside of a missile silo that had already launched its missile and was now expecting incoming ICBMS. What are you really guarding it from?)
Anyhow, with the reinstitution of military discipline represented by the firing squads you are officially Welcome to New America. It could be worse. In New USSR you have the government doesn't shoot you, you have to shoot yourself. (After you wait in line for three days.)

The only hopeful note for humanity is that when Dr. Oakes screams at people in the rubble of Kansas City they offer him food and he cries. The poor man has lost his wife and both his kids and everything else too. He’s angry and bitter about all that’s happened and surely resigned to his own death but at least he recognizes the little bit of kindness left in the ragged remnant of humanity left.

Hindsight certainly makes much of this film seem as silly as much of the Cold War seems now, but on the other hand there’s a lot to be gained from periodically taking a gander at such things, not least for the corrective they might provide to our own fears. The kind of destruction posited in The Day After, unlike the kind of threat represented in communist takeover films like Red Dawn or Amerika, is not quaint because the means for its occurrence are still at hand. The world is still armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons and our complacency about them in their entirety stands in marked contrast with our concern over less world-ending threats. So maybe a viewing of The Day After every so often would be a good thing for society, you know to remember the important things like.
Once upon a time there was a Cold War, and Steve Guttenberg and these things called diaphragms...