The Day After

The political controversy over "The Day After" when it was first broadcast in 1983 had to do with the idea that a television movie about a nuclear war was an indictment of the policies of the Reagan Administration. Of course "The Day After" was not an attack on a particular president, but rather it represented the liberal nightmare of the worst of all possible futures, with a full out nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. Four years later the ultimate conservative nightmare was aired with the mini-series "Amerika," in which the United States has been taken over by the Communists. Both were predicated on questionable assumptions, the former on an escalation of a conflict over Berlin and the later on the effects of an electro-magnetic pulse, but those were both simply excuses to tell the story that wanted to be told.Ultimately "The Day After" is not so much a story as it is a depiction of what a nuclear war would be like that comes under the heading of "seeing is believing." Prior to the airing of this television film Hollywood showed what it was like to live in the world after a nuclear war in films from "On the Beach" to "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome," suggested that a nuclear war would be so horrible that a president would drop nuclear bombs on New York City rather than go to war in "Fail Safe," and ended the Cold War satire of "Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" with a series of atom bomb's exploding set to the popular song "We'll Meet Again." But what they did not show was what that nuclear war would be like. Even the "Star Wars" universe assumed there would be a nuclear war some day, as did I, but depicting the horrors of such a war was never really done until "The Day After."However, exploding mushroom clouds and the victims of radiation poison were not what was most memorable about "The Day After." The icon image from the film became the shots of the missiles taking off, with the people of Lawrence, Kansas looking up into the sky at the ICBMs headed towards the Soviet Union knowing that their missiles were heading for us. Suddenly it became clear that the true moment of horror would be when you saw those missiles because chances were you would never see the mushroom cloud that took your life. In fact, given the choice between being incinerated and surviving long enough to watch your loved ones suffer horribly, I think most people would hope for the quick death. This film turned those last few minutes of life from the old joke about how you need to bend over, put your head between your knees and kiss you ass goodbye into an enduring image of outright terror.The worst moments of this film are the painful period between the missiles taking off and the nukes exploding. One of the silos is right next to the Dahlberg farm, and the emotion nadir of the film is Denise Dahlberg (Lori Lethin) comes down the stairs holding the wedding dress she will never get to wear and her father tells her to get into the storm cellar. Then Jim Dahlberg (John Cullum) has to go upstairs and drag his wife Eve (Bibi Besch) screaming and crying away from the bed she is making in a desperate attempt to pretend that the world is not coming to an end.Jason Robards is Dr. Russell Oakes, who along with Nurse Nancy Bauer (JoBeth Williams) has to deal with the casualties following the detonations at a besieged hospital, and Stephen Klein (Steve Guttenberg) is the guy who takes refuge with the Dahlbergs. Joe Huxley (John Lithgow) is the college professor who gets to supply most of the relatively small amount of exposition the story requires: a student thinks they are safe because Kansas is in the middle of nowhere, but the professor is the one who points out "There's no 'nowhere' anymore" since there is an Air Force base and 150 Minutemen Missile silos spread halfway down Missouri, all constituting "an awful lot of bullseyes." When the missiles take off he is the one who knows it takes thirty minutes to reach their target, a fact that applies to the incoming missiles as well.I remember the night of November 11, 1983 as I watched "The Day After" how ABC did not run any commercials after the nukes went off and that right afterwards the network had a special news program in which Dr. Carl Sagan introduced us to the idea of a "nuclear winter" and the fact that the reality of a nuclear exchange would be much worse than we had seen. To say that this was a sobering idea to give an audience that was already depressed by what they had seen, would be an understatement. Sagan, of course, was opposed to the use of nuclear weapons and condemned the arms race. Speaking on the other side, which is to say in favor of the concept of nuclear deterrence, was William F. Buckley, Jr., and what we got to see in that debate (which is still available on video) was that both were right.It is rather amazing, given the history of humanity, that it has been almost sixty years since nuclear weapons have been used in war. Ironically, we now live in a world where we still believe that those weapons are going to be used, although now we assume it will be the work of terrorists (or an attempt to stop terrorists) and not a war between East and West. I would not be surprised if right now Hollywood is kicking around ideas of what it would be like the day after that sort of nuclear detonation, going beyond what we saw in "The Sum of All Fears." Hopefully it would be as successful at forestalling our worst nightmares as "The Day After" has been these many years.

I saw the previews on ABC television when this film was the talk of 1983. I was not at all primed for what I watched those next two uninterrupted hours. I remember President Reagan coming on immediately after the telecast admonishing the public to stay sober and that the country was nowhere near the stage of this film. Well, that's what politicians are supposed to say. I later read he was as shook up as everyone else. He sat depressed by himself for a long time after his private screening. There is a denominator commentary in the film that addresses our capacity to block out reminders of our mortality.The movie does not and nor should it apologize for its transparency of just how people are : sheeple . We witness the simplified bubble-like existance of Lawrence, Kansas, in seemingly mass denial that the unthinkable could happen literally in their back yard and why not literally since a missile silo is twenty yards to the right of the barn.But maybe Im being a bit harsh here. Maybe denial is the best coping mechanism when you live yards away from a live round underground missile silo currently being checked...twice. The story doesn't build with predictable speeches from brooding academics or senior cynics sitting on porches sipping cider. We get the story the way jaded America gets it : news flashes and testing signals from the emergency broadcasting system on TV screens in the backgrounds of various living rooms of the characters and they treat it as an afterthought...as we do. But select characters heard the breaking news about soviets closing in on Berlin and moiled over a mounting nuclear strike but not where they couldn't retreat to the comfort of the conventional wisdom of " ...or maybe they will contain it" and use those symphony tickets. But not the audience. The director keeps the TV loud enough in the background where we can hear and discern the urgency while the girls argue over who hid the birth control pills. There was a scene where little kids were watching TV where a reporter described missiles being air-burst over "advancing soviet troops" as they showed American air force pilots running to their bombers and what were their parents doing? Walked right by the TV to go have sex! The movie explores motivations in how the mind copes with the inevitable by instinctively retreating to primal appetites like food and sex which illustrates mans deeper instinctive longing to be told what to do when a crisis hits. The whole essence of our faith in warning systems and voices over speakers telling where to hide and where to meet rides on it...that cocoon of cynical co-dependency finally fails in the face of a power that is sovereign and absolute in its destruction.And this was pretty much how the film revealed the story to us in the first hour...through news flashes and speculative conversations between the jaded and the seasoned everywhere from barbershops to university cafeteria to country kitchens prepping for life's rare highlight: the daughter's wedding.The second hour was not just a storm cloud of Iconic images and sounds of a population caught unprepared, it was an in your face frontal assault against our sensibilities.1)The sounds we cherish like the quiet cornfields and rustling wheat violated by the unnerving radio squawking of " We want to confirm...is this an exercise...negative..repeat..negative. Roger copy...this is not an exercise!"2) Downtown shoppers running in a panic horrified at the thought of not enough room in the shelters intercut with Eve setting the table while worrying is there enough potato salad for the guests. ...and then the blood scream as her husband snatches her from making the beds and carries her to the basement...she knows its over.3) The little boy in the backyard frozen with his mouth gaped open watching a missile emerge out of that fenced off sandbox yards away his parked bicycle.4) The disembodied voice in the chaotic supermarket yelling, "just get the canned goods...the batteries."5) Dr. Oats listening to emergency broadcast instructions while driving alone on the expressway as gridlock clogs the opposite direction.6) Doctors rush into the hospital courtyard to see missile trails overhead.7) A football game in a sold out stadium. The players stop. No movement in the stands as three white smoke trails arc the sky.Intimacy. Innocence. Healing. The winning touchdown replaced with the touch down of an ICBM in twenty minutes. All society signposts vaporized.We are left with a slow disintegration of relationships for the rest of the film. No feel good bonding here. Again, the script doesn't let you exhale. The special effects were more implied than absolute.They didn't have to be absolute because it fit the movie's gritty saturated look of once vibrant colored reds and golds of a Kansas countryside seared into the dirty white ashen gray of an impending nuclear winter that could last six years. The director lingers the camera on scenes of suffering to where its uncomfortable and sometimes excruciating to watch. Self preservation runs amok. Man has thrown his two babies of moral and ethical facilities out with the bath water of commonsense. The rest is anarchy, sticks, and stones. "Is there anybody there...anybody at all." The Professor asks over the CB radio as the movie ends. The film doesn't answer that question. It just takes its place as one of the great movie lines that addresses when man makes eye contact with the insurmountable...and it doesn't blink. Its been thirty years since "The Day After". The question remains unanswered.

Buena actuaciones , hiper realista

A bit dated but it still packs a punch. The first hour is about the days leading up to the attack as seen through the eyes of various characters. The second hour is THE DAY AFTER and how those characters react to the devastation.

Jason Robards heads up this tale about world war 3.It follows the folk of Kansas who are hit by nuclear warheads.For the eighties, the effects are really good & the film is well acted & well scripted.

ti fa capire molte cose, venditore gentilissimo e velocissimo

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