Atomic Cafe, The (1982)

Posted on Apr 17, 2002 under "Hot", Documentary |

Directed by Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty, and Pierce Rafferty

After having depleted or passed over pretty much all the interesting documentaries at the closest video store, I got a nifty idea: Why not try the library? The Davis County library system has a piss-poor A/V collection as far as new releases and such are concerned (as opposed to the Salt Lake County libraries, which almost pose a threat to Blockbuster), but as far as documentaries (and taped stage plays) go, it’s the cat’s meow.

So I waded through tapes of Nova and National Geographic and Great Performances episodes until this baby caught my eye — a special educational edition, no less, donated to libraries by a foundation dedicated to education on social issues and whatnot.

Pandora’s Bomb.

Composed entirely of period film clips with no added narration, The Atomic Cafe documents America’s entry into the “Atomic Age,” beginning with the first test explosion Alamogordo, NM in July, 1945, and continuing through the early 1950s, as America made its accomodations to the omnipresent threat of Mutually Assured Destruction. Without relying on the commentary of hindsight, the filmmakers did a superb job of compiling images from newsreels, military training films, and educational movies with contemporary comments and music to deliver a package that packs quite a wallop.

A large part of the impact lies in simple juxtaposition (I’ve got an English Lit degree, so I’m licensed to use that word with reckless abandon): Triumphant parades of returning U.S. servicemen in 1946, kissing their ladyfriends and dancing in the streets, is accompanied by jovial folk ditties portraying our victory in the Pacific as a “good ol’ prank” on those Japs; we immediately cut to footage of the demolished rubble that was Hiroshima, complete with charred bodies in the streets (recognizable as corpses only because of the way the white teeth stand out from the blackened flesh), intercut with Army personnel chalk-lining the blast-imprinted shadows of pedestrians on the sidewalks and medical examinations of the radiation-scarred survivors.

You too can lock-step for freedom!

This is not a selective anti-nuclear screed; carefully shown is the threat of a similarly-empowered Soviet Union, necessitating a balance of power. But the assumptions of American imperialism are also on broad display, both through the jingoistic political posturing of staged newsreel footage, as well as the assumptive takeover of Bikini Atoll for testing. (The announcer’s assurances that the natives didn’t mind at all being moved for the good of the Free World reminded me uncannily of the Reaganesque president’s comments in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, reassuring the American public that “those cute little Corto Maltese people, they want us there, you just ask them.”)

In fact, the assumptive righteousness of the American cause is almost as chilling — almost — as the repeated footage of the test explosions. No, I’m not claiming that the American ideals and way of life aren’t worth the effort to defend them; far from it. But seeing our own propaganda, literally showing Americans in lockstep to defend their liberties, is more than a little disconcerting. And the “Just trust the government, we know what’s best” stance advocated at every turn is replete with “audience-participation irony,” knowing now what nobody knew then about what that paternal government thought about “acceptable losses.”

Hope you packed your lead BVD’s.

For instance, one particular Pacific test ran into unaccomodating wind patterns, resulting in the exposure of the inhabitants of three other islands to radioactive fallout. On the one hand, we have the official spokesman reassuring everyone that, after his two-week visit to the islands, he’s seen absolutely no ill effects from the exposure; but his reassurances are undercut by the Army’s own footage of medical examinations showing scab-covered locals.

Or closer to home, we have an incident of St. George, Utah, 140 miles from the Nevada test site, being exposed in like manner by recalcitrant wind patterns. The friendly advice from the government was simply to stay indoors for an hour and not be alarmed. Radiation is really the least of the dangers of the atom bomb, they said with authoritative warmth. Unfortunately, having lived close to St. George myself, I know that morticians there have to be specially trained to deal with the huge deforming tumors they find regularly on all of the cancer casualties in town. I also know, thanks to the book American Ground Zero by Carole Gallagher (among many books written since on the subject), that President Truman was informed in a memo that exposing the locals to fallout was acceptable because they were considered “a low-use segment of the population.”

Even in Army training footage of the time, it was implicitly admitted that the “fallout is our friend” stance is more than a little misleading. Instead, our authoritative announcer solemnly tells his military audience that casualties from fallout, if any, should be considered “unknown soldiers” in the fight against Communism. Too bad no one thought to tell those unenlisted soldiers.

That’s a pretty convenient landmark there.

The powers-that-be didn’t see fit to even protect their own military personnel, though. Another set of footage shows enlisted men placed in trenches around a test blast, where they sat through the flash and the initial shockwave and reversal, then stood up to watch the pretty colors. Nobody told them about the second wave, the one that would carry a cloud of radioactive dust into their unprotected faces. The effects of that won’t show up, in the form of statistically improbable cancer rates, for a few years after; in the meantime, their orders were to hop out of the trenches and jog toward the mushroom cloud.

The most stunning part, though, is how easily the American people took the omnipresent threat of total extermination in stride and accomodated it in their lives of post-war prosperity. Anti-Communist sentiment was so fully and monolithically inculcated that the people portrayed here were cheerful to build bomb shelters and learn to duck ‘n’ cover rather than give those Commies an inch. The single image which sticks in the brain longest, and which graces the video cover, is that of a lead-lined radiation suit made circa 1950 by a father for his son. Dad jauntily suits his boy up, then helps him get on his bike and sends him off to little league practice in his suit. That single image speaks volumes of how John and Jane Q. Public were supposed to live in a state of intentional denial of the threat of nuclear holocaust. There’s even a lively little cartoon of a kindly doctor explaining how obsessive worrying about the bombs dropping is unreasonable, since that ol’ room in the basement labelled “bomb shelter” should set any red-blooded American’s heart at ease.

The capstone of the whole thing is an artfully edited sequence which combines all of the positive duck’n'cover classroom films, and other films showing how gosh-darned easy it is to evacuate the streets and find shelter in the case of an attack, with unglossed test footage. You’ve seen those clips a billion times of the house being blown over and back by the blast, of trees bending over like licorice whips and then being snapped off by the backlash, but seeing it here is like the first time: The juxtaposition of the complete destruction from the atom bomb with the schoolchildren of America crouching with their arms covering their heads shows up the happy “We can survive” talk as mere sound and fury. There’s something about watching a nuclear explosion that still grips me right in the intestines and makes me gulp my air. This is Death, this is Shiva, the destroyer of worlds. It is the whirlwind reaped, the Unmaker, the absolute period at the end of the sentence.

**Because if the gummint says it’s safe to march toward the cloud, shucks, it must be safe!**

This video has a double layer of nostalgic significance. The first obviously relates to the original time period, but the second relates to the documentary’s compilation in 1982. That was the period of President Reagan’s brinkmanship policies with the USSR; the following year, The Day After was broadcast on TV and made an indelible impression on a certain twelve-year-old boy living in Maritime Canada. I had been brought up believing in the nigh certainty of a nuclear exchange in my lifetime; I had nightmares of seeing the mushroom clouds rise (despite the complete dearth of even third-string military targets on or near Prince Edward Island). Seeing The Atomic Cafe made me realize how much of that overwhelming weight was leached from my consciousness over the ensuing decade, and how much it had weighed on me back in the day. I’m not entirely sure I want to praise Ronald Reagan for his strategy — there were a hell of a lot of lives riding on that gamble, and the paternalism involved seems to echo that same attitude evident in this documentary — but I can’t argue with the result. Anyone upset with the uncertainty of today’s political climate needs to watch this and realize that uncertainty is a much better option than Mutually Assured Destruction.