2006-06-15 - 8:59 a.m.
Propaganda nostalgia
It's getting lonely here on Diaryland, like the bit in "The Day After" where the psychotic teenage farmer's daughter runs outside and has to be rescued by Steve Guttenberg. When they go outside, there's just quiet, and flies buzzing. I look at my favourites list, and no-one updates anymore. But I still do, and here's my update: "The Day After" really blows as a movie. And sucks. I grew up in London in the '70s, during the height of those "you can't hug a child with nuclear arms" and "better red than dead" chanted slogans. I've gone on an anti-nuke march. Made my own sign, even. (I was 9 or 10, don't look at me like that.) When "The Day After" came out in 1983, I was bothered by it, as were all my 13 year old friends, all looking solemn and wondering whether we'd even get to go to college. My mother, on the other hand, was rather irritated by it. I should have followed her example. I have watched it numerous times over the ensuing years, and each time it annoys me more, not because the information is wrong - who knows what a nuclear war would do? I don't, and speculation is a grand tradition in scare-the-living-CRAP-out-of-you movies - but because it becomes increasingly clear each time that the scriptwriters assumed we were morons. The script is BAD, people. It's stilted, stereotypical, racist, sexist, and mean. It has people reacting in a way that even the worst people didn't after Katrina, or the Asian tsunami, the Pakistan/Mexico/pick a county devastating earthquakes. I point blank refuse to believe that people will regress to the level of baboons just because something bad happens. Oh, sure, a small segment of society will, but that's why it's such a great thing that everyone in America is armed (okay, Maryland may be hosed, but the rest of us will be okay). As Robert Heinlein said before the mush ate his brain, "an armed society is a polite society". Working from crime statistics in counties in Texas where gun laws have been changed to allow concealed carry, I gravitate towards this theory. (Do you think I'm going to get mail? What fun.) So, unlike all the silly post-apocalyptic movies where only the bad guys ever seem to have guns, let's assume that most people in Kansas City in the early '80s had guns. Heck, I bet even deep-in-denial Farm Momma is packing - I would, if I was out in the middle of nowhere. Then the issue with the TOTALLY GRATUITOUS shooting of the Farmer over a roasted horse and some trespassers would have had a rather different ending. (and why didn't Momma take the shotgun and shoot them herself? She was in the house the whole time. I've met midwestern farmer's wives, and they're a tough bunch.) It's one of those movies that considers the message more important than the story - and those kinds of movies always suck. You want message? Do a documentary. You want to scare the pants off people? Write a *good* story, a believable story. I don't take nuclear danger lightly (though to judge from the made for TV movies that have come out in recent years, some people think we should be throwing them around like free candy), but I don't like being repeatedly hit over the head with a frying pan while someone yells in my ear "see?! SEE?!". It's dumb, and annoying. And makes me take the message much less seriously than you want me to. Plus, it might get you punched. Those frying pans *hurt*. Like the "War on Drugs" hyperbole, it makes me distrust the message completely - if they're lying about one thing, can I trust them about anything else? - and I think that's why I eventually left the movement and became more libertarian. I don't want other people telling me how I should think, especially if they can't be entertaining about it. Steve Guttenberg as a radiation victim is always amusing, though; I suppose it's one of the reasons I still watch the movie, even though it's now more out of date than some of the movies from the '60s. I mean, "Night of the Living Dead" still holds up well, but "The Day After" is a dinosaur. Sadly. It would be a great movie to remake, though, using sociological data from natural and wartime disasters as guidlines for how people really might behave. Yeah, that'll happen.
Dorsal - Ventral
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