It
is a Tuesday evening and a nuclear warhead has hit RAF Finningley. I watch a
woman piss herself with fear and hear someone sat directly behind me who should
know better laugh. On this particular
Tuesday evening contemporary Sheffield is settling into a seasonal darkness of
autumnal damp and decay. However, in the projection playing out on the wall of
my University, the City of Steel is about to become molten. I am watching Threads,
a docudrama portrayal of a nuclear war and it’s aftermath in September 1984,
directed by Mick Jackson and written by Barry Hines.
Threads was produced at a time when
fears about and the consequences of a nuclear attack were heightened. During
the late 1970s and early 1980s Jack Kibble-White reports, in his article ‘Let’s
All Hide in the Linen Cupboard’, that ‘the White House changed its nuclear
strategy from… mutually assured destruction (MAD) to an idea that nuclear war
was winnable.’Evidence of this can be seen in a piece from the Chicago Tribune by Kenneth R. Clark published in January 1985 just
prior to the premier of Threads in
the United States of America. Writing in his article ‘Threads: Nightmare After the Holocaust’, Clark reports the on-going
argument between scientists such as Carl Sagan, who argued a nuclear attack
would cause a nuclear winter leaving ‘our little civilisation absolutely
imperilled’, and Edward Teller, ‘the father of the hydrogen-bomb’, who believed that such an attack would be survivable and limited to ‘the bombs
fireball’.
Clark states that ‘the President of the United States’ shared the view of
Teller. In
Great Britain, Kibble-White writes that ‘in a 1982 Gallup poll… 38% of
respondents declared that they believed a nuclear war to be inevitable.’
With the public consciousness so preoccupied with the prospect of a nuclear
strike it is unsurprising that, when first broadcast ‘on Sunday 23 September
1984 at 9.30pm… 6.9 million [people]… a remarkable 40% share’ of available
audience tuned in to watch Threads.
Threads charts the attack and its
aftermath through a series of juxtapositions and contrasts. Two families of
different classes come together through their children in, as Kibble-White
argues, almost a parody of the northern kitchen sink drama genre. The film
opens in spring with Ruth proclaiming her love for the season and the ‘buds
coming out’,
only for this particular spring to give birth to a nuclear winter rather than
the fruitfulness of summer. There is the metaphoric contrast seen through Jimmy’s
love of foreign birds, how they act as a sanctuary for him until the human-made
nuclear missiles migrate from Russia to cause such devastation. Jackson’s use
of the docudrama genre, the interspersing theoretical scientific fact through
title cards and voice-over between the action is also an affective
juxtaposition. This blending of apparent fact and fiction creates a sense of
realism to what is being played out on screen and, as you watch a plastic E.T.
doll melt following the direct strike on Sheffield, it is clear that the
director and writer do not wish this to be viewed as science-fiction.
I
believe it was the combined affect of these juxtapositions and the level of
realism that left me finding Threads thoroughly
depressing and horrifying. As I watched, even though the threat and level of
paranoia in connection with a potential nuclear war is not at the levels of the
1980s, everything I saw had the potential of coming to fruition. It also
started me thinking about the recent debate that has arose with the vote on the
renewing of Trident and whether the next potential Labour Prime Minister,
Jeremy Corbyn, would not ‘push the button' to launch a nuclear weapon to defend Great Britain. With the Russians seemingly
supporting incursions in Georgia, the Crimea, and Syria and NATO positioning
themselves against them, how long will it be before tension levels are at the
same high as the early 1980s? How long before foreign birds migrate for a
nuclear winter?
