Old nuclear war drama Threads and today's autards (long)

Posted by kman

Old nuclear war drama Threads and today's autards (long)
September 25, 2015

Registered: 13 years ago
Posts: 1,367

Please be warned. If you're sensitive, this might seriously disturb or upset you.

Threads was a BBC TV-movie about nuclear war and its aftermath shown in Britain in 1984. It's in the same vein as ABC's The Day After in the US or the theatrical release Testament, later shown on PBS stations.

The BBC drama was officially aired only one time on a US network then, on one of Ted Turner's cable stations in 1985. Like most Americans, I was unfamiliar with it until a mention appeared recently on another website.

Several days ago I watched Threads. At my age, in my 50s, nothing much on TV or in the movies fazes me, nor did any of it very much when I was younger. That was until viewing Threads online.

As all the reviewers say on various review sites and forums, it is the single most harrowing, shocking movie ever filmed, and it makes The Day After look like a slick, sanitized, overly optimistic joke. That's unfair to the American movie, which was really very good in its day, but Threads is far grittier. Unlike the earlier dramas, this BBC movie accounts for nuclear winter and goes some years into the bleak future after the attack. If The Day After was a slap in the face to wake you, Threads is a sucker punch to the gut—over and over and over again. Some reviewers have suggested that had it been released in theaters in the US, it might well have earned an NC-17 rating, the modern equivalent of X.

You'll find precious few jokes about Threads on forums. Instead, Britons all talk about how watching it affected them for days afterward. It did the same to me, which I did not expect.

If you insist on seeing it, and remember my warnings, here it is online:

https://vimeo.com/18781528

The scene that was the most gut-wrenching to me was pretty benign. It takes ten years after the war. A very limited recovery has brought back some electricity generation, and in this scene some children born after the war are being shown an old black-and-white educational video to try to teach them something. Whoever chose that video for that scene was a diabolical genius, as the subject could be considered virtually obscene given what had already happened. The subject was "skeletons and skulls": "This is a cat. This is a cat's skeleton. This is a chicken. This is the skeleton of a chicken." Skeletons and skulls are potent symbols of death and extinction, and you realize that those children will never see a live cat or live chicken and that those animals might well have been extinct in Britain by that time. This video drives home what has been lost. But that's not all.

Those children don't comprehend: they just stare blankly at the screen. They can't learn much: the radiation and lack of food after the attack stunted them permanently. They speak a broken English: a word here, a word there, barely understandable. You realize in this scene that the limited recovery cannot last, as the children will not be able to learn coal mining, operating steam equipment, or anything about power generation. As the adults who lived through the attack become debilitated and die off, which is already happening, these children will not be able to pick up the pieces and continue to rebuild. The limited recovery will turn out to be what economists (ironically) call a "dead cat bounce". If Britain is at medieval population levels and standard of survival ten years after the war, these children are the harbinger of Britain's looming new stone age. That part of the movie drives home the lack of hope for the future as well.

One of the children is a daughter born to a main character, Ruth, just after the war; Ruth was a few months' pregnant when the attack hit. Her daughter is affected too. When Ruth dies of premature aging around the time of the video screening, that is, ten years later, the daughter doesn't understand why Ruth isn't getting up to get them both some food. She shows no emotion at her mother's death. A few years later, after a boy her approximate age rapes and impregnates her, she gives birth to what is apparently a stillborn freak—but Threads deliberately leaves some details obscured. As she holds the baby just after birth at a makeshift hospital, she looks closely at it and appears just about to scream when the movie suddenly ends and the credits roll. That pending new stone age isn't going to last long either, it seems, since human oblivion will shortly follow if the youth are having mutants and stillbirths...

Threads left me badly shaken in a way no other movie ever has. I've seen The Day After a few times. I cannot watch Threads again, at least not any time soon.

But upon reflection in the days after watching the movie, the striking thing about the children was this. Threads appeared before autism and autards became well known. These children behave like today's low-functioning autards: can't learn, can't speak, prone to violence, lack of emotion or empathy. That raises a profound question: could there be something in the environment that is triggering autism? If so, to return to questions I've asked before, could it be something like cell phone towers or drug use? Seeing this movie makes me more determined to look for an answer. Your comments are of interest. Sorry for being so long-winded.