2. Threads (1984)
If you like harrowing films, it is all going on in Threads. Relive the heady days of nuclear paranoia! Witness the most depressing aftermath of a nuclear war ever put on celluloid! I think that Threads (which was originally made for and screened on the BBC) terrorised a generation of British children of a certain age. I am glad I did not catch it as a child as it would have scarred me for life. Heck, it scarred me for life when I first saw it in my 20s! Threads focuses on two families - one working class, one middle class. Ruth, the daughter of the middle class couple, has been impregnated by Jimmy, son of the working class family. They try to start a new life together, but their happiness is jeopardised by mounting global unrest between East and West who are inching towards a nuclear war. We are shown, as the crisis mounts, in documentary style all of the things that would happen in Britain in the tensions leading to nuclear war. Phone-lines are cut, dissidents arrested, hospitals emptied, museums take down paintings and artefacts to be stored safely, Fire Brigades are all recalled, roads are shut down, mass panic buying of food begins, and there is the formation of emergency committees who go into a bunker and are there to help rebuild the country after the bombs drop. I should also mention that the ghastly Protect and Survive plays 24 hours a day on TV and radio. Protect and Survive was a series of British civil defence films and leaflets that were designed to be given to the UK public if nuclear war was looking likely. They are spectacularly macabre but also amusingly naive. The leaflets teach you how to make a lean to in your house where you can safely wait out a nuclear war. The videos show you what to do with dead bodies after a nuclear strike and they fatuously suggest that if the bomb drops while you are outside, lying down on the ground and putting your coat over your head may just save your life. A likely story.
Threads is very clever in building up the momentum of escalating global crisis and its effects on the two families. One problem that I have with the film is the scene in which the bomb siren goes off signalling the first strike. This happens at 8 in the morning (because America will be asleep and therefore at their most vulnerable) and the city centre just happens to be chock full of people at that time of the morning. Convenient. Nevertheless, the actual nuclear strike is handled very well by the film makers. We see a milk bottle melting, houses going on fire but the director mainly uses stock footage of nuclear experiments. This is very cleverly integrated into Threads and we get a sense, not just of Sheffield's annihilation, but of global melt down. The next section of the film deals with the post-nuclear landscape. Nuclear winter sets in as all the debris floats out into the atmosphere, blocking out the sun. Temperatures thus drop and crops fail. People start dying of radiation sickness and hunger and the NHS is no good to them as the narrator announces all the hospitals in the UK couldn't cope with the effects of one bomb dropped in Britain, let alone a whole salvo of nukes. Ruth has survived the attack. She is dispossessed, she eats dead sheep and rats, she gives birth to a daughter with no medical assistance. The population of the UK has dropped to medieval levels. Ruth's daughter works in the fields alongside her. Ruth just collapses one day and dies. She was made blind by a massive hole in the ozone layer letting in excess UV light. Ruth's daughter is illiterate and speaks a basic version of English. She has sex with a young boy and becomes pregnant - giving birth to a mutant baby. End of film. Threads was expertly written by Barry 'Kes' Hines, so with Hines in charge of writing duties, you know you are not going to get any joy in the movie. Unremittingly bleak, Threads is probably the most truthful film about nuclear war, its impact and its aftermath. Critics usually say that Threads is the British equivalent to America's The Day After. The Day After is a very traumatic viewing experience. It freaked me out when I first watched it. But it seems to give the message 'A nuclear war would be dreadful but we would be okay in the end'. Threads offers no such glimpse of sunshine and that's what makes it so darn harrowing.