The Day After

It's on the SciFi channel right now. Funny to think it's been nearly 25 years since I first, and last, saw it. I was struck by the cast that includes the likes of Jason Robards, John Cullum, Stephen Furst, John Lithgow, JoBeth Williams, Amy Madigan, Steve Guttenberg...I didn't remember noticing any of them at the time, and though some of their stars (Guttenberg's for instance) have faded since the early 80s, they were biggish names in those days.

I remember it being a huge event when it came out. VCRs were still new technology, and it was in that barely-recallable time when you watched a film, commercials and everything, when it aired, or you didn't watch it at all. I was a freshman in high school, and it was required viewing; most of my friends say it was so for them as well.

Sadistic. That's the word that comes to mind. Not that we weren't used to it. We all went to Catholic school, so we were no strangers to punishment, deserved or not, physical and otherwise. We were used to being controlled with threats and fear. Still, 25 years later, I'm puzzled as to the logic behind this particular "assignment."

It's hard to recall the real level of uncertainty, the constant undercurrent of fear that coursed through daily life during the Cold War. It almost seems pointless to have produced such a film 40 years into it. Who in this world was ignorant of the possibilities? Who didn't have at least the occasional sleepless night, imagining the nightmare scenarios, the horror that would engulf us, particularly those unlucky enough to survive? I vividly remember the consensus among my peers being that living in a big east coast city was a good thing. We had no delusions about "the day after." We had designs on ground zero, always hoping to be just close enough for a flash...and then nothing.

I suppose I wasn't scarred. I watched, I survived, I had nightmares, I moved on. Sitting here now, though, watching the final scene that has always stuck with me, when Jason Robards returns to his home in Kansas City, when the words scroll across the screen stating that the events portrayed in this film are likely far less severe than what would actually occur, I wonder what in the name of all that's supposedly holy was going through the minds of our teachers.

This was not an after school special on teen pregnancy or the dangers of drinking and driving. This was not a cautionary tale, or an attempt to enlighten the public about an issue of which they were fundamentally ignorant. It was not even an instructional film on how to survive, unlike the frightening but useless air-raid drills of the 50s and 60s.

We were teenagers. Cocky, insolent, moody, erratic, secretive and of course, POWERLESS. We could do nothing to change the dangers present in our world; we could not even vote for someone who might find a way. We were, like the rest of the world, captives of circumstance.

So why present this horror? Why show us what our world, at least to our minds at that point in history, was bound to become?

Two decades later the threats are different. Climate change, terrorism, pandemic flu. The proverbial "big one" could hit at any time. And yet I feel no complusion to, in the name of education, sit a child down in front of a screen and force them to watch a ruined world die in agony. And I wonder, all these years later, what drove those "educators" to steal our hope.