The Day After
Edward Hume and Nicholas Meyer, 1983
Last writeup: 2004.0117

In my last batch of revisitations, every movie’s score took a sig­nificant tumble.  Not this one.  I watched some of this TV movie, which depicts a nuclear war from the vantage point of the small towns and farms surrounding Kansas City, when it first aired back in 1983, and I had a lot of company: it’s still the most-watched TV movie in U.S. history, and in fourth place among all scripted programs, behind only the finales of M*A*S*H and Cheers and the revelation of who shot J.R. on Dallas.  But I was nine and didn’t have the attention span to sit through the whole thing, so I only watched it from start to finish when I was twenty-nine, after hearing a report on NPR about the movie’s twentieth anniversary.  That report said that the film hadn’t held up.  I dis­agreed then, and watching it again forty-one years after its orig­inal airdate, I disagree now.  If anything, each subsequent view­ing has left me more impressed.  I think I’ve now watched it all the way through three times, but I’ve watched the middle section on its own a couple of times as well, and it never gets less com­pelling.  I rarely get immersed even in the movies I enjoy, but I always do in this one: there’s a real you-are-there feeling to the scenes of motorists lined up at payphones, of curbs jammed with college students trying to hitch rides back to their hometowns, of locals blindly shoveling cans of food into their shopping carts at an overwhelmed grocery store.  And little sticks with me more than the sick, eerie sight, not of enemy missiles on their way down, but of our missiles on the way up.  There’s a brief window when the fate of the world is now sealed but nothing is different yet: in ten minutes the horizon will be dotted with mushroom clouds, but for now, it’s a lovely late summer afternoon.

That was the point of the movie, after all: to provide a preview of what awaited Middle America if the world continued racing down the path to armageddon.  And as I discussed in my original writeup of the The Day After⁠—which I think holds up a lot better than most of the articles I wrote in my twenties⁠—in 1983, that wasn’t much of an “if”.  You know how we’ve known for decades now that by continuing to burn fossil fuels we’re heating the planet to the point that, barring some technological miracle, its carrying capacity will soon drop well below the current global population?  And yet instead of doing much of anything about it, we’re leaning into it?  With the second-largest contributor to at­mospheric greenhouse gases having just voted to gleefully accel­erate our emissions?  In 1983, it seemed pretty clear that nuclear war was just as inevitable and just as imminent.  The Day After was basically just a sneak preview of ’84 or ’85.  Of course, the hope was that it might actually help to avert the future it por­trayed, and might disabuse viewers of any illusion they might hold that a nuclear war could have any winners, that a plucky band of survivors might find themselves with a clean slate on which to draw up a new era of American greatness.  As long as it could open some eyes and change some minds, it didn’t actually have to be a well-told story on top of all that.  But this time around I found myself really admiring the sharp dialogue of the final act in particular, with scene after scene that nails the end­ing of this thread or that.  I hadn’t really appreciated the way The Day After delves into the psychology of a varied set of char­acters confronted with the end of everything, exploring the dif­ferent ways that people can fall apart.  It may not be great art, but it’s more than decent craft, applied to a premise that could hardly be more relevant to my interests.

Which brings me back to the question of relevance.  I had as­sumed that the reason the NPR report said that The Day After hadn’t held up, at least among the college students of 2003, was that their world was so different from the one on screen: no Soviet Union; no forty thousand ICBMs pre-programmed with U.S. targets, ready to be fired on command.  But was it really so different?  Didn’t Condoleezza Rice push for war with Iraq on the basis that it had a secret nuclear weapons development program and “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”?  So I gave the segment another listen to see whether it addressed this point, and it turned out that the reason those college stu­dents of 2003 found the movie unwatchable was basically that they thought the haircuts were silly.  But 2003 is closer to 1983 than to 2024, and it’s no longer just the college students and younger who don’t remember the Cold War⁠—there are college students today whose parents don’t remember it.  So how much relevance could The Day After possibly have today?  Well, consid­er what has supplanted nuclear war on the top of the list of exis­tential threats: again, that’s climate change.  Why is it such a danger?  These days I mostly hear about how it increases the severity of natural disasters: hurricanes become more powerful, flooding becomes more widespread, heat waves take a greater toll.  But that strikes me as penny-ante stuff, relatively speaking.  The real danger is that as heavily populated swaths of the earth become uninhabitable, as crops fail and ecosystems collapse, people aren’t going to just sit quietly and die.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with a world of, say, four billion people; that’s the world of The Day After, the one I grew up in.  But when the carrying capacity of the world shrinks to four billion, and you have ten billion fighting for those four billion spaces, well, now we’re talking about resource wars and waves of mass migration that meet with violent resistance.  Throw nuclear proliferation into the mix, and we start losing cities as hotspots flare up.  When I was a kid, the fear was a full nuclear exchange between the superpowers, with their allies as collateral damage: the equivalent of ten million Hiroshimas packed into the space of an hour.  Now it seems more likely that we have just a handful at sporadic intervals.  But that still leaves us with many millions of lives lost, and a planet pockmarked by exclusion zones.

Of course, the resource war scenario posits relatively rational military calculations.  What has always made nuclear prolifer­ation so worrisome is that the more accessible nuclear weapons are, the more likely it seemed that they would fall into the hands of someone irrational, whose religious ideology called for the apocalypse or who wanted to etch his name into history by effec­tively ending it.  If I must die the world dies with me, that sort of thing.  But there’s no need to wait for a tinpot dictator some­where to set off a couple hundred nukes when an unhinged maniac can be handed the authority to unleash a superpower’s arsenal.  Which is why one moment in The Day After that plays very differently today than it did four decades ago, or even two, is the president’s speech over the radio.  I think it’s meant to be little more than the standard pablum you’d expect, rhetoric that rings hollow for those doomed to live the rest of their lives in a radioactive replay of the Stone Age.  “There has been no surren­der, no retreat from the principles of liberty and democracy for which the free world looks to us for leadership,” the president intones.  Because that was what the Cold War was purportedly all about⁠—all that Gettysburg Address stuff.  It was a dispute over political ideology, risking everything to hold the line against totalitarianism and ensure that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.  Except now U.S. voters have retreated from those principles and elected a fascist government, headed by someone who in his first term was itching to make use of America’s nuclear arsenal.  “Why have them if we can’t use them?” he asked, vowing, “If a nuclear war happens, we won’t be second in line pressing the button.”  And history teaches that fascists don’t wait around very long before consolidating power.  What would make for a better Reichstag Fire, justifying the imposition of dictatorial measures, than the nuking of an American city?  And is it not a foregone conclusion that if the fascists were indeed to go this route, the city they would select would be San Francisco?  Two birds, right?  Estab­lish total control of the country and wipe the city they most loathe off the map?  I don’t live in San Francisco, but I live close enough that my house would be destroyed by an airburst and would be buried in fallout by a surface blast.  I wouldn’t be va­porized, but I’d be one of the zombies dying of radiation poison­ing we see in the third act of The Day After.  Elect ’80s relics, win ’80s fates, I guess.  It goes to show the truth of a quote I hadn’t remembered from previous viewings, but paused to jot down this time because it seemed so relevant to our moment.  One of the main characters, a doctor, hears the latest news, which makes it sound like the doomsday clock should be set at half a second to midnight.  He asks his colleague, “Do you understand what’s go­ing on in this world?”  To which his colleague replies: “Stupidity has a habit of getting its way.” Tell me about it, doc.

Rescore: 14 ➞ 15

Lost in Translation
Sofia Coppola, 2003
Last writeup: 2004.0302

I don’t think I have much to add to my previous article about this one.  On the surface, it’s about a Burt Reynolds type⁠—a huge celebrity in the ’70s, known for action and comedy⁠—whose star has faded a bit, to the point that now he’s in Japan doing whiskey commercials.  (Before the Inter­net, it was common for surprisingly famous people, who would never be seen in the U.S. doing something so lowly as a TV com­mercial, to pocket a few million doing ads in Japan, confident that they would never be seen elsewhere.  E.g., here are the big­gest tennis stars of their era demonstrating no prescience that Youtube will ever be a thing.)  There he has a few chance encoun­ters with the young wife of a photographer in Japan on assign­ment, and they start spending time together.  My contention back in 2004 was that the movie wasn’t really about Japan at all:

When you’re an outsider, you tend to feel like you’re the only one who doesn’t belong⁠—that’s what makes you an outsider, after all, rather than just a member of some sort of alternative clique.  When everyone around you accepts as natural and normal things that make you think “What the fuck?”, it’s quite a thing to find someone else with a “What the fuck?” face on.  Lost in Transla­tion makes it clear that it’s not just Japan that makes Bob and Charlotte feel this way.  This is the role of the dippy actress and the hip-hop dude in the hotel bar: they serve notice that while the film will be using Japan to convey the protagonists’ alienation, they’d be having much the same experience in, say, Los Angeles.  Key moment: the hip-hop dude locks in on Charlotte and tries to impress her with a disquisition on the “hella large beatz” he’s been working on.  “You know what I’m sayin’?” he asks, rhetoric­ally, only to be floored when Charlotte replies with an emphatic “No.”

But those who don’t have to smile and nod their way through conversations like this every day, who don’t feel like they’re living on an alien planet, would likely have trouble relating to a pair of characters who do.  This is where Japan comes in.  Japan’s a meta­phor.  It’s about as foreign to most Americans as you can get while remaining at America’s level of technological and economic devel­opment (which is why sending everyone to Yemen wouldn’t have worked⁠—adding First World/Third World issues into the mix would have muddied the metaphor).  So people who actually do feel at home in their countries can get a sense of what it must be like to find yourself in a culture whose beliefs and practices make you shake your head in bemusement.

A few years after writing the above, I read George Orwell’s Span­ish Civil War memoir Homage to Catalonia, which contains a bit that I think about almost every day⁠—the bit when he gets shot, and gets to find out firsthand what his dying thoughts will be.  He says that, first, he thinks about his wife, and then, that he feels “a violent resentment at having to leave this world which, when all is said and done, suits me so well”.  And, yeah, I cannot relate to that at all.  This world most emphatically does not suit me well, and my violent resentment has been at the fact that I’ve had to spend my life on a planet and in a timeline where I don’t be­long.  Lost in Translation tries to give a hint of what this is like to those in Orwell’s camp.

I guess that the one part of my previous article that I would be most inclined to change is the way I kept saying that the charac­ters “click”, that “they really are a pair of kindred spirits”, that they “have a lot in common”.  That kind of talk is concerned with essential affinities and thus with the long-term sustainability of their relationship.  But this time around I was more struck by the miracle of the moment.  Gadzooks, here is someone I actively want to spend time with!  And not only that⁠—the feeling is mutu­al!  The person I actively want to spend time with actively wants to spend time with me too!  Forget about axes of compatibility, forget about the future: for either of those things to be true is a marvel and for them to be true simultaneously is such a rarity as to be worth making a movie about.  Rescore: 14 ➞ 11 (not a seri­ous dip in my estimation of the film, more a recalibration of the scale).

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Charlie Kaufman, Pierre Bismuth, and Michel Gondry, 2004
Last writeup: 2004.0806

Why did I put this movie into the pantheon twenty years ago?  A lot of it was probably spillover effect from Being John Malko­vich: I expected a masterpiece; it turned out to be good; there­fore, another masterpiece!  But I had a look at my original article and it wasn’t exactly a rave⁠—I basically just ticked through the themes in a way that gave little indication that when the link to the article got moved over to the archive page, the title of the movie would have a green dot next to it.  So exploring how my opinion has changed will require some guesswork as to what my opinion was in the first place.

But let’s give it a go!  The premise of this movie is that a sad sack named Joel discovers that the woman he’s been seeing for the past two years, Clementine, has gone to a company called Lacu­na, Inc., to have him erased from her memory.  Distraught, he goes to Lacuna to have her erased from his.  Most of the movie takes place in a surrealistic mindscape, as we accompany Joel through his memories of Clementine, which dissolve around him as they play out: bystanders wink out of existence, books on the shelves of the Barnes & Noble go blank, houses collapse.  But as the process moves from the most recent memories to those fur­ther back, when things between them were better, he changes his mind and works with Clementine’s avatar to find a way to evade the eraser.

To the extent that movies are experience delivery systems (Pat­tern 25), the experience on offer here is mainly the roller coaster ride through that surrealistic mindscape, about which I had mixed feelings.  I liked some of the subtler touches, like signs in the background fading into empty rectangles, but some of the big set pieces were not for me.  For instance, it might seem like an odd choice to cast Jim Carrey as Joel the introvert, but then in the mindscape he plays himself as a child and a toddler and even a baby, and okay, yeah, there he is doing Jim Carrey stuff.  I don’t think this was ever really my thing, but I think I was probably a little more open to surrealism in general twenty years ago, so that might have accounted for some points I would not award today.

Also, in order for the premise to work, the central relationship has to have soured to the point that the characters want to not merely break up but forget each other’s very existence.  If they hate each other that much without justification, they look kind of stupid.  If they hate each other that much with justification, at least one of them is going to be so unsympathetic that it will be hard to root for them to save their relationship unless it’s in a “you @#$%ers deserve each other” sort of way.  As it turns out, Clementine is pretty awful⁠—her last fight with Joel is in part over the fact that she’s sideswiped his car against a fire hydrant while driving drunk.  I understand (at least, better than I once did) that many of the sorts of things that would be unforgivable in a stranger don’t make you abruptly give up on someone you love.  But Clementine is a stranger to the viewers, and even if we look at her through Joel’s eyes, I mean, c’mon, you don’t recover from that until she recognizes that what she’s done goes way beyond the pale and that she has to go into treatment.  Instead she goes to Lacuna.  Then, when we do follow the trail of memo­ries far enough back to make it back to the good times, we run into another problem.  My original article came out before the phrase “manic pixie dream girl” was popularized, so the phrase I used was for the sort of character Clementine is was “vivacious free spirit teaches repressed guy how to live”.  However, I said that one of the strengths of the film is that Clementine is not a vivacious etc.  Why did I say that?  Mainly on the basis that she says she isn’t.  And, yes, unlike some manic pixie stories, Eternal Sunshine does show the initial thrill fade and does show that Clementine is far from a dream girl.  But still, the good memories are of Clementine coaxing Joel onto a frozen river with no fear that the ice might break, frolicking with him on a snowy beach, breaking into a vacation home and stealing the owners’ liquor, etc.  That is manic pixie stuff.  Meanwhile, it’s not like Joel has much to recommend him either!  The Clementine of 2004 com­plains that he’s boring; the Clementine of 2002 seems to pursue him mainly because there wouldn’t be a story otherwise.  I sus­pect that twenty years ago, I might have said that the main char­acters of a movie don’t need to be sympathetic, and the fact that these aren’t⁠—in ’04 I described them as “if not actively annoy­ing, not people I’d really want to spend time with”⁠—allows us to watch the movie with scientific detachment, without the distrac­tion of rooting for those crazy kids to make it work.  But these days there’s a lower ceiling on a movie I end up watching with scientific detachment.  (See Pattern 44.)

So the points that this film hangs on to are mainly a tribute to the other themes I mentioned in the original article.  It does leave the viewer with a lot of food for thought.  Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?  Are couples arbitrary?  (The movie shows the same people attracted to one another after getting mindwiped⁠—and shows that the same romantic script can work twice on a mindwiped person, but not when it comes from a different aspiring partner.  Interesting!)  And how would you react, in the infatuation stage of a relation­ship, to hear your own mental catalogue of grievances conveni­ently stored on a cassette?  I do hear cassettes are making a comeback!

Rescore: 16 ➞ 12

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