🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
According to the critics, Golden Globes voters, and Vegas oddsmakers, Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is this year's Oscar frontrunner. The cinematic masterpiece is deserving of every accolade whether in performance, direction, or visual effects, with one notable exception. The filmmaker's missed the opportunity to describe how Oppenheimer's quest to save the world from nuclear oblivion was fulfilled, albeit posthumously, by a TV movie called The Day After.
In narrative oblige, the filmmakers were beholden to the mythological framing deployed in the Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Limited to two lengthy acts in glorious 70mm, audiences bore witness to a tragic fall from grace of J. Robert Oppenheimer. A three-hour character drama about the perilous combination of genius, arrogance, nationalism, and naivete. Sans a third act, a Hollywood ending, viewers were denied their Aristotelian catharsis. Not only had Oppenheimer "become Death, the destroyer of worlds" but the world was irrevocably set on the path to oblivion.
And, yet, we're still here. Thanks in great part, to a group of intrepid storytellers who helped pull the planet back from the nuclear brink.
In 1983, 20 years after the coda in which a despondent, broken Oppenheimer accepted an award from President Lyndon B. Johnson, Hollywood fulfilled Oppenheimer's mission. Salvation came from the least likeliest of sources. The Day After was a made-for-television disaster movie that imagined a nuclear attack on Kansas, including the aftermath with society's descent into a dystopian nightmare. As detailed in Apocalypse Television: How The Day After Helped End the Cold War, the film aired on broadcast television at its peak, just before it was digitized into a thousand channels on cable, and well before the Internet atomized the world into trillions of bytes and billions of memes. This was a time when only three networks ruled the airwaves and occupied, as one TV executive described, "the only book on the shelf."
In late 1979, ABC programming wizard Brandon Stoddard was inspired to make the film after witnessing the fictional meltdown of a nuclear power plant in the film The China Syndrome. Three weeks later, the world witnessed the actual partial meltdown of a nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island. Like Oppenheimer, Stoddard was transformed into yet another Greek mythological figure, a modern-day Cassandra, determined to use the power of a television movie to warn the world of the possibility of nuclear oblivion. Only, unlike Cassandra, people believed TV.
Stoddard's quest would take nearly four years to complete and involved dozens of creative collaborators, from screenwriters to producers to a famous, if famously obstreperous, A-list director. The journey was marked by continuous strife from advertiser flight, fraught battles on the set and in post-production, from the network to a backlash from the holy alliance of the Far Right composed of conservatives like William F. Buckley and televangelists like Jerry Falwell. The latter led an Armageddon cult convinced that nuclear war would lead to the second coming of Jesus. The greatest obstacle of all proved ironic when the White House, incapable of stopping the program from airing, launched a full-throttled publicity campaign to co-opt the film's message as proof that President Ronald Reagan's nuclear saber-rattling proved the ultimate deterrence.
A month before it aired, Reagan screened the film. Thereafter, the world would become safer.
Prior to The Day After, Reagan pursued a policy of "peace through strength" which included descriptions of "evil empires" and plans for building "star wars" defense laser weapons systems. Members of his administration had discussed plans for a "winnable nuclear war", even down to evacuation plans that had people fleeing cities based on their license plate numbers. Along with the film, a frightening series of events occurred over the fall of 1983 that pushed the world to the edge of the precipice. A short list included the Soviet Union blowing up planes with a congressman aboard, Middle East terrorists using car bombs obliterating Marine barracks in Lebanon, and U.S.-led invasions-slash-coups of tiny Caribbean islands under false pretenses. Thanks to recently released reports, we're also aware that the Soviets had become trigger happy, seconds away from launching World War III whether due to faulty instruments or intelligence.
In his diaries, Reagan wrote that the film was "powerfully done...very effective & left me greatly depressed." After The Day After, Reagan historians have described his "reversal," a remarkable pivot in policy and rhetoric towards the Soviet Union. Instead of evil empires, Reagan spoke of imaginary Soviet couples caring deeply about their children. Instead of space lasers, Reagan installed fax lines to the Kremlin in hopes of preventing any further false alarms. His administration was to pursue every possible means for detente and cooperation. Combined, all these efforts would ultimately lead to de-escalation of the arms race at least for the time being, until rogue states and old and emergent superpowers launch the next.
Although Oppenheimer denied us a Hollywood ending, The Day After delivered on the protagonist's mission and changed world history. Thanks to a band of Hollywood storytellers.
David Craig is the author of Apocalypse Television, a clinical professor at USC Annenberg, a visiting scholar at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center in the Institute for Rebooting Social Media, and a Global Fulbright Scholar.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
