The celluloid application of the apocalyptic construct is largely indicative of its far-reaching cultural implications – as a concept so explicitly linked to notions of religion, spirituality, and postmodernism, divergent portrayals in film can help illuminate the inherent dualisms that can both inhibit and magnetize the power of the End of Days as a construct. The way the myth is treated cinematically serves as a reflection on the temporality of the anxieties that reside within our own culture, particularly in the mid 1980s, when the presence of waning Cold War ideals and the encroaching reality of globalization imbued the apocalyptic film climate with contemporaneous real-world inspirations.
In the introduction to Reel Revelations: Apocalypse and Film, authors Lee Quinby and John Walliss note the evolution of apocalyptic film from its formative years, when the genre’s links to the Book of Revelation were more explicit, to the Cold War years, when “both [the] religious and secular film industries tapped a widening fear of nuclear devastation to produce a slew of end-of-the-world films ranging in focus from social critique (On the Beach, 1959) to satire (Dr. Strangelove, 1964) to hope for salvation (The Late, Great Planet Earth, 1979)” (Quinby, Wallis 1). The influence of Revelation is still apparent in more contemporary apocalyptic film, though perhaps not as perceptible as the political tone embraced by films whose directors were influenced by Cold War-era anxieties.
In August and September of 1984, two films were released in the United States and the United Kingdom, respectively, that presented radically divergent portraits of the end of the world. The first film, John Milius’ Red Dawn, is a hyperbolic ode to anti-Communism and American nationalism that distinctly combined the trappings of a teen movie with the rabid, justifiable violence of an epic war saga. Red Dawn is without a doubt an elaboration of popular Cold War-era American attitudes of the time, and it represents a unique perspective on the land of the free as it might exist after a full-scale invasion – of Cubans and Soviets, nonetheless. A little over a month later, Mick Jackson’s BBC telefilm Threads was broadcast in households throughout the United Kingdom. The film operates on entirely contrasting notions that differentiate it significantly from Red Dawn’s Hollywoodized, populist overtones – it is an incredibly brutal, hopeless, and despondently grim portrayal of nuclear war, and its aesthetic style that borrows heavily from documentary film expounds its innate blend of bleak realism and prophetic warnings. The two films’ antithetical motivations speak not only to their national affiliation but also to a more implicit divergence in prevailing social attitudes that became more pronounced as the Cold War drew to an end. Less than a year after the release of Red Dawn and Threads, Geoff Murphy’s The Quiet Earth entered the apocalyptic cultural lexicon as a New Zealand film oddity that relishes in the silent, endless irrevocability of an ambiguous Doomsday. As another reference point in the apocalyptic discourse of the day, its unconventional aesthetic and treatment of the subject shows a marked departure from both previous films. Its release in country whose politics enforced nuclear disarmament is a reflection on its depiction of the apocalypse that strays from placing blame on those responsible, a characteristic that sets it apart from both Red Dawn and Threads and welcomes it into a more postmodern version of the concept.
The rapid succession of these three films on a chronological scale is hardly coincidental. The presence of three incredibly divergent portraits of the apocalypse between 1984 and 1985 help to illuminate a fascinating reality of a time period where filmmakers approached the End with a fearlessness and sense of subjectivity, not to mention the residual power all three films have had on the consciousness of modern-day viewers. What can these three film’s existence illuminate about the world during that time and the way developed, highly Westernized nations embraced opposing popular depictions of the apocalypse? From a sociological standpoint, all three are pertinent in the examination of that period’s treatment of the matter. Decades are defined in mostly irrelevant generalizations, and as such, analyzing a time periods as it pertains to these films is largely unhelpful. However, in terms of apocalyptic fiction, the time period is ripe with references and cultural markers of a fascination with the apocalyptic myth and its trappings.
Aside from clichéd literary allusions, the year 1984 was a prime year for apocalyptic belief – shortly after the release of Red Dawn, Mikhail Gorbachev was instituted as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and less than two years after The Quiet Earth was released, he announced perestroika. Without a doubt, the Cold War had evolved into something very different from when it began – and while concerns for outright nuclear war were lessening, the countries directly involved were undeniably changed as the world lumbered towards the new millennium. A year before Gorbachev’s election, the Soviet Union boycotted the Olympics in Los Angeles. One day after the release of Red Dawn, President Ronald Reagan was broadcast via radio during a sound check, jokingly saying “ My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes” (National Public Radio Archives). A month after the release of Threads, The Provisional Irish Republican Army attempted to assassinate Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and members of the Cabinet in the Brighton hotel bombing. In an official statement by the IRA released that day, the organization stated its intentions succinctly, saying, “Today we were unlucky. But remember – we only have to be lucky once. You have to be lucky all of the time” (BBC). In November of 1985, Reagan and Gorbachev met for the first time in Geneva, a symbolic gesture that was seen as a signifier of hope. The complex dualisms and cultural nuance displayed by these three films is underlined by their link to modern chronology and the final years of the Cold War. The relationship between these films and their release dates is not causal nor does it imply correlation between pervading attitudes – the link is far subtler and merits thorough analysis from multiple levels.
As art, entertainment, and objects of their time, these three apocalyptic films comment on highly different but temporally parallel themes, producing a multilayered capsule into a specific junction in the development of the Apocalypse myth and its relevance to contemporary society.
“Soviet Union suffers worst wheat harvest in 55 years. Labor and food riots in Poland. Soviet troops invade. Cuba and Nicaragua reach troop strength goals of 500,000. El Salvador and Honduras fall. Greens Party gains control of West German Parliament. Demands withdrawal of nuclear weapons from European soil. Mexico plunged into revolution. NATO dissolves. United States stands alone.”
The opening title sequence of John Milius’ Red Dawn, released in August of 1984, flagrantly ignores the “show, don’t tell” maxim of filmmaking in its abbreviated, succinct prologue that details the beginning of the film’s fictional World War III. The text is displayed in yellow capital letters against a black background as ominous strings reverberate through the soundtrack, ultimately leading to a swelling, triumphantly-scored opening credit sequence that transitions from soaring blue skies to a series of picturesque images of pastoral Midwestern wilderness – open plains, jutting plateaus, a virgin stream, and an idyllic stand of trees. We see a quiet street in an archetypal American town – complete with a Chevron – and a three-story, white wooden house on a tree-lined block. A newsboy rides his bike through the Rockwellian tableau, and a group of schoolchildren scurry across a street as a traffic director flags them along with approval. The camera pans down the length of a bronze statue of Theodore Roosevelt, perched atop a base inscribed with text that reads, “The Rough Rider – ‘Far better it is to dare mighty things than to take rank with those poor, timid spirits who know neither victory nor defeat.’ – Theodore Roosevelt, 1899.”
The stirringly composed and decidedly American imagery that make up the film’s introduction are indicative of its overall treatment of more cosmic concerns – and the film’s tone adheres strictly to the outline provided by the aforementioned scenes. Red Dawn is a film whose narrative is inextricably accompanied by the political climate of the United States during the 1980s, and its lasting influence is owed largely to its status as a socio-political indicator of prevailing American attitudes of the time.
In her review published on the day of the film’s release, New York Times film critic Janet Maslin prefaced her recognition of the film’s “rabidly inflammatory” nature with a concise opening:
“The place: a small, all-American town. The time: sooner than you think, mister. A history teacher is telling his class about Ghenghis Khan, when he looks out the window and sees enemy parachutists landing. We learn from a 15-second preamble that the United States has lost all its allies, and that the Soviet Union is badly in need of food. Soon enough, we see, beneath a bumper sticker that says ”They can have my gun when they pry it from my cold dead fingers,” the corpse of a American citizen, being relieved of his weapon by an invading soldier” (Maslin).
Before the reverent visual allusion to the Second Amendment noted by Maslin, the teacher becomes the first of numerous casualties in the film – and his demise, along with a student that is shot and two other who are hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, occurs within the first five minutes of the film. We see him emerge from the classroom to investigate the descending paratroopers, and soon after, the ominous looking soldiers outfitted in loose-fitting camouflage jumpsuits gun him down. Their masks and goggles render them faceless, but anyone with a passing knowledge of American foreign relations at the time of the film’s release can assume their allegiance to the Soviet Union, direct or otherwise. Soon the scene returns to the city street shown in the opening of the film, which is pockmarked with smoking piles of rubble and abandoned vehicles and in the midst of hurtling, explosive projectiles. Innocent town residents march down the street with their hands on their head in surrender as the unidentified invaders prod them with gun barrels. The America we know has been compromised, fractured, and destroyed by an opposing force, barely ten minutes into the movie, and Calumet, Colorado, the setting of the film (though it was filmed in Las Vegas), is no longer a bastion of wholesome Americana. It is a warzone – its residents prisoners.
Authors Rhonda Hammer and Douglas Kellner pinpoint the crux of these scenes of domestic invasion in their chapter of American Cinema of the 1980s: Themes and Variations, edited by Stephen Prince. The historical context of Red Dawn’s release is pertinent to its impact, as the film “offers a compendium of the period’s anticommunist anxieties. [It] appeared during a period of intense debate over Reagan’s support of the Nicaraguan contras, accompanied by a military build-up and hostile posture toward the Soviet Union.” In essence, the film embraces Reagan’s position on the lack of American military action in Nicaragua – specifically, the authors state, the president’s “warning that if we didn’t fight the communists in Nicaragua, we would have to fight them in Texas” (Hammer, Kellner 114). The ethos of the film not only embraces Reagan’s all-or-nothing, Manichaeistic declaration – it buys into it wholesale. Red Dawn operates on a similar level to other commercially popular films of the decade, like Invasion USA (1985), Rocky IV (1985), and Top Gun (1986), all films that “demonize the Soviet Union and portray it as Reagan himself did, as an ‘Evil Empire’ seeking to impose its will on the free world,” writes Stephen Prince in the introduction to American Cinema of the 1980s. Prince states that Reagan revived the Cold War of the 1950s, and Red Dawn and its thematic brethren can be described as what he calls “New Cold War productions” (Prince 12).
The film follows a group of scrappy young high-school students into the isolated refuge of the mountains surrounding Calumet. Jed Eckert (Patrick Swayze) leads the group, along with his brother Matt (Charlie Sheen) and their friends Daryl (Darren Dalton), Danny (Brad Savage), Robert (C. Thomas Howell), and Aardvark (Doug Toby). Eckert, the captain of the football team, is a bastion of American masculinity and morality – and his intuitive and quick-thinking nature leads the group to Robert’s father’s sporting goods store on the outskirts of town where they stock up on supplies and weaponry before venturing into the mountains. A subsequent trip back into Calumet exposes the true nature of the invasion, when Jed and Matt learn that their father and many other residents are being held in a Soviet reeducation camp. They find out that Robert’s father was executed by the Soviets after the enemy finds discrepancies in the store’s firearm inventory, and they visit the local Mason family and agree to take in their granddaughters, who attended high school with they boys. Through their encounters back in Calumet, they learn that they are now in “Occupied America,” and that a large portion of the United States is under the joint control of the Soviet Union and Cuba.
Milius’ filmography speaks towards a level of consistency in thematic material that is highly indicative of his own tendencies to pigeonhole the American psyche into machismo-infused, hyper violent parables complete with square-jawed protagonists and black-hearted foreign enemies. As a screenwriter, he is known for having written the now ubiquitous snappy one-liners in the Dirty Harry (1971-88) series – “Go ahead, make my day” – and Apocalypse Now (1979) – “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” (Patterson). Milius also directed and wrote seminal camp classic Conan the Barbarian (1982) in addition to having written two Tom Clancy adaptations, The Hunt for Red October (1990) and Clear and Present Danger (1994), and is an active member of the National Rifle Association’s board. Milius continues to embrace his label as Conservative anomaly among the ranks of other prominent members of notoriously left-leaning Hollywood, and his association with groups like the NRA do little to distance his political ideology from the red-blooded imagery that pervades his oeuvre – though his joking assertion that he would “have Rush Limbaugh drawn and quartered” in a 2009 interview with Thom Patterson certainly sets him apart from stereotypical conservatives of today.
The heavy handedness of the film’s narrative is a constant point of jarringly resolute social commentary – Aardvark drinks the blood of a deer he shoots in the mountains, the concentration camp is a converted drive-through movie theater playing Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, the only item in the post-occupied drugstore is perfume, and the camera lingers on images of imposing Soviets in furry hats tossing books into flaming oil drums. A group of Americans are lined up and shot as they sing “America the Beautiful.” Maslin adequately describes the dualistic nature of such images in her review, stating “those who consider the events set forth in Red Dawn to be probable are no more apt to find the movie credible than those who regard them as ludicrous.” However, there is an inherent effectiveness in Milius’ literal interpretation of the possibility of Communist takeover – and his intentions, though not always articulate, are genuine, entertaining, and effective, and the film far from monotonous.
Perhaps one of the most disturbing depictions of nuclear war in the cinematic medium, the BBC telefilm Threads (1984) is an evocative, sobering portrayal of the aftermath of a large-scale attack on England. Written by British novelist Barry Hines and directed by Mick Jackson, who worked strictly in non-fiction film prior to Threads, the film takes place in the midsized city of Sheffield in northern England. As a fictional work with the aesthetic and structure of a documentary, it draws heavily on research and footage from Jackson’s non-fictional film A Guide to Armageddon (1982), but it is primarily a drama with an emphasis on non-diegetic material introduced as narration, captions, or title screens to illuminate the factual basis for scenes. In the original airings on the BBC – once in September and another in August of 1984 – viewers were introduced to the film with a disclaimer stating that “some of the following scenes may cause distress…” (Collinson), a warning that is perhaps too lenient in its perfunctory nature. Threads has been praised for its high level of realism, and in turn, its deeply unsettling content. Notably, after its initial broadcast run, it was not screened for almost two decades until 2003.
The ethos of the film is apparent from its opening scene, which features macro shots of a spider weaving a web. In conjunction with the consistent documentary aesthetic adopted by Jackson, a voiceover narrates the pre-credit sequence:
“In an urban society, everything connects. Each person’s needs are fed by the skills of many others. Our lives are woven together in a fabric, but the connections that make society strong also make it vulnerable.”
Via the opening narration, it becomes apparent that Threads seeks not to implicate specific entities – it places blame on all of humanity and not a tangible other. The film follows a familiar narrative construct by focusing on a young, unmarried couple in Sheffield, Ruth Beckett (Karen Meagher) and Jimmy Kemp (Reece Dinsdale). Ruth’s illegitimate pregnancy is introduced early in the film, amidst diegetic news media that presents the global political climate in snippets over radio and television broadcasts, cursory pans over newsstands, and intermittent conversations among characters that touch on the increasingly dire tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. The film presents the characters’ reaction towards news of the international spiral towards war as entirely blasé – Jimmy is more concerned with timely football scores than diplomacy, and Ruth faces her own reservations about her pregnancy.
When the Soviet Union invades Iran, the United States government intervenes with support from the British military. The film’s characters, and consequently, its viewers, witness these events from a removed perspective that mimics how we experience news in the real world – via the narrow and easily dismissed gaze of mainstream media. According to the British Film Institute’s website on the film, it “treat(s) media reports of international tension [as] largely ignored … background chatter,” a narrative choice that “question(s) the lack of public education in nuclear issues, but also establish(es) the interpersonal and socio-economic ‘Threads’ of society and create(s) empathy with characters in everyday situations, heightening the shock when nuclear war breaks out and those ‘Threads’ unravel” (Rollinson). The use of a civilian viewpoint deconstructs the discrepancy between official responses from large entities, like government and the media, a familiar trope of other texts in the vein of Threads, where the “disparity between international political events and private experience had already emerged” in novels like Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), another text “where suburban characters have no meaningful connection with the events going on,” as observed by author David Seed in British Science Fiction Television: A Hitchhiker’s Guide (Seed 165).
The rapidly unfolding scenario that follows the Soviet invasion of Iran is bleak – beginning on March 5th, the conflict escalates considerably on May 11th, when a United States submarine is attacked in the Persian Gulf. American troops are deployed in Iran to block Soviet advancement towards oil fields, and a news broadcast overheard by Jimmy in a pub announces that the Soviets have begun to facilitate the movement of warheads into Iran. Britain begins deploying troops to Europe, and commercial airlines and shipping routes are taken over by the government in preparation for wartime. When US demands for joint withdrawal in Iran are ignored as the Soviets continue a troop surge in the area, an attack on a Russian base is ordered. In response, Russians deploy a nuclear missile to destroy the American-led airborne offensive. A series of dire conflicts begin to appear in rapid succession as a US carrier is sunk, Cuba is blockaded, and the British government issues a constant stream of warnings and advisories to its citizens. In addition to following the plight of both the Kemp and Beckett families, the film focuses secondarily on Clive Sutton (Harry Beety), who serves as the Chief Executive of the Sheffield City Council. The function of Sutton’s narrative juxtaposes the government-sanctioned response to the ongoing crisis and provides a distinct foil to the experiences of the areas civilians. As the conflict escalates, Sutton and other officials take refuge in a bunker, and domestic telecommunications begins to buckle under the weight of war. The civic preparation imposed by the government takes on a highly problematic role in Threads, and though Hines has strayed from political commentary, the abject failure of Britain’s preimposed regulatory measures intended to brace for nuclear attack is notably evident in the film.
On the morning of May 26th, a warhead is denotated over the North Sea, crippling power and communications in a radius that affects most of Britain. The first nuclear warhead hits RAF Finningly, an air base in close proximity to Sheffield, and another warhead detonates in the immediate area. The film’s account of the attacks are harrowing and appropriately chaotic – sirens blare as civilians run amok, transformers explode as a result of the energy pulse, and a brief, blinding flash appears, followed by a deafening roar and clouds of debris that descend on the city. A mushroom cloud appears on the horizon as a character looks on with an unparalleled level of shock, awe, and horror, followed by an adequately terse verbal recognition of “Jesus Christ, they’ve done it… They’ve done it.” The camera focuses on a woman soiling her pants and images of the two families barricading their respective “safe” rooms with mattresses. A title screen reads “Blast casualties between 2½ and 9 million.” A second detonation imprints another disruptive white flash that underlines an image of a woman in mid-scream, followed by brief visuals of solids turning to ash, milk bottles melting, people spontaneously combusting, and structures evaporating – initially accompanied by an eerie silence, and then a howling, violent funnel of wind and static noise. Another title card reads. “East-West exchange 3000 megatons. 210 megatons total fall on UK.” A housecat squirms in near-paralysis and a blackened hand reaches upwards from a flaming pile of rubble. All is lost.
The film follows the nation’s downward spiral, ending thirteen years after the attack when population levels have dwindled to 5 million, a return to Medieval-era figures. Ruth’s daughter, now an adolescent, is shown speaking to a male companion in barely intelligible Pidgin English. Ruth is shown cooking a rabbit over an open flame when she is approached by two male teenagers who chase after her for the food. She darts through the fractured rubble in an attempt to escape, and one of her pursuants is shot. As she fights over the rabbit with the other boy, their scuffle transitions to copulation, and the scene cuts away to Ruth, some time later, in labor. The film ends after she gives birth to a bloody, stillborn infant in a makeshift hospital. Ruth holds the lifeless wad of bloody bandages, and the scene cuts to blackness in the film’s conclusion.
The film’s presentation is brutal but not nihilistic due to its strict basis in fact and despite its notable avoidance of aligning with any particular creed, it is most easily defined as a film that is critical of the universal obsession with nuclear energy that plagued the Cold War years, and secondarily, an assessment of Britain’s (and by extension, any government’s) useless precautions against the use of nuclear weaponry.
In a political fiasco perhaps worthy of a cinematic adaptation itself, a debate over nuclear opposition reached its peak in June of 1984 when the leader of New Zealand’s conservative National Party, Robert Muldoon, announced a snap election while visibly intoxicated on national television (NZ 1984: Snap Election). Muldoon’s party governed with a precarious majority over the country’s parliament, and the opposing center-left, socially progressive Labour Party, led by David Lange, was poised to oust Muldoon and his party’s dominance in the forthcoming election. Muldoon’s inarticulate announcement was in response to in-fighting between National Party members, who split into factions regarding the future of nuclear weaponry in the country after Labour Party member of Parliament Richard Prebble introduced a bill to abolish nuclear armed and powered ships in addition to banning nuclear reactors within the country’s borders. When Marilyn Waring, a National Party member, crossed the floor to support the Labour Party’s efforts to pass the bill, Muldoon was prompted to announce a premature election, and as a result, the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act of 1987 was passed as the final nail in the head of a series of treaties beginning in the 1970s that discouraged pro-nuclear practices in New Zealand. Specifically, the act implemented five treaties as law, the primary of which “establish(ed) New Zealand (as) a Nuclear Free Zone” and “promot(ed) and encourag(ed) an active and effective contribution by New Zealand to the essential process of disarmament and international arms control” (New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act 1987). As a result of the act’s passage, the United States suspended treaty obligations with the country – a move that was largely due to an incident in February of 1985, when the New Zealand government forbid the USS Buchanan, a destroyer, from entering one of the country’s ports.
According to author Jon R. Stone in Reel Revelations, “movies function both as a reflection and as a critique of society. Most, however, while pointing to perilous flaws in modern life, do not point to other-worldly sources as the basis for their critique of culture” (Stone 59). Like Red Dawn and Threads, Geoff Murphy’s The Quiet Earth (October 1985) speaks to a perspective that is inextricably linked to its national affiliation. However, it presents an apocalypse that acts as a foil to the scenarios presented in Red Dawn and Threads – instead of portraying the End as a patriotic parable, in the case of Red Dawn, or as an unimaginable Doomsday resulting from international conflict, as in Threads, The Quiet Earth sees the End in a manner that in retrospect owes more to postmodernism than timely fears of nuclear war. While the film’s themes certainly embrace a post-millenial view of the apocalypse, it remains a product of its time that addresses its relevance with a level of sophistication that was unparalleled in popular fictional texts of the day. Producer and co-writer Sam Pillsbury associated the film’s pertinence in an interview with Andreas Heinemann:
“The metaphor is clearly apocalyptic and the potential for nuclear fallout was very much at the forefront of my life at the time. It was about then (that) me and some of my friends had what was called the peace squadron and would go out and blockade American nuclear boats that tried to get into Auckland Harbor. They succeeded, but we made a spectacular demonstration – we were on the front page of the New York Times. I think the broader concern was global responsibility” (Heinemann).
The stated ethos of placing responsibility in the hands of all is also examined in Threads – but The Quiet Earth’s message operates on a divergent mechanism. Instead of actualizing the suffering and loss produced by apathy, it breeds a layered sense of transcendent philosophical beliefs into the familiar trappings of a sci-fi narrative. The film’s premise was lifted from British author Craig Harrison’s 1981 novel of the same name, and Harrison also co-wrote the screenplay.
The Quiet Earth opens with an extended sequence of a sunrise, set to a redolent score that is repeated throughout the film. A man lies asleep in the nude in a birds-eye view of a bedroom. The sky reddens, and the sun is blotted out in a flurry of abstract celestial imagery. The man, Zac Hobson (played by native Kiwi Bruno Lawrence, in a role originally intended for Jack Nicholson, who was turned down due to outlandish salary demands [New Zealand Film Archive]), spends the first third of the film engaged in the trappings of utter isolation, as it seems he is alone in the world. All other humans seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth. As the narrative unfolds, viewers become aware of Hobson’s personal involvement with the mysterious mass disappearance. As a scientist working in the New Zealand-branch of an international research entity, it seems that he is at least partially to blame, though later in the film, when he comes across a young woman, Joanne (Alison Routledge), a conversation illuminates the true perpetrators of the global desertion:
JOANNE
Are you trying to tell me that you and your white-coated cronies up the road there really had something to do with… this?
ZAC
Don’t know. It was an American idea – they were experimenting with energy transmissions through a grid surrounding the earth. Aircraft drawing directly from that grid so they wouldn’t have to refuel – that sort of thing.
JOANNE
Of course. An exclusive, all-male club playing God with the universe.
Naturally, it was the Americans who caused such a vast, irrevocable blunder – but the core construct of the event as an apocalypse is examined from multiple perspectives when the characters begin to discuss what really happened. Zac says that he “get(s) the feeling [they’re] either dead or in a different universe.” When Zac and Joanne find a Māori man, Api (Pete Smith), they begin to understand what they have in common: all three experienced the event at the exact moment of their deaths, saving them from vanishing. It is implied via flashbacks that Zac committed suicide by overdosing, Joanne’s passing resulted from electrocution by a hair dryer, and Api was killed in a fight. The moment of revelation that followed death was experienced by all three, as they discover. Api describes his experience as reaching a new level of understanding: “As I began to go unconscious, I could see it all happening. I was watching from high up… It was really peaceful, like a weight had been lifted off me. There was another thing… like a light, a long way off. I was traveling towards it – yearning to reach it. Suddenly, I felt the whole weight of life lift off me.” Both Zac and Joanne experience identical moments of revelation that coincided with their “death” that allows them to continue on together in an uninhabited world. Ultimately, they destroy the research facility to prevent another “Effect” from occurring, and Api tells Joanne that he is willing to sacrifice his life to drive explosives into the building. Before he can, Zac does just that – and resulting conclusion is steeped in ambiguity.
In Contemporary New Zealand Cinema, author Ann Hardy equates The Quiet Earth’s treatment of spirituality with the film’s national affiliation:
“The thematic territory of [the] narrative is psychic and spiritual partly because it is specifically not religious; that is, [it] deal(s) with nonmaterial explanations for life-events but [doesn’t] represent, in a manner which constitutes an endorsement of them, the tropes of Christianity, or of any other religion for that matter. In this, [it is] consistent with the generally secular, sceptical traditions of European New Zealand filmmaking and film criticism” (Hardy 120).
The film’s final scene sees Zac wake up on a beach in an unspecified location – is it Purgatory, Heaven, Hell – or the coastline of Wellington? The more cosmic options seem to be the most viable, as the horizon is dotted with column-like cloud formations and a massive, ringed planet that rises high in the sky. Regardless of the locale, the nature of the film’s apocalypse is clear. The End presented in The Quiet Earth is far more postmodern in construction than the blatant physical repercussions presented in Threads and Red Dawn – rather, it explores a Doomsday of realization and new awakenings.
The apocalyptic belief reflected in Red Dawn, Threads, and The Quiet Earth paint wholly disparate portraits of an age-old concept – and their place in history speaks to each film’s respective treatment of the apocalypse. The eighties were infused with anxieties stemming from numerous sources, and as the Cold War came to a close, it appears that the global sociopolitical climate was no less sound than it had been in the preceding years of uncertainty. Professor Alan Filreis notes the source of such ambiguous fears that led to the “Age of Anxiety” – “fragmentation was one fear. The loss of control was another. The bomb symbolized the two fears in one” (Filreis).
The ties that link the three films are less numerous than the factors that separate them, though their deeply unsettling content unites a significantly consistent ethos of anxiety. The contrasting themes presented in Red Dawn, Threads, and The Quiet Earth are evident in their dissimiliar overall structures, but when examined simultaneously in a historical context, they present a philosophy that meshes notably with other depictions of their time. The Cold War-era’s “espousal of a monstrous uncertainty both of future and morality” (Nuttall) went hand-in-hand with fear of mutual extermination (McGuigan 160), and such anxiety is apparent in all three films.
Of all three filmmakers, Milius is most readily labeled as an auteur due to his consistency in vision throughout his prolific career, though each director places personal concerns within the context of their respective films. The film’s continuing legacies are also reflections of the filmmaker’s intentions – Red Dawn was recently named one of the best conservative movies of all time by the National Review (Miller), and Threads has been rebroadcast in recent years to commemorate the anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United States military-led effort to capture Saddam Hussein was called “Operation Red Dawn” in the film’s honor (Noah), and film critics repeatedly list The Quiet Earth as one of the best cinematic interpretations of the apocalypse.
As stated by Jim McGuigan in Modernity and Postmodern Culture, our society doesn’t necessarily live with the same fears that plagued developed nations in the 1980s, but now, “anxiety is a widespread social phenomenon in the richer countries of the world, like the USA and Britain,” where it seems that a distinct societal more relates to the “feeling that even when and where things seem to be good, they are really rather bad” (McGuigan 161). Pandemics, vast technological advancements, the fear of environmental collapse, global warming, and sensationalized news media all have the ability to “whip up dark-age-type millennial fever” (Dunant, Porter ix) and induce levels of amorphous anxiety that are similar to the uncertainty of Cold War-era fears, and the current state of nuclear proliferation has done little to lessen unease. Ultimately, these three films can be viewed as transformative, temporal texts of a timeless concept – and their specific place in history is a necessary indicator of a unique period in apocalyptic thought. Their lasting impact in popular culture is underlined by the glut of films that addressed similar topical concerns in less distinctive manners, and their messages remain potent, striking, and perhaps most importantly, entertaining. After all, they examine one of the most complex constructs of humanity in a medium that is distinctly modern, mass-market, and accessible, all indicators that are mirrored in apocalyptic fiction of today. However, unlike most apocalyptic films of the 21st century, these three texts will carry on, in one way or another, thanks to their unparalleled glimpse into a bygone era whose ideals continue to pervade our society, a seeming contradiction that is above all perhaps the most frightening aspect of their enduring power.
Works Cited
Collinson, Gavin. “Threads.” BBC Four Drama. BBC, Dec. 2009. Web. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/cinema/features/threads.shtml>.
Conrich, Ian, and Stuart Murray, eds. Contemporary New Zealand Cinema: From New Wave to Blockbuster. London: I.B. Tauris &, 2008. Print.
Cook, John R., and Peter Wright, eds. British Science Fiction Television: A Hitchhiker’s Guide. London: I.B. Tauris &, 2006. Print.
Dunant, Sarah, and Roy Porter. The Age of Anxiety. London: Virago, 1996. Print.
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