Trigger warning: the following article contains potentially distressing material detailing the aftermath of a nuclear stike, including specific harm to children.
If Peter Watkins’ 1960s docudrama, The War Game, imagined the arrival of the bomb as an “enormous door slamming in the depths of hell”, then its depiction in Mick Jackson’s Threads rips the wood right off its hinges. Picture for a moment the rotting stench of human remains piled up in the corridor of a hospital; the agonised screams of children receiving amputations without anaesthetic; rats feasting on the innards of your recently deceased loved ones. Yes, this makes for a horrific picture. But the description can offer but a tenth of the mental anguish Jackson’s fallout-event film generates, close to four decades later.
So many of cinema’s greatest, most harrowing treatments of prospective nuclear Armageddon achieve their terror through puncturing the steel of government warmongering, exposing the unadulterated humanity of the men behind it: think Henry Fonda in Fail Safe, his pensive staring to the tune of bleeps and bloops on a giant map; or J Robert Oppenheimer and those guilt-sodden eyes in Nolan’s eponymous biopic. Ordinary society is oft an unseen casualty rendered so through the decisions of a few morally conflicted men in suits.
But what makes Threads so ineffably petrifying is how it re-configures our view of this entirely plausible nightmare; those sweaty men of power are cast off into the shadows, leaving us – your annoying kid brother; your fretful parents; your blasé apolitical mate – in the centre of the blast zone.
The biggest losers in an unwinnable war
Jackson – combined with the universal yet fiercely local penmanship of Barnsley man Barry Hines – embedded Threads into the psyche of the nation so deeply by attacking the overly optimistic idea that London, or another far-off city of greater strategic import, would be the sole casualty of a nuclear salvo.
Instead, working people from 1984 Sheffield, like Ruth (Karen Meagher) and Jimmy (Reece Dinsdale), our young protagonists scrambling to prepare for their first child, are the biggest losers in an unwinnable war of someone else’s design. Their familiar faces obscured by the dust and smoke to come are ours. The couple’s lived reality resembles ours, too. Hines – whose at once rich and dour exhibition of proletarian life lends itself so well to the colour of Ken Loach’s social responsibility movies, as much as his own novels – paints Jimmy and Ruth with the vibrant tones of working class culture; strife, hope and all.
Jimmy quarrels with his folks over Ruth’s baby news; the kid brother, Michael, grapples with his Epoch gamebox; the sister teases with questions about nuptials; Jimmy and Ruth opt to have the baby anyway, dreaming up all of life’s riches still in store as they strip the wallpaper of their new apartment. This is life as it is: ‘don’t let the bastards grind you down’ style.
So it’s all the more troubling when this familiarity starts to fade into the background: news bulletins frantic with talk of a Soviet-led coup in Iran metamorphose from background static into tangible signs of catastrophe; local officials are corralled into emergency posts; F4 Phantoms screech ahead; protesters are met with armed force; shops are left bare. There’s talk of ‘stopping’ the doomsday clock, but this chain of mistakes and miscalculations have already reached the fuse: there’s a white flash and then silence.
A blanket of grey death
And so begins humanity’s swirling down the plughole of nuclear annihilation. From here, Jackson recalls a modern Gustav Doré in the way he illustrates the visceral pain and suffering of those caught up in the first 80 megatons to hit the UK: calcined corpses litter demolished buildings; stray animals asphyxiate on smoke; children’s toys melt with their owners.
But most grotesque of all is the single shot of a mother clutching a charred newborn, a bond forever broken by an evil too ineffable for words. Jimmy is never seen again, nor anyone else who disappears in the blast. And Ruth – now orphaned, pregnant and alone – is left to fend for herself in the coldest of nuclear winters.
Of course, the possibility of nuclear war between the West and the Soviets predates Threads: its mutation from a distant paranoia into a real, present threat had played in the minds of the public since the Cuban Missile Crisis, over 20 years earlier; not to mention 1983’s closest nuclear close-call in history, Ronald Reagan’s railing against the Soviet Union as an “evil empire”, or the British government’s laughably misinformed Protect and Survive campaign.
But Jackson took this fear and transformed it into a monster more hideous than any news story could convey, positioning the most likely victims of a fallout – working bodies from industrial cities – in fictional images more real than reality.
So is the effect of Paul Vaughan’s ‘Horizon voice’, whose steely, objective commentary on the ensuing winter cements the accompanying images in the permanency of fact. Just hearing the broadcaster document the 500 megatons of dust in the air, thus robbing Britain of any meaningful food security or light, leaves us begging for these poor people to succumb to a quick death.
After all, the casualties of the blast have been spared radiation sickness, starvation and the fate of the ‘20 million corpses’ that line the street. But luck is a rarer currency than water now; hope but a distant memory. All that’s left is the blanket of grey death across the skyline and the pestilence our children inherit.
Renewed, mutated horror
Threads’ release in September 1984 was coined ‘the night Britain didn’t sleep’ for good reason. Traumatised school children who viewed the film as part of their syllabus – including my own parents – tossed and turned as they imagined the future wasteland awaiting them; new mothers fretted how radiation might poison the life inside of them, if they were to survive at all; the nation had been front-and-centre witnesses to their own stewing in a Dante’s Inferno-style hell.
But what of today’s audience – those young human beings who are watching Threads for the first time, at one of the most dangerous periods in human history? Uncomfortable viewing is an understatement, for these scenes which convey the whole gamut of our collective nuclear extinction do not feel like ‘if’scenarios, but ‘when’.
Doomsday Clock at 90 seconds to midnight
In January this year, The Bulletin for Atomic Scientists reset their watch to 90 seconds to midnight, and it’s easy to see why: Vladimir Putin has opted for Russia to ‘suspend’ its New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, aligning with advisor Sergei Karaganov’s calls to deploy limited nuclear strikes on Western Europe, as well as the state’s Defence Ministry threatening to hit British military facilities.
In Oceania, Australia, the UK and the US continue with their already problem-riddled AUKUS deterrence pact, aiming to deter China, whose naval growth (between 2014 and 2018) exceeded the combined tonnage of the Royal Navy, and whose goods account for 27% of all Australia’s two-way foreign trade – an act of economic suicide.
And all over the world, the nine nuclear-armed states spent 13.4% ($10.8bn) more on their arsenal in 2023 than 2022, wasting billions on a technology designed to eradicate life over preserving it, thus edging us closer to a final miscalculation.
In reference to her on-screen character, Karen Meagher said “everyone knows a Ruth or Jimmy”. And as we enter what seems to be a second Cold War, I fear she may be more right than she knows.
CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO OUR CROWDFUNDER
HELP US BECOME STRONGER SO THAT WE CAN CONTINUE TO DELIVER POWERFUL CITIZEN JOURNALISM!
