274 Day After, The The Eighties in America
son Davies: A Mingling of Contrarieties. Ottawa, Ont.:
University of Ottawa Press, 2001.
Little, Dave.Catching the Wind in a Net: The Religious
Vision of Robertson Davies.Toronto: ECW Press,
2006.
Margaret Boe Birns
See also Literature in Canada; Literature in the
United States; Richler, Mordecai.
Day After, The
Identification Made-for-television movie
Date Aired on November 20, 1983
The Day Aftergraphically depicted the horrors of nuclear
war and, at least implicitly, criticized the mutual assured
destruction theor y upon which the United States’ security
policy depended in the early 1980’s. It was a widely seen
and discussed example of a common subgenre in 1980’s
American culture, a culture increasingly dominated by fear
of nuclear holocaust.
The apocalyptic danger of nuclear war had long
been a subject of films and television shows before
The Day Afterwas first broadcast to approximately
100 million American viewers in 1983. In that year,
the United States was again in the midst of an arms
race with the Soviet Union, increasing public anxi-
ety and making the broadcast seem particularly rele-
vant. Earlier treatments, moreover, had tended to be
low budget (for example, the 1963Twilight Zoneepi-
sode “The Old Man in the Cave”) or had focused on
the events leading up to such a war, rather than the
aftermath. The major exception to this, the power-
ful 1959 presentation of the end of the world inOn
the Beach, had treated the topic almost clinically, fea-
turing the unscathed but doomed Australians wait-
ing for the radioactive cloud to reach and kill them
too.
The Day After, by contrast, starkly depicted the ugly
brutality of nuclear destruction, although it also—as
its producers acknowledged—understated the case,
in part by portraying the United States being hit by
significantly fewer missiles than would actually occur
in a Soviet first strike. Still, the film painted a grisly
enough picture a third of the way into its duration,
when the pastoral life around Lawrence, Kansas, was
irrevocably destroyed by nuclear missiles targeting
the missile silos located there. By then, the film’s pro-
ducers had already taken their audience through the
vocabulary of the age: “launch on warning” warfare,
stage two alerts, and other prevailing concepts of nu-
clear warfare. Most interesting, the American Broad-
casting Company (ABC) followed the film by airing
a candid discussion of the dangers of the era, featur-
ing leading public figures, scientists, and commenta-
tors. Over time, its message spread. By 1987,The Day
Afterhad been shown in more than forty countries
abroad, including Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalizing
Soviet Union.
Impact The airing and subsequent widespread dis-
tribution of the film was highly successful in achiev-
ing one of its aims: It brought about widespread na-
tional and international discussion of the possible
consequences of nuclear warfare. Ironically, how-
ever, that discussion was not entirely of a pacifist na-
ture. Its scenario of Soviet aggression as the cause of
nuclear annihilation also bolstered President Ron-
ald Reagan’s argument at the time that the United
States could not afford to rely on arms parity with the
Soviet Union but needed demonstrable arms superi-
ority for the mutual assured destruction (MAD) sys-
tem to succeed. The arms reduction agreements
and accompanying discussions by Soviet and Ameri-
can leaders of means of averting catastrophe that the
film’s producers had deemed necessary came only
later, when the Soviet Union itself began to implode
peacefully near the end of the 1980’s and disinte-
grated into its constituent parts in the early years of
the following decade.
Further Reading
Gregg, Robert W.International Relations in Film. Boul-
der, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1998.
Jordan, Chris.Movies and the Reagan Presidency: Suc-
cess and Ethics. Westport: Conn.: Praeger, 2003.
Lipschutz, Ronnie D.Cold War Fantasies: Film, Fiction,
and Foreign Policy. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Little-
field, 2001.
Strada, Michael, and Harold Trope.Friend or Foe?
Russians in American Film and Foreign Policy. Lan-
ham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1997.
Joseph R. Rudolph, Jr.See also Cold War; Film in the United States; Rea-
gan, Ronald; Science-fiction films; Television;Te r m i-
nator, The.