Fair dues, The Atomic Cafe was an innovative piece of filmmaking for its time. Producers Pierce Rafferty, Kevin Rafferty and Jayne Loader knew that there was no way that they could get their CND-friendly message across directly without sounding like a load of pedantic scolds, so they dumped the narrative and went for using clips and soundtracks derived from stock footage. The result is genuinely funny in places, it does flow well for its 88 minutes running time, and seeing stock footage that was almost impossible to find before the Internet was fascinating back in '82, but none of this saves Cafe from emerging as a product of the Berkeley, Birkenstocks, and bong water set who talk smugly over their fair trade lattes about what a load of rubes infest the United States who won't do as their self-appointed betters tell them.
Cafe is one of those films that only thrives when the audience shares a huge cargo of shared assumptions with the filmmakers. There is, of course, the usual snobbery: White people are racists, people who dress neatly in suits or pressed skirts and have proper grooming must be conformist nitwits, and rural working-class people are hillbillies. All this is self-evident because poor production values and bad acting in the stock footage is objective proof of low intelligence and probable inbreeding. This is especially true if the fimmakers decide to replace the original soundtrack with a country western novelty song.
Cafe is supposed to chronicle the development of atomic weapons and the Cold War, but there is no context given for any of it. When it aims at satire, it strikes the very propaganda it allegedly mocks. The film opens with the bombing of Hiroshima, which is made to look like an act of gratuitous sadism without an inch of footage given to the atrocities and fanaticism of Imperial Japan that brought them to this pass. The threat of Communism is treated as nothing more than paranoia on the part of the simplistic, consumerist Americans that lead to such obvious (to the filmmakers) injustices as the McCarthy hearings (that Senator McCarthy had nothing to do with) and the execution of the Rosenbergs for trading atomic secrets to the Soviets. Cafe gives a full five minutes of screen time to the latter and implies that the Rosenbergs were innocent victims of mob justice. Never mind that they were couldn't have been more guilty if they'd worn hats with neon "I'm guilty" signs. Sad music and footage of orphaned Rosenberg children carried the day and made a nice, albeit pointless, segue to footage of a soulless Levittown that shows what a barren lie the American Dream was. Lenny Bruce, where art thou!
From there, the message is that Americans in the 1950s were ultraconformist drones who all voted for Eisenhower and were to a man uptight and frustrated because sex wouldn't be invented until 1962. There's no indication that Americans had recently come out of a bloody war before which was a great depression where people not only feared poverty, but also the threat of something akin to a fascist takeover lead by their own reformist government flapping in the wings for nearly a decade. Never mind a weary people enjoying postwar prosperity, Americans back then were just a childish, pampered lot; trivial, oblivious to human suffering, fearful of a non-existent Communist threat and incurious about the horrors perpetrated by their government in their name. Small wonder when Rafferty et al show a hypothetical atomic attack on the US, it's almost with a sense of satisfaction as if these silly Americans are getting what they deserve. Naturally, it isn't a Soviet bomber that drops The Bomb, but the Enola Gay on full irony alert. To quote the infamous Reverend wright, America's chickens were coming home to roost.
Then, in the real world, Reagan, Thatcher, and the Pope came along, ended the threat of all-out nuclear war by consigning Communism to the dustbin of history, and spoiled all their fun.
Some people have no consideration.
3 comments:
One of the best reviews I've read on the film. Good analysis on the 20/20 hindsight that goes into characterizing legitimate concerns as "paranoia" against communism.
I'd like to hear how former military in the former USSR review this film.
Supposseddly Russian Generals saw the 'Davy Crocket' test and said they wanted one also.
Kruchev nixed it as HE wanted no one else to authorize the use of nukes in a conflict with the West.
Maybe some former SAC guys (and the opposing equivalent) can explain how Nuclear bombers were suppossed to RETURN to their bases.
To us in the 21st Century, it seems it was going to be one-way.
Thanks for your dissection. I didn't watch the movie when it came out, and never have, because all the descriptions I read told me it was just like you say it is. In 1982, I didn't understand how saturated in leftist ideology popular culture was becoming, but I knew something was wrong.
The generation that was coming of age in 1982, the later baby boomers, were intellectually perfect blank slates for the left to write its messages on.
What little they knew about World War II was from movies and revisionist history. The Cold War, although still going on, didn't seem especially threatening because the U.S. had the atomic weapons to keep the Soviet Union impotently blustering. If the dolts who made and gushed over The Atomic Cafe felt safe enough to make fun of "anti-Communist hysteria," it was because an older generation's steadfast anti-Communism and its nukes, missiles, and submarines kept them safe.
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