[With beach
season underway in earnest, a series AmericanStudying some famous beaches.
Leading up to a special weekend Guest Post from a talented young scholar!]
On the intense
and tragic film that couldn’t compete with historic fears.
1959, the same
year as the original Gidget movie
about which I blogged yesterday, also saw the release of a very, very different
beach film: On the Beach. Based on British-Australian
writer Nevil Shute’s 1957
novel, the film featured an all-star cast (including Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner,
and Fred Astaire) as
the sailors, scientists, and their friends and loved ones dealing with a
post-apocalyptic world. It’s 1964, World War III has taken place, and the
resulting radiation is slowly taking over the world and destroying its
remaining inhabitants. Mostly set on or around Peck’s submarine, the film uses
that setting to create a broadly claustrophobic tone, portraying a world in
which likely slow death by radiation poisoning or the humane but absolute
alternative of suicide pills seem to be the only possible futures. It’s
unrelenting and uncompromising, and deserves to be much better remembered than
it is.
While that’s
true of the film on its own artistic merits, it’s even more true in terms of
what the film reveals about the Cold War’s threats and fears. When I think of
World War III scenarios in popular films, I tend to think of over-the-top
dramatics of one kind or another: the ridiculous satire of Dr. Strangelove (1964);
the teenage humor and heroics of War Games (1983) and The Manhattan Project (1986); the flag-waving jingoism of Red Dawn (1984). All
of those films can illustrate certain important aspects of the period, but all
feel, again, exaggerated in one way or another, extreme in both their plots and
tones. Whereas On the Beach, to this
AmericanStudier at least, feels profoundly grounded, offers a socially and psychologically
realistic depiction not just of the potential aftermath of a nuclear war, but
also and even more tellingly of the period’s collective fears about what such a
war would mean and do. Seeing [SPOILER ALERT] Fred Astaire kill himself rather
than face imminent radiation poisoning—well, that feels deeply representative
of the moment’s worst fears.
You’d think that
such fears might have lead to more widespread opposition to the Cold War’s arms
race and military
industrial complex—and indeed the U.S. military must have thought so too,
as they denied the filmmakers permission to use a submarine or any other
official materials. But I would argue that whatever possible influence such
fears might have had was far outweighed by a different set of fears, ones
exemplified by October
1962’s Cuban Missile Crisis: fears not of nuclear war and its aftermath per
se, but rather of the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal, and what would happen if
America’s did not match and even exceed that opposing threat. Whereas On the Beach portrayed the horrific
results of a nuclear war, the Missile Crisis reflected and amplified fears that
the U.S. was potentially unprepared for such a war, one that our enemy was
willing and able to bring to our very doorstep. Perhaps no film, not even one
as compelling and convincing as On the
Beach, could compete with such historic threats—and so the arms race and
the Cold War only deepened in the 1960s and beyond.
Last beach
context tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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