THE COLD WAR TURNS HOT ON TV: WORLD WAR III IN TELEVISION MOVIES
BY DAVID RAY CARTER

In the closing weeks of 1989, American President George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declared the Cold War over at the Malta Summit. The agreement put an end to the over fifty years of mutual hostility between the nations that began at the end of World War II. More importantly, it was a peaceful end to a particularly “hot” decade for the Cold War, one that saw the initiation of the Reagan Doctrine, the downing of KAL Flight 007, and the Soviet war in Afghanistan.

The tension of the 1980s was, of course, due in no small part to the strident anti-Communism of President Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s patriotism infectiously swept across the nation, even taking root in his former stomping grounds of Hollywood. Nineteen eighties’ cinemas were home to a new “red scare,” with a number of films reinforcing Reagan’s belief of communism as an imminent threat to the American way of life. Nineteen eighty four’s Red Dawn and 1985’s Invasion U.S.A. both posited communist invasions of America, with the US firmly the victor in both conflicts. Even outside the realm of communist invasions, the Soviet Union was portrayed as the villain in a number of box office blockbusters of the decade. Films like Rocky IV, Rambo III, Top Gun, and even the comedy Spies Like Us all featured microcosmic Cold Wars with the United States emerging on top each time.

The patriotism—perhaps even jingoism—of American cinema of this period is sharply contrasted with the much more measured portrayal of the Cold War on television. Where films reduced the conflict to good versus evil, television recognized that the reality of the Cold War was more nuanced and understanding and that both parties would be culpable for the outcome. That presumed outcome, a nuclear World War III, was most often presented as a welcome event in American films; a fait accompli that would be won quickly and painlessly by the US. TV movies of the period approached the idea of a World War III with far greater hesitation and, in perhaps a bigger departure from their silver screen companions, without a clear winner or loser.

Catastrophe awaits in By Dawn’s Early Light and Threads.

There are enough World War III TV movies to consider them to be a unique subgenre of the medium. They take on a variety of forms but structurally they fall into two camps: those that deal with the prelude to nuclear war, and those that deal with the aftermath. It is important to make the distinction between these forms and their cinematic equivalents to better illustrate the break between WWIII TV and film. WWIII TV movies, with few exceptions, are all structured around a nuclear war occurring, and in this regard those prelude films are not too dissimilar to their big screen brethren. However, the divergence comes when depicting the results of that prelude. Films like WarGames, Octopussy, and Spies Like Us each feature varying takes on averting nuclear war—“happy endings,” so to speak. WWIII TV movies have no such happy endings and conclude with nuclear war shown or implied, as evidenced in the ending to the aptly named World War III, one of the first entries into this subgenre.

Those films that deal with the aftermath of nuclear war are, conceptually speaking, the most similar to cinema, as the post-apocalyptic genre of film was well-established by the eighties when WWIII TV movies first began to appear. There is, however, an even greater distance between television and cinema than is seen in the prelude films. Like Cold War cinema, post-apocalyptic cinema has a tendency to distill the concept into a simplistic good versus evil narrative. Aftermath TV movies dispense entirely with questions of morality and instead focus on the realities of life after nuclear war. Consider that The Road Warrior and the 1984 BBC movie Threads ostensibly have the same plot—survival after nuclear war—and the distinctions between how the two mediums approach the topic becomes clearer.

It should be noted that while WWIII TV movies deviate from their mainstream cinematic counterparts, they do have something of an analog in cinema. Many of these films have much in common with a strain of pessimistic science fiction films from the sixties and seventies. Titles like No Blade of Grass, Z.P.G., and the speculative documentary The Late, Great Planet Earth all offered similar, cynical views of the future.

Though related to this pessimistic science fiction, to refer to these films as pessimistic is an understatement, as the philosophies on display in these works are more akin to nihilism or fatalism. Just as the trope of averting nuclear war at the last second from Hollywood films is subverted, so is the idea that society would quickly pull together and rebuild. WWIII TV movies are deeply cynical about society’s chance for survival after a nuclear war, both in regard to the practical aspects of living and to maintaining some type of societal cohesion.

To highlight the breakdown of society through microcosm, these films tend to eschew depicting large groups in favor of focusing on individuals and family units. The genre varies widely on how it treats its subjects, however. Films like Special Bulletin and Threads focus on small groups of characters but treat them with an almost clinical detachment that is akin to Frederick Wiseman’s 1987 film Missile. Interestingly given that Wiseman’s film deals with the military, military-centric films like Countdown to Looking Glass and By Dawn’s Early Light tend to feature larger ensemble casts and approach the subject more melodramatically, with soap opera style performances.

These films are geographically diverse but tend to share the common temporal setting of immediately before or immediately after the nuclear disaster. Time is of extreme importance in all of the films of this subgenre. Large portions of the narratives are used to orientate the viewer in time and several entries feature on-screen dates or a literal countdown to emphasize the impending doom. With no exceptions, all of the movies take place in the current day relative to their production. It’s an important distinction from cinematic portrayals of World War III, which typically take place in the relative future or under conditions different than the then-current state of the world.

This emphasis on time and the constant reiteration of being set in the present day is, essentially, a scare tactic. This shouldn’t be that surprising— these are horror movies, after all. WWIII TV movies are horror movies that ultimately had a very short shelf life but were extremely effective in the period in which they were made. Revisiting them in the post-Cold War, post-Soviet Union world is an interesting experience. One gets the sense that these films weren’t made out of any antiwar or antinuclear moralizing, but out of genuine fear on the part of the filmmakers that the events they were depicting could someday be a reality. The fact that these films span less than a decade is a sobering reminder for us how quickly the world could change and we could find ourselves back in a similar situation.