Do you remember the time–it wasn’t so long ago–when nuclear holocaust was generally considered a scary thing? Now the subject is terribly passe, what with the collapse of the Evil Empire and all, but back in the 1980s nuclear terror was everywhere. People wrote (and, in large numbers, read) somber political tomes on the “unthinkable” subject; political circles were filled with talk of the nuclear freeze and disarmament; radicals organized protest marches against World War III, promising “No Business as Usual” until the danger was averted. Jonathan Schell’s terrifying account of the “republic of insects and grass” that would follow nuclear destruction, The Fate of the Earth, hovered on the top of the best-seller list. The melodramatic TV movie The Day After traumatized Americans across the country. The TV room in my dorm was filled to overflowing with anxious students the night the show aired; we sat watching it together in a kind of awed silence, and when the bombs finally hit, some of my friends had to be led from the room in tears.
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It’s a show that would have been unimaginable a decade ago, but this year its arrival in the fall lineup occasioned no discernible public reaction whatsoever. (It’s doubtful that the show has attracted many viewers either, but that’s another story.) It shouldn’t be surprising, really, that the mood has shifted so quickly. As historian Paul Boyer has observed, periods of intense concern about the bomb–the aftermath of Hiroshima, the height of the 1950s cold war, the early-1980s cold-war revival–have alternated with long periods of apathy and disinterest. I, like many others, suffered nuclear nightmares (literally) in the early 80s, but I haven’t exactly been losing sleep lately worrying about the end of the world. Perhaps I should be. Though the cold war, in its classic form, is over, nuclear weapons continue to proliferate in a world filled with injustice, civil wars, and squabbling nationalities. In The Bomb’s Early Light, his account of America’s initial reaction to the atomic bomb, Boyer notes that periods of apathy often have little to do with the reality of the threat. The highly abstract nature of the threat and the complexity of the issue both tend to create an illusion of safety that is perhaps not justified by the facts. The very familiarity of the threat mitigates the effectiveness of seemingly hysterical doomsday warnings.
If realistic representation has been difficult, nuclear humor has always been a hit-or-miss affair. The best attempts have been frankly and bitingly satirical, with a strong political edge–Dr. Strangelove is still a disturbing and dystopian masterpiece, a brilliant satire of the deadly logic of preprogrammed confrontation. Those who have attempted to simply joke about the subject have almost always fallen flat. Bob Hope ushered in the atomic age with a pathetic little love poem: “Will you be my little geranium / Until we are both blown up by uranium.” (It doesn’t even scan.) Woops! has no political edge whatsoever, and this is probably one of the reasons it has precious little humor.
What’s next? Will the networks take advantage of the current “compassion fatigue” to present the lighter side of starvation on “Those Silly Somalians?” Or the wacky fun of incest and bondage on “Family Tied?” I shudder to think. TV programming, like nuclear war, is too horrible to contemplate.
