Nuclear Fears

[naomikritzer]

Remember how in the X-Files, there was that storage room in the middle of the Pentagon where they kept all the secret stuff? I think that show worked as well as it did because on some level, most of us believe in that room. We may not believe in flying saucers, alien abductions, elaborate government conspiracies, or the Loch Ness monster, but we believe that room is there -- maybe not in the Pentagon, but somewhere. The scripts, characters, and chemistry were important, of course, but fundamentally, I think that show tapped into our belief in that room.

I was woken kind of abruptly this morning (because our new mattress arrived, so I had to get out of our old bed so it could be hauled off -- yay!) and was thinking back over the jumbled memories of my dreams a few hours later. My first thought was, "Huh, I had a Battlestar Galactica dream." (The jumble was triggered, weirdly, by seeing the BG logo in someone's LJ userpic.) A friend sent us the first season on DVD as a gift a few months ago (presumably to try to suck us into watching the show) and we finally got around to watching the movie and the first few episodes in the last couple of weeks. (We've only made it up through "You Can't Go Home Again," FYI, so please don't give me any spoilers.)

Anyway, I mentally sorted through the jumble and realized, no, it wasn't a BG dream, it was a post-nuclear-holocaust dream. Like I used to have when I was a kid. (I was very actively terrified of nuclear war for much of my childhood. I suffered insomnia, I believed I wouldn't live until I was 30, I had nightmares, etc. My parents didn't let me watch The Day After when it aired because they thought it would exacerbate my fears.)

I wonder if part of why that TV show works is that if you're the right age (30-ish or over) it taps into that remembered fear?

Comments

[lilisonna.livejournal.com]

It was effective for me. While not terrified of nuclear war, it was always somewhere in the back of my head.

Still is, for that matter.

[patchwork-prose.livejournal.com]

I never had post-nuclear holocaust dreams and I don't remember being afraid of their being a nuclear war, but I do have nightmares of being in a spacesuit with the oxygen supply having failed. And I'm 60-ish.

Ever read LEVEL SEVEN by Roshwald? That was an unnerving view of the aftermath of nuclear war.

[fehler.livejournal.com]

I got super freaked at "Special Bulletin" when I was a kid. They did the whole "war of the worlds" news broadcast as a domestic terrorist/hostage/nuclear bomb explosion.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086350/

[marikochan.livejournal.com]

They had that room in Indiana Jones, too!

[naomikritzer]

Yep, and Raiders had it first -- when I saw the X-Files pilot, and saw that room, I yelled, "Look! There's the box with the Ark of the Covenant!" to probably_lost or malachitefer. I think it was probably a deliberate reference. But -- in Raiders of the Lost Ark, it was a postscript to the main action of the movie. A joke to wind it all up. In the X-Files, it was something the entire series hinged on, and emblematic of much that happened over the course of the series.

[huladavid.livejournal.com]

When I was about 6 or 7 I was afraid of the Echo satellite, and the Giant Hand The Would Come Out Of The Night Sky And GET Me

I saw The Day After at a friend's house, and just at the bomb hit, they blew a fuse... A bit unnerving.