Mirror McCarthysim
John Gross
The secretary of the Soviet Peace Com- mittee, Mr Grigory Lokshin, has recently reminded us that in 1950 an appeal calling for a ban on atomic weapons which was circulated in the Soviet Union obtained 150 million signatures. On the face of it, this is not quite such encouraging news for Western unilateralists as Mr Lokshin may have intended. That Soviet public opinion should have been so far advanced over 30 years ago, and made so little headway since then; that today there should not be so much as a Greenham Common protest tak- ing place outside each and every SS-20 in- stallation; that Mr Andropov can dismiss unilateralism as naive without any apparent fear of the electoral consequences — all this is hardly a hopeful precedent.
Still, one has to make a start somewhere, and it must be admitted that in 1950 the United States had nothing to show remotely comparable to the Soviet petition. The mood of American triumphalism may have begun to ebb, particularly once the Rus- sians had exploded their first atomic bomb, but that only made most Americans even more reluctant to give up any possible nuclear advantage. At the same time there was growing apprehension about just how terrible a nuclear war might be. To help allay such fears, the American authorities spent a great deal of money in the 1950s on propaganda, especially about civil defence, calculated to make the idea of the Bomb easier to live with.
As most readers will probably know by now, this is the material on which the makers of the new American film The Atomic Cafe have drawn, in an attempt to show that a generation ago America as a whole was being constantly depicted as an 'atomic cafe', a nuclear arsenal in which one could none the less relax and have a good time. The result is an interesting film, and well worth going to see, but the recep- tion that it has had seems to me equally in- teresting. I have read a dozen or so reviews and without exception they have not simply praised the film but endorsed its viewpoint and taken it entirely on its own terms. It is 'an appalling horror comic which records the paranoia of the post-war decade' (the Times), it provides Americans with 'a devastating self-portrait' (the Sun- day Times), it has 'the kind of authority and impersonality which few accounts of recent history possess' (the Spectator). I may quite possibly have missed something, but the only sceptical comment I have come across is a single sentence in the Observer review which concedes that 'the view of the Cold War is lop-sided in the fashionably revisionist manner'. (I thought for one gid- dy moment I was going to have to add Time Out, which complained last week that 'it fails to offer even the barest social context for its material', but which then went on ... as if atomic madness was an isolated phenomenon unrelated to the whole con- stellation of 1950s paranoia from McCar- thyism to UFOs'. In any case, the magazine's main account of the film, in a previous issue, was a full-page salute by John Pilger.) While I wouldn't myself go as far as say- ing that The Atomic Cafe is 'a laugh a minute' (the Financial Times), it does have some undeniably funny moments, and some alarming ones too. It is hard not to laugh at the sight of Nixon speechifying away while the man sitting beside him fails to control a tic which makes his eyebrows keep shooting up; hard not to shudder at the priest who advises post-atomic survivors to repel 'the needy stranger' with as much force as they find necessary; hard not to wince at the public relations exercise which involved getting a group of native girls to sing 'You are my sunshine' just before Bikini Atoll was evacuated. The makers of the film have had no difficulty collecting responses which were bland or brutal or woefully inadequate. While politicians call for the use of nuclear weapons in Korea, juke-boxes churn out songs about 'Atomic Love' and 'Atom Bomb Baby'; there is a hideous discrepancy between newsreels of radiation victims and soothing civil defence films — children scampering under their desks for cover, a cartoon featuring a sub- Disney character called Bert the Turtle.
And it is all true, isn't it? Everything has been gathered from the archives, nothing has been made up. Yes; but that only goes to show what can be achieved by selection, omission, artful juxtaposition, misplaced emphasis. Episode by episode, the film has enough truth in it to make the sturdiest pro- American feel uncomfortable. Taken as a whole, it is as crudely slanted as anything you might expect to find in the pages of Krokodil.
The most obvious trick is to keep the Soviet regime and all that it stood for well out of sight. We are permitted a brief un- friendly glimpse of Stalin on the saluting base. So much for Stalinism. There is also a piece of buffooning between Khrushchev and Nixon which is more ambiguous, al- though it is Khrushchev if anyone who has the last word. But beyond that Communism is characteristically represented by 5-movie sequences showing what would happen if the Reds took over a small American town. Divorced from wider historical reality, from a world in which Prague and Warsaw and Kolyma actually existed, such scenes do indeed begin to take on the paranoid quali-
The Spectator 11 December 1982 ty which Time Out was hoping to see. The flying saucers are coming! Instead of putting the propaganda of th,e, period into context, what The Atomic Cr does is to treat the propaganda itself as the context, into which it then fits careftwY, selected slivers of reality. In the midst 0' Cold War material we are sudden!) presented with Nixon ringing a bell to augurate Mental Health Week ('the nation's biggest problem'): one does nt/t have to have taken a course in structuralign to be able to decode the message. And thefl there is the candid camerawork wine° shows President Truman joking (presumably with the film crew) and then putting on a serious expression just in tithe to start recording the solemnest of sole° statements — this was in 1945 — about the advent of the atomic age. No doubt we would think better of him if he had heel; looking suitably sombre throughout, int' what are we meant to conclude? That he was a phoney who privately thought tha,t dropping atom bombs was a bit of a laugh,' As someone who believes that the boinu should not have been used against JaPath or at any rate not without far more advance warning, I can see that there would be con' siderable justice in putting this particulart incident to symbolic use in a film about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But as a Ori ment on Truman's subsequent president' career it seems to me nonsense. We hatve, only to remind ourselves (since no one e i n The Atomic Cafe will) of how he depose MacArthur in 1951.
There were bomb-happy politicians America 30 years ago, and The AWN', Cafe makes great play with them. Provide° they were sufficiently scarey and bellicose, the views of some thrice-forgotten gressman are of more interest to the ten': who compiled the film than those of errit, nent liberals or influential moderates 0` even Secretaries of State. There is not eve: a guest appearance by John Foster Dune 'e although I was bracing myself for s°111, rhetoric about 'roll-back' and massive retaliation. But then perhaps soinOtrio might have pointed out that when it came it (as the Hungarians found to their cosq)
'
Dulles did not actually go in for much r°.` ing back; that whatever his faults, tossin6 nuclear weapons about was not one. 0, As it is, The Atomic Cafe could be ct.)
sidered from one angle a rather reassurintibe
piece of work. If a society as crazy t a one it portrays managed to avoid starting,s nuclear war, there are still strong gronnus, for optimism; even proliferation starts 1°,, mg some of its terrors. But that har“1e'd7 seems the point. We are no more exPec,...t, to argue about the implications of the ID",,; than we would have been expected to arg,ue about the implications of Bert the Dot' Instead, we are invited to sit back, to aceePo what we are offered, to let the images lceeari flooding towards us. And if we do, the fills,. message seems unanswerable — 'no nukes' unless we are stubborn enough to insist t-t; the film's version of events should not confused with what happened in historY.
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