Threads is the the social media platform of the day.
(My Threads account is here – and the early impressions are positive, though further functionality needs to be added, but it is a marked improvement on the Hell-site that Twitter has become.)
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But for those of us of a certain age and from a certain place Threads has another meaning:
The film had an immense influence on me when showed at school, though not one which seems to be shared by others.
My school was a south Birmingham 1980s comprehensive, and the well-meaning, earnest progressive teachers no doubt intended that the film would make us think about the issues of nuclear war.
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As it happened, the depicted post-war apocalypse was nothing compared to the sort of things I was reading about anyway (though I am sure I really shouldn’t have been doing), and so almost all the film left me unfazed.
But.
There was one moment which stuck with me, with force, and it has shaped my political and legal thinking ever since (to the extent that my political and legal ponderings warrants being called “thinking”).
By way of background, part of the film is about some people in a bunker who were in charge – or at least regarded themselves as in charge.
All the bunker scenes have been collected here:
And in that bunker they had telephones.
Proper, bulky desk telephones, not what we have now.
And via those telephones the important people in the bunker requested things and gave orders.
That was how those in control were to keep in control – telephony was the means of transmission and obtaining intelligence.
Telephony was the – ahem – thread that kept those who governed in charge of those who were governed.
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*Spoiler Warning*
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Those in the bunker die, pretty much unnoticed by the survivors of the nuclear strike.
Eventually some come to dig them out.
And there is this moment as the torch light goes around the bunker.
Corpses, and dust, and broken things.
And also a redundant telephone:
For some reason the sight of that redundant telephone stuck with me more than any of the special effects or make-up and horrific images and awful sounds.
I could not stop thinking about it.
What happens when those who are supposedly in charge no longer have the means of being in charge?
For in any large human grouping those in charge cannot do it by personal, face-to-face dominance alone, there needs to be methods of communication and means of control.
And those methods and means are precarious, and so they cannot be taken for granted either by those who govern or by those who are governed.
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About this time in the mid-1980s I also became fixated by this image in a book I had about kings and queens, which I have featured a few times in my blogging:
The combination of the Threads telephone and this Thackeray picture led me to a lifelong preoccupation about constitutions and language and images and law – about how one small group of people in one place actually get to exert day-to-day power over people in other places.
How does this actually, practically work?
And so I ended up as a lawyer and commentator.
Of course, those with power can always resort to coercion and lethal force – but short of this last resort, there are norms and systems and lore and laws which provide how we govern and are are governed.
So how are these threads crafted and put in place, and how are they maintained and repaired?
And these systems and methods of communication and means of control can sometimes just go: whether by technical failures, or even by the loss of legitimacy and authority.
The threads can snap – or they can be cut.
And then what happens?
Well.
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Thank you for indulging me and letting me share my Threads anecdote. As today is Threads day, one way or another, I thought this would be the best time to tell it.
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“Threads” and “The Day After” arrived on NZ television about the same time, the dour-bleak and shiny-bleak versions of the end of the world to haunt my adolescence. Now in Europe with daughters the age I was then and a background of Putin’s nuclear threats, I’ve been thinking a family movie night should include them. If only so the girls can demand “how badly did you guys waste the past forty years, that these movies are still relevant?”
It’s nothing more than a précis of current thinking but you may ‘enjoy’ the article in last weeks New Scientist (1st July) on civilisations. It gathered thinking data etc that stable hierarchical civilisations are not the only option, that the civilisations that survive disruption are the more equal, less hierarchical and that it all seems dependent on the stable climate of the Holocene
Having read it and your actions thoughts re ‘Threads’ both tonight, they felt like similar views but different lenses
I worked in the ‘phone business in the early ’60s and saw some of the ‘precautions’ in case of attack. The thinking seemed to span the ‘late 30s to mid ’50s. A peculiar time, bits of the ethos were almost Victorian. A lot of the equipment went back long pre WW2 and there were still a lot of WW2 reminders around. The cable records held a palimpsest of the old Fighter Command and Ack Ack networks. Heavy ironclad equipment designed to survive a crumpled building – but not really. Those shiny new plastic phones were screwed into the same old kit the sinister black bakelite jobs had.
This was the ’60s and even the older men thought most of it was pointless. Times were changing rapidly what with Profumo and government types unable to keep their trousers up, miniskirts, Lady Chat and TW3 poking fun at the system. The antique equipment feeding data into the fancy computers at a new factory nearby.
I left that world behind and never did see Threads or When the Wind Blows. I read somewhere that HMG worked out that after 3 H-bombs there would be nothing worth governing anyway. But the supporting bureaucracy lived on until the ’90s.
Thank you for this interesting reply. There is a lot in this.
I also remember Threads and if I have the right production (nuclear apocolypse figured in TV, films and books much more then that it does now, so this incident could have come from one of the other productions), one item that survived the blast was a Sainsbury’s carrier bag, seen blowing across an empty townscape. So if we ever do get the 4-minute warning, don’t hide under the stairs, wrap yourself up in carrier bags.
On your point about telephones, authority and control, I have read (can’t remember where) that the telephone could have been one of the factors resulting in Nazi attrocities. The telephone allowed very senior people to contact very junior people directly. When there is a large power differential, orders are much less likely to be questioned than if passed down a chain from one level to the next.
I had thought for a while that it must be hard for young people now to imagine growing up at a time when a world-ending nuclear holocaust was not just possible but sometimes likely. Now, however, we have to face the possibility that in spite of brave talk by NATO members about red lines, there are at least two dictators with nuclear weapons who might just be mad enough to use them.
The Sainsbury’s bag is the only specific visual image I retain from the only film that has genuinely given me nightmares. I saw it the day after The War Game, but it was Threads that made the greater impression.
Lovely post.
It is interesting to reflect how “When the Wind Blows” and “Threads” and for older readers the Cuban Missile Crisis are now fading from popular memory.
There was an excellent Errol Morris documentary interviewing Robert MacNamara (The Fog of War) in which Macnamara recounts the tale that Russia had already installed nuclear armed warheads, and the Cubans would have used them if the Yanquis had invaded.
The entire documentary was a vehicle for MacNamara to plead for restraint in a nuclear armed age – as inevitable mistakes in war will lead to the destruction of nations.
You should do another longer piece on Thackeray and your 2000AD influenced scepticism about authority, which is a common thread through your attitudes to the EU and bureaucracy in general.
Thanks for this. I watched Threads in full in 2007 while I was university.
I find it a haunting film. What is depicted in it must not be allowed to happen. I hope it is shown with Russian subtitles/dubbing and in all languages around the world.