Despite deciding ten years ago that I would never again watch Threads, I found a once-collectable VHS version in my library as part of a job-lot. After some months' hesitation, it went into the player last night.
Reading the imdb comments, it seems that dozens of people give it a ten star rating and simultaneously vow to never return to it.
It is amazing how much I had forgotten in the ten years between viewings. All I really retained was a memory of the bumbling bureaucrats in their useless shelter and the nativity parody near the end, when the darkness becomes almost surreal. The rest must have been blocked out for it remains memorably and staggeringly grim!
I don't think I had previously registered how far the film was thematically organized around the theme of technology. Boy, does 1984 look ancient here! All the old kit has a retro appeal but the trends towards kids being plugged into their headphones and primitive space-invader games, while rolling-news numbs the populace. Bar-codes and early digital scales are already on the scene in the shops, while the civil servants struggle with basic communications and power.
The film has two layers of documentary framing, delivering an elaborate picture of the progress to war in diagetic bulletins which wash over a mostly passive populace, while the awful events we see are placed in wider context by the non-diagetic on-screen statistics read by Paul Vaughan - for so long the voice of the BBC's Horizon strand of science documentaries. Towards the end, the radiation-sick survivors are struggling with simple arts and crafts while a children's programme about bones plays from a videotape. An old woman mimes along to it as if it is a religious ritual.
I had forgotten that Barry Hines was the author. Eighties Sheffield as depicted here is not so far from the working-class world of Kes: pigeon-fancying, smoky pubs, steamed up windows in parked cars, all the awkward social rituals of a quickly-arranged wedding. The use of found footage is mainly ingenious - fuel strikes, motorway log-jams, atrocious weather have built-in authenticity. I think the Japanese man was too obviously from Hiroshima, however.
The tensions of the Reagan-Thatcher era have seemed to retreat with the collapse of the Soviet block and today's kids are unlikely to receive this kind of traumatic treat in school. The scenarios of Mutual Assured Destruction and Nuclear Winter have not really disappeared, however. The living would still, I am certain, envy the dead and the continuing conflicts in the Middle East remain troubling with some highly unstable players of the same old games.