Review of 'The Atomic Cafe'

As part of its recent offering of films for free on demand viewing, YouTube has made available the complete 1982 film 'The Atomic Cafe.' Produced and directed by Kevin Rafferty, Jane Loader, and Pierce Rafferty, the film is comprised entirely of archival footage of atomic age American civil defense and propaganda shorts, along with newsreel footage and clips from film and television programs of the period. Eschewing the usual over-arching narrative voice typically used in many documentary films, 'The Atomic Cafe' took the unique approach of telling its story solely through creative manipulation and intercutting of these various archival and found sources, weaving a spellbinding pastiche, at times both farcical and tragic, depicting America during the post WWII era into the Cold War of the 1960s. To commemorate this important film, TV Multiversity is reprinting here a review from the year of its release.

The Atomic Cafe is a shockingly entertaining film about a subject hardly calculated to elicit gales of laughter. Combining vintage newsreels, kinescopes, government information films, radio broadcasts, and some improbably pop tunes of the late Forties and Fifties, filmmakers Jayne Loader and Kevin and Pierce Rafferty present a seamless chronology of the Cold War years, focusing on the hilarious, absurd, and ultimately dangerous government propaganda about the atomic bomb.

Throughout the film we laugh ourselves silly at 'Duck and Cover' drills and songs such as 'My Atomic Love' and 'I Ain't No Communist,' at Nixon and Khruschev in a comic Cold War debate straight out of Abbott and Costello, and the crazy logic of an army chalk-talk telling soldiers not to worry about radiation because 'you'd be killed by they blast, heat, and debris anyway!' We howl at how dumb we used to be, right up until the film's climax, when an anonymous talking head asks, 'What would it be like if the bomb were to drop here - say, tomorrow at 10?,' and a chilling simulation of the real thing - drawn from the very sequences we were snickering at moments earlier - wipes the smiles off our faces and leaves us stunned. 'There's nothing to do now but wait for orders from the authorities and relax,' says father to his 'nuclear' family in the film's ironic final words. If The Atomic Cafe succeeds in its purpose, no one who sees it will ever relax and trust the authorities again.

The filmmakers' mastery of the form, gained during five years of research and countless hours in the editing room, has earned The Atomic Cafe a distinguished place among the best compilation films of any year. None can deny the obvious craft involved here. What is disturbing, however, is the assumed naivete of the filmmakers. Loader has been quoted as saying that their intention was to have viewers come away with 'an understanding of the persuasive power of propaganda that will make them more skeptical about what they hear now.' In a background article, New York Times' writer Robin Herman refers to The Atomic Cafe as 'an unadorned menu of old... films,' which, in Pierce's words, 'force[s] people back on their own memories, on their own thoughts, on their own perceptions about this material.' In fact, The Atomic Cafe is a successful - even brilliant - propaganda film itself, one that steadily builds its message with every omission of sound or context, every layering of song or speech. Sounds editor Margie Crimmins' audio overlaps not only like the diverse sequences together, they subliminally create the film's editorial message. There is no voice-over narrator because none is needed: the filmmakers manipulate their material so invisibly - using ironic juxtaposition of film clip to film clip, or film with divergent music or speech - that their massaged message is wittily hammered home in every cut, leaving the viewer little room to doubt or question the filmmakers' picture of 'the way we were.'

It opens in July 1945 at the first A-bomb test at Alamogordo, New Mexico and then proceeds to Hiroshima - before and after the bomb's devastation. A lone Japanese man gazes up at the sky, becoming Everyman and an ominous figure resurrected for the film's finale. Newsreel footage of Truman announcing the attack pointedly includes his bantering laughter prior to his address. The inclusion of this out-take quietly underscores a message American callousness soon echoed by radio comedian Fred Allen, who compares the bombed-out city to Ebbets Field after a doubleheader with the Giants. We hear this over views of charred babies lying in the Hiroshima ruins.

The Nazi menace is fast replaced by the Communist threat, and maps now oozing with Red aggression recall the famous maps in Capra's 'Why We Fight' series. Newsreels report the first H-bomb test, the Korean invasion, the HUAC hearings, and the Rosenberg's execution - the stark reality which stands in sharp contrast to clumsily staged anti-communist minidramas and bland advertisements for shopping centers as 'the concrete expression of practical American idealism.'

With the Fifties comes Ike, TV dinners, and suburban sprawl. In a telling juxtaposition, an Eisenhower speech on America's greatness and the challenge of the Atomic Age is tactically poised over shots of fast-food joints, supermarkets, and the car culture metaphorically headed into the night. As if answer to the garden city solution to urban blight envisioned in The City, drab, undeveloped tract housing is panned. So much for American idealism. So much for the American dream.

Throughout the film are recurring shots of people tuning in their radios and TV sets, which effect smooth transitions between scenes and across the years while subtly pointing up the mass media's influential - and questionable - role as vehicles of American propaganda and misinformation.

Newsreels report more bomb tests, including the 1954 Castle Bravo tests and their effect on unsuspecting Pacific Islanders. Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, assures us that these people are fine as we see clumps of hair puled from the head of one radiation victim. The answer to 'nuclearosis' - a name given atomic fear by a cartoon doctor - fallout shelters. Scenes of shelters being frantically built are intercut with an interview with Columbia University Professor Seymour Melman explaining the futility of such shelters (one of the few sequences which suggest accurate information was available at the time). But the Cold War escalates, and silent movie chase music accompanies our race to build shelters and beat the Russians.

Preparing for that nuclear attack was everyone's business, kids included. In the film's most celebrated sequence, 'Duck and Cover' advice from a Disneyesque 'Burt the Turtle' shows Paul and Patti how to protect themselves (ludicrously) if an atomic bomb falls on their way to school. In a devastating montage, the filmmakers punctuate Burt's sappy lyrics, 'He did what we all must learn to do - you and you and you and you,' with the faces of Einstein, Oppenheimer, Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon and even Ronald Reagan.

Carefully developed are the film's major themes: the callousness, ignorance, or sheer inanity of America's leaders; the American people's gullibility in accepting simple answers to complex questions; the media's collusion as agents of propaganda; and the unholy reliance on religion in duping the people.

The Church is a curious and pervasive target here. We hear Truman urging Americans 'to pray God we use the power He gave us to do His ways,' while 'Jesus Hits Like an Atom Bomb' is the catchy country western tune heard over anti-communist parades. An army official rehearsing the Marshall Islanders n a newsreel on their evacuation of the Bikini Atoll concludes by saying, 'If everything is in God's hands, it cannot be other than good.' On-the-street interviews soliciting opinions about the H-bomb prominently feature pro-nuke clergy, and a cleric later discusses the 'situation ethics' of arming oneself in a fallout shelter. Last but not least, a now-classic army film shows an inanely grinning chaplain comforting his worried men with the memorized message that the mushroom cloud is 'a wonderful sight to behold!' Men, crouched in foxholes, emerge moments after the bomb blast and dutifully advance on the billowing yellow cloud - perhaps the most disturbing image in this film.

The film's principle targets, though, are our political leaders, and cheap shots at some easy marks provide some of the film's funniest moments. When not exhibiting callousness like Truman, our leaders are shown off as buffoons. Richard ('Always Good for a Laugh') Nixon is seen in long-shot ringing the bell for Mental Health Week and in close-up with what looks suspiciously like a herpes on his lower lip. Lyndon Johnson, then a Senator, tells us that now that the Russians have the bomb, any American city is a target - 'Dallas or Houston or Amarillo... or even Johnson City!'

Loader and the Raffertys know, as did Len Lye, that mockery is the best way to deflect propaganda's power. Lye paved the way for The Atomic Cafe back in World War II when he edited sections of Triumph of the Will to a popular British tune and made Swinging in Lambeth Walk, a pungently funny deflation of Nazism. (The Atomic Cafe has its own take-off on that well-known propaganda film, with interviews of soldiers at the Castle Rock tests cut to mimic the infamous Nuremberg soldiers' roll call.) But what Lye knew, and the makers of The Atomic Cafe seem to deny, is that the product of this mockery is still propaganda.

By going for the jokes, Loader and Rafferty have painted a one-sided view of Fifties' America. Their selections and omissions would lead us to believe that there was no anti-nuclear movement in the Fifties with scientists and citizens banded together to combat the forces of misinformation and aggression. Just how naive were we? As 'baby boom' children squatting in dark school corridors during air raid drills, we all knew somehow that we were waiting for 'The End.' Playing tag at fallout shelters on the way home from school had nothing to do with safety, it was all over. We knew, somehow. To reflect the complexity beneath the placid exterior of the Fifties would have detracted from the artistic shape the overall message of the film Loader and the Raffertys made.

By making a comedy of nuclear manners, the filmmakers have garnered theatrical release and media attention for their work. Making palatable a subject many viewers would ordinarily shun, they have engaged a mass audience in serious life-or-death issues. Raising mass consciousness through entertainment is admirable. But what is the film's final impact? Is the 'tragic relief' of the film's apocalyptic ending enough to balance the non-stop jokes? Does the real dilemma sink in or just roll off the viewer's back, with visions like Nixon's comical side kick, Robert Stripling, twitching his black eyebrows the film's lingering afterimage rather than Armageddon?

There is nothing here to nurture the hope that we can counter the powers of misinformation and, more importantly, prevent nuclear holocaust. There is nothing to temper the final impact of decadent cynicism, which both feeds the film and is fed by it. It is cynicism, and not skepticism as Loader claims, that is the film's final message, and it may be as dangerous as fallout. If we cannot trust anyone, why should we begin by trusting these filmmakers?

[This review was written by Deirdre Boyle and originally published in Cineaste, Vol. XII, No. 2, 1982, pp. 39-41.]