Is it only possible to counter propaganda with propaganda? Three American film archivists, discovering a trove of American material from the Cold War era - US Army Information films, newsreels, advertisements, radio broadcasts, government shorts, songs, cartoons etc. - decided to make a compilation film from it. The result is stunning, horrifying, comic, unreal, revealing an entire nation, the most powerful and influential nation in the world, the centre of modern democracy, home to many of the brightest minds in the world, giving way to collective insanity. And all over one of America's most far-reaching inventions, the atomic bomb.
'Atomic Cafe' details three stages in America's relationship with the bomb. Firstly, when only the Americans had it, there is a distinct smugness, as President Truman, barely able to suppress the joyful giggles, thanks God that it fell into American hands, and not those of 'our' enemies. Because America is so sensible and impartial, and would never do anything silly with it. Like blow up an entire idyllic Pacific island, misjudge meteorological reports and contaminate many nearby islanders, as well as a Japanese fishing vessel whose dodgy produce is then sold throughout Japan and - ha! - imported to America.
Like bomb two entire Japanese cities. This is perhaps the most chilling section of the film - the rest just shows Americans in demented fearbliss. One of the pilots of the Enola Gay describes the mission with terrible, cold, euphemistic, mathematical, military, precise jargon, reducing a barbarous act that killed hundreds of thousands, maimed many more, contaminated whole generations, and destroyed the psyche of a nation, to a theorem, successfully demonstrated. The filmmakers have this charming absraction soundtracking footage of the actual human cost. Another knuckleheaded pilot slavers at the aesthetic pleasure the mushroom gave him, words that would be echoed in the later glorious war against Iraq.
Curiously, in the face of suppressed public misapprehension, it is the visual wonder of the bomb's effects that are repeatedly asserted, as if the atomic bomb is just one big firework, bigger and better because it is American, a military-sponsored cultural experience from a nation that was in the process of jailing some of its best minds. We're only three years from 'Top Gun'.
The execution of the 'treasonous' Rosenburgs is another shameful American farce: crowds of 'ordinary' Americans baying for blood as enthusiastically as their recent German enemies (the Rosenburgs were, of course, Jewish). The execution itself doesn't quite go to plan, as Ethel survives the recommended dose of electricity - one visibly shaken reporter seems to regret the medieval brutality of the exercise, but still manages to condemn her righteously (the propaganda invokes religious imagery a lot to justify itself).
All this merry-making changes when the Russians 'pinch' the bomb. Complacent superiority gives way to panic. The moronic anti-Red propaganda shown here would be funny if we didn't know how many lives it ruined under McCarthy, Nixon and all their cronies. Particularly piquant scenes include a good-old-boy American town enacting the consequences of a Soviet takeover, or the newsman who stops to advertise two fine American shopping malls, excellent examples of non-Soviet Western capitalism. The third stage is the final descent into lunacy, as the inevitability of bomb apocalypse results in new housing estates with built-in bomb shelters, and boy scouts being encouraged to jump off their bikes and hit the pavement in the even of a nuclear blast (thanks for the tip!).
'Atomic Cafe' is a valuable record in the rare visual recording of a nation actually becoming a superpower. America's vaunted role of world policeman coexists with a vicious isolationism - one priest (!) recommends families having a weapon in their bomb shelter to ward off any undesirable 'needy strangers' who might need help (I take it the Good Samaritan parable is cut from American bibles); the patronising of both Europeans and Pacific islanders reveal America entering its own imperial Victorian age. The film is also a brilliant piece of sociology, about the construction of gender (the male power in the home as metonym for the male power in government) and family (the radio broadcast of the Rosenburgs' execution is cut with Lynch-like shots of beautiful suburbia), politics, commerce, media-power.
This is an essential guide to anyone who needs a background to film masterpieces like 'Written On The Wind' or 'Bigger Than Life', although, as a documentary, it cannot compete with them as insights into what it was like to live in the 1950s - just because the government treated its subjects as idiots doesn't necessarily mean they were. The last line in the film, after a nuclear blast has ravaged America, is 'Let's wait for orders from the authorities, and then we can relax'. 'Atomic Cafe' shows that asylum America got the authority it deserved, and the brief flash of Reagan in the archives suggests that it wasn't a mentality that had just gone away.
It is a shame, then, that the film is tainted by its own processes, distorting the evidence to produce a single viewpoint, just as those silly films did. The filmmakers cannot trust the audience to see the inherent ghastly idiocy of the propaganda for themselves; they have to lead us with a heavy hand. Like authority. It intercuts footage with ironically disparate soundtracks (eg the proto-'Blue Velvet' effect I mentioned above); at the climax, 'Cafe' lunges into a Walpurgisnacht of American craziness, full of speeded up editing and 'zany' sound effects. Having watched so many of the films, maybe Rafferty-Loader-Rafferty got used to the idea of power.
'Atomic Cafe' details three stages in America's relationship with the bomb. Firstly, when only the Americans had it, there is a distinct smugness, as President Truman, barely able to suppress the joyful giggles, thanks God that it fell into American hands, and not those of 'our' enemies. Because America is so sensible and impartial, and would never do anything silly with it. Like blow up an entire idyllic Pacific island, misjudge meteorological reports and contaminate many nearby islanders, as well as a Japanese fishing vessel whose dodgy produce is then sold throughout Japan and - ha! - imported to America.
Like bomb two entire Japanese cities. This is perhaps the most chilling section of the film - the rest just shows Americans in demented fearbliss. One of the pilots of the Enola Gay describes the mission with terrible, cold, euphemistic, mathematical, military, precise jargon, reducing a barbarous act that killed hundreds of thousands, maimed many more, contaminated whole generations, and destroyed the psyche of a nation, to a theorem, successfully demonstrated. The filmmakers have this charming absraction soundtracking footage of the actual human cost. Another knuckleheaded pilot slavers at the aesthetic pleasure the mushroom gave him, words that would be echoed in the later glorious war against Iraq.
Curiously, in the face of suppressed public misapprehension, it is the visual wonder of the bomb's effects that are repeatedly asserted, as if the atomic bomb is just one big firework, bigger and better because it is American, a military-sponsored cultural experience from a nation that was in the process of jailing some of its best minds. We're only three years from 'Top Gun'.
The execution of the 'treasonous' Rosenburgs is another shameful American farce: crowds of 'ordinary' Americans baying for blood as enthusiastically as their recent German enemies (the Rosenburgs were, of course, Jewish). The execution itself doesn't quite go to plan, as Ethel survives the recommended dose of electricity - one visibly shaken reporter seems to regret the medieval brutality of the exercise, but still manages to condemn her righteously (the propaganda invokes religious imagery a lot to justify itself).
All this merry-making changes when the Russians 'pinch' the bomb. Complacent superiority gives way to panic. The moronic anti-Red propaganda shown here would be funny if we didn't know how many lives it ruined under McCarthy, Nixon and all their cronies. Particularly piquant scenes include a good-old-boy American town enacting the consequences of a Soviet takeover, or the newsman who stops to advertise two fine American shopping malls, excellent examples of non-Soviet Western capitalism. The third stage is the final descent into lunacy, as the inevitability of bomb apocalypse results in new housing estates with built-in bomb shelters, and boy scouts being encouraged to jump off their bikes and hit the pavement in the even of a nuclear blast (thanks for the tip!).
'Atomic Cafe' is a valuable record in the rare visual recording of a nation actually becoming a superpower. America's vaunted role of world policeman coexists with a vicious isolationism - one priest (!) recommends families having a weapon in their bomb shelter to ward off any undesirable 'needy strangers' who might need help (I take it the Good Samaritan parable is cut from American bibles); the patronising of both Europeans and Pacific islanders reveal America entering its own imperial Victorian age. The film is also a brilliant piece of sociology, about the construction of gender (the male power in the home as metonym for the male power in government) and family (the radio broadcast of the Rosenburgs' execution is cut with Lynch-like shots of beautiful suburbia), politics, commerce, media-power.
This is an essential guide to anyone who needs a background to film masterpieces like 'Written On The Wind' or 'Bigger Than Life', although, as a documentary, it cannot compete with them as insights into what it was like to live in the 1950s - just because the government treated its subjects as idiots doesn't necessarily mean they were. The last line in the film, after a nuclear blast has ravaged America, is 'Let's wait for orders from the authorities, and then we can relax'. 'Atomic Cafe' shows that asylum America got the authority it deserved, and the brief flash of Reagan in the archives suggests that it wasn't a mentality that had just gone away.
It is a shame, then, that the film is tainted by its own processes, distorting the evidence to produce a single viewpoint, just as those silly films did. The filmmakers cannot trust the audience to see the inherent ghastly idiocy of the propaganda for themselves; they have to lead us with a heavy hand. Like authority. It intercuts footage with ironically disparate soundtracks (eg the proto-'Blue Velvet' effect I mentioned above); at the climax, 'Cafe' lunges into a Walpurgisnacht of American craziness, full of speeded up editing and 'zany' sound effects. Having watched so many of the films, maybe Rafferty-Loader-Rafferty got used to the idea of power.