‘Atomic Cafe’ Good For Another 35 Years

By ROB PATTERSON

“You couldn’t have asked for a better time for it to be re-released,” I recently quipped with both irony and dread to my friend Jayne Loader, one of the three producer/directors of the 1982 documentary film, The Atomic Cafe. With Trump engaged in a childish pissing match with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and rumblings of war underneath his approach to Iran, we all need to be reminded about just what it means and how dangerous to the planet it is to even consider the notion of using nuclear weapons.

Before I proceed further, a bit on my full disclosure above, as it does relate to even reading me here. I first met Loader in the late 1980s via a mutual friend, who touted her as we were heading to meet Jayne one evening at a New York City bar as one of the filmmakers behind The Atomic Cafe. I was duly impressed by that, having seen the movie when it was first released and finding it both important and very clever. I came away from talking with Loader that evening quite liking her.

I was delighted to connect with her again about a decade later on an early Internet email group I became part of. In the same group was our fearless leader here at The Progressive Populist, Jim Cullen, who invited me to write this column – now the longest running association I have had with any publication in my more than four decades of professional journalism.

But as my digression does point out regarding my full disclosure, I loved The Atomic Cafe even before I knew Jayne. The fact that I now have a friendship with her makes the movie’s return in a digitally restored version all that more delightful to me.

It is a notable achievement in independent filmmaking. It was made using US government propaganda films and historical newsreel and other footage. As someone pointed out in the Q&A session with the filmmakers at the premiere public showing of the movie in its return, it has no narrator to tie it all together – an impressive feat of film editing. Yet the story it tells is quite clear: the development and use of the atomic bomb at the tail end of World War II and how “the bomb,” as it was simply known to us in the postwar years, was regarded in popular culture.

Also to its credit is how The Atomic Cafe effectively evokes both horror and humor. We’ve now gone so far past when the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were well-known that it’s important for later generations to learn just what the destructive force of these super-weapons can do. And for those of us who know and remember to be reminded.

The footage showing the effects of the blast and subsequent radiation is as chilling as ever, if not even more so as the irresponsible and ignorant Trump rhetoric about nukes has moved the Doomsday Clock closer then ever to the inconceivable yet now again scarily relevant possibility of nuclear conflict. (And much as I hate to even consider, much less say it, we live in a dangerous time when the use of some likely crude atomic weapon in a terror attack isn’t merely possible but probable.)

The quite black humor to be found in the government “informational” films during the Red Scare “duck and cover” Cold War era harks back to how those of us in the first post-nuclear generation dealt with the unthinkable danger, as also found in the movie Dr. Strangelove. It is the proverbial spoonful of sugar with the medicine.

Dismay is yet another of the emotional responses the film evokes in that nuclear bomb test were done so casually. It’s more of the richness of the movie.

The Atomic Cafe is an undeniable modern totem we must respect and heed. In 2016, the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress selected it for preservation for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” – all three apply. Even if Jayne wasn’t a friend, I’m thankful it has returned and urge all to see it for either the first time or again. If we’re hopefully around to do so.

Populist Picks

CD (replay): Tommy by The Who – My friend who runs the premier fan site for my favorite band, The Who, asked me to write an essay on their 1969 rock opera that raised the group to superstardom and subsequently became a movie and a Broadway musical. Much as I have no use for the later iterations, listening to the whole album in full for the first time in too long to remember since I last did confirms what a splendid work of rock music ambition it was and remains.

TV Series: Top of the Lake – Much as I am loath to say anything nice about anyone foolish enough to believe in Scientology, the magnificent (and to my tastes quite fetching) Elisabeth Moss yet again proves her considerable acting chops in this superb and also tough and haunting show set in New Zealand and Australia created by Jane Campion (of The Piano fame).

Rob Patterson is a music and entertainment writer in Austin, Texas. Email orca@prismnet.com.

From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2018

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