Or, as this should alternately be titled:
WHY I COULDN'T LEAVE WELL ENOUGH ALONE.
I don't know if you know this or not (which is why I'm here--to alert you to the up-to-the-minute internets happenings that you absolutely MUST know about) but a recent MEME making its way around the ether is this woman named Anne Sellors. I want to say I heard about this on Fark first, but I distinctly remember the email conversation I had with The Friend in NC. He was all like, "Hey, did you hear about this woman who was in this movie?" And I was all like, yeah, I totally heard all about it. But then he sent me video, which is way better than reading a description.
Anyway, google Anne Sellors and what you will discover is that she has the greatest entry on Internet Movie Database, EVER. She has one credit to her name, "Woman who urinates herself," in the made-for-British-TV movie THREADS. So you google her, and this is the basic information you get about her. And you can find video of this scene on YouTube. But for you, Dear Audience--and to satisfy my own curiousity--I rented THREADS from the library. I just finished watching it a half hour ago. I so totally need a cigarette right now, because I'm completely freaked the fuck out. And not in a good, SILENT HILL "Pyramid Head Is Coming To Get Me" sort of way, but in a "Now I can't read Fark or Yahoo news or Salon because I JUST DON'T WANT TO KNOW" way.
THREADS tells the story of a Russian nuclear attack on NATO bases in the West and its effects on the British town of Sheffield. The movie begins benignly enough with a young couple discovering they're accidently pregnant, and as their families try to deal with the "fallout" of this revelation, news broadcasts on TV and radio play in the background, documenting the growing tensions between Russia and the US over Iran. One precision nuclear warhead strike on a base leads to all-out annihilation. THREADS follows the decade long struggle of the survivors.
At the end of the movie, there's a list a mile long of technical advisors, Carl Sagan being one of them. I remember back in the day reading his book The Nuclear Winter: The World After Nuclear War, because we were all crazily obsessed with nuclear war (at least The Cousin and I were; I remember in 1986, when I was in eighth grade, and the Chernobyl explosion had happened. Tom Brokaw said on the news that all the lettuce in the world was irradiated. I wouldn't eat lettuce for the longest time after that). I had a dream once, when I was in sixth grade, that there'd been a war. The Brother and I were sleeping in bunk beds that were in an "L" configuration; I was in the top bunk. In my dream I woke up to find a portion of the roof had fallen, killing The Brother. Everyone was dead and I was the only person left. And at the end of the dream I was sitting on a tree stump, surrounded by cans of food that I couldn't open. I was so shaken by my own reaction to the idea of my brother dying.
When I was in college, I took a class on American literature since 1945. The last week of class was a free week, the professor said; "I'll let you guys choose the book we read, just give me a synopsis and I'll choose one for us to study." I suggested Generation X, which was my favorite book at the time. For some reason, the professor chose that one. He liked to spend most of the class time complaining about how much he hated it and thought it was overindulgent crap, which was ironic because everything we'd read up until that point was Russell Banks and John Updike and lots of middle-aged men having mid-life crises and writing self-indulgent crap about it. Anyway, I digress. One of the major complaints the professor had was that much of Generation X focuses on the narrator's fear of nuclear holocaust: he frequently has nightmares about it, and finds himself drawn to missle testing ranges. "What a bunch of CRAP!" my professor cried. "You kids have no idea what it was like having to live with air raid sirens going off and ducking and covering under your desks and fallout shelters!!!" "OH CONTRAIRE, MON FRERE!!!" I hollered back. I remember the drills we had in elementary school where we'd hunker down in the locker room. And The Day After. And the Doomsday Clock. Three Minutes to Midnight. "We begin bombing in five minutes." What a bunch of SHIT that your generation has sole rights to being afraid!!
When I got THREADS from the library, The Husband right off the bat said no to watching it. I was under the impression that anything with a credit such as "Woman who urinates herself" can't be THAT serious. I mean, I saw that part on YouTube. It was fucking hysterical. SHE PEED HER PANTS!!! HAHAHAAHHA!!
But then you see it in context, and it isn't so funny.
I did a quick look-see on the IMDB message boards about the movie. There's a thread, "parts that stick in your mind." The one that people remember most? Anne Sellors urinating on herself. And they don't remember it in a humorous way.
I forget where I was going with this.
So, yeah, nuclear war is bad. THREADS shows a lot of bloodly limbs and vomiting. OMG, there was this part, after the bomb dropped and there was rubble everywhere...they showed this pile of debris and there was a fountain of blood shooting out from it. And there was a lot of radiation sickness. And deformed babies.
And there's no Steve Guttenberg to save the day.
It was just all sorts of fucked up.
Oh, now I remember. The WORST, THE WORST!!!!! PART OF THIS MOVIE!!!! Is that it takes place in MAY (which is coming up) and the war is between Russia and the US over control of Iran. So listening to the news in the movie was a lot like listening to the news right now. Which is why I'm so freaked out about the news right now. It reminds me of when I first read Stephen King's The Stand. I started reading it in 1985, a few days before the action in the book starts. It upped the freakout factor of the book by a billion. So THREADS ends up being all the more difficult to watch because the cause of the war is so close to what's going on politically in our own world. It's just totally fucked up.
In conclusion, THREADS kicked ass in the way that only British people can kick the soap opera-y ass of American films. It's not as chokingly difficult as TESTAMENT, another really horrible-to-watch nuclear war movie. THREADS is far more scientific in its methods. I can't breathe. I should have never watched it.
That being said, get it from the library. You NEED to see it. Because I think we've all been living with a false sense of security. That doesn't sound right at all, what with the Iraq War and everything, but it could get so much more worse. There's this really awful part of the movie where all these people are attending a rally, and someone's making a speech about the consequences of war and whatnot, and the people attending the rally are pissed because there's nothing worth saving about their lives as they are, anyway: there's a recession, and everyone's out of work, so what's the point about getting all worked up about bombs? And it was just another thing about this movie that hit unpleasantly close to home. And it's not just because Iran is threatening to make a bomb, but because our current government is desperate to use the ones we already have. We need to make sure that it gets back into the human consciousness: A nuclear war is unwinnable.
In the movie there's an awesome line spoken by a peace activist: "The Russians would have conquered a corpse of a country." How can I sleep at night knowing my indifference helped kill it?
