Nicholas Meyer
The Day After

A start, an epileptic jerk makes the blankets look like the tangle of a car accident with dozens of deaths. A long shiver when my entire body makes me wake up completely in the time of a sharp snap of fingers. I can't see them, but my pupils, seen from the outside, must be a spectacle capable of raising the hair of a horror film enthusiast. I gasp for air. Pure anguish. I feel the sweat everywhere: in the sheets and on my body. It's as one with the skin: it seems as if they have smeared and imprisoned me with infinite rolls of cellophane wrap. It's been 15 years, but the memory of those nights is vivid and still present.

The fact is that I wasn't ready to see that movie. Too young and psychologically fragile. I wasn't even looking for it: at twelve, I found it by chance along with many other "adult" VHS tapes recklessly left in a dark corner of the house. And so it got stuck for days and nights between blond hair and jaws. I forced myself to fall asleep thinking of the beautiful brunette, that shy girl with the upturned nose, whom I had a crush on, or the upcoming summer. The result was just procrastinating that horrendous and dreadful awakening in the middle of the night.
My father remembers his birthday in October 1962 well: as the climax of the heaviest and most unsettling period of his life. He was young, but mature enough to fully understand the extreme political situation of the time. It wasn't just a remote possibility, but a terribly plausible hypothesis. He now tells me, with a reassuring cup of coffee in hand, that the tension of those days was unparalleled.

THE DAY AFTER

"The Day After" begins where several movies have placed the closing credits. It's essentially a film set in the famous quote by Einstein: "if World War III breaks out, the fourth will certainly be fought with clubs and stones." Those red buttons, sometimes caressed and even touched (as already happened in Berlin in '48/'49 and in the aforementioned Cuban missile crisis), and those endless alphanumeric codes are pressed and typed. The warheads launch from east to west and from west to east. And this time, there is no Superman or a Bruce Willis ready to stop the mad race a few seconds before impact with heroic sacrifice. The mushrooms rise for kilometers and tyrannically claim the stratosphere and extinguish the sun.

There is no moral. There is no debate about who is to blame. A camera simply records one of the numerous targeted cities: specifically, we meet some survivors in Kansas who were not fortunate enough to be vaporized in an instant. It is the description of a torment, a vortex, a sharp and rapid downward spiral. Humanity, faced with absolute tragedy, does not pray but suddenly regresses millions of years: to its animalistic state, with Darwin in the front row. Ready to kill without remorse or regrets for a handful of calories. In the perpetual gray and nuclear cold, the rational desire for suicide clashes with the illusory temptation to survive. Everything is contaminated. There is only despair and death. Everywhere.

For once, I won't spend more than a single line judging the film from a technical/acting standpoint because everything takes a back seat in front of a plot of such emotional intensity. It’s enough to say that the work is well realized, special effects included.

The difference between "The Day After" and all the disaster films of the decade I’ve seen is large and apparent. Recently, there is often a technological competition to bring down, in the most spectacular way possible, the Statue of Liberty & Co., to reach the abyss and then unexpectedly save the day in the last minute. Here, however, the devastating power of atomic explosions, the cleverness, and leadership of the heroic protagonist won’t stick in your mind. In "The Day After," the compelling image of a strand of hair falling like dry straw remains: life slipping away. This film disquiets us for the lack of even the slightest semblance of a crumb of hope. If you’ve never seen it, I recommend it: it will make you reflect, it will shake you with the awareness that we are not facing a natural catastrophe; something unpredictable, and thus justifiable as the “justice of God.” Our end, on the other hand, we have built and packaged ourselves with a flashy gift wrap.

To seal it all, shortly before the end credits, the film's scientific conclusion sounds like thunder, reminding us, before bidding us goodnight, that what we have seen is an infinitely milder and rosier simulation compared to the post-nuclear reality should a third world war actually break out.

ilfreddo