I forgot to say:

I loved the textual narration that ended The Day After:

"It is hoped that the images of this film will inspire the nations of this earth, their peoples and leaders, to find the means to avert the fateful day."

Wow. Pretty lofty goals for a made-for-TV movie. Then again, we never experienced a nuclear winter, so maybe it did its job.

Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon
Strikes again

I like reading/watching post-apocalyptic fiction (apocafic, if you will). Today I watched a movie I got from Netflix entitled The Day After. It was an ABC-produced made-for-TV movie from 1983. The cast included Steve(n) Guttenberg and John Lithgow. The first half hour was unbearable slow, but the remaining hour and a half wasn't too bad. So I sit down an hour later and read some (non-apocafic) Sarah Vowell--Pass the Cannoli. Which is like humorous reminiscences that try to make some sort of social/cultural point, I guess. Anyway, I'm reading along and suddenly I get to this passage:

"By 1983, he'd [Reagan] made the whole country so nervous that there was a prime-time TV movie about nuclear winter called The Day After." p. 43.

Sure, maybe this movie isn't as obscure as I think it is (After all, I was only 2 when it came out), but come on. What are the odds of reading that part of that book literally an hour after watching that movie? I think it means that we will experience apocalypse via nuclear war sometime this month. Probably initiated by the crazy North Koreans.