Actual military training and debriefing films. This declassified material, such as the film used to prep soldiers for live nuclear bomb combat drills, tends to be straightforward and informational. There's no ironic manipulation used there; the awful truth is that the people exposed to the test were clearly misinformed about the dangers of radiation. We see soldiers told that all will be fine, and then the blast effect blows a pressure wave of contaminated dust into every pore in their bodies. Other films clinically document tests with shop mannikins and live pigs. We see the pigs suffering direct blast effects, with some being loaded onto trucks, still alive and suffering traumatic burns and injuries. After some brief photos of Hiroshima victims, this is the most graphic material. Yet an 'amusing' title labeling the pig pen as 'Pork City', makes the soldiers on screen look like callous torturers. Other film excerpts play as if they were commissioned as damage control for AEC goofs, as when entire populations of docile and agreeable Polynesians had to be moved from their accidentally irradiated island homes. The lack of guile on the part of the filmmakers, is evident in the fact that they were unaware of their own incredibly condescending attitude toward the 'primitive' and thus irrelevant natives - one moment even suggests that a smiling local woman will enjoy the 'company' of her handsome soldier protectors. Like WW2 Nazis filming their own war crimes without concern for their possible later use as evidence, a hidden factor in these films is that their subjects sincerely believed that they were doing the right thing.

Newsreels. Accompanied by loaded headlines that presume the unimpeachable rightness of our side, and the abject Evil of our enemies, these dramatic 'news' features were made by the newsreel departments of movie studios that already functioned as message-carriers for the government. The no-holds-barred techniques of the Frank Capra Why We Fight series of WW2 propaganda films are used to sell the concept of separate 'free' and 'slave' worlds, and to impress with fearful-looking animations of nuclear strikes. Publicity stunts, like one town's pretending to be overthrown by Communists, are seized upon as spontaneous demonstrations by a right-thinking public.

Educational and Public Service Informational films. Often funded by uncredited government agencies, these independent film productions by companies large and small naturally competed to find effective ways to present a predetermined message. Technically, this is real propaganda, because sophisticated media techniques are specifically employed to indoctrinate the presumed passive and suggestable viewer. Madison Avenue cleverness meets ex-Signal Corps resourcefulness, as Andy Hardy-like families withstand direct attack with little distress. Atomic attack is repeatedly portrayed by flashes of white light, that warn people of impending danger, instead of being deadly in themselves. Pulling a picnic blanket over one's head or climbing under a desk enable people to escape blast effects that level buildings. These are the real Big Lie films, that audiences believed because they wanted to believe, or because they had no other sources of information.

This kind of paternal dishonesty is easily recognized by kids, and Savant believes it promoted disaffection and alienation among the youth of the fifties, whose yardstick for truth was the liberal satire of Mad Magazine. The snickering Junior High creeps ruining the screenings with their jeers knew when they were being lied to, and quietly rejected all the lessons of society, good and bad. If these propaganda pictures were seen in a fair context, they'd have been rejected in the '50s in the same way we laugh at them now. But then they were shown to captive audiences - schoolchildren, people in work gatherings - where it was implied that one's teachers or employers expect passive acceptance of their content. So it didn't matter if the shows were insultingly fake, or if they starred familiar actors like Hugh Beaumont pretending to be Army Generals.

TV and Radio Entertainment. The Atomic Cafe doesn't employ any Hollywood film clips, no doubt due to high licensing costs. But there are a number of talk show clips that demonstrate that spokesmen willing to expound extreme ideas were always welcome on the air. Congressmen and 'experts' are all too eager to exterminate millions in an atom war. A clergyman practically foams at the mouth while anticipating the 'regrettable' need to use deadly force to defend one's fallout shelter against one's own neighbors. The dozen or so amusing 'atomic' novelty songs used as a soundtrack, are about romance heightened by atomic lust, or promises of desire in the fallout bunker. A bunch of these mostly painful pop tunes are country or rockabilly regional efforts. Since arcane tunes exist for almost every subject under the sun, it's not known whether a song urging MacArthur to nuke Korea, or a rockin' tune riffing off the lyric, 'Fire, heat & lighting', was heard by millions, or never even released.

The makers of The Atomic Cafe clearly have a message to get across, and they use the inherent absurdity of their source material in creative ways to achieve their goals. But they're careful to make sure they leave them essentially untransformed. When we see Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover posing with a strip of microfilm, we know we're watching a newsreel. The content isn't cheated. Except in wrapup montages, narration from one source isn't used over another. When raw footage is available, candid moments are seen of speechmakers (including President Truman) when they don't know the cameras are rolling. Caught laughing incongruously before a solemn report on an atom threat, Truman comes off not as callous, but human - a far cry from Ronald Reagan's cheap jokes about nuking Russians accidentally broadcast in the 1980s. ¹

The film has an attitude of fairness. Richard Nixon comes off as patiently civilized next to a blustering, bullying Nikita Khruschev.  ⁵ Dukakis' running mate Lloyd Bentsen, urging voters to petition congress to nuke Northern Korea, is just as bomb-crazy as any Republican. Hiroshima pilot Paul Tibbets is allowed to make his full speech and express his contradictory emotions, in footage usually shown much more selectively.

Finally, besides its sense of humor, the film has a great sense of poetry. In one deeply affecting passage, President Eisenhower talks about our rich society, and the vague, troubling unease it is experiencing. We hear an excerpt of emotional, disturbing Miklos Rosza music from the Film Noir classic The Killers, as a lonely car moves down a dark highway in America. Eisenhower goes on to verbally distill the concept that mankind is too primitive to comprehend its own technological terrors. It's a great speech, from a President not remembered for great speeches, and The Atomic Cafe uses it to merge philosophical reflection with the Noir despair.  ³

1. Ever seen those moments, when Reagan joked that he could wipe out Moscow in 30 minutes? Funny how some newsworthy footage is effectively suppressed in our 'free' society.
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3. The villain of Kiss Me Deadly, the Noir touchstone of the atomic age, talks about the world becoming more primitive with every scientific advance, using classical allusions and a mythical framework. Both Eisenhower and writer A.I. Bezzerides were clued-in to a major truth of our atomic world.
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4. "What's a war, Daddy?" says the little girl in the ads for We Were Soldiers. Her father answers that a War is when bad people try to take the lives of good people, and your Daddy has to go try and stop them. That anybody over ten years old doesn't start tearing up theater seats over a scene like that says it all. We have a political climate where dissent has been marginalized and neutralized, and self-servicing garbage like the above passes unchallenged.
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5. This, of course, is the context of the famous Khruschev, 'We will bury you!" quote. Apparently refusing to be charmed by the latest American washing machines, the scary Soviet Prez was that the Soviet Union would soon outstrip the West in the production of quality appliances - "We'll bury you in consumer goods!" were supposedly his real words.
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