On The Beach Redux

I can't remember when I first read "On The Beach," the Neville Shute novel about the post apocalpyse following a nuclear war; I was either 10 years old or 12, but I was definitely 12 when the movie came out,  and both had a powerful effect on me.

The movie had a powerful effect across many nations, when it premiered in 1959 in Moscow, Washington, New York, Sydney, London and Paris all on the same night, adjusted for the time zones.

It was the most powerful Jeremiad against nuclear brinksmanship and nuclear weapons until "The Day After," a 1983T.V. show about nuclear war and the total destruction it would bring. President Ronald Reagan later said that this show moved him and President Gorbachev to sign the nuclear arms reduction treaty in 1987. 

So "On the Beach," powerful and widely seen as it was, may have been ahead of its time, as 1959 was not long after the Red Scare, McCarthy period and no nuclear disarmament treaties got signs after that. In fact, just a few years later the world came within a hair's breadth of nuclear obliteration during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Neville Shute was appalled by the movie made of his book--they took it from a bleak, nihilistic work and tried to make a love story out of it with Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck, and the big conflict seemed to be whether Peck would bed Gardner or remain loyal to his dead wife.

So what prompted an Australian company to re make the film in 2000? 

Well, for one thing, they updated it: in the original, the nuclear holocaust began in the Middle East with a war between Israel and its Arab neighbors, but the 2000 version is sparked by a Chinese invasion of Taiwan with an American nuclear response.

The crucial scenes are preserved in both films: the expedition to Northwest America to investigate what turns out to be a spurious signal which might signify life, the escape of a sailor from the submarine, who opts to die at home rather than back in Australia, the fiery demise of an Australian scientist in his Ferrari, choosing a spectacular way to die rather than just taking his suicide pills. 

But the 2,000 film is vastly superior: At one point, looking at her sister and her sister's daughter playing in the garden, Moira says, "Look at that! A picture of that mother and child should have been pasted above every nuclear launch switch, and this war would never have happened." And we find out later something exactly like that did happen on board the American submarine.

Upon its arrival in Melbourne, the American submarine is pelted by Australians who are furious at the Americans for the war they ignited. The Australians advise Americans to not wear their uniforms off their ship. 

There is a much better and more extensive rendering of the argument about whether the nuclear cloud hovering over the Northern Hemisphere would ever actually cross the equator and doom Australia and the Southern hemisphere, which, for the purposes of the story has to happen, but the authors are careful to show how scientists cannot be sure and argue continuously about what their data means. Most scientists argue the air currents in the two hemispheres are so separate a nuclear cloud in the Northern Hemisphere would never cross the equator, but nobody's ever done the experiment. And, nobody is sure if nuclear detonations in Taiwan, and Micronesia would be close enough to the Southern Hemisphere to change the calculations.

In the end, in the story, the nuclear cloud relentlessly spreads south, latitude by latitude toward Melbourne.

Virtually everything is better in the 2000 film but it is a gut wrenching experience--in the end you've got to watch a mother and father give their own child a lethal dose to save her from further radiation induced suffering, before swallowing their own doses. Not since the scene in "Downfall" where the Goebbels poison their six children with cyanide capsules in the bunker has a scene of infanticide been so starkly rendered. 

The Australian authors also introduce a mishap which infects an American officer with a nuclear dose and we watch him die slowly, agonizingly from the resultant leukemia, a demonstration of what is going to happen to the women and children we have been watching.

There are no speeches from Fred Astaire decrying the fecklessness, incompetence and stupidity of heads of state, but simple conversations among people who know they are simply not in a position to prevent catastrophe.

The 2000 movie was made over 25 years ago, and one might ask why it was made at all, 40 years after the original, as nothing much has changed in the realm of nuclear holocaust discussions.

But the real theme is one of helplessness of ordinary people to prevent such horrors from reigning down upon them and their families. You and I, in our New Hampshire town or even our Washington, D.C. suburbs, are no better positioned to stop a "nuclear exchange" than we are to stop an asteroid from destroying the earth--like the folks in that wonderful movie, "Don't Look Up," there is simply nothing we can do.

There is the theme of sheer incompetence among our leaders which has even more appeal today than it did in the year 2000. The message is that if we simply accept this incompetence, it may ultimately come round to destroy us.

The crew asks the Captain to offer a prayer before they take their submarine back out to sea to go to die in America, and he admits he has no religious background, which becomes immediately apparent when he asks the Lord that their deaths not be "in vain."

Whatever that may mean.

Was he saying that he hopes life has meaning, even if, on the brink of death, he can't for the life of him figure out what that meaning might be?

But this film is not a Sartre essay on Being and Nothingness.

It's not a romantic comedy, nor even a science fiction excursion. 

It is profoundly depressing, but it is beautifully wrought.

At one point, Moira finds the Captain reading "Great Expectations," and asks why. "It's not a great title for current circumstances," he admits.

"Are you enjoying it?" she asks.

"More now than when I originally read it," he says. "Don't know why."

She laughs and we laugh with her--it's just a simple moment of humanity we've all shared, and it makes the people, the story, the whole enterprise seem very real.