In the same way that Christians ask themselves What Would Jesus Do (WWJD), I sometimes watch films and think What Would K-Punk Say (WWKPS): his essays on A History of Violence and Batman Begins were so illuminating that some films can feel incomplete without his exegesis.
Children of Men was one of those films. It cried out for his commentary (alas, they could only get Zizek) and I emailed to telling him so, but due to him moving house he only recently got to see it on DVD with his eventual post linking it in with some atrabilious musings on the exhaustion of culture/capitalism and referring to a TV drama called Threads, which was apparently about the after effects of nuclear apocalypse. Needless to say, I ordered Threads immediately.
For I love apocalyptic dramas. As a ten year old I devoured Z is for Zachariah and Day of the Triffids. For years I helped myself to get to sleep by becoming absorbed in a fantasy wherein I was a survivor (protected by clambering inside my duvet cover) of a nuclear bomb attack. Walking into Wigston alone, I found myself struck by the silent, empty streets and wondered whether the populace had been wiped out. So let’s say I had high expectations for Threads.
Threads begins (spoilers follow) with a realistic depiction of ordinary Sheffield life, full of annoying families, back-street aviaries and fumbled fucks in Ford Cortinas. It feels less like a drama and more like a documentary replete with RP narrator explaining the increasingly tense geopolitical situation. The news - overheard in pubs, on the wireless, glanced at in newspapers - builds with devastating inevitability so that when the bombs fall it comes as something of a relief.
As Martin Amis said in Einstein’s Monsters, nuclear weapons are unthinkable. The reality of the consequences are beyond our ken. Civilization crumbles, hope dissipates, and there is nothing that anyone can do to stop it. Selling sex for rats to eat - that is the reality of post-nuclear Sheffield. I mean, bleakness is so much part of Sheffield civilization that to see that civilization torn to shreds is to experience a bleakness beyond compare.
And yet, some people survive, more or less in starker and starker contrast to the RP announcer, who calmly explains what would happen to the crops, to the radiated children, and to the piles of rotting corpses. The viewer is left demoralised, barely able to face a future full of nuclear bombs in the Middle East, bird flu, global warming, and bioterrorism. I loved it.
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