The Persistence of a Nuclear Threat
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argues that perceptions of national identity are articulated and debated in
cinematic representations of the American past, extolling “film’s ability to hold
up to scrutiny and drive home the emotional meaning of the imagined
community of nation and its bruising inadequacies.”5
The film texts of the 1980s suggest a meaningful societal discourse on the
nature of nuclear war and the Cold War. Two of the most fascinating nuclear
war texts of the 1980s are T esta m en t (1983) and R e d D a w n (1984); polarextreme films which introduce a feminist and adolescent male perspective,
respectively, on the crucial topic of World War III and a nuclear holocaust. The
Hollywood discourse on nuclear disaster during the Reagan era, however, began
in 1979 with The C hina S y n d ro m e examining questions of safety in the nation’s
nuclear power plants. Box office receipts for The C h ina S y n d ro m e were strong
as, in a case of life imitating art, the film benefited from the nuclear accident at
Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. This commercial success was followed by
the documentary The A to m ic C a fe (1982), in which filmmakers Joyce Loader
along with Pierce and Kevin Rafferty construct an amusing tale of how the
atomic bomb