As 'Oppenheimer' drops, local cinemas focus in on nuclear films, Iowa's atomic history

FilmScene projection staffer and Nuclear Movies curator Lee Sailor is also introducing each film in the series before the screenings. — Emma McClatchey/Little Village

With the highly anticipated premiere of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer on the summer calendar, FilmScene staffer Lee Sailor decided to curate a Nuclear Movies series over a few weeks in July. The Iowa City cinema’s series typically last longer, but “we were slightly concerned about how many people would want to go see the world end for four weeks in a row,” Sailor explained.

“And I eventually came to the conclusion, partly from watching Threads, that spending too much time thinking about nuclear war was a good way to go crazy.”

No, Sailor’s not talking about the new social media app. The third and final show in the Nuclear Movies series — before Oppenheimer officially lands at 6:30 p.m. Thursday — is Threads, a gritty, 1984 TV movie depicting a hypothetical but starkly realistic nuclear fallout endured by common folk in Britain. The film is far less action-packed than Ishirô Honda’s Godzilla, which kicked off the film series earlier this month, and in 1954 introduced the iconic movie monster — a cinematic representation of the bomb from a Japanese perspective — to the world.

Threads, by comparison, is clinical and skin-crawling. “They do use a bit of effects to portray a bomb dropping and things getting destroyed, but it is very focused on what these weapons do to humans, what they do to human bodies,” Sailor said.

This approach also contrasts with Stanley Kubrick’s war-room romp Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), FilmScene’s second entry in the Nuclear Movies series, which satirizes the Cold War arms race, Operation Paperclip and anti-communist conspiracy theories.

Nearly two decades after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brutally murdered, injured and sickened hundreds of thousands of civilians — the full reality of which was initially concealed by both the U.S. and Japanese governments — millions around the globe knew to fear the weapon developed by J. Robert Oppenheimer’s team of physicists, including Americans. Fallout radiation replaced air raids and fire-bombings as the ultimate existential threat to life on earth.

“Dr. Strangelove is a good example,” Sailor said. “It’s not just the fact that there are nuclear weapons but the fact that they could contaminate the whole world [that scares people].”

Of course, nuclear technology can contaminate a landscape without an enemy dropping the bomb — a fact that hits close to home for many Iowans. Much attention is paid to the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos National Laboratory commanded by Oppenheimer, but materials for the atomic bomb were produced at sites all over the country, including Ames, Iowa. Ill-informed scientists processed plutonium and uranium in unsafe conditions and disposed of nuclear waste in even more misguided ways.

Curious about this bizarre and dark chapter in Iowa history? Des Moines-area filmgoers can catch the 2017 documentary Uranium Derby at Varsity Cinema on Wednesday, July 19.

For her directorial debut, New York-based artist and filmmaker Brittany Prater decided to turn her lens on her hometown of Ames and its atomic history. Prater utilizes interviews with experts and locals, archival footage and both secondary and primary sources to investigate the clandestine production of nuclear bomb materials in and around the Iowa State University campus for use by Oppenheimer’s team. The film follows evidence that suggests the Department of Energy is aware of 10 sites in Ames contaminated by nuclear waste in the ’40s, which may be connected to cancer clusters over the decades.

“…[I]t becomes clear that the topic of nuclear waste was more successfully buried than the waste itself,” reads the film’s description. In the trailer, an interviewee reflects, “There are 7 billion people on the planet and we do stupid stuff all the time without knowing the consequences of what we dream up.”

Prater will be in attendance at Wednesday’s screening, and participate in a Q&A following the 88-minute film.

While a documentary didn’t make the cut for FilmScene’s Nuclear Movies series, Sailor said he was close to picking one for their July 19 show.

“Probably the one film that I’m particularly disappointed we weren’t able to include is a sort-of-documentary called The Atomic Cafe,” he continued. “It’s been made available on YouTube by the distributor, but it was released in the ’80s and is sort of a collage film of the public information films from the ’40s, ’50s and very early ’60s, showing how people were thinking as this was going on — a shift from ‘Okay, this is something survivable. It’s like what came before,’ to ‘Okay, these new bombs are quite different.'”

Wednesday’s feature, Threads (1984), may not be a documentary, but it is one of the more influential TV movies of the 20th century.

Threads was one of the first mainstream depictions of the ongoing effects of nuclear fallout — an eye-opening experience for millions of viewers in the mid-’80s, including future Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker and, allegedly, then-President Ronald Reagan, who’d announced the “Star Wars” missile defense program not long before.

“Hollywood likes to talk about how it can change the world, and these are one of the few instances where it actually did seem to influence things because Reagan saw these films, and it did shape his thinking,” Sailor noted.

Sailor, who studied nuclear politics as a student at the University of Iowa, hopes his series helps shape the way FilmScene viewers think about disaster narratives in cinema. Fear of widespread death and societal collapse may feel a little more visceral for audiences post-COVID-19 pandemic.

“It’s interesting,” Sailor said, “literally the first film I watched during lockdown when I was quarantined in my grandmother’s attic for two weeks … was Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, which was about nuclear war [and] a man trying to bargain with God to save the world. And it was like, okay, I understand that feeling. Here is an existential threat: what does it mean? How do we react to that?”

Though his series is all about the bomb, Sailor had a surprising answer to Little Village’s inevitable question: Barbie or Oppenheimer ?

“I’d say Oppenheimer to a certain extent comes off a bit like homework, whereas Barbie, it looks lighter,” he said. “I’m looking forward to Barbie.”

Both blockbusters will premiere at FilmScene and Varsity Cinema on Thursday.

Want to explore the nuclear film subgenre some more? Sailor shared the top contenders that didn’t quite make the cut: