| Doug Carmody |
Threads plays at the Trylon Cinema on Saturday, June 7th, and Sunday, June 8th as part of Bleak Week. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
Threads opens to a world on the brink. But despite a sky disrupted by thundering jet planes and a radio warning of escalating tensions between NATO and Iran, the opening scene shows two young lovers, Ruth and Jimmy, trying to have a nice time on a date. The next scene pairs a television announcement about Soviet escalations in Germany with some consequential personal news—our protagonists have a pregnancy to deal with.
The young man’s father states what the film has been implying: “It’s a hell of a time to be starting a family.” But the precise sort of time the characters are dealing with isn’t exactly clear. The newly expectant grandfather is concerned about a recession, but the television and radio broadcasts point to an impending nuclear war.
These broadcasts are one of several ways that world history interrupts the lives of the Sheffield citizens depicted in Threads. These interruptions are all the more notable because the first act of the film, marshalled by screenwriter and frequent Ken Loach collaborator Barry Hines, otherwise bears social realist trappings. Even when these incursions aren’t diegetic new bulletins, they tend to ape the form of mass media—intertitles clacking across the screen to the sound effect of a typewriter, a narrator providing contemporary voice-of-god style narration. The imposition of history confronts our everyday protagonists with a seemingly endless series of difficult choices—whether it is the right time to have a child is only the first of many quandaries.
This interleaving of styles produces a mode of temporality in which our heroes are always too late to avert catastrophe, but never too late to soften its blows. Like Americans choking in wildfire smoke as we drive to work, these characters exist in the moment between the bad consequences of past actions and the worse consequences of present actions. They live in disaster time.
Helpless Governors Wake / Background Media
The media transmissions in Threads dictate the terms of Sheffielders’ engagement with their historical moment. By making these characters aware of impending armageddon on a permanent, low-boil basis, the film cultivates a sense of anxious social responsibility on top of the prevailing aura of doom. The citizens of disaster time receive an ethical calling along with their torment.
In some cases, characters approach the moment with nihilism. Jimmy’s friend cajoles him into taking his “last chance” to sleep with someone other than Ruth—while the friend is ostensibly referring to Jimmy’s impending marriage when talking about the “last chance”, the scene is interwoven with a telecast giving a frightening update on the Iran situation. By likening the apocalypse and Jimmy’s engagement in this sequence, the film implies that trying to escape the moment is a pointless, immature response. It turns out to be futile—Jimmy’s affair is interrupted by floodlights from a military maneuver.
Because the mood of disaster time is inescapable, it demands engagement from our characters. The moment of crisis paradoxically seems to infuse individual actions with a higher degree of moral significance. A series of petty-minded people appear more villainous in this light—the local grocer who raises prices, the boorish men who shout down an anti-war speaker at a community gathering.
Despite the vaguely positive portrayal of Labour-ish speakers at these assemblies, Threads neglects to offer obvious political solutions. Neither of the two assemblies lead anywhere. The latter, a seemingly too-late call for a general strike, gets disbanded by police. But neither gathering seems to activate the citizens. Even an obvious crisis does not necessarily generate the political energy needed to avert catastrophe.
Speaking for the Dumb / Narration
Whereas the film’s inclusion of diegetic media imbues disaster time with an uneasy sense of social responsibility, its use of quasi-objective intertitles and voiceover supplements this with a mood of total futility. These direct addresses to the audience emphasize information that the characters lack, compounding the sense that the city of Sheffield is overwhelmed by the scale of the ongoing disaster.
These techniques bracket the film. The very first shot shows a spider weaving a web while the voiceover insists that “the connections that make society strong also make it vulnerable.” Shortly afterwards, an intertitle informs us of the time and place: “Sheffield, Saturday March 5th.” Threads immediately locks the audience into a pessimistic outlook, announcing that we will be watching a film about society’s weakness. It also forces us to consider the ensuing images as part of a particular historical moment, which insinuates the apocalyptic temporality to the audience even before it manifests in the plot. Shortly after, intertitles will inform us of the “nearest military targets” to Sheffield.
Each technique tends towards a sort of divine cruelty as the film’s disaster escalates. After the bomb drops, the intertitles cease to be accompanied by a clacking keyboard sound effect, but they continue to silently inform the audience of a plethora of morbid casualty notices and related realities (“no spare fuel for cremation”). The voiceover also continues apace, at one point blithely explaining that “the entire British Health Service, even if they’d survived, would be unable to cope with the effects of even the single bomb that has hit Sheffield.”
Throughout the first act, these modes of address play like excerpts from a future society’s recordkeeping, but this facade quickly drops after the explosion. The techniques continue without plot-wise basis, and only emphasize the increasing grimness of Sheffield. It gives a new sense to “voice-of-god” narration—there are no mortals left with such an informed outlook on the situation. These narrative flourishes expand the scope of the visually depicted chaos, implying a scale of catastrophe that far outstrips the ability of the characters to confront it.
The Music Must Always Play / Continuous Time
As this despair accumulates, we begin to wonder when these poor citizens might be relieved of their ethical duties. Will they pass some point of no return at which history subsides to doom, rendering their choices pointless? Rather than this sort of before/after break, the disaster time of Threads emphasizes continuity: the foreboding present in the first frame of the movie expands throughout, but never eclipses the significance of the characters’ decisions.
This temporality can be understood by contrast with another film that centers on an explosion: Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Both films put nuclear destruction on screen, but Oppenheimer renders it as a moment of rupture. The explosion at Los Alamos functions narratively as an original sin, where Oppenheimer’s scientific achievement opens the door to acts of military terror and visions of apocalypse. For that film, even the destruction of Hiroshima plays as an echo of the sin at Los Alamos.
Accordingly, the after-explosion storyline plays as a futile attempt to unwind the consequences of the bomb’s creation. Even the formal architecture of the film attends to the notion of a before/after break, with the post-explosion scenes being filmed in black and white. Oppenheimer’s ending alludes to a “chain reaction” that may terminate in apocalypse. It’s a bleak notion, but oddly exculpatory: because this reaction cannot be stopped after it has been instigated, it doesn’t really matter whether Oppenheimer continues to advocate for disarmament.
Chaining of cause and effect in Threads also follows a cataclysmic logic. But in apocalyptic Sheffield, every point in the causal chain can be contested in a way that leads to a marginally better outcome or a much worse one. Beginning with the opening that pairs NATO escalation with the beginning of a pregnancy, none of the film’s events can be undone, but they can be addressed with varying degrees of compassion and strategic acumen. The explosion in Threads turns out not to be a break in this chain, but rather a particularly gruesome link.
No One Exists Alone / The Ethics of Disaster Time
The leaders of Sheffield’s local government confront an escalating series of ethical quandaries when trying to deal with the consequences of this incessant armageddon. Their choices include who to feed in the immediate stages of fallout (“why waste food on people who are going to die?”) and how to handle crime (at one point an intertitle informs us that “special courts of justice” have formed, while an execution plays out in the background).
These decisions, which only become more difficult as the situation grows more dire, reminded me of the worst days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The horrors of those days played out at a slight delay: a day with a large death toll was mostly reflective of choices made three to four weeks prior. Even perfect conduct on an individual and social level wouldn’t have been able to avert the damage incurred by our previous mistakes. This sort of unfurling disaster has much more in common with the continuous temporal mode of Threads than the rupture-fixated narrative of Oppenheimer.
Modern times have presented us with several ceaseless disasters, each of which produces their own sort of disaster time. Climate catastrophe resembles a slow tipping of an invisible scale, with each passing year rendering our planet a touch more uninhabitable, and each bit of warmth baking in a smorgasbord of unforeseeable catastrophes. While American citizens have a diffuse relationship to the climate disaster, we are each burdened with the awareness that our mode of existence weighs the scale ever so slightly towards tragedy.
The genocide in Gaza also operates under the logic of disaster time. Every moment of inaction brings horror, whether in the immediate form of murder and starvation or the more long-run forms of denied medical care and wrecked civil infrastructure. The latter horrors will propagate harm for decades after any ceasefire.
In these sorts of conditions, where an impossible amount of past, present, and future damage has already been accrued, it is no wonder that many people appeal to the idea that it is too late to fix things. By manufacturing points of no return—U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords, the Nakba, or perhaps the Six-Day War—they absolve themselves of the responsibility to engage with history as it unfolds.
In this light, the bleak final act of Threads renders as perversely heartening. Even the meekest individuals, living under an unfolding catastrophe, are still confronted with consequential moral choices.
Ruth, the woman impregnated in the opening of the movie, is the first character to recognize that time is still proceeding as usual, presenting new crises on top of the one they have just experienced. She thinks of her pregnancy, which she now doesn’t want to carry to term, noting “we’re breathing in radiation all the time. It will be ugly and deformed.” In eventually continuing her pregnancy, Ruth affirms the centrality of procreation to the narrative of Threads: the film begins with the conception of her child and will end with the birth of her grandchild.
The film’s coda delineates the importance of ethics in catastrophe by juxtaposing the childbearing experiences of Ruth and her daughter Jane. Ruth delivers Jane at the peak of armageddon, and Jane delivers her child when society is stable and increasing in population again. But the new type of society has been stripped of tenderness—whereas Ruth navigated her maternity by relying on the threads of human decency remaining from pre-apocalypse (being fed by a friend of Jimmy’s and a stranger who scavenged rat meat), Jane finds no such goodwill.
Instead of healing, the post-apocalyptic world seems to have harshened. Rather than speaking back and forth, Jane’s generation bark commands at each other in a broken caveman grammar. She is abused by her contemporaries, attacked by the police, and finally very nearly denied medical care during her labor, with a hospital worker insisting she use her “common sense.”
It is an unavoidable consequence of previous failures—radiation, starvation—that there seems to be something wrong with Jane’s baby. But it is a present-tense ethical failing that causes a healthcare worker to dispassionately hand her this baby, wrapped in a bloody bundle.
The genius of Threads lies in this interweaving of past and present failures, and in the film’s grim insistence that the gravity of the past can never deliver us from our present responsibilities.
Edited by Finn Odum