42. The system to which the characters in Above and Beyond must be educated is already complete and entire in the 1990 cable tv release, By Dawn's Early Light. This is one of the few films which actually follow the cause, development, conduct and termination of a nuclear war. The makers of this film do not need to educate their viewers into a representational system; the previous forty years have already constructed it for them. The nuclear system had become well known to every person living in the industrialized world. An entire generation had grown up inside of the system, knowing its reality with intimate, threatening details. Countless films, documentaries, school drills, comic books, novels, and nightmares have transformed the nuclear epiphany into mundane reality. There is thus no need to educate and convince the characters in this film of the necessity or attributes of nuclear systems as in Above and Beyond. The military metaphysics into which films made in the preceding 45 years educated their characters (and so the audiences) has permeated the whole of the life world as both a quotidian way of existence and an autonomous event process which could erupt at any time, overwhelming the merely human.

43. The resulting nuclear simulacrum reveals the film readers' familiarity with the stock signifiers by reducing them to shorthand images and scenes. No longer is it necessary to show mushroom clouds and towering fireballs - only one such image appears in this film which has several nuclear explosions. The same familiarity holds for the nuclear system as a whole.

44. The system which we saw being elaborated in Above and Beyond is sufficiently entrenched that the expert pronouncements, the scientific and military projections are the taken-for-granted truths which this film can present as the real. The portrayals of SAC headquarters at Omaha, Nebraska; of the B-52's and the various crew members' occupations, of the 'Looking Glass' airborne command post, are sufficiently familiar to the audience that argot, slang and even operational procedures are simply mentioned without explanation. One hears of the SIOP (Single Integrated Operation Plan, a computer generated series of recommended responses to various scenarios), of ECM (electronic counter measures), EWO (emergency war orders) and the rest of the alphabet soup of military acronyms. Similarly, the electronic plotting boards are so familiar to the film reader that their simulated reality, upon which the military commanders must act, is unquestioned.

45. That such a shorthand is used suggests that the reader is simultaneously close to the filmic nuclear simulacrum and removed from it. Through the historical elaboration of filmic portrayals of nuclear explosions, it is now sufficient to show only intense flashes of light, followed by some local blast damage, to signify the nuclear explosion. We have witnessed the evolution of a metonymic device through the use of the same effect in films such as Testament, and Miracle Mile. Or the explosion can be shown as the blotches which appear on radar screens and the screens' subsequent fuzziness and static, caused by the electromagnetic interference which the bomb generates. In both cases, the representation of the explosion reduces the bomb to its effects, closing the gap between reality and representation, showing the bomb's explosion as pure light which inscribes its reality directly onto the world. We see here another example of what Virilio calls the derealization of the military vision; "nuclear weapons inherited both the darkroom of Niepce and Daguerre and the military searchlight" (Virilio 1989, p. 81). Their light intrudes directly into reality, illuminating it, freezing it.

46. The people inside the system, though now presented in new, up to date gender roles, are still caught inside a system which is inimical to their merely human lives. One of the subplots follows a B-52 crew commanded by the pilot (Powers Boothe) and co-pilot (Rebecca de Mornay). They have been having a romance, highlighted with the establishing shot of the film's first scene which rakes in on a cheap motel, following the two into the room. They are both Air Force officers, and in the context of their profession, this romance is illicit. Boothe's character explains that military protocol holds this fraternization counterproductive to their first duty, the Air Force. And this is indeed shown to be the case.

47. When duty calls, they answer. Even so, she is less crisp and efficient than he. She is allowed to show the human concern in a meaningful way. Another airman, realizing that his new wife is dead, behaves irrationally, but De Mornay's character, though emotional, is not in the sense borne by the audience, irrational. She questions and comments upon their orders, and it is she who asks for confirmation of the 'go' order. Finally, she is the one who with her offer to sacrifice herself, convinces the pilot to call off the attack. Only from within the military system are her actions questionable. She is our counterpoint to the military view, our conscience finds voice in hers.

48. It would seem that this couple have neatly resolved the problem of the Tibbets. Within the system, wearing their blue uniforms they maintain a professional distance and working relationship, while off duty, and hence outside of the system, they have a torrid romance complete with the usual domestic squabbles. She is unhappy that he wishes to keep the two realms so distinctly different. She is less easily able to bifurcate her life into two incommensurable spheres, but yet she does not express a desire to leave the military. Two narratives compete for acceptance. The first is the vision of the military system, and this is acceptable to the extent that it successfully excludes other points of view. Human relationships are not detected on the radar screens or on the big electronic plotting boards. The second is the positioning of people within the system as functioning parts of it while yet retaining a human perspective with which the audience can identify. This plurality of codes creates an expectation for order, for resolution and closure (See Barthes 1975, pp. 75-7). The two narrative worlds cannot co-exist indefinitely, and the tension between them appears as both dramatic tension and as personal conflicts for the characters.

49. Personal conflict appears often as a division of consciousness between two interpretive possibilities which are predicated by two signifying codes. In By Dawn's Early Light this dilemma is raised to a problematic when De Mornay's character is unwilling to drop the bombs and finally succeeds in talking the pilot out of continuing the mission. The bomber has been ordered on the 'Grand Tour,' ie. a bombing mission which is aimed at killing the major military and governmental figures in the Soviet Union. She refuses to participate. In part her reticence arises because she questions the logic of striking the Soviet command, which would leave no one to stop the war, to turn it off. However, she is also uncomfortable knowing that she will be killing civilians. Murder is for her too personal; she yet feels responsibility for her actions. The feelings voiced by her character appear only as they depart the realm of the possible. Electronic simulations, training, the isolated and rarified cockpit of the plane itself eliminate any real contact with death. Her concern is abstract just as is killing.

Victory Over Time

50. Her refusal sparks a terse exchange between herself and the pilot. The pilot says: "You'd turn the key in a Minute Man silo in a minute." She explains that there one has no time to think. Much of the dramatic line of Dawn's Early Light is built around the impossibility of acting in real time on events too complex to understand yet too important to ignore. Is the detected second launch by the Soviets aimed at the U.S.? If so a counter-attack must be launched immediately before the warheads from the first launch destroy the C3I (Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence) infrastructure of the U.S. forces.

51. The other subplot follows the President (Martin Landau), who after a helicopter crash is out of touch and believed dead for a while, and his successor, the Secretary of the Interior (Darren McGaven) as they attempt to understand the details of the war and plan appropriate actions (and especially responses) to the Soviet missile launches. The Soviets, having been struck by a missile launched by dissident forces within the Soviet Union itself, have launched a limited counter-strike against United States bases. The President in turn launches a limited counter-strike against similar Soviet targets in retaliation. At this point, while he is being evacuated, the President's helicopter crashes.

52. While the President is incapacitated and out of touch with the military, the Interior Secretary must interpret the scenarios and schemes which various military officers put to him. His dilemma is in deciding whom to believe, which version of a complex situation is most accurate. His is not a gaze from vantage point of uninterrupted truth. He has only the rapidly dissolving computer evaluations, interpretations from remote sensors to go on and these compete with the biases and sense of history of his military advisors. As such, his gaze is tenuous and as the bombs and missiles continue to explode, it fragments, like a shattering mirror. In the face of the collapse of positive control, ideology and personal psychology supplant the command structure.

53. He will attack the Soviets not because the computer suggests that this is an appropriate response but because he believes that victory is both possible and necessary. Communications are in shambles, both in the U.S. and in the U.S.S.R. Without communication systems, neither the nuclear system nor the image of the world in relation to the nuclear system can be visualized and so controlled. Vision is all. The destruction of the enemy's access to this vision, of the ability to see the whole of the system and of the situation all at once in its electronic and military simulation is one version of victory.

54. This version of victory is not the only possible outcome, though, and a dramatic tension develops between the Secretary's resolution and another one which is more acceptable because it is held by more 'reasonable' characters. The viewer is led to identify with certain characters within the military system: "Alice" (James Earl Jones in the Looking Glass airborne command post), the President (Martin Landau) and the bomber crew. These characters are more believable because they do not believe that an all out nuclear war can be survived, and most of their actions are aimed at preventing this type of nuclear war, at 'turning it off'. The film reader has been educated to this as well. It is reasonable to believe, based on preceding films, expert pronouncements and news which are public domain, that a limited nuclear attack might be 'survived'. Though it is commonly accepted that a full-scale nuclear attack would be utterly catastrophic and eschatological.

55. On the other hand, the Secretary of Interior (McGaven) and the Army colonel who advises him continue to operate in a cold war mentality, expecting the worst from the Soviets and preparing to retaliate in full. These two have apparently not been persuaded by the thaw in Soviet-U.S. relations. Thus one discourse prevalent in the real world finds itself mirrored in the filmic. Those who accept the 'new world order' of cooperation and dialogue appear heroic while more conservative positions lead to war, ruin, destruction.

56. Interestingly, the conservatives do not trust the system. This film shows that a 'pause' has been built into the U.S. forces' computer generated response which allows for a delay of several hours before the submarines fire their missiles, thus allowing the leaders on both sides a chance to reflect, piece together the situation and perhaps stop the continued escalation of conflict. Neither the Secretary nor the colonel trusts either the Soviets or the system, and they set into motion the plans to raise the conflict to a full-scale nuclear war.

57. However, even in this Gotterdammerung, everything must happen within the rule of law, according to procedures. 'Alice' will not countermand the orders of the Secretary. The military waits for the command codes to come from the 'proper' authorities. Even nuclear war is not sufficient reason for senior officers to disobey obviously bad orders. More junior officers, the bomber crew, do decide to disobey, and they are marked for annihilation by their own side. The system, even when it is wrong, is obeyed and trusted by most. It is more real than real. Believing only the simulation of their reality, people cannot counterpoise alternatives to it. They are little more than relays in a switching circuit.

The Nuclear Discourse

58. The system is thus complete. What was begun in the effort to build the bomb - the hierarchical organization of knowledge and vision, the secrecy, the exclusion of personal life - appears in this film in a finished form. The depth of knowledge which is taken-for-granted has increased tremendously from the earlier example. An audience fluent in the visual and verbal languages of the military, and now expecting these languages to be 'realistically' employed, confronts this new constellation of significations and discourse.

59. May we now speak of a nuclear war discourse in popular film? These films posit a discursive position, and hence a point of view and subjectivity. Reading them historically, we can the see the changes between two positions in time. The changes reveal transitions in attitudes and expectations as well as a growth in familiarity. Yet it is difficult to specify what precisely the discourse is. Above and Beyond showed a hierarchy of values which placed the system supreme; human tendencies toward caring, openness and sharing were, in the filmic context, necessarily sacrificed. People learned to adjust to the needs of the system. By Dawn's Early Light reveals a world where the system is in place and complete, and human values must struggle to resist its tendencies toward autonomy and self-augmentation. The difference between these two films cannot be explained away as a mere transition in ideology, for to do so is to abandon the search for a nuclear discourse in favor of politics and theoretical posturing. Rather, we must seek to understand what has been elaborated in the intervening years.

60. The establishment of a clear narrative and signifying code revolving around the issues of nuclear weapons systems and nuclear war posits a narrative suspension of closure and a clearly defined act of closure which must recur in subsequent films. Characters strive to construct the system and to control it, making it serve their ends while the system tends always toward exploding, toward becoming pure destructive energy. The resistance of closure, its elliptical suspension and hence the delay of the telos, the truth of nuclear weapons, necessarily invokes the 'human' domain which parades before us familiar scenes in new settings: rational actors striving to do good; lovers living their impossible romances; people just doing their jobs, etc.

61. Yet there is critique whose appearance is the sine qua non of the nuclear war film. Films such as By Dawn's Early Light almost inevitably include some non-diegetic statement about the danger of nuclear war. However much we may be fascinated with the gadgetry of the system, the planes, radars, radios, codes, plans, exotic weaponry, etc., the pleasure derived from watching them work is a little guilty and is mollified with the device of a critical rejoinder, much as pornographic novels would include a 'socially redeeming' paragraph at their end. Yet like pornography, the resolution of nuclear war films drives toward a single aspect of the event. Instead of genitals, however, we have missiles. Instead of orgasms, explosions. The sexual dimension of nuclear weaponry is well documented (eg Cohen 1987; Easlea 1983), and is not the point here. Rather, films about nuclear weapons and nuclear war draw attention to the hardware, the systems, the technology of nuclear war, and the mere representation of these, their presence in the film, pressures the film toward showing their use. We do not need to see explosions; it is enough to follow their trajectory on the plotting boards which have supplanted reality within the gaze the film reader now occupies. As film readers we want to see the missiles launch, the bombs explode, the buildings shatter. The narrative form demands as much. In pornography the orgasmic moment is called the 'money shot', the necessary end toward which each scene builds. This reveals that pornography is organized around the gaze and pleasure of the male viewer, the masculine event of ejaculation. Nuclear war films reveal their positioning in the tendency toward their own money shot: the explosion. The gaze is not human but systemic, not social but military.

62. Like pornography, nuclear war films raise the polar opposites of liberation and power which suggest the presence of discursive center, a tendency toward particular organizations of representation, signification and meaning. Although, in the light of Derridian critiques we cannot locate a center, cannot posit a 'meaning', yet we may speak of its traces. Gazing across the military glacis, we are encouraged to take pleasure in the system and its uses, to enjoy the spectacle of excess which plays to our own Spenglerian expectations of decline and destruction and which expresses our own frustration at our confinement within the system. Yet at the same time, we are encouraged to be soothed and comforted with the control of the system and the critique of the film itself. Our desire, having been bled off with spectacle, is dismissed with the story we cannot quite believe, that the nuclear war will not occur.