Fail-Safe: After us, the machines
"Even if we do survive, what are we? Better than what we say they are? What gives us the right to live, then?"
You probably haven’t noticed, but Donald Trump has been extra-apocalyptic of late. That’s a lot considering that his standard mode is warning how America has gone to hell in a handbasket from sea to once-shining sea. In recent remarks, the Republican presidential nominee has been growing downright dire, particularly about the prospect of another world war. He seems to think that if elected, he alone can ward it off, as if he were some combination of Henry Clay, Captain Picard and Superman.
With Joe Biden out of the race, Trump, 78, is our last Cold Warrior left in presidential politics, our final Baby Boomer candidate. Born in 1946, Trump was 16 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was likely the closest the two sides ever came to a nuclear exchange – and he was already a Page Six Manhattan socialite when Reagan and Gorbachev negotiated an arms-reduction deal. By contrast, even the new white-haired, balding Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, who to me looks like the “other” Lebowski from The Big Lebowski, has a frame of reference that was formed largely after the Berlin Wall fell – as does 59-year-old Kamala Harris.
Trump has lived with the prospect of annihilation his entire life. During the 80s, he called for nuclear disarmament and even suggested to one observer that he be sent to Moscow to negotiate an arms treaty with Gorbachev himself. (In typical fashion, he boasted he could end the Cold War in an hour.) But as president, he pulled the U.S. out of arms-control treaties meant to discourage nuclear proliferation.
It makes me wonder if Trump ever saw Fail-Safe, which was basically The Day After for his generation. (The difference is that far, far more people watched The Day After.) Trump would have been 18 when Fail-Safe hit theaters. Or was Trump one of the many who had seen Dr. Strangelove, which had the fortune of being released before this nuclear drama, and decided he didn’t need to see something with such a similar story? Or maybe Trump never went to the movies, which given his pop culture proclivities, I find hard to believe.1
Like Strangelove, Fail-Safe concerns itself with a rogue U.S. nuclear bomber, but this film plays its story straight. So straight and so sober that no musical score is used. Its director, the great Sidney Lumet, shoots the film in black-and-white; it’s all close-ups and shadows. Like Lumet’s 12 Angry Men, this is a Talking in a Room movie. (No women, of course. Women were still largely excluded from the decision-making space then.)
Its first few minutes are disorienting. An Air Force general (Dan O’Herlihy) is having a dream of watching a bull being speared in the ring by a blurred figure. Who is that matador, he ponders when he awakens. By the end of this harrowing film, he’ll discover the answer. Meanwhile, at a late-night cocktail party in Washington, a squirrelly academic (Walter Matthau) is describing to a rapt audience how the U.S. might survive and prevail in a nuclear exchange even if it meant a loss of 60 million people. “We're talking about war. I say every war, including thermonuclear war, must have a winner and a loser. Which would you rather be?” he asks of one critic. It’s nuclear war as a parlor game in a setting reminiscent of John Cheever. “It's all hypotheses of course, but fun to play around with,” Matthau says.
Lumet, who would go on to direct classics such as Serpico and Network, seemed fascinated by the concept of institutional rot, how systems that were designed to protect people — the military, the police, the courts, the media — instead become vehicles for personal ambition, greed and capriciousness. In Fail-Safe, it’s the arrogance of the Pentagon, the unshakable faith in its own monstrous technology, that becomes the instrument of the nation’s undoing. Through a series of mechanical and human failures, the U.S. and the Soviets ultimately are forced to determine whether a limited nuclear conflict is indeed survivable and beyond that, preferable, as Matthau’s political scientist postulates at the film’s outset. This is a scenario that may hold more power today. With the advance of artificial intelligence tech in the past year, the prospect of yielding control over our planet’s viability to machines makes Fail-Safe more relevant than ever.
As the film hurtles toward its devastating conclusion, the man charged with making unimaginable decisions is the president of the United States, as played by Henry Fonda. And here is where the movie’s casting becomes its greatest asset. Fail-Safe is populated by a bevy of recognizable character actors, including Matthau, who had not yet attained the stardom he would find later. That leaves the gray-haired and aging Fonda as the movie’s only star, and when he arrives on the scene, you, as a viewer, feel the weight of his bearing, his gravitas, as he faces down an existential crisis at the White House. He is quiet, thoughtful, forceful and, at the end of the day, deeply rational.
We can only hope that when a future president is confronted with the decision to whether to kill millions of people, he or she holds similar virtues. And trust me, that day will come, sooner or later.
WHERE CAN I WATCH IT? Fail-Safe is rentable on all major platforms. The movie was remade by George Clooney in 2000, but I recommend the original.
HEY, ISN’T THAT? Yes, the Russian translator sitting with Fonda is Larry Hagman, who would go on to star in the sitcom “I Dream of Jeannie” and later as J.R. on “Dallas” (that’s quite the jarring resume). In this movie, he looks all the world like a young Tom Hanks.
DUST CLOUDS: The closest the world ever has come to a “fail safe” moment was probably in September 1983 when a false alarm from an early warning radar system almost resulted in a retaliatory nuclear strike by the Soviet Union. It was just weeks after the U.S.S.R. had mistakenly shot down a South Korean airliner that had strayed into its airspace and likely was the point of the highest tension between the two powers since the early 1960s. The system alerted officers at a base outside of Moscow that the U.S. was sending one ICBM its way. The officer on duty, Stanislav Petrov, thought it odd that the Americans would launch an attack consisting of one missile and waited for corroborating evidence before notifying his superiors. None came and no retaliatory strike was launched.
ARMAGEDDON INDEX: 9/10 It’s a cautionary tale for a reason.
WHAT ELSE I AM WATCHING: TV: “Veep” (S2, MAX), “The Prisoner” (S1, Amazon). Movies: Look Back in Anger (Richardson, 1958).
LAST ENTRY: Repo Man (1984)
NEXT ENTRY: Hail Caesar! (2016)