Testament: The end of a nuclear family

A small, harrowing film from 1983 pulls no emotional punches in portraying what happens after the bombs fall.

Parenthood isn’t a pact. It’s a dare.

As much as you can hold your child in the depth of the evening and swear to protect them, your heart knows it’s a promise you can’t keep. Too much is beyond your control. The world outside your door is not your own.

Having a child offers so much potential for heartbreak it’s a wonder anyone goes through with it. But it’s appropriate that our culture celebrates and revers it, throws parties and showers with banners and balloons. There is so much capacity for joy. The dread, when spoken about at all, is whispered.

Yes, the world is filled with lousy mothers and absent fathers, with women who were never given a choice and men who didn’t realize what they were getting into. Raising children is the most common task we humans do and likely the most imperfect. There is boundless room for error. It may be sacred, but it is not a sacrament.

But most parents do their best. They beat against the current. If anything, parenthood is about perseverance. About showing up. Kids form memories differently than adults. They don’t remember when you were there; they’re much more likely to recall when you weren’t. If you put in the work, you’ll probably receive a passing grade.

When children are young, you hold so much power over them as to almost appear to be a deity. But if you are a god, you are a cursedly powerless one, unable to clear a path for their safety and wellbeing. It is an incredible leap of faith to trust the universe to take care of your own. Believe me, I understand the homeschoolers. When my daughter was growing up, there were days when I couldn’t bear to let her out of my sight.¹

After the pandemic lockdowns, when we were told to send our kids back to school, part of me didn’t want to let go of those days. As much as I wanted to return to “normal,” I liked the feeling of having her under my roof. We joked that the pandemic may have destroyed her social life, but her Dad was fine with that.

And what was normal anyway? For her to go to a school that concerned itself mainly with making sure she didn’t bring a killer virus or a handgun to class? Why not lock the doors from the inside and wait out the world? Why let the madness touch her?

I know I have been one of the lucky ones, not only during the pandemic, but to live where I live in a country of relative comfort and safety, where I’m not closing my eyes at night worried to death about the fate that awaits my child, whether it’s in a war zone or village ravaged by famine. I can’t imagine the fear – and the guilt – that comes with that.

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Testament is a harrowing, deceptively brutal film about what happens when you can’t keep the world at bay, when forces larger than your own invade, consume and pillage and all your plans and hopes and money don’t end up making a damn bit of difference. It is, plainly, a film about the end of the world from the perspective of a parent simply trying to keep going for one more day.

The best way to experience the film, if you chose to view it (and I would completely understand if you would rather not; this is not a movie for everyone), is to enter it blind without knowing where it’s going. For its first few minutes, it feels like a portrait of a small town in Northern California, a slice of life, with bicycles and dogs and station wagons. Like something out of a Spielberg movie.  At center is an ordinary American family, the Wetherlys: The father (William Devane) works in San Francisco, the mother (Jane Alexander) stays home, raises her three kids, and in her spare time, oversees the elementary school play. Everybody’s busy. Nobody’s following the news.

So when, in the middle of an otherwise normal, suburban sunny afternoon with “Sesame Street” on the TV, it’s a shock when first comes a panicky news bulletin followed by the piercing tone of the Emergency Broadcast System. Anyone of my generation or older knows that sound. (When it was tested, as it was frequently when I was growing up, my stomach would drop even as I knew it wasn’t a real attack. That was what it was like in central Ohio: tests of the Emergency Broadcast System mixed with tests of the tornado warning sirens. No wonder I’m on Lexipro.)

What everyone has long feared has happened. The Soviets have launched missiles, a harried anchorman reports. The United States has followed suit. Soon there’s a blinding flash outside, a horrific white light that fills the living room and then dissipates. The residents of the neighborhood rush outside to the street. All seems eerily calm, but over time, it becomes clear that most of the major cities in the nation have been destroyed. Pockets of humanity still exist, communicating by short-wave radio.

At first the residents credit their good fortune and attempt to maintain some sense of normalcy. In a quietly devastating scene, the school play goes forward: The Pied Piper of Hamelin, who leads the children away from town.² But soon it becomes clear that there will be no surviving this event for anyone. Radiation has poisoned the air, the food, the water. Society begins to break down. The residents become scavengers. Then they start dying.

There are scenes so wrenching involving Alexander’s family that at times I gasped in pain. Her performance is a mix of stoicism and grief that earned her an Academy Award nomination. The director was a woman, Lynne Littman, who dedicated the film to her family.

One particular sequence near the end, when Alexander’s Carol is confronted with an impossible choice, is too much to even try to describe, but if you make it that far, you’ll know it. At one point, Carol finally cracks and falls to her knees. “Who did this?” she yells to the heavens. “Goddamn you!”

But in the 1980s, we knew who the culprits were. They were on our TVs and radios every day. We lived knowing that thousands of nuclear missiles were pointed in our direction, ready to fly at a moment’s notice and that all that we cherished could be incinerated in a blink. Despite that, we kept marrying, having children, going to work, screwing, dancing, drinking, gambling, watching baseball and attending church.

In other words, we made sure they best we could that there was no room left for dread. It’s inconvenient.

WHERE CAN I WATCH IT: Testament is rentable on Prime Video and Apple TV, among other services.

HEY ISN’T THAT: You might do a double take when you realize the young, worried couple at the town meeting is played by Kevin Costner and Rebecca De Mornay, both before they appeared in major roles. De Mornay has been in Nuclear Theater before as the pilot of a nuclear bomber. We’re not done with Costner.

ARMAGEDDON INDEX: 10/10. This was not a drill.

DUST CLOUDS: The early 1980s became a particularly perilous moment in the relationship between the U.S. and the Soviet Union – not just because the fervent anti-Communist Ronald Reagan had moved into the Oval Office. There was unusual instability in the leadership of the U.S.S.R, who had seen only a handful of top men since its inception. In late 1982, Leonid Brezhnev, whose near 20-year tenure as general secretary was marked by the easing of tensions known as détente, died and was replaced by Yuri Andropov, the former head of the KGB and a hard-liner. (He would barely last a year on the job himself.) In March of 1983, Reagan dubbed the USSR “the evil empire” in a well-publicized speech. Later that year, the Soviets mistakenly shot down a Korean airliner, KAL flight 007, after it strayed off course. Nerves on both sides were rattled, and the prospect of a nuclear war was suddenly considerably less abstract than it had been. Testament was released in November 1983. Later that same month, the much more viewed The Day After premiered on ABC.

WHAT ELSE I AM WATCHING: TV: Curb Your Enthusiasm (S12, MAX), Tokyo Vice (S2, MAX), Shogun (S1, Hulu), Resident Alien (S2, Netflix). Movies: Killers of the Flower Moon (Scorsese, 2023), Pushover (Quine, 1954).

COMMENTS OR SUGGESTIONS: nucleartheater@gmail.com

LAST ENTRY: The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

NEXT ENTRY: The Hunt for Red October (1990). Action in the North Atlantic!

1. There is a lovely work by the Irish poet Robert Whyte in which the speaker makes “a quiet request to the great parental darkness” to hold his daughter when he cannot and “to comfort her when I am gone.”

2. The Pied Piper fable figures in another gut-wrenching, haunting film about tragedy befalling children, The Sweet Hereafter (1997).