The Day After The Day After: My Atomic Angst
Church grew up in Lawrence, Kansas. He was in elementary school when The Day After, the controversial television movie about the aftermath of a nuclear war, was filmed there. The movie brought Hollywood-style devastation to a town that had seen plenty of its own real devastation—including horse thief William Quantrill’s massacre of a U.S. cavalry regiment (in 1863) and a firebombing at the University of Kansas (1970). For Church, a young boy with a vivid imagination, it was one more sign that the world was a scary and potentially murderous place. This is memoir as snapshot: a portrait of a watershed moment in the author’s life. Church exhibits a frequently dismissive attitude: Why bother to deride the star of Jericho, a post-apocalyptic series set in a fictional Kansas town, as “Johnny Depp lookalike Skeet Ulrich”? Gratuitous asides aside, this chronicle of the filming of The Day After offers a thought-provoking take on what visions of Armageddon feel like to an impressionable young boy. --David Pitt