The Atomic Cafe Essay

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The Atomic Cafe paints a humorously dark tale of the atomic bomb era in American history. The producers created the film from 1940s and 50s government and media footages to warn against the use of atomic bombs, by showing the ridiculous and ignorant ways the U.S. portrayed the effects of the bomb to the public. The modern viewer’s hindsight allows us to reject the beliefs people held about nuclear weapons when the footage was produced, because we now know the effects nuclear war could have. The film emphasizes how the American government and citizens believed the bombs were righteous to use. President Truman even stated, “we pray that [God] may guide us to use [nuclear bombs] in His ways and for His purposes.” The Atomic Cafe stresses how close the world was to destruction by ending the film with footage portraying a hypothetical bombing. This has relevance to the rising tensions of the Cold War between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. in 1982 when it was released, as well as today with nuclear threats between North Korea and the U.S. …show more content…

citizens, and that the U.S. had a right to build more bombs in retaliation to growing threats of Communism. Informational videos, newscasts, and military propaganda took advantage of the public’s lack of awareness, and attempted to rally Americans behind the use of atomic bombs on foreign enemies. The Atomic Cafe uses these videos to let the people in the past speak for themselves, which creates more understanding between people then and now, as well as allowing modern people to directly criticize past held beliefs. If the directors had chosen instead to narrate over the footage, the argument against nuclear weapons would be weaker, because the information shown would come with the bias of present hindsight, instead of from the mouths of people living in the early atomic

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