What the F is going on!?! Part One: The Big Board

In the last few weeks, current events here in the United States have gone a bit wild, and as a cinephile/politics junky I couldn’t help but put together a watch list of movies inspired by the times. My dad grew up with Pierce and Kevin Rafterty who made some rather political documentaries in their own right and may now be best known for their mentorship of Michael Moore in documentary filmmaking (as well as the strange connection that they are George W. Bush’s first cousin’s as well). Almost 20 years ago I was toying with writing screenplays and had been working on a story of college age boys in a fallout shelter, so my Dad had me sit down and chat with Pierce who directed Atomic Cafe with his brother. He was telling me of Kevin’s project he had been working on for years with no expectation of ever being able to release due to the rights. He was putting together an American History told through film clips. I think Oliver Stone ended up doing something like that, but I have never wanted to touch that due to his very weird politics, and considering how wildly inaccurate his film JFK is (the placement of the seats in the car easily disproves the “magic bullet” theory, while there are questions around the assassination, the things that he fixates on are a complete waste of time). Kevin passed away in 2020, never releasing his own project, although his filmography is impressive on its own. 

I figured a good way to break up what ended up being a rather extensive watchlist is to break up the movies by themes. I will give some historical and political context, but I don’t claim to be an expert in those areas, and from cinematic aspect, I don’t expect to be exhaustive or expert. In this installment of “What the F is going on!?!” we are going to go to “the room where it happens.” In a non-fictional sense, that place is the Situation Room in the White House where the President has a hub for communications, media reports, intelligence reports from all over the world, accompanied by key foreign affairs aids, the joint chiefs of staff (a group of high-ranking military officials), in a room that is staffed by non-partisan military officials. Daily reports of anything going on around the world are available for the President provided by the staff of the situation room, which is really a complex of a couple of rooms with various roles and workspaces. In the last year I read the great George Stephanopoulos book, “The Situation Room,” which gives a great history and understanding of the room of every President from Kennedy to Biden. In media, the situation room is famously visited frequently by President Bartlett in The West Wing, although it hadn’t been updated and expanded until the show was winding down, and it was fictionalized in the Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, where a fictional “War Room” was created to serve the purpose of the situation room. 

Dr. Strangelove (1964)

This is a good place to jump in, this is one of the greatest movies of all-time, a satire about a US nuclear strike on the Soviet Union carried out at the behest of a General at a base in Greenland who loses his mind, sending out a false order to strike inside of Russia. The problem is, the Soviets have just implemented a technology to automatically detonate all of their nukes if a strike ever hits them, triggering the end of the world. They put the system in place but were waiting to let the world know for a more ceremonial event, and as I write this it sure sounds like the type of dumbass shit Trump would have done to try to jazz up his birthday parade. I thought of this movie as a companion to the current events of the missile strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities because of the decision making process, the voices whispering in presidential ears and negotiations with adversaries in attempts to keep things from getting worse. The aides for the president in this movie give a wide range of insane ideas including the general in the War Room that advocates to just let it happen and take advantage of a bad situation. Frankly it’s a bit fucked that the eponymous Dr. Strangelove is a former Nazi defector who can’t help but to give a Nazi salute when he gets too excited, considering the fact that Sebastian Gorka was removed in the first administration for wearing a pin for a group that sympathizes with Nazis only to be back in the second admin, and Elon Musk had his own “Mein Fuhrer! I can walk!” moment at the inauguration. 

Fail/Safe (1964)

At the same time Kubrick was making Strangelove, Sidney Lumet was making the nearly identical, but straight drama about an errant nuclear attack on the Soviet Union by the US, set in a War Room. Interestingly enough, this “war room” is more similar to the situation room of today where there are staffed work spaces and a separate room where the president can make phone calls and have a quiet place for decision making. It seems that Trump was pressured by Isreal into bombing Iran because the Israeli attacks were not capable of piercing the Iranian nuclear sites and US systems are, but the most compelling information in his decision making process was that he liked the dramatic footage on Fox News of the Israeli attacks on Tehran and wanted credit for a dramatic display as well. The decision making process in Fail/Safe is quite different. Lumet is a director who focused on justice in almost every one of his 40+ films over six or seven decades, so his president sees the mistaken attack on the Soviets and tries to shoot down his own bombers, gives information to the Soviets to attempt to shoot them down as well, and when all else fails he has to make the decision to send an American bomber to drop two nuclear bombs on Manhattan in a statement of justice to the Soviets after Moscow is decimated in order to thwart possible annihilation of the planet in an all-out nuclear war. In a way, this is the decision that Trump makes to clean up his own mess when it was conveyed to Iran that they could send missiles to a US base to be intercepted, in an attempt to save face and de-escalate. This is also a similar move that is made in Watchmen, a book, movie and TV series that consistently pops into my head through most world events, where Adrian Veidt stages an attack on Manhattan in an attempt to unify the world against either Dr. Manhattan or a giant alien squid monster. Watchmen, however, plays out the repercussions of such a tit for tat where information gets out that it was staged and the world sees unexpected instability.

Thirteen Days (2000)

This is the first film based on real events in this watchlist, and it covers the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in the Kennedy White House. The Bay of Pigs invasion on Cuba was such a massive fuck up of communications and intelligence that Kennedy tasked his aides to create a hub in the White House where the President could be appraised of everything going on in the world from news sources to intelligence and be able to communicate confidentially anywhere in the world. They created the Situation Room in the White House, which saw its first great challenge during the Cuban Missile Crisis, about a year and half after the Bay of Pigs. The Russians were sending warheads to Cuba, the US Navy had a blockade stopping them, and in less than two weeks the Kennedy administration negotiated to ease tensions and pull back the greatest known threat of the Cold War. This film does show the fairly primitive situation room at the time, but the utilization of a hub for information still proved to be invaluable, the ships of weapons turned away from the shores of Cuba in exchange for a pull out of US weapons systems from Hungary at a later date, a decision to not announce a link between the two movements in an attempt to save face for the Soviets, and claim that the decision to return the ships was theirs all along. While this movie does do a pretty good job of showing the stand off at sea during the blockade, oddly, one of the best representations of the blockade is in the totally fictionalized version of events in X-Men: First Class where Magneto sends missiles back at ships from both sides and an errant bullet in the chaos strikes and paralyzes Professor X. But they won’t tell you that in the history books.

WarGames (1983)

This is the echo of the cold war nuclear anxieties of the 1960’s. I was born in 1983 and was well aware that I was alive during the Cold War, but it was not a time when we really thought we were on the brink of annihilation. I never had to do a duck and cover drill, that is something chronicled in the aforementioned Atomic Cafe where they would instruct kids during a nuclear attack to dive under their desks and cover their heads in an effort to get into a comfortable position to kiss their asses goodbye. Here, we get a glimpse at the fuckups of hawkish decision making from a war room in NORAD’s hollowed out mountain in Colorado. A boy accidentally hacks into a simulation the Air Force uses to game out nuclear attacks, convincing the system that an actual attack is underway and everyone involved tries to figure out if an attack will really happen and if the system can be beat. Oddly, this also plays into domestic politics as the large budget bill of garbage that just passed includes a stay on regulating A.I. by the states for ten years, which surely will not result in naked robots traveling back in time.

Shin Godzilla (2016)

You may have noticed that the situation room and fictional War Rooms tend to see a lot of nuclear threats, so why can’t a situation room also deal with the original nuclear metaphor, Godzilla. Here, the old lizard is the loose nuclear weapon attacking a city in this very of a War Room movie. This War Room isn't as flashy as any of the others, it even has windows that allow for the administrators to just look at unfolding events. Their obstacle isn't in codes, or jammed signals or a hacker, it's their own red tape that keep them from acting quickly as Godzilla evolves at each attack. Much like building aggressions in the cold war would raise the stakes in any of these other films. This juxtaposes the strategy during the current conflict with Iran where the thought is that allowing the other side to save face and back down assumes only a short-term plan with no concept of long-term repercussion when additional munitions are manufactured, or nationalism grows as a reaction to a country being attacked resulting in future terrorist threats. In a way, Shin Godzilla has the same long-term threat of re-animation and possible humanoid monsters coming to life as well. 

War Game (2024)

The most recent installment to this War Room themed list comes from just last year in a documentary showing an actual government war game playing out a simulation of an insurrection of unexpected scale and origin, planned out in the wake of January 6th. This is the only non-nuclear focused citation in a war room, but, as we see changes to the threats to the US from decade to decade, the 2000’s saw a massive shift from post-cold war to the war on terror and in the rise of Trump we are seeing accelerating domestic terrorism that has been simmering for decades. This exercise used participants from the last five administrations as well as people whose lives have been affected by far-right extremism. While the participants manage to preserve the union at the end of the day, many of the career military and political higher-ups fail to address a broader problem of extremism that would only grow in the weeks, months and years after their fictional events. The proof is in Donald Trump’s 2024 election, the pardoning of Jan Sixers, a complete lack of accountability in the legal system for Trump and those around him, and the public amnesia of that day while further attacks have continued even as the new administration has been in office. This near-sightedness doesn’t just apply domestically, but abroad. Although we have a cease-fire with Iran, nothing has been resolved. 9/11 wasn’t just an attack just because they hated America in a broad sense, Osama bin Laden was very clear in his statements that the reason that they carried out their attacks was because of the US military presence in the land of Mecca. 9/11 was entirely motivated because we had troops in Saudi Arabia that had been there since the first Gulf War about ten years prior. We actually pulled out all of our troops pretty soon after the attacks, we gave into the single demand of bin Laden, it wasn’t very broadly reported, it was an attempt to save face, but bin Laden continued to stoke extremism and made additional claims of motivations and hawks in the White House led us into two wars with countries that none of the hijackers were from. Evidence of intelligence of Weapons of Mass Destruction were fabricated in the marketing of war in Iraq to the United States people. Additional terrorist groups emerged because of our invasions, they cost the US Government impossible amounts of money and these parts of the world don’t seem to be safer areas of the world than they were 25 years ago as a result. 

These kinds of actions have resulted in the kids or grandkids of people around during inciting incidents to become extremists and whether it is a threat that is foreign or domestic, none of these issues should be measured by whether America survives the day or the news cycle, but they should be seen for how they change the people who seem to be on the sidelines at the time.

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