Abstract
This chapter explores Britain’s relationship to the atomic bomb by charting its geopolitical standing in the larger Cold War, exploring where and how nuclear anxieties were represented on screen, and analyzing the allegories and fantasies that attended to such a feeling of national inadequacy and perceived decline. It surveys a wide range of film types, from newsreels to James Bond features, and looks at how ideas about war during this period migrate into other genres. The chapter focuses on a comparison between two films about atomic fear, one about the threat and experience of the bomb, and the other about its aftermath. Peter Watkins’s The War Game (1965) and Richard Lester’s The Bed Sitting Room (1969) are wildly different explorations of the same sets of anxieties.
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Flanagan, K.M. (2019). The Bomb and After: Fantasies of Apocalypse and Decline. In: War Representation in British Cinema and Television. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30203-0_5
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