“Hiroshima Is Peanuts”: The Strange Landscape of The Day After

Abstract

Nicholas Meyer’s made-for-television movie The Day After (1983) depicts an apocalypse wrought by the exchange of nuclear weapons between the United States and the Soviet Union. This essay argues that the film, particularly in its representation of landscape, offers a series of surrealist touches that not only disrupt the aesthetics of 1980s made-for-television movies but that also complicate the film’s representation of the American heartland. Ostensibly “at stake” in the film’s nuclear exchange, and drawn using an assortment of patriotic clichés, the heartland becomes a site of instability, danger, and threatening destructiveness that challenges the logic of the late Cold War.