Film #5 — 1/2 Post-Apocalyptic Films; 4/9 Decades
By C. Ramsay
Commercializing the nuclear paranoia of the 1960s, Panic in Year Zero! centres on married couple Harry and Ann, as well as their two teenage children, as they witness the start of nuclear war while embarking on a family road trip outside of suburban Los Angeles. Fear of the Other, of societal fracturing, and of isolation are pivotal to the film’s interests, which are also aimed at highlighting the specifics of how these fears can so quickly come to fruition. Before the day is out for the Baldwin family, disaster capitalism is on the rise, individualistic attitudes are rampant, and panic is unavoidable.
The hypocrisy of American values is underscored fairly early on, with a radio broadcast reporting that “the president has called upon every American to do his duty in reestablishing law and order,” followed quickly by the completely contradictory statement that “there are no civilians. We are all at war.” The public’s understandable large-scale panic, resulting in mass migration and the frenzied purchasing of necessary supplies, is frequently disharmonized by the smaller, more individual instances of panic that typically culminate in dangerous speeding, theft and looting, and violent altercations. The inevitable death of the nuclear family at the advent of nuclear holocaust, along with its corresponding familial expectations, is briefly acknowledged when Ann Baldwin voices concern for her mother’s well-being back in Los Angeles and is promptly stymied by her husband triaging their own safety above his mother-in-law’s. Though he’s right in his priorities, he shuts down any word of his wife’s mother with such carelessness and lack of emotion, with her never being brought up again past an attempted phone call, that she reads more as a dead-end plot point than an exemplary subject of the film’s philosophy. Regrettably, any interest the film evokes from the audience in terms of what’s considered justified under extreme circumstances and where the line of no return is is never really explored more deeply than simply introducing the concepts as a means to progress the plot.
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