The Reality Is Always Worse

By Otto Friedrich

Two days after The Day After, the Public Broadcasting Service showed a film that was strikingly similar and strikingly different: Cambodia and Laos, the ninth installment of its seemingly interminable history of the Viet Nam War. Compared with the 100 million people who watched the imaginary bombing of Lawrence, Kans., only a minuscule number watched the real bombing of Cambodia. The press, which devoted large headlines to The Day After, lost Cambodia in a kind of time warp. Since TV shows get covered when they start, the Viet Nam series had been widely reviewed two months before--old news by now. Although The

Day After was moving and dramatic, the largely ignored documentary on Cambodia was more moving, more dramatic, in every way more powerful--even if it was about a relatively small conflict, in no way comparable to a nuclear holocaust. And that was so for one simple reason: it had all really happened. One of the striking elements in The Day After was the deliberate blurring of who started the war, or what it

was all about. On Cambodia, there were constant explanations. Here was President Nixon pointing to maps and charts. Here was Henry Kissinger making the point that we were bombing not a neutral nation but an enemy-base area. The victims of The Day After were all Americans, most of them civilians, many of them women and children. As we watched them being engulfed in flames, we could identify with them and feel richly sorry for ourselves. It was harder to watch a film of Americans doing the killing, to hear one

of those friendly Kansas voices asking permission to strike this or that "target." One sensed an eerie beauty in the way the bombs cascaded through the sky, and in the answering orange flames that surged up out of the jungle. There was little bloodshed in Lawrence, Kans. We could ad mire the skill with which the makeup men decorated the actors' faces with red streaks, but we could keep telling ourselves that it was not real blood, and there was not much of it anyway, nothing gory. In Cambodia, blood was

everywhere. One man lay drenched in it--with only the movement of one eye showing that he was still alive--and the mattress beneath him was drenched too. One recalled Lady Macbeth's outburst of horror: "Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?" The injured in Lawrence, Kans., smiled bravely at their injuries. The young actress who was supposed to be suffering from radiation sickness smiled bravely at the student who comforted her, and he smiled bravely back. On a cot in Cambodia lay a young man whose arm had just been amputated, and next to him lay his infant daughter whose arm had also been amputated. Neither of them smiled. They both looked numb. The stump of the man's arm kept twitching uncontrollably. At the end of The Day After, a statement said that a real nuclear war would be much worse. Indeed it would. The documentary on Cambodia probably could also have ended with a statement that the reality was worse. The reality is always worse. TV film does not transmit pain, only an image of pain, a faint visual echo. No TV

documentary is "true" in any abstract philosophical sense. It inevitably omits essential points; it fails to show what was not filmed; it reflects the viewpoints, if not the biases, of its makers. Yet in its effort to be true, in its search for the way things really happened, the documentary justifies its own shortcomings. Truth, even when only partly grasped, can be seen to have a certain dignity, a majesty. This is testimony. We sense that we have an obligation to listen, to watch.

No docudrama, on the other hand, no matter how well intentioned or how skillfully made, can avoid the taint of artifice, of things having been manipulated to make a point (or just a profit). Even in The Day After, much of the power came from the quasidocumentary idea that nuclear destruction had been visited upon the real town of Lawrence, Kans., rather than upon some back lot of Warner Bros. The best movie sets remain always movie sets, and in a reconstructed Auschwitz, a grimy-faced Vanessa Redgrave remains always Vanessa Redgrave. And as we have lately been watching with a shudder the theatricality of a tousle-haired young actor shot during a Dallas motorcade, we can hardly help asking: Why are we looking at this? What is the point being made?

The easy answer to all these spectacles of destruction is that killing is unforgivable, or perhaps the platitude that "War is hell," or even the obvious injunction that it must not happen. But it does keep happening. In Tripoli, the P.L.O. has been hacking itself to pieces, and killing hundreds of innocent bystanders in the process. That is not a nuclear war, to be sure, but the dead and maimed women being shown on the TV screen every evening can hardly appreciate the difference.

Still, nuclear war remains a special kind of nightmare, threatening an apocalypse for the whole human race. When ABC summoned a panel to explain what its film actually meant, most of the experts claimed that it supported their own differing views. Just as Secretary of State George Shultz argued that The Day After should inspire Americans to rally around President Reagan, Astronomer Carl Sagan foresaw real danger of all life being extinguished in a state of freezing darkness. There was Robert McNamara arguing that the number of missiles must be reduced, and there was Kissinger explaining the need for tough strategic thinking. The only panelist who laid no claim to being an expert on nuclear strategy was the writer Elie Wiesel, and to Moderator Ted Koppel's question of what should be done to prevent nuclear war, only he offered the answer that no expert, understandably, ever gives. Said Wiesel, "I don't know."

That was at once the most honest, and the most terrifying, of answers. Yet last week's ominous bulletins from Geneva--and from Moscow--seemed to suggest that such a confession of uncertainty, however candid and admirable in its way, is just a first step. Real missiles are being deployed at an increasing rate in both Western Europe and Eastern Europe, and fatalistic acceptance is not enough of a reply for those who are responsible for a nation's future. Real (TM) events, unlike TV scripts, keep demanding not just emotion, not just fear, but answers--perhaps wise answers, perhaps foolish answers, perhaps dangerous answers, but something. Even the attempt not to choose, to paraphrase George Orwell, is an act of choice. --By Otto Friedrich This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.