“Duck and Cover”… and Never, Ever Forget: Disciplining Fear in Cold War America

A version of a presentation I am giving on the 1951 Federal Defence Administration, "Duck and Cover". 

The Cold War pedagogical film called Duck and Cover, which was shown to primary school classrooms in America as a means to instill civil defense strategies amongst children. The film features Bert the turtle who is described as “very alert”. Upon the signal that danger is close, in this case, a monkey in a tree holding a lit stick of dynamite, he proceeds to take a nervous gulp and to pull his head and limbs into his shell, adopting and demonstrating the duck and cover position.

My essay will aim to argue that rather than sharing a productive and necessary lesson, “Duck and Cover” produces fear amongst the viewing children, advising them that they are never safe and must always be prepared for the bomb. The film’s efforts to train the students to duck and cover communicate a surveilling enemy gaze who might strike at any point. Rather than training students to adopt a productive defensive reaction, “Duck and Cover” instills fear within its viewing subjects and disciplines them to feel afraid and unsafe even in their homes and schools.

The first theoretical platform that I make use of is Jean Baudrillard’s discussion on the obscenity of images and of advertising. Although Baudrillard could be viewed as quite reserved or even technophobic at times, his discussion of the television is useful in this context to unpack how “Duck and Cover” produces more harm than it provides help. For Baudrillard, the screen in the domestic setting, which exhibits fictitious images and events make them seem imaginable and thus more plausible or realistic. “Duck and Cover” works exactly in this way. By making visible the possible interruption of everyday life by the atomic bomb, the young viewers are forced to conceive of an enemy gaze surveilling their actions and deciding to strike or not.

I expand this by attending to Żiżek’s notion that fantasy and fascination is driven by a non-existent and imagined gaze that looks upon a subject. In this case however, the gaze is not imaginary but hypothetical and poses real potential for destruction. The danger of “Duck and Cover” is that it leaves much to be imagined by its viewers and, in the wake of such provocative stimulation, the minds of such viewers get filled by such overwhelming imagery.

I go on to disucss Foucault’s Panopticon to describe the instruction of “Duck and Cover” to behave as if an enemy’s threatening gaze might always be actively peering in on them. The children have indeed been put in charge of their own well-being and defense – in the form of ducking and covering – and this message has been internalized so that citizens must always be alert and ready to respond according to their training.

In the film, the narrator proceeds to give examples of the various places the children might be upon the arrival of the bomb. He instructs the children to duck and cover under their desks so that nothing can hit them or to duck and cover away from windows or glass doors which he claims will cut them. These vivid descriptions are nothing less than traumatic and inevitably stimulate fear, whereby the children are already positioned as victims in danger. I argue that this can be viewed as an demonstration of Baudrillard’s claim that obscenity begins when something is “all-too-visible”, when the secret is dissipated and information is mass circulated. In this way, “Duck and Cover” provides too much information to its viewing students. Instead of simply providing a helpful response tactic to its citizens, it goes into the scenarios of injury so graphically that it functions to pervert spaces that are supposed to be safe and comforting.

My focus then shifts to the scenes that involve the home. One of these scenes is of a mother rubbing lotion on her son’s bare chest and back. The narrator explains how unpleasant sunburn can be as a warning of the effects of the bomb. Here I make use of architectural theorist Beatriz Colomina’s discussion of the home and particularly on the ways in which domestic hygiene is a military and national campaign for ultimate efficiency. I think that this can be extended to bodily hygiene and care for the next generation as being integral to this strategy.

In this way, both Colomina as well as Foucault provide relevant and useful accounts of the ways in which the internalization of surveillance result in specific behavioural codes, even within the home that aim to support and contribute to the state’s military agenda. In this way, fear enters the most private sphere. While the film never shows the atom bomb go off while the children are in their homes, the repercussions of it do exist in this supposedly safe domestic structure.  

I end my essay with a brief discussion of another shorter text by Baudrillard called “The Pornography of War”. In this article, Baudrillard discusses the post 9/11 American military photographs of Iraqi prisoners and argues that the visibility of these images amongst an American public is equally harmful to American citizens as the images of the twin towers burning down. He conflates images and war as both being virtual and ingenuine. He states that:

“for images to constitute genuine information they would have to be different from war. But they have become precisely as virtual as war today and hence their own specific violence is now superadded to the specific violence of war. Moreover, by their omnipresence… [images] have become in substance pornographic”.

For Baudrillard, the mass visibility of images is akin to, and an example of, the pornographic. The violence of images is at once as real and as virtual as war and are active contributors to war itself. He ends his essay with the statement that “this is America having electrocuted itself”.

Bibliography

Baudrillard, Jean. “Pornography of War”. Cultural Politics, Vol. 1, Issue 1 (2005): 23-26.

Baudrillard, Jean. “The Ecstasy of Communication” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. ed. Hal Foster. Washington: Bay Press (1983): 126-134.

Colomina, Beatriz. “Domesticity at War”. Discourse, vol. 14, no. 1 (Winter 1991-2): 3-22.

Foucault, Michel. “ ‘Panopiticism’ from ‘Discilpine & Punish: The Birth of the Prison”. Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts, Vol. 2, No. 1. The Dynamics of race and Incarceration: Social Integration, Social Welfare, and Social Control (Autumn, 2008): 1-12.

Matthews, Melvin E. Duck and Cover: Civil Defense Images in Film and Television fromthe Cold War to 9/11. (Jefferson: McFarland & Company Inc, 2012).

Żiżek, Slavoj. ‘Big Brother, Or The Triumph of the Gaze Over the Eye’, in CTRL[Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance From Bentham to Big Brother. Ed. Thomas Y. Levin & Ursula Frohne & Peter Weibel. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002).