Threads

Remembering an influential moment in that 1984 film

Threads is the the social media platform of the day.

(My Threads account is here - and the early impressions are positive, though further functionality needs to be added, but it is a marked improvement on the Hell-site that Twitter has become.)

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But for those of us of a certain age and from a certain place Threads has another meaning:

The film had an immense influence on me when showed at school, though not one which seems to be shared by others.

My school was a south Birmingham 1980s comprehensive, and the well-meaning, earnest progressive teachers no doubt intended that the film would make us think about the issues of nuclear war.

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As it happened, the depicted post-war apocalypse was nothing compared to the sort of things I was reading about anyway (though I am sure I really shouldn’t have been doing), and so almost all the film left me unfazed.

But.

There was one moment which stuck with me, with force, and it has shaped my political and legal thinking ever since (to the extent that my political and legal ponderings warrants being called “thinking”).

By way of background, part of the film is about some people in a bunker who were in charge - or at least regarded themselves as in charge.

All the bunker scenes have been collected here:

And in that bunker they had telephones.

Proper, bulky desk telephones, not what we have now.

And via those telephones the important people in the bunker requested things and gave orders.

That was how those in control were to keep in control - telephony was the means of transmission and obtaining intelligence.

Telephony was the - ahem - thread that kept those who governed in charge of those who were governed.

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*Spoiler Warning*

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Those in the bunker die, pretty much unnoticed by the survivors of the nuclear strike.

Eventually some come to dig them out.

And there is this moment as the torch light goes around the bunker.

Corpses, and dust, and broken things.

And also a redundant telephone:

For some reason the sight of that redundant telephone stuck with me more than any of the special effects or make-up and horrific images and awful sounds.

I could not stop thinking about it.

What happens when those who are supposedly in charge no longer have the means of being in charge?

For in any large human grouping those in charge cannot do it by personal, face-to-face dominance alone, there needs to be methods of communication and means of control.

And those methods and means are precarious, and so they cannot be taken for granted either by those who govern or by those who are governed.

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About this time in the mid-1980s I also became fixated by this image in a book I had about kings and queens, which I have featured a few times in my blogging:

The combination of the Threads telephone and this Thackeray picture led me to a lifelong preoccupation about constitutions and language and images and law - about how one small group of people in one place actually get to exert day-to-day power over people in other places.

How does this actually, practically work?

And so I ended up as a lawyer and commentator.

Of course, those with power can always resort to coercion and lethal force - but short of this last resort, there are norms and systems and lore and laws which provide how we govern and are are governed.

So how are these threads crafted and put in place, and how are they maintained and repaired?

And these systems and methods of communication and means of control can sometimes just go: whether by technical failures, or even by the loss of legitimacy and authority.

The threads can snap - or they can be cut.

And then what happens?

Well.

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Thank you for indulging me and letting me share my Threads anecdote. As today is Threads day, one way or another, I thought this would be the best time to tell it.