Eric Robert Nolan graduated from Mary Washington College in 1994 with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology. He spent several years a news reporter and editorial writer for the Culpeper Star Exponent in Culpeper, Virginia. His work has also appeared on the front pages of numerous newspapers in Virginia, including The Free Lance – Star and The Daily Progress. Eric entered the field of philanthropy in 1996, as a grant writer for nonprofit healthcare organizations.
Eric’s poetry has been featured by Dead Beats Literary Blog, Dagda Publishing, The International War Veterans’ Poetry Archive, and elsewhere. His poetry will also be published by Illumen Magazine in its Spring 2014 issue.
There’s a pretty damn interesting chestnut from from 80’s-era nuclear nightmare films available on Youtube — 1983’s “Special Bulletin.” (The link is below.) I was surprised I hadn’t heard of it. I think most 80’s kids remember ABC’s “The Day After.” That infamous television movie was a cultural touchstone that scared a generation of kids. “Special Bulletin” was produced by NBC the same year, actually preceding “The Day After” by nine months. Instead of a world-ending war with Russia, the feature-length special imagined a single incident of nuclear terrorism in Charleston, South Carolina. (I myself had no idea that Charleston was the strategic military nexus that the movie explains it to be.)
“Special Bulletin” was filmed as a “War of the Worlds”-type narrative, consisting exclusively of faux news coverage, and it’s pretty damned good. (It won a handful of Emmys.) It’s just as frightening today — or maybe more so, given the increased threat of precisely this kind of terrorism from stateless groups.
The acting is mostly good, the directing successfully captures the feel of live news coverage, and the absence of a musical score further lends the movie a sense of realism. The story has a few surprises for us, too — the plot setup is creative and interesting, and much more thought went in the the teleplay than I would have expected. The film asks some difficult questions about the role of the media in affecting the outcome of high-profile crimes like the one depicted. (Would such questions be more or less relevant in the age of camera-phones, uploaded ISIS executions and Facebook Live? I’m not sure.)
I was also quite impressed with some of “Special Bulletin’s” thriller elements. (I’d say more, but I will avoid spoilers for anyone who wants to watch it below.)
One thing that detracts from the format’s realism is the fact that some of this movie’s actors are easily recognizable from other roles in the 80’s (although it’s fun spotting them as an 80’s movie fan).
Most viewers my age, for example, will recognize Ed Flanders and Lane Smith. The utterly sexy female reporter who arrives on location at Charleston Harbor is Roxanne Hart, who later played Brenda in “Highlander” (1986). (She’s still quite beautiful, guys, and she’s still making movies.) Most jarring of all, however, is a prominent role played by David Clennon, who any fan of horror-science fiction will recognize as Palmer from John Carpenter’s 1982 masterpiece, “The Thing.” This is still fun, though — he has that same disarrayed hair. Was it his trademark back in the day?
Believe it or not, I actually can remember Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” being played in the summer of 1979. (That would have been the summer before I entered second grade.) The song came out in September 1978; but I can pinpoint the year as 1979, because this is a vivid summer memory. I heard “Heart of Glass” being played loudly on a hot day by a house halfway down the street I grew up on, and I was playing with the first Star Wars figures I’d ever gotten. (I’d adopted R2-D2 and C-3PO the prior Christmas; they lived among shuffled papers in the top drawer of the bright blue desk that Santa had also brought me.)
Blondie was a big deal. “Call Me” and “The Tide is High” were two other hits that I heard a hell of a lot as a little boy in 1980. You could guarantee those would come up at least once on the way to school on whatever radio station the bus driver played. (The little kids sat toward the front; my best friend Shawn and I had a habit of sitting in the coveted “front seat” behind the driver, who was an adult we really liked.)
If you watch the truly Kafkaesque video for “The Tide is High,” you’ll actually see an utterly bizarre homage to Star Wars, in which Darth Vader morphs into … an upright robotic rat, apparently. I am not making this up. It’s in the second video I posted.
What’s befuddling is that I don’t think I have heard Blondie played since … the very early 1980’s, I guess. Other superstars from the era occasionally get rediscovered. In 1993 and 1994, for example, the kids at Mary Washington College were hit by a horrifying revival of the truly abhorrent ABBA, not to mention a couple of “songs” from (God help us), The Partridge Family. (If you ask me, a meth epidemic would have been less troubling.)
Ultimately, Happy Hour Hallelujah is a proclamation and celebration of life even while staring the suffering of existence squarely in the eyes. It is an affirmation of the Great Yes that art defiantly screams in the face of entropy’s existential core. It is a truth that seeks to puncture through deception. It is a fire that yearns to rise from out the ashes. It is the next step forward when all momentum seems to be at a standstill. It is a light piercing through the darkness. It is nothing more and nothing less than the expression of one man’s vision toward the future….
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 