Gaspar and I were standing at a bar, chatting about the ongoing war, before a triple-screening of his films in London, when he recommended the film Threads from 1984. When Gas (Noe) recommends a film, be prepped. He texted me a link from YouTube, so I already knew I was fucked. It’s a TV film from the eighties, a BBC production directed by Mick Jackson, about a nuclear bomb going off in Sheffield. I’m looking for an appropriate word, although it’s still messing with my head a bit… harrowing might work for now. Great art sometimes works on you progressively. It can be so powerful that your mind and body begin to feel its effects days, weeks, even months later. I’m fresh off of Threads, but it’s working me over. I know when something is. When I posted the film poster on my Instagram, a friend replied, “that film left me in a fucked headspace for a month.” Right.

What’s immediately striking is the film’s relevance to what’s going on now, the film shows headlines about a war in Iran, U.S. involvement, and then Russia. Iran’s the spark, and the oncoming apocalypse begins almost invisibly in the background through news headlines, radio reports, and television clips. Regional conflict triggers superpower confrontation. Geopolitical inertia.

When you watch a war film, you’re expecting some kind of spectacle, waiting for the bomb, waiting for the attack — that’s the centrepiece, the build-up to chaos, and then the flood of visuals: fire and blood and screams.

But Threads doesn’t do that.

There’s no spectacle. The apocalypse is background noise. Characters sit in pubs getting pints and seeing things unfold on the television, suspended between the truth and potential untruth of an oncoming reality. That’s why it’s like a documentary, because it feels like how things happen. And that’s why it’s harrowing — it is not a cinematic experience of war, it feels like you’re watching what could actually happen.

Council meetings, emergency planning documents, civil servants attempting to maintain procedure — quick feeble attempts at normalcy when hell breaks loose. Nothing seems urgent, reality is still ongoing — conversations about pregnancy, going to the supermarket. It’s life and death. Death doesn’t announce itself loudly, you’d just be walking one day and it’s over. Threads refuses to comfort the viewer, when the nuclear bomb hits, it hits.

But I’m not talking about a film that simply depicts the reality of war well and handing it a big wow. It’s not that. What I’ve realised is it’s also come down to Gaspar who recommended it to me in the first place, and thinking about the conversation between him as a filmmaker and what this film does.

Violence without catharsis is strange, where most films choose violence as spectacle. In Irreversible, Gaspar does the opposite, he makes the violence physically unbearable. The scene where Monica Bellucci’s character is raped lasts almost nine minutes. You are watching violence in real time, as it really happens. Long takes, no escape.

Filmmakers have the elements at their disposal, the most significant of which is time. Film is sculpting with time. Our human perception of time is unstable, we can dream for five minutes and experience two days, memory compresses years into seconds, and film is that medium that taps directly into time’s precariousness. A film can make a second feel eternal, even events unfold backward (as Gaspar does in Irreversible). I’m digressing, but stay with me, I’m actively trying to understand what the fuck I’m talking about.

Debord already said we’re living in the society of the spectacle, and it pretty much means we consume images over lived experience as reality. Images distort catastrophe.

Now it looks like this:

a quick Instagram reel —

a hypersonic missile,

scroll,

a tinned fish review.

Spectacle compresses time. Violence becomes a thrilling image.

But what does Threads, or Irreversible, do?

They play with time differently, but to similar effect.

They destroy spectacle.

In Threads, the nuclear explosion is brief, visually confusing, and then immediately followed by collapse — the film doesn’t end with the explosion. The real shock is that it goes on. The real horror is the collapse of the future.

The bomb becomes its own time.

Time itself has been altered, and the death goes on and on — language decays, starvation. Across decades. Time isn’t compressed to a mushroom explosion and bang, shit, it’s over. Nah. The violence is duration.

Gaspar, in another way, does the same thing. He doesn’t edit it down. He forces you to endure.

Gaspar traps the viewer inside minutes. Threads traps the viewer inside decades.

There’s this weird desire to see fucked up shit. Sometimes you just wanna see a bomb go off. You want the visual thrill, the spectacle, of explosion. Of fucking, fighting, cartel videos of a dog eating a guy’s balls off. We have a human inclination toward the gruesome. Sometimes I’m in conversations and some bloke will just be like, “just fucking nuke it and be done with it.”

That idea can be said, joked about, whatever, because the reality of it that exists within the contemporary mind is just spectacle — the real horror is unimaginable.

A great film, a great book, can change one’s perspective. It can make you think differently about the world.

Threads made me think about everything differently.

Watch it. As Gas said, “turn off your phone for 90 minutes while watching it. the movie is really powerful and deserves full attention.”

We’re living in some wild times right now, on the brink of WW3, nuclear threats all over the goddamn place.

Get your head outta spectacle. Reality’s real. And the aftermath lasts a fucking long time.