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Image Credit: screenshot from Target Austin, via TAMI 

H/T: Dr. Randi Cox, Stephen F. Austin State

Recently I attended the Cold War Cultures conference here at UT and had the pleasure of attending several especially provocative panels. Of particular interest was a talk by Stephen F. Austin State’s Dr. Randi Cox’s on Target Austin, a 1960 PSA film that localizes the threat of nuclear war by imagining an attack on the Texas capital.

Rather than reaching a wide, national audience with general scenarios, the film makes the fear of nuclear war more palpable to a specific audience by employing well-known local personas and footage of immediately recognizable locations.

A shot of the UT campus included in the film’s opening:

A image of the popular swimming hole, Barton Springs, on the morning of the attack:

This skyline shot that prominently features the UT tower is the last shot before the blast:

Cox points out that the film clearly privileges the white, middle-class family who has access to a private shelter.

In contrast to the above image of the prominently featured mother reading to her daughter, the images below indicate the punishment the film heaps on its single characters. A secretary panics in a public shelter in the basement of a building and an insurance salesman (his professional identity rendered null by nuclear attack) runs to his death outside the city limits after his car breaks down in the Texas Hill Country.

Cox also notes that the film includes no instructions on what to do in such a situation. Rather than provide useful information for an already frightened public, the film exaggerates deeply pervasive fears about nuclear war as well as feelings of inadequacy in anyone who lies outside the piece’s narrowly defined domestic norms.

You can watch the film in its entirety via the Texas Archive of the Moving Image (TAMI).