
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).
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