Duck and Cover

It seemed strangely auspicious to me to watch on Turner Classic Movies, the old civil defense film Duck and Cover on the same day that people in Hawaii, apparently thought that they were about to be incinerated by Kim "Little Rocket Man" Jim Un's ICBM missiles.  (It turned out to be a false alarm.)  Duck and Cover is a nasty bit of Cold War kitsch that can still send chills up your spine.  Bert is an animated turtle wearing a sort of World War II helmet -- when he is threatened with aerial bombardment, he retreats into his shell, thus, giving an example of how a victim of a nuclear bomb attack should shield himself from injury.  The film features interracial class rooms in which the kids duck and cover under their desks to avoid the blast of a nuclear missile detonating nearby.  We see various iterations of the primal scene -- an air-raid siren sounds and the kids "duck and cover".  In one sequence, in a playground, the children abandon their bats, balls, and jumping rope to run inside the building and "duck and cover" -- the camera takes still-lives of the bat, ball, and jumping rope eerily abandoned in desolate empty frames worthy of a film by Ozu.   In one scene, a family's supper is interrupted by the wail of sirens -- everyone ducks and covers under the table, leaving us with a good view of a 50's style meal complete with a bottle of Guelden's mustard on the table.  We see kids alone in corridors and walking along sidewalks surprised by the scream of the sirens and "ducking and covering."  "The attack may come," the narrator says reassuringly, "when there are no grown-ups around."  The kids crumple against walls or cower in door openings.  The eerie thing about the maneuver is that we don't really see the kids getting up after the exercise -- instead, we see people going about their daily activities, then, the shriek of an air-raid siren, and the actors crouching, putting knees to head in a fetal gesture, and, then, locking their hands over their necks.  But I don't really recall anyone coming up out of that position -- in other words, in a flash everyone is "changed", terribly changed, but the kids who have gone into the "duck and cover" position don't ever get up; they seem to have become motionless corpses.  This may not be literally true but it's the impression that the film gives -- once, you go into the "duck and cover" posture, there is simply no return from the dead.  The phrase "duck and cover" comes with a little radio-TV ditty, a little rhyming jingle or theme song intoned by Bert the Turtle who seems to have wandering into this very American film from a PSA made in England.  I can't see a picture like this objectively because it is part of my childhood.  I recall doing "duck and cover" exercises when I was in kindergarten and through the fourth or fifth grade of elementary school.  So what's on screen is entangled in lots of contractures, scar tissue and ligatures linking the images to other memories in my life.