Fridge / When the Wind Blows

...wait, there's more to get than "nuclear war and Blind Obedience are bad ideas"?

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The Film

Fridge Brilliance

• Roger Waters did the music for the film and he wanted to have his music all the way through (he wasn't the only one: Squeeze and Genesis really wanted to contribute music and turn the whole thing into a pop musical) but the filmmakers said no. After the nuclear attack, there is no music at all until the film ends.
• When the nuke hits in the middle of the movie, a montage of the Bloggs' lives plays until their wedding photo breaks...it's basically a Really Dead Montage. Jim and Hilda are at this point, for all intents and purposes, dead; the radiation has the indecency to force them to linger.
• Eventually, later in the film, Jim realizes what's really going on, at least to a degree; Jim's bumbling about is actually him trying to hide the fact that they're both dying of radiation poisoning. Near the end of the film, Hilda finds out too, hence why she suggests they get into the paper bags again, and pray.

Fridge Horror

• Ron, the Bloggs' son, is kind of a jerkass, regardless of "nerves". He sings to his father "We'll all go together when we go" over the phone. He laughs at his father for being responsible. Imminent death is looming over him and his loved ones, he has a child to worry about, and he isn't doing a damn thing about it. At least his parents had the decency to try and help their situation. Worse, it's implied he's an alcoholic. At best, he'll be dead. At worst, he'll have just enough time to realize that he treated the event that killed his entire family like a joke just before suffering the same fate. Take deadly situations seriously.
  • If you think about it Ron's behavior, while jerkish, makes sense, as, unlike his parents (and probably many others), he knows the severity of the situation and the most likely outcome, thus he doesn't really do anything because, in the end, what his parents did proved to be futile (it's all but stated that they die, the film is more overt with it). If anything because of how dire and futile the situation is (or would be), Ron was probably losing his mind and living in denial (not unlike what happens with the "Denial" stage of Grief), combining Fridge Horror with Fridge Brilliance.
    • Wasn't Ron in central London, where a bomb hit? If you're in the middle of where the nuke lands, it is, indeed, absolutely pointless doing anything except accepting your fate. I always took his "nerves" to be a polite British euphemism for going absolutely snooker loopy.
• The bags are so the government will have an easier time collecting the bodies. It's rendered moot, since everyone's implied to be dead.
  • Not necessarily. Remember Jim told Hilda they lived in an isolated part of the country. The government is probably putting their attentions on dealing with the city citizens before going to the outline areas. Of course by the time they get around to it, it'll be far too late for the Bloggs, or anyone else who may have survived the initial blast.
    • There's a brief scene that shows they live in Clayton, which is very close to Leeds. Leeds itself was a city that produced munitions during WW2, and due to its manufacturing usage would have been one of the cities targeted in a nuclear war scenario.

The Comic

Fridge Brilliance

• In When The Wind Blows, Jim Bloggs repeatedly says, "Ours is not to reason why", but never remembers the next line — and then, at the end, says "Into the valley of the shadow of Death...rode the Six Hundred...", for the line is from Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade":
  'Forward the Light Brigade!'
  Was there a man dismay'd?
  Not tho' the soldier knew
  Some one had blunder'd:
  Theirs not to make reply,
  Theirs not to reason why,
  Theirs but to do and die,
  Into the valley of Death
  Rode the six hundred.
• Briggs' earlier book Gentleman Jim offers a reason for Jim's completely supine approach to officialdom, establishing him as an unusually pure example of a Failure Hero. Jim, bored with his job as a lavatory attendant, decides that he wants a better job, and after going through various options which are hopelessly unrealistic for a poorly-educated middle-aged man, decides to become a highwayman who will rob from the rich and give to the poor. This involves getting a horse, a costume, a sword and a gun, none of which he is able to obtain, so he makes do with a donkey, improvises a costume from a curtain, a pair of Wellington boots, one of Hilda's old blouses and a modified ARP helmet, and uses toy weapons. All along the line, however, he comes up against authority and ends up being arrested and sent to jail. It's clear at the end of the book that he quite likes it in jail, because he no longer has to make any decisions for himself. If Jim learns anything from this, it's that he's always in the wrong with respect to authority. Which doesn't help him and Hilda at all when the authorities declare a nuclear war.

Fridge Horror

• Soon after the blast, rain begins to fall, and the couple stand out in it, relishing in the coolness and collecting some rain water to drink. This is very likely what is called rain out, which in respect to radioactive fallout, acts like a natural sponge to the fallout in the atmosphere; in a nutshell, it collects the radioactive particles from the air in the form of rain, cleansing the air, but further polluting the ground by having it soaked with what is basically concentrated nuclear fallout. And the Bloggses are rubbing themselves with the water and drinking it. No wonder they began deteriorating so quickly.

Meta/Other

Fridge Brilliance

• Iron Maiden's Filk Song based off When the Wind Blows changes the ending to the elderly couple killing themselves, believing an earthquake was a nuclear blast. The song was made in 2010, some thirty years after the comic the movie was published. The topic of social commentary has changed from the then-current perils of nuclear war to the fearmongering and mass-hysteria of the media of the 21st century.