Atomic Bomb Cinema

The Apocalyptic Imagination on Film

Jerome F. Shapiro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415936606
• eBook ISBN: 9781135350192
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Unfathomably merciless and powerful, the atomic bomb has left its indelible mark on film. In Atomic Bomb Cinema, Jerome F. Shapiro unearths the unspoken legacy of the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and its complex aftermath in American and Japanese cinema.

According to Shapiro, a "Bomb film" is never simply an exercise in ideology or paranoia. He examines hundreds of films like Godzilla, Dr. Strangelove, and TheTerminator as a body of work held together by ancient narrative and symbolic traditions that extol survival under devastating conditions. Drawing extensively on both English-language and Japanese-language sources, Shapiro argues that such films not only grapple with our nuclear anxieties, but also offer signs of hope that humanity is capable of repairing a damaged and divided world.

www.atomicbombcinema.com

1
1895 to 1945

Prototypical bomb films

What counts is not so much the statistically measurable popularity of films as the popularity of their pictorial and narrative motifs. Persistent reiteration of these motifs marks them as outward projections of inner urges. And they obviously carry most symptomatic weight when they occur in both popular and unpopular films, in grade B pictures as well as in superproductions.

—Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler¹

The development, use, and buildup of nuclear weapons has created a fertile environment for the proliferation of apocalyptic stories. And yet, when we think of apocalyptic narratives, we generally think of The Revelation to John in the New Testament, and not popular films. In When Time Shall Be No More, Paul Boyer shows that for many contemporary Americans, geopolitical events, not the least of which is the development of the bomb, are understood through a fundamentalist Christian teleology that ends with a scourging of the earth, establishment of a heaven on earth, the passing of judgments, and the salvation of the righteous.² This is an apocalyptic teleology. However, if we look closely at mainstream popular American culture, we can also see that the apocalyptic narrative tradition continues to shape the stories we tell, even if the stories do not adhere to fundamentalist doctrine. This is especially true of atomic bomb cinema. The apocalyptic narrative tradition, needless to say, is not the only influence on bomb films, nor are these influences limited to popular culture. To understand the development of atomic bomb cinema we must not only familiarize ourselves with the apocalyptic literary tradition but also with the nascent apocalyptic elements prevalent in early science fiction and horror films, as well as with some important critical tools. This chapter will begin with an explanation of how several seemingly disparate strands of thought and cultural tradition—the concept of the psychological “crisis,” the “apocalyptic imagination,” and, equally important, the influence of the apocalyptic imagination—weaves together popular and elite culture.

A Cultural Pattern: Monks Exhorting the People to Righteousness

It is a curious thing in the West that, during times of intense social change and cultural anxiety, maverick intellectuals with great charisma leave the monastery to exhort the laity and their own peers with spectacular eschatologies. We have seen this throughout history in diverse groups ranging from Jews during the Babylonian and Hellenistic diasporas to early and Medieval Christians. In our own time, however, we tend to overlook mainstream intellectuals and associate millennial movements with extremist groups that include Maria Devi Khristos, the Branch Davidians, Hamas, AUM Shinrikyō (or the Sect of Supreme Truth, which has recently changed its name to Aleph), suicide cults like Solar Temple and Heaven’s Gate, and even Ronald Reagan, who captivated the world with fiery speeches about evil empires and Utopias protected by space-based, nuclear umbrellas. Frank Kermode, moreover, has observed that in our time “[e]ven the scholar who studies crisis as a recurrent, if not perpetual, historical phenomenon, tends to single out ours as the major instance.”³ I would argue that this is not “even” but especially true of scholars who write about the bomb.

Some of our most respected intellectuals have aggressively stepped forward over the issue of the bomb, particularly the issue of its depiction in films. They have come from all disciplines: the humanities, the social and behavioral sciences, the natural sciences, and—since the bomb is often conceptualized as a modern plague—from clinical medicine. For instance, Dr. Helen Caldicott—a pediatrician who, in the 1970s, left her post at Harvard University to resuscitate Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR)⁴—has announced that “[t]he World is on the brink of disaster.” More to the point of this study, she adds that we should “[n]ever underestimate the subliminal and overt power of film and television!”⁵ That chemist-with-a-conscience, Linus Pauling, agrees. At the preview of Stanley Kramer’s 1959 film On the Beach, Pauling proclaimed: “It may be that … On the Beach is the movie that saved the world.”⁶ The cultural historian Paul Boyer specifically equates nuclear annihilation with “Armageddon” and, like Caldicott, decries Hollywood while exhorting the reader to join the ranks of the righteously antinuclear to help in “driving back the shadow of global death” and destroy the “destroyer.”⁷

Historian and social critic Christopher Lasch similarly lays much of the blame for the ills of the “nuclear age” on the “world of flickering images.”⁸ Psychologist Robert J. Lifton—who writes about the so-called inadequacies of popular bomb films—uses a distinctly New Testament, evangelical style in his writings and speeches to cast himself in the role of the gentle shepherd, spreading “the good news” that will give us, the living dead who worship at the alter of nuclearism, salvation from our psychically numbed lives.⁹ Although Michael Ortiz Hill, the depth psychologist, also hints at psychic numbing and waxes apocalyptic, he is the only cultural critic I know of who recognizes the grip of the apocalyptic imagination on himself, and then consciously embraces it as a necessary part of human experience.¹⁰ Of all the intellectuals writing about the bomb, however, the most exemplary is the antinuclear philosopher Jonathan Schell. Evoking Sunday school lessons about choosing between good and evil, he writes, “Two paths lie before us.” Even though insects are common images in apocalypses, I sometimes wonder if Schell was not inspired by the giant ants in the seminal apocalyptic bomb film Them! (Gordon Douglas, 1954); for, in his exhortation to antinuclear righteousness, he masterfully combines apocalyptic narrative structure, Manichaean rhetoric, Paschal imagery, and 1950s-style Hollywood science fiction into visions of postnuclear plagues of “insects and grass.”¹¹

Out of context, the scholarly commentary seems atavistic or comical, even irrational, but it is not. Rather, it exemplifies a common pattern of nuclear text and imagery that can be seen in all segments of American society. The scholarly literature is, in other words, an example of how the culture responds to and represents events that induce anxiety. My own writing, no doubt, is imbued with this power—that is, the power of the apocalyptic imagination. If I speak passionately against other scholars, however, it is not because I think they are evil or bad, nor even wholly wrong; it is because I think it is erroneous and dangerous to condemn entire societies as being pathological. Regardless of my commitments vis-a-vis the bomb, Judaism, or anything else, I have no desire to add to the world’s grief by using my scholarship as a vehicle to insinuate myself into other people’s psyches and advance my own self-righteous, Utopian fantasies. My primary interests are in explaining to my own satisfaction what these films mean, contributing to the scholarly debate, and, I would hope, to provide some answers to several vexing questions that will help others to reach their own conclusions about the world they inhabit. In other words, rather than quicken the apocalypse, I prefer working to repair the world. And yet, as Michael Tolkin, the filmmaker, says, those of us who are “nourished and delighted by this sub-category of intellectual porn … don’t mourn the end of the world, we want a sky box. The millennium is our entertainment and vocation.”¹² Indeed, if there is to be an apocalyptic reckoning, then in my fantasies it begins here—in academe, which is as much or more in need of divine retribution than anywhere else. If you as the reader are not yet convinced of the importance and ubiquity of this patterned response to contemporary intellectual discourse, you will be by the end of this chapter.

The Apocalyptic Imagination before the Bomb

Jacques Derrida is well known for having written that “[t]he ‘reality’ of the nuclear age and the fable of nuclear war are perhaps distinct, but they are not two separate things.”¹³ Yet, no fictional feature film that I can think of is truly concerned with the technological, strategic, or geopolitical “reality” of nuclear war. Nor are they the emblems of nuclearism, global psychopathology, or mass schizophrenia. After watching hundreds of bomb films it seems to me that the best psychological metaphor for understanding what the bomb means comes from psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson’s suggestion that the bomb constitutes a “crisis.” In Identity: Youth and Crisis, Erikson clearly defines this concept:

[I]t may be a good thing that the word “crisis” no longer connotes impending catastrophe, which at one time seemed to be an obstacle to understanding the term. It is now being accepted as designating a necessary turning point, a crucial moment, when development must move one way or another, marshaling resources of growth, recovery and further differentiation. This proves applicable to many situations: a crisis in individual development or in the emergence of a new elite, in the therapy of an individual or in the tensions of rapid historical change.¹⁴

Conceptualizing the bomb as an Eriksonian crisis that must be resolved works well because it does not insist on a normative or single possible outcome, only that resolution of the crisis is necessary to future development. His definition of crisis has the additional advantage of allowing for substantial political, cultural, and personal differences over how a crisis should be resolved. Crises that arise from the physiological, psychological, and anagogic effects of nuclear war or nuclear-related disasters are common themes in atomic bomb cinema. In bomb films, these crises are typically expressed through the vital, ancient, narrative tradition that John J. Collins labels “the Jewish matrix of Christianity,” that is, the apocalyptic imagination.¹⁵

At this juncture a caveat is in order. My phrase “the Jewish apocalyptic imagination” (and perhaps even Collins’s phrase, “the Jewish matrix of Christianity”) may give the misleading impression that the ideas that I am trying to develop here are highbrow, obscure, and arcane. One colleague felt compelled to point out to me that “the germ of the idea … is obvious in the ‘High Holy Day services’ and ‘the most popular Jewish practices.’”¹⁶ Indeed, but the Jewish apocalyptic narrative tradition is, in my mind, at least, the clearest formulation of these ideas; its influence extends far beyond Judaism, and it is the key to understanding atomic bomb cinema.

Apocalypse, as bomb films attest, never lies very far from the imagination. This is because the conceptual structure of its generic framework, as derived from Jewish tradition, is the foundation of the Christian world-view. The term “apocalypse” has generally been misused, or misunderstood, to denote an end rather than a continuum. Hal Foster, in his highly influential book The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, seems to have confused for a generation of scholars the apocalypse with “the end of ideology” and the end of history.¹⁷ Kim Newman, again at the furthest extreme, blithely announces that having read a dictionary, he knows all he needs to know about the specific meanings of “millennium,” “apocalypse,” and other terms, then reduces these terms to denoting only literal representations of “world-ending or -changing catastrophes.”¹⁸ In other contexts, thoughtful scholars use the term too thoughtlessly. Stephen Prince, for example, several times refers to Akira Kurosawa’s films as “apocalyptic,” but provides no sense of what an apocalypse is in either Western or Japanese cultures.¹⁹ Furthermore, apocalypse is frequently confused with other narrative traditions. Most notably, Susan Sontag, in her essay “The Imagination of Disaster,” confuses apocalypse with disaster and later Jewish messianic prophecy, while Robert Torry, in his analysis “Apocalypse Then: Benefits of the Bomb in Fifties Science Fiction Films,” confuses it with Biblical testaments and deluges.²⁰ In addition, Christopher Lasch astutely recognizes that “the apocalyptic vision of the future affirms the possibility of human survival and transformation.” And yet, Lasch sees the “modern secular form” of the apocalypse as evidence of the “minimal or narcissistic self” embodied in “[r]oodess men and women who take no more interest in the future than they take in the past.”²¹ In other words, the very word “apocalyptic” has also come to be misused as a term denoting a kind of mass psychopathology, as well as disaster and destruction. Thus, the word has lost its currency, and needs to be revitalized by returning to its root meanings.

In Greek, the word apokalypsis means “revelation.”²² The psychological connotation of the word, David Miller tells us, is to disclose or uncover, “especially as in a dream or vision, like the lifting of the veil for Ezekiel or John, writer of the Book of Revelation.”²³ John J. Collins, in his seminal study The Apocalyptic Imagination, notes that since the late first century, the word “apocalypse” has been used primarily as a genre label for Christian narratives in which the central character takes a spatial or temporal journey, a cosmological plan is revealed to the character, and the character returns to exhort others to live in accord with the plan. The origins of the genre, however, can be traced back to at least the twelfth century B.C.E., but flourished in the hands of pre-Christian Jews. (According to Richard Freund, the Rabbis did not concern themselves with the apocalypse until the Hellenic period.)²⁴ The genre has not only survived the centuries, but also proven adaptable to many social situations. This is because, in part, a fundamental characteristic of the apocalyptic generic tradition is the assimilation of other literary traditions by authors trying to reach a broader audience.²⁵

There are, of course, strong parallels between not only apocalyptic narratives and testaments and deluges, but also, for example, Hasidic and Jewish mystical storytelling traditions. In these stories, the central character, usually a rabbi, has a vision or his soul ascends to heaven, often without knowing or having a clear understanding of the existing crisis. Through this experience the rabbi learns that his community is threatened, he is then able to return to his community to teach. The rabbi’s vision or revelation itself may thwart the threat, but the revelation remains an important ethical message. Little emphasis is placed on actually describing the hereafter, or the rewards received in the hereafter; rather, the emphasis is placed on just living in the here and now. The parallels between these Jewish narratives, Jewish apocalyptic narratives, and apocalyptic bomb films, such as The Beginning or the End (Norman Taurog, 1947) and even The Time Machine (George Pal, 1960), are striking.

Another characteristic of the apocalyptic tradition, and its relevance to atomic bomb cinema, is its ability to survive within what seem to be completely new generic traditions. For example, in Film and the Nuclear Age, Toni A. Perrine argues that time travel and travel between worlds as “narrative motif[s]” are “supremely cinematic.” More importantly, citing Paul Coates, Perrine argues that the “emergence” of travel to other times and other worlds as new “literary theme[s]” are “linked to the simultaneous emergence of cinema” in the ninetee...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• Introduction Vexing questions, and atomic bomb cinema
• 1 1895 to 1945: Prototypical bomb films
• 2 1945 to 1949: The initial elation after Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• 3 1950 to 1963, Part I: A complex growth industry
• 4 1950 to 1963, Part II: Cold war fantasies
• 5 1964 to 1979: Losing faith in social institutions
• 6 1980 to 1989: The Reagan era
• 7 1990 to 2001: The post-cold war years
• 8 1945 to 2001: Japan’s atomic bomb cinema
• Conclusion Demonic cinema
• NOTES
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
• FILMOGRAPHY
• INDEX