Title:A vision of ourselves; what the people saw - JMAUTI

Title:A vision of ourselves; what the people saw (bombing of Hiroshima)
Time
Roger Rosenblatt. 126 (July 29, 1985) pp54(6) (4492 words)
The potential significance of Hiroshima was never lost on Americans. Even
bathed in the kissing and weeping at the end of the war, people realized
that the remarkable Bomb that felled an empire and brought the world to
rapt attention was not going to be a gift without a price. In the aug. 20,
1945, issue of TIME, James Agee looked ahead: "With the controlled
splitting of the atom, humanity, already profoundly perplexed and
disunified, was brought inescapably into a new age in which all thoughts
and things were split--and far from controlled." Agee was anticipating an
opposition between people and their invention that would widen rapidly as
the century continued, until eventually Americans would almost come to
believe that the Bomb had invented itself. The new age would be seen not as
a time of what people did, but of what was done to them.
Forty years now we have been living in that age, no longer new, yet nothing
has replaced it. Those born in the atomic age most likely will die in the
atomic age, if they do not die because of it. What people saw in Hiroshima
was not only the suffering of people; the devastation of a city; the
conclusion of a long and deadly war; the development of a scientific-
military partnership; a new set of rules for U.S. President and for
international politics. It was a vision of the future, a forecast of the
world's destruction. We did not like what we saw.
We therefore went about the business of accommodating that unhappy vision,
and avoiding it at the same time. Both ends were achieved in the culture,
where the collective consciousness could make its fears decorative. Ever
since Hiroshima the Bomb has been at the center of films, books, plays,
paintings, songs, intellectual life. It is not always played the same part.
In the years immediately after Hiroshima, the public seemed not to want to
confront the Bomb directly, and so created a culture in which the end of
the world was given a sidelong glance. Lately, we cannot seem to get enough
of the Bomb, and stare with a hypnotic fixation.
In a way, the world of politics brought about both extreme reactions
because the Bomb, of necessity, was kept secret from the public before it
was first used and, perhaps of necessity, has been treated by those in
charge of it as a secret ever since. What are secrets to governments are
mysteries to the public; no one outside of a very few people in power has
ever understood how nuclear weapons are developed, or why. Suddenly there
was Hiroshima, suddenly the hydrogen bomb, suddenly the MIRVs. Yet while
the machinations of the experts and professionals have remained hidden from
the public, the effects of the weapons have been continually described and
displayed. In the space between secret processes and demonstrated effects,
the public imagination has produced works in which the ends were always
clear, and thus focused upon, and the means obscure, and thus ignored.
What people saw initially in Hiroshima seems to have scared them more
profoundly than they realized they could be scared. In 1946, W.H. Auden
coined the term the age of anxiety. But anxiety did not begin to plumb the
peculiar fear engendered by the Bomb: not only the image of world death,
unwarned of, unsignaled, but of death-in-life, benumbed survivors of an
atomic explosion wandering poisoned and helpless as the Hiroshima citizens
Yoshitaka Kawamoto saw the morning of the bombing. Or, less dramatically,
wandering in a world so near the brink of atomic war that they could no
longer live freely and wholeheartedly, a world in which it feels dead to be
alive. Yale Professors Robert J. Lifton and Kai Erikson defined the
psychological boundaries of that world: "The question so often asked,
'Would the survivors envy the dead?' may turn out to have a simple answer.
No, they would be incapable of such feelings. They would not so much envy
as, inwardly and outwardly, resemble the dead."
Responding to such an image, American culture of the late 1940s and early
1950s absorbed a whole range of fictional characters who were at once
alive, dead and menacing. Frankenstein, created by Mary Shelley in 1818,
came into his own. The Frankenstein movies starring Boris Karloff were
produced in the 1930s, but not until 20 yers later, when these films found
a showcase on television, did the American imagination fully respond. Like
the Dracula, mummy and zombie films of the same period, which were almost
equally popular, the Frankenstein story was not only of the living dead,
but contained the additional element of science run amuck, which allowed
another connection to be made to nuclear threat. Here was the atomic tale
writ wild. Brilliant Dr. Frankenstein, tampering with nature, gums up an
experiment intended to safeguard life and make men immortal, and suddenly a
little girl lies dead in the monster's arms. Not since Daedalus had a
technological feat backfired more painfully.
King Kong was also revived as part of the folklore of the era, elicing an
audience's sympathies by representing a force taken out of nature and
abused. The innocent atom wore a gorilla suit. But new figures arose as
well. Stories about whole galaxies demolished by radiation were common; the
Japanese, as if performing for Americans the dual function of accusation
and exculpation, produced dozens of English-dubbed movies about radioactive
monster from the sky or the deep. More subtle were such films as Invasion
of the Body Snatchers, which simultaneously confronted the fear of death-in-
life and embraced it; people might be better off devoid of emotions (read
normal life). The effect was to make a pre-emptive strike against the Bomb.
It is even possible to see the films of the early 1950s not just as anti-
Bomb, but anti-Communist . The nation was being told that it was better to
be dead than Red, with the implication that the two conditions were
indistinguishable. Thus images of de-spirited human beings may have
represented victims of a dual menace. In practical terms the two threats
could be viewed as one and the same; surrender to the Soviet way of life,
which was seen as death-in-life, would first entail a nuclear war. The
central danger of the undead creatures--that they had expansionist
tendencies to make the entire world undead--may have cooperated nicely with
the scares of the times.
Exceptions to these indirect dealings existed too. In 1958, Tom Lehrer was
singing We Will All Go Together When We Go ("universal bereavement,/ an
inspiring achievement"). Robert Lowell, ahead of his time in such things,
wrote Fall 1961: "All autumn the chafe and jar/ of nuclear war;/ we have
talked our extinction to death." Marguerite Duras's Hiroshima, Mom Amour
might also be judged an exception to the indirectness of the period. In
some respects, Hiroshima, Mon Amour is not about Hiroshima at all, only
using the occasion as a locus for showing how people learn to deal with a
tragic past--in the case of the woman in the story, a past that has nothing
to do with Hiroshima. Yet choosing Hiroshima as the context, the witness
box, for the woman's revelation is a way of saying: here is the place one
either remembers or forgets, and the consequence of foregetting is
Hiroshima.
The majority reaction of the era, however, still was not to look squarely
at what was feared. Literature took a very sidelong glance. In what other
age would the perpetually haunted and displaced hero have emerged with such
stature? In what other age would a writer like Kafka have been made so
welcome: characters lost in and tormented by a gnostic society, unaware of
the location and identities of their enemies, feeling peril and persecution
for unspecified crimes, and yet not innocent either?
In the 1960s the indirect approach to the Bomb seemed to be changing. In
1963 Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds was produced, and in 1964 Stanley
Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. One was a standard something-is-wrong-with-
nature film that made monsters of benignities, the other a headlong black-
comic attack on the nuclear threat. Dr. Strangelove even incorporated the
subtheme of nature out of control in the Bomb-crazy Dr. Strangelove's right
arm, which goes its own way, fondly recalls the doctor's Nazi days and at
one point attempts to strangle its "master." Commercially, if not
critically, The Birds was the more successful of the two films, even though
the character of the mad nuclear scientist (always suspect) became a
permanent part of national folklore. Still, it seemed that we were not
quite ready for so relentless a contemplation of nuclear disaster,
especially one that began with the onscreeen demurrer, "It is the stated
position of the U.S. Air Force that their safeguards would prevent the
occurrence of such events as are depicted in this film."
For the following decade, to the mid-1970s, the American public seemed to
be supplied with diversions from the choise of either a direct or an
indirect apprehension of the Bomb. One was the introduction into the
culture of explicit sex and explicit violence--the explicitness seeming
more significant than either sex or violence per se, and perhaps indicating
a desire to take revenge on some threatening situation, if not the one that
might have been uppermost in people's minds. Fictional heroes of the period
may have offered similar distractions, functioning as little "bombs" in
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