Filming the Bomb
Sep. 14th, 2010 07:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zalenaThe documentary film corps that filmed the Bomb:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/science/14atom.html?src=ISMR_AP_LO_MST_FB
I've recently wondered at the fact that no one seems particularly concerned about the Bomb, anymore. As though the threat went away with the Cold War.
There were two key moments of consciousness re: the Bomb in my life.
1. Chernobyl. And of course, the day my father said that its fall out would be in the vicinity of Squaresville. I wondered if this was such a big deal, while I still was obliged to walk to school. I also wondered if I would survive the walk home. Nuclear holocaust and the apocalypse fit hand in glove. I wonder if anyone has done studies on the nuclear Xtianity?
2. I did a report on the Bikini Atoll tests. I got ahold of a National Geographic on the topic and those pictures are still emblazoned in my head. As are several bizarre facts, like the incidence of diabetes among the natives who were set up on a neighboring island on a gov't welfare program and still haven't returned home. It struck me at that age that they ate the same surplus foods that were served to us in school lunch. Anytime the Bikini Atoll comes on the news, I feel a feel a kind of proprietary urge.
I also saw, somewhere, test footage of the Bikini Atoll. It was in grainy black and white: nothing like the photographs in the National Geographic. But there were goats on those boats. And I thought this was very strange that they would send animals into the blast. What did they think was going to happen to them?
There was, of course, the Sadako moment, in 6th grade, turned into a multi-media event by our teacher who wrote a song and featured our childish drawings in an accompanying slide show. But it's sentimentality---and my absolute haplessness with orgami---didn't have the same impact as the two previous incidents. Why was Sadako sadder than our classmate J who also had leukemia? His survival of which did not make him a hero, but an outcast. I think we didn't understand what happened to him and worried it would happen to us.
But occasionally, I still have moments of almost primal wonder: "Really?" I thought. Probably while reading Ellen Klages book, Green Glass Sea, "They thought the atmosphere might catch on fire, but they ignited it, anyway?"
And my mother, whose father worked in aerospace, telling me about nuclear sunsets from her childhood in Utah. It took me years before I put together her descriptions and The Orb's Little Fluffy Clouds. There's a reason we don't see sunsets like that anymore. [The harmonica samples, by the way, come from Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West* and are the sounds someone makes while being baroquely hung from a stone arch: making the Orb's song not only that much sinister, but giving it the air of critical commentary re: the West and the uses to which its landscape have been put. A video with earthworks and mine tailings, might not be out of place.]
I suppose what gets to me every time is the beauty and destruction hand-in-hand. I think of those filmmakers, and I imagine their awe: not only of the blast, but the challenge it provided to film. Someone could get addicted to that: well knowing the dangers. Someone could want to see it go off: just to see it. Purely as an aesthetic exercise.
I suspect I've got the nuclear tourism bug. Not bad enough to be currently planning a trip, but enough that I have a list of sites squirreled away that I want to see. Not only Trinity, but missile silos. For me, and the others who want to see it, these things feel like forgotten worlds, tucked away in our subconsciousness, a sense of the way we once thought the world might end: but didn't.
Also: Douglas Coupland's Life After God.
* Once Upon a Time in the West is a problematic film, but it is at the same time a visual masterpiece. The first nine minutes or so of the film in which gunmen wait for a train to arrive is a fantastic example of ambient cinema. It is also one of those strange moments of stillness one finds in Leone's film, like the famous mexican stand-off in The Good, the Bad, the Ugly. Westerns, generally, are filled with these moments. Long, long, waits before the action explodes. But starting a film this way is somewhat unusual.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/science/14atom.html?src=ISMR_AP_LO_MST_FB
I've recently wondered at the fact that no one seems particularly concerned about the Bomb, anymore. As though the threat went away with the Cold War.
There were two key moments of consciousness re: the Bomb in my life.
1. Chernobyl. And of course, the day my father said that its fall out would be in the vicinity of Squaresville. I wondered if this was such a big deal, while I still was obliged to walk to school. I also wondered if I would survive the walk home. Nuclear holocaust and the apocalypse fit hand in glove. I wonder if anyone has done studies on the nuclear Xtianity?
2. I did a report on the Bikini Atoll tests. I got ahold of a National Geographic on the topic and those pictures are still emblazoned in my head. As are several bizarre facts, like the incidence of diabetes among the natives who were set up on a neighboring island on a gov't welfare program and still haven't returned home. It struck me at that age that they ate the same surplus foods that were served to us in school lunch. Anytime the Bikini Atoll comes on the news, I feel a feel a kind of proprietary urge.
I also saw, somewhere, test footage of the Bikini Atoll. It was in grainy black and white: nothing like the photographs in the National Geographic. But there were goats on those boats. And I thought this was very strange that they would send animals into the blast. What did they think was going to happen to them?
There was, of course, the Sadako moment, in 6th grade, turned into a multi-media event by our teacher who wrote a song and featured our childish drawings in an accompanying slide show. But it's sentimentality---and my absolute haplessness with orgami---didn't have the same impact as the two previous incidents. Why was Sadako sadder than our classmate J who also had leukemia? His survival of which did not make him a hero, but an outcast. I think we didn't understand what happened to him and worried it would happen to us.
But occasionally, I still have moments of almost primal wonder: "Really?" I thought. Probably while reading Ellen Klages book, Green Glass Sea, "They thought the atmosphere might catch on fire, but they ignited it, anyway?"
And my mother, whose father worked in aerospace, telling me about nuclear sunsets from her childhood in Utah. It took me years before I put together her descriptions and The Orb's Little Fluffy Clouds. There's a reason we don't see sunsets like that anymore. [The harmonica samples, by the way, come from Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West* and are the sounds someone makes while being baroquely hung from a stone arch: making the Orb's song not only that much sinister, but giving it the air of critical commentary re: the West and the uses to which its landscape have been put. A video with earthworks and mine tailings, might not be out of place.]
I suppose what gets to me every time is the beauty and destruction hand-in-hand. I think of those filmmakers, and I imagine their awe: not only of the blast, but the challenge it provided to film. Someone could get addicted to that: well knowing the dangers. Someone could want to see it go off: just to see it. Purely as an aesthetic exercise.
I suspect I've got the nuclear tourism bug. Not bad enough to be currently planning a trip, but enough that I have a list of sites squirreled away that I want to see. Not only Trinity, but missile silos. For me, and the others who want to see it, these things feel like forgotten worlds, tucked away in our subconsciousness, a sense of the way we once thought the world might end: but didn't.
Also: Douglas Coupland's Life After God.
* Once Upon a Time in the West is a problematic film, but it is at the same time a visual masterpiece. The first nine minutes or so of the film in which gunmen wait for a train to arrive is a fantastic example of ambient cinema. It is also one of those strange moments of stillness one finds in Leone's film, like the famous mexican stand-off in The Good, the Bad, the Ugly. Westerns, generally, are filled with these moments. Long, long, waits before the action explodes. But starting a film this way is somewhat unusual.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-09-15 01:19 pm (UTC)Nobody's particularly worried about a plane dropping the bomb on the States anymore, but suitcase nukes are still a threat; and the whole reason Obama continues his folly in Afghanistan is to keep A.Q. from getting to Pakistan's nukes. Both of these scenarios are pretty scary!