to be in the heart of empire or nettled by its veins is to be IV-dripped its doctrines on a daily basis. at our luckiest, we can sidestep the more blatant fast-food propaganda. eating is a necessity, though. and it’s hard to know how the things we consume affect us; what ideological microplastics are sneaking into our bloodstreams.
one such trojan horse in popular culture is the hollywood spectacle of the bomb. the cinematic explosion slowly anaesthetising the public consciousness to the propulsion of death. we grow up seeing these blasts as grounded siblings of the firework – roaring climaxes that punctuate the orgasmic destruction of a blockbuster’s villain, consuming the baddie absolutely in a lathering inferno, a pyrotechnic celebration of the hero’s victory. Sebastian (Kevin Bacon) being dropped by Linda (Elizabeth Shue) from the ladder of an elevator shaft into a swirling pool of flames in Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man (2000) demonstrates the oh so familiar arithmetic in hollywood’s narrative structure, one that coaxes us into understanding explosions as hygienic obliterations, pristine capital punishment, the cleanliest way to snuff out life.
in a lot of ways, that is exactly what an explosion is. demise delivered in a dense package, touch cordoned from culpability; i push a button here, death happens there and my finger is spared the squelch of blood. the bomb is fire-and-brimstone magic. causally coherent but as accountably unfathomable to our caveman brains as actualising infinity into a concrete amount of matchsticks.
the image of the vintage hero, unconcerned and swaggering away from towering flames that are engulfing foes into nothingness, is embedded deep in the cultural psyche. the phenomena mutated as hollywood yearned for more: more “complexity”, more realism, more edginess.
in the climactic scene of Bad Boys 2 (2003), Detective Lieutenant Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) is held at gunpoint by the drug lord Hector Tapia (Jordi Mollà) in the middle of a Cuban minefield. Special Agent Syd Burnett (Gabrielle Union) aims her gun at Tapia and his criminal crony Carlos (Otto Sanchez) emerges to demand she drop it – while Lowrey’s partner and Syd’s older brother, Detective Lieutenant Marcus Burnett (Micheal Lawrence) aims his gun at Tapia. (a gulf away from) a true Mexican stand–off. Syd obliges, throwing her gun at Carlos’ feet which launches a landmine into the air physics-defyingly, blasting Carlos back, giving Miles ample chance to park a bullet between where Tapia’s third eye would be. the druglord falls backwards, landing squarely on a landmine and his upper body bursts unceremoniously into gloopy wet chunks of viscera. a pause. Lowrey, who’s faith in his partner’s shot accuracy was wavering, checks his ear for a bullet-wound, finds none, and erupts into a celebratory shout. “now that’s how you’re supposed to shoot!”. Lowrey crawls towards Syd, yelling a procession of hilarious things before passionately kissing her on the precarious sand of an active minefield.
…absolute cinema.
where climactic hellfire once washed away the villain in flaming suds of total annihilation – an unsophisticated method of desensitising that simply told us not to think about the guy in there that is horrifically burning in agony because he deserves his puritanical comeuppance – Tapia’s gruesome demise in Bad Boys II is emblematic of a more refined strategy; condensing the spectacle of the blast towards the corporeal form, forcing the audience to engage with the cartoonish mutilation of the villain’s body blowing up and throwing in a comedic jab afterwards to let us know that it’s all good. we experience the violent transition of death, see the exaggerated gore, hear the squelching of meat and dismiss it because that guy was a shit-bag. and also our hero is funny and gets the girl. all's right with the world.
Oppenheimer (2023) is the ultimate example of the traditional structure. the sheer scale in which the atomic bomb dissolves all life within its blast radius is likely the reason why many criticised Nolan’s decision to exclude the impact of the mushroom cloud on the Japanese people. suffering is not confined to the villains, the blast is far to big to put our fingers in our ears and pretend that the hell-flames have only singed the enemy, too many fathomable innocents lives were lost to not at least think about bestowing them the honourable privilege of the camera’s gaze to heroically capture their trauma and fate.
of course, Nolan’s decision to omit the a-bomb’s devastation on Japan is no great deviation from the hollywood playbook. J. Robert Oppenheimer may not be a John McClane or a T800 Terminator but he’s who we’re rooting for, more complex and more flawed than the archetypical hero with a nuanced, internal torture that mars his every expression after the successful detonation of the bomb he worked so hard to create. despite being based on real historical events, we’re still only obliged to follow the hero! to cut the camera from our protagonist strutting away unflinchingly from the heat-blast is bad maths! (even if he’s walking away from an act of mass killing with a single tear streaming down his face). we’re not supposed to deliberate on the villain’s right to life after the curtain falls – thus is the silent contract of the blockbuster.
i will be frank. i’ve been thinking about all this after discovering an israeli airstrike demolishing a playground in Gaza that killed eleven children. the genocidal effort against Palestine and the devastations in Congo and Sudan have illuminated many to the consequences of the west’s incessant interventionism. there are many voices better suited than mine to highlight these atrocities, to trace their historical roots and reveal how the fruits of violence we are witnessing today have been able to blossom.
my thoughts brought me to how israel’s retaliation to October 7th is an endeavour largely reliant on projectiles and airstrikes. the political, moral and legal justification for such an aggressive offence can only be fathomed by understanding how the sanitisation of explosives happens in our psyche. it happens in the manufacturing of a headline that reports an airstrike killing. the importance of the death dissolves in severeness, 11 died, a faceless quantity, whoever’s hand steadied the rocket launcher is never even questioned, there is no assigned mass murderer, for the explosion is hungry and free, untameable, able to chew up everything including people that it shouldn’t, abiding by its natural law of indiscriminate destruction and we’re all supposed to dip our heads at the news-screen and say, “such a shame.”
the hands that cause explosions aren’t culpable. they never belong to any one person therefore no-one is to blame, a spontaneous combustion just happens to hit a civilian or ten. it’s a “truth” in direct opposition to the “40 beheaded babies” claim, a falsehood that lubricated israel’s white phosphorus munitions endlessly.
the intention behind circulating the falsehood was two-fold: a) cement a boogieman (in the form of Hamas) and b) project a mental image of grotesque violence into the public psyche – one that requires physical presence and strong ethnic hands and gore-bloodied weapons and menacing human force. “40 beheaded babies” is a cipher like “knife crime” – the former smearing Palestinians and the latter smearing Black diasporans, painting both as savage villains doing savage things with their savage hands.
narratively, the only way to correct them is to engulf them in biblical flames.
so i’ve been thinking about cinema’s role in defanging the consequences of explosives in our minds, how the obliterative violence of bombs is so “okay”, if not to me specifically but “us” societally; how a part of our soul switches off at the mention of airstrikes and drones and bombs and explosions. they override people and leave only spectacle. i suppose i am writing this as something of a confessional: i want to learn to be disgusted by bombs, to train myself to see them in films and wonder who might be caught up in their fiery froth, to treat the bomb not as a spontaneous force of nature allowed grace but be more resolute in recognising that its callousness as a tool of war is so much bigger than its blast radius.
and i guess that i’m inviting you to do the same.
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Interesting to read your response, and yeah, Oppenheimer felt like a sterile and intellectual film to me -- felt jarring considering the subject matter + what you've written about with how the victims of the bomb weren't part of the story.
Six months since the post, I'm curious to know if your thoughts have changed.
For my own self, I found it a forgettable film save that the bomb-detonation scene had a visceral power that hit me hard -- especially because of how the suspense had ramped up towards it in the story. It was an impressive moment but, whatever I took away from it ("nuclear bombs are powerful") wasn't something I didn't already have before.
Despite not liking it, I ended up seeing it three times in the cinema. I'd promised to different friends I'd watch it with them, and they held me to it, so I went for a different formats each time to see if it changed things (standard, IMAX, 70mm).
After having seen more than 9 hours of the movie, I'm still not sure I can say what it was trying to communicate in terms of values or messaging. I noticed different things each time, but nothing had a consistent or clear feel to it. As a result, my opinion of the film changed each time I saw it. Never in such a way that I ended up liking it, but I did appreciate certain aspects.