Going Nuclear with Kathryn Bigelow
POST VIA LIBERATION LIT
A House of Dynamite, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, is almost the type of movie that should be made and distributed every day of the year. It’s almost freakishly good, though fatally flawed. Despite the movie’s massive contextual weaknesses, if the Academy has any brains, heart, or conscience, A House of Dynamite would win best picture. Released to scandalously few theaters a few weeks ago and now available on Netflix, A House of Dynamite — referring to nuclear-armed civilization — may be the best movie made to date on the nuclear threat, and likely the best since Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and Sidney Lumet’s gut-ripping Fail-Safe, both appearing in 1964, over sixty long years ago during which time the world is literally lucky to have survived total nuclear destruction.
The world has come close to the terminal ultimate on multiple occasions, including the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 when American President John Kennedy recklessly gambled the fate of the planet while moving like a tough guy against Cuba, threatening invasion, and pressing Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to remove Soviet nuclear missiles from Cuba, which had been placed there to both protect Cuba from American invasion and as retaliation for American nuclear missiles placed near the Soviet Union in Turkey.
During this crisis, the American navy encircling Cuba bombed a nuclear-armed Soviet submarine in the area. The only reason the world didn’t blow up that day is that Vasili Arkhipov was the only one of three officers on the Soviet submarine required to approve nuclear missile launch who, instead, alone refused consent to do so amid the American bombing. Thus it has been widely noted (though little known in America) that Vasili Arkhipov is very possibly the most important person to have ever lived, saving the world from total nuclear destruction. The American Navy, aggressive and belligerent on the seas as so often, had no idea what they were doing, bombing a nuclear armed sub. And Kennedy — the bomber-invader of Vietnam, as belligerent as any American President — also had no idea what he was doing menacing and bullying Cuba and the Soviets. Kennedy and badly blinkered American intelligence had no idea about the quantity of nuclear weapons already in Cuba or how close they came to compelling the Soviets to launch those nukes at America.
President Kennedy and American intelligence thought they knew but weren’t even close to knowing. And so it has gone ever since, not least when decades later the USS Vincennes — accidentally? — shot down an Iranian airliner in the Persian Gulf when the plane was 12 miles off the coast of Iran. The USS Vincennes, a U.S. Navy guided-missile cruiser, was inside Iranian territorial waters, even closer to the coast of Iran than the Iranian plane, that summer of 1988 when it shot down the Iranian airliner killing 299 people including 66 children.
Iran retaliated 5 months later by blowing up an American airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, Pan Am Flight 103, killing 270 people — though both America and Iran, intent upon deflecting blame for their own actions, continue to tacitly conspire to deny the tit-for-tat sequence. A year later, a report from U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings would note that the American Navy was too reckless and dangerous to be allowed to operate where it pleased — let alone, unlawfully, within the territorial waters of other countries.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 that would inspire the two great anti-nuclear weapons movies two years later (two movies not as propagandistic as need be) — the American Navy got lucky. President Kennedy got lucky, and the world did not blow up. That kind of dumb luck runs out, and eventually the world will blow up unless nuclear weapons are abolished — entirely. Other times, computers have malfunctioned, showing false incoming attacks forcing officials to make desperate wholesale life and death decisions based on faulty and incomplete information. A House of Dynamite does a good job showing this horrific predicament in its scintillating non-stop slice of life hair-raising, hair-trigger dramatization. Unfortunately the drama and illumination of A House of Dynamite stops at these last second slice of life depictions and gives no insight into the crucial structural and historical context of the nuclear death threat we all live under, let alone the very real possibilities, and even near miss, of nuclear abolition.
During the 1986 nuclear summit in Reykjavík Iceland, American President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to nuclear abolition, in a stunning moment of mutual sanity, shocking their aides. This idea was quickly rolled back by the high officials of the bureaucracy representing the military-industrial establishment. Nevertheless, the massive worldwide Peace movement of the 1980s helped force into existence nuclear arms control talks, agreements, and subsequent massive nuclear weapons reductions. Unfortunately, enough nuclear weapons remain to destroy civilization multiple times over, and nuclear weapons stockpiles and plans for use are growing again, while America and Russia retain control of about 90 percent of global nukes. You will learn none of this from A House of Dynamite, let alone that America is the only country to use nuclear weapons, is fundamentally responsible for nuclear proliferation, and has been historically the one country that has both blocked and stands in the way of nuclear abolition.
Oh no, in A House of Dynamite, it’s the poor United States of America that is under attack from the sheer madness of nuclear weapons — a madness America started, weaponized, proliferated, maintains, and has always been fundamentally responsible for. America is the nuclear enemy of the world, so of course an American movie of nuclear weaponry portrays America as the victim of a nuclear strike, with zero context that America is responsible for the crazed nuclear tragedy in progress.
At least key characters in the movie seem to show utter disgust for the existence of these weapons in the first place. And it does make sense to show the nuclear threat to even the big bully of nuclear weapons, America, if you want to try to convince Americans that nuclear abolition is not only a good idea but necessary for human and ecological survival — but even that is not well portrayed. You need the relevant context and facts of responsibility and possibilities to clarify and drive the point home, to sufficiently expand consciousness, knowledge, and conscience. A House of Dynamite — gripping, topical, timely, and vital as it is — badly lacks that insight and context, when it would have been so easy, so much more compelling, so vital to include to make something more of the movie than merely a slice of life nuclear thriller.
Much more could be said, and hopefully someone will have the brains, and the guts, and the heart to portray it in sequels and follow-ups to this movie, including in other films, TV shows, novels, songs, and so on, in any kind of art, grafitti, you name it. Awarding A House of Dynamite best picture of the year, for the heart-breaking, mind-bending, high-quality dramatization of one of the most, or the most, critical topics in the world might help spur the creation of greatly needed contextual sequels to this movie, to advance culture, so that people and the world itself might have a sequel to their own current tenuous and perilous existence.
POST VIA LIBERATION LIT
A Practical Policy 