In a 1988 lecture entitled ‘What is the writer saying?’, Anthony Burgess asked the audience to imagine literature as a kind of line. At one end of this line, he says, we have didactic literature, and at the other end we have pornography. Art, as realised in the works of, say, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, exists in the middle of the line, where the writer is concerned only with the manipulation of language. The key to a bestseller, according to Burgess, is to bend the line so that the didactic and the pornographic meet. In such books we learn an awful lot about the organisation of the White House, or how an airport is run, or how secret military operations are carried out; and when we finally get a bit of sex or violence, it is as a kind of reward for learning. Burgess only applied his formula to works of literature, and even then only jokingly, but I think it applies equally well to films.

One of the most adept practitioners of the ‘film bestseller’ is Kathryn Bigelow. In films like The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, there is an abundance of technical jargon and procedural trivia, but also enough periods of violent indulgence to keep those who are less enamoured of military ranks and code words interested in the story. What these films lack, however, is that ‘middle of the line’ quality which characterises all good works of art, whatever the medium: namely, the incitement to question our basic assumptions about the world. Thus, in The Hurt Locker, we are asked to focus on the inner turmoil of an American bomb-disposal expert, while disgracefully ignoring the commoner, but much less discussed, experience of the 500,000+ Iraqis who died and the millions who were displaced as a result of the United States’ ‘intervention’. At no point are we prompted to question the correctness of what we see or the moral implications of how we see it. The result is a tacit affirmation of the values and falsehoods pedalled by the ruling class.

And Bigelow’s latest film, A House of Dynamite, is no different. Here, as in The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, the view that Bigelow takes of her subject matter—nuclear war—is so narrow and peripheral as to constitute outright misrepresentation. That she should choose to tell the story of a single, unattributed missile being launched at the United States is highly revealing of American attitudes towards, and ignorance of, the United States’ commitment to nuclear supremacy and proliferation since 1945. As Noam Chomsky notes in his essay ‘How Many Minutes to Midnight?’, in those years after the war, ‘the United States possessed about half of total world wealth and an even greater percentage of its manufacturing capacity’. Moreover, ‘the Russians’, who quickly became the scapegoat for US expansionism, were ‘far behind in industrial development and technological sophistication’. Yet the move towards nuclear disarmament never came, and peace proposals that might have eased tensions were flatly rejected by the United States. For example, when Khrushchev proposed mutual reductions in weapons in the 1960s, the incoming Kennedy administration not only rejected the proposal, but, as Kenneth Waltz wrote, consequently ‘undertook the largest strategic and
conventional peace-time military build-up the world has yet seen’.

Subsequent administrations took over where Kennedy left off, bolstering the United States’ military arsenal and constantly threatening to put that arsenal to use. Perhaps the most revealing move came during the Clinton years, when a STRATCOM study entitled ‘Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence’ concluded that the United States should maintain first strike capacity and that ‘It hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and coolheaded… That the US may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be part of the national persona we project’, adding that it is ‘beneficial [for our strategic posture] if some elements may appear to be potentially “out of control”’. The purpose of such behaviour, of course, is to create a perpetual threat of nuclear attack, which, as Chomsky notes, is a severe violation of the UN charter.

With all that in mind, it seems to me absurd that a film which focuses on a nuclear threat without origin, and which fails to mention the United States’ complicity in its own destruction, will inspire any meaningful discussion about nuclear disarmament or the responsibility that governments and systems of private power bear in that process. On the contrary, I think that it will serve to consolidate the view that precarity and unaccountability are essential parts of humanity’s relationship to nuclear weapons, and may even exacerbate the prejudices that many Americans have against ordinary Russian and Chinese citizens. To be clear, the main problem of the film is not that it is unrealistic; indeed, incidents of this kind (minus the detonation) were and still are unnervingly common. Rather, the problem is the narrow scope of what it deems to be permissible debate—a scope which, in my view, wholly conforms to the demands of capitalist censorship.

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