Art and nuclear culture

Abstract

The author traces the rise of twentieth-century “nuclear culture,” citing examples from Japan’s Godzilla movies to jazz songs. He notes that artists reacted in both positive and negative fashion to the promise of new technology, and that the public’s fear of radiation and death has paralleled its fascination with disaster.

Unlucky dragons

It is 6:45 a.m., March 1, 1954. Lucky Dragon No. 5, a Japanese tuna fishing trawler, floats on the Pacific in the early morning darkness, about 87 miles from an atoll known as Bikini. Suddenly, out of the twilight, the crew sees a flash that turns the sky and sea into “flaming sunset colors.” In the midst of this phenomenon, a yellow umbrella shape glows even brighter on the horizon, slowly turning pale and eventually purple before fading away. The light is gone; darkness returns. But a few minutes later, a loud roar engulfs the ship with a horrible rumble that seems to come from the ocean floor, “like an earthquake.”

Now, as the sun comes up, the crew sees a huge grotesque shape on the horizon, a series of dark thunderclouds rising high into the sky. Despite the fact that the ship is upwind from the cloud, it grows larger and larger and begins to spread out over the vessel like some gigantic creature. The wind picks up; the sea gets choppy; and it begins to rain. Only this is no ordinary storm; the rain contains a kind of sleet, white particles among the droplets that stick to the ship’s deck and get into the eyes, ears, and noses of the crew. The fishing lines are pulled in, the decks are washed off, and the Lucky Dragon turns home toward Yaizu.

But the drama is not over for the crew. That evening, the symptoms begin: headache, nausea, diarrhea. Their eyes turn red. A few days go by, and their skin turns dark and blisters appear. A week goes by, and their hair begins to fall out, “in bunches, roots and all” (Oishi, 2011: 18, 19, 22). After the ship arrives home, it is quickly determined that the men are suffering from radiation poisoning. Aikichi Kuboyama, the ship’s chief radio operator, dies on September 23, becoming a fatality of shi no hai, the death ash, as it had by then become known in Japan (Japan Times, 2009).

Later that same year, another Japanese vessel, a freighter named The Glory No. 5, sits calmly in the Pacific waters, the men playing music to while away the evening. Suddenly there is a dazzling light and an explosion. The crewmen look into the sea and witness another underwater explosion, this one sending them hurling backward from the shockwaves, blinded by the vivid flash of illumination. The ship quickly catches fire as the radio officer desperately signals for help. But it is too late; the ship goes down into the dark waters in flames. Several search vessels are sent to the area where The Glory disappeared—only to meet similar fates.

Meanwhile, on the island of Ōdo, a fisherman is rescued from the sea by the villagers. Before collapsing, he explains that his boat was destroyed by “a monster.” Fearful, the villagers perform a ritual dance to ward off a “legendary creature that lives in the sea.” That night, a terrible storm hits the island, with strong winds and bright flashes of lightning. The morning reveals crushed houses and dead livestock. A team of scientists arrives on the island to investigate and find, surprisingly, that the village water now contains high levels of radiation (Tsutsui, 2004: 27–28).

While the Lucky Dragon incident is real, the second radiation incident is fiction—the opening sequences of the 1954 film Gojira, later released in the United States in 1956 as Godzilla, King of the Monsters. The Lucky Dragon’s voyage was not providential; in the crew’s search for bonito, they had run aground on a sandbar, been tossed about in a storm with 70-foot waves, been ordered to change course toward Midway, and had caught few fish for all their suffering. During a storm, crewman Matashichi Ōishi felt they were at the “gates of hell” (Oishi, 2011: 13), but he had no idea at the time how prescient he was, for the unlucky Dragon would be caught in fallout from the largest hydrogen bomb test ever conducted by the United States. On March 1 (February 28 on the other side of the international date line) an explosion some 1,000 times bigger than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and two-and-a-half times more powerful than anticipated by scientists, had been detonated at Bikini Atoll. Although the Lucky Dragon was outside the pre-designated danger zone, it was nevertheless caught in the storm of radioactivity. The miscalculation of the magnitude of the explosion coupled with a change in winds from the north to the east resulted in the contamination of several inhabited islands, beta burns on servicemen conducting the test, and the Lucky Dragon incident. Once the radioactivity landed in the water, currents bore it as far away as Japan, India, the United States, and even Europe.

The poisoning of the crew and the panic resulting from the contaminated tuna that reached markets (not just from the Lucky Dragon but from subsequent fishing all over the western Pacific), caused renewed outrage among the Japanese, who saw this as a third atomic attack on their country, and instigated an international call to control atomic testing. This spotlight on nuclear experiments would not only affect future detonations but would have an impact on culture as a whole, and Toho Studio’s film in particular.

Several vectors came together to produce the spectacle that is Godzilla. Producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, needing a film for Toho after a co-production with Indonesia had collapsed, decided to capitalize on the success of the 1953 US film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Ray Harryhausen, who had studied under Willis O’Brien, the stop-motion master who brought King Kong to life in the 1933 classic, was enlisted to create a dinosaur awakened under the Arctic Circle by an atomic test called Operation Bravo (this, a year before the actual Operation Castle Bravo test on Bikini Atoll). Based on a 1951 short story by Ray Bradbury called “The Fog Horn,” in The Beast the creature wreaks havoc on both New York and London before an “anti-radiation” isotope torpedo finally kills the creature as he is destroying Coney Island.

Tanaka teamed with director Ishiro Honda, and they were in pre-production when the Lucky Dragon incident occurred. It inspired Tanaka and he decided to comment on atomic testing, altering the beginning of the screenplay to resemble the event and changing his monster from a giant octopus to a dinosaur-like creature, one that breathed radioactive fire. Honda would later say that the idea was to have the monster represent the atomic bomb, to make “radiation visible” (Brothers, 2009: 43–45). If the fate that befell the men of the Lucky Dragon was a tragedy, the transformation of the creature into a kind of atomic-age dragon was, ironically, very lucky for Honda, Tanaka, Toho Studios, and cinema audiences from the 1950s to today.

Godzilla was only one of a series of disaster films released during this period. After Godzilla attacked Tokyo, dinosaurs would trounce London (The Giant Behemoth, the Sea Monster [The Giant Behemoth in its US release], 1959; Gorgo, 1961); insects enlarged thousands of times from radiation poisoning would attack US cities (Them!, 1954; The Beginning of the End, 1957); and aliens with ghastly destructive powers would threaten mankind in its entirety (The War of the Worlds, 1953; This Island Earth, 1955). Toho Studios itself would release numerous sequels (Godzilla Raids Again, 1955; King Kong vs. Godzilla, 1962) and spin-offs featuring other gargantuan creatures (Rodan, 1956; Mothra, 1961; Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, 1964; Destroy All Monsters, 1968). These destructive fiends, produced by atomic explosions or grown immense through radiation, seem to exist for the most part, like the bomb, at an incomprehensible scale. In their enormity, they represent the potential for atomic annihilation—the closeness of doomsday—a thought that is so unfathomable, so inhuman, that, in a sense, these monsters cannot even occupy conceptual or physical space with humans. Humans look up, scream, run; cut to Godzilla, a man in a suit stomping out a world of miniature cities. So horrendous is Godzilla, as is what he symbolizes, that any actual simultaneous presence would be too disturbing. He exists in another world and only touches this one through mostly awkwardly spliced together montage of the two worlds, a collision of the real and the insane that forms a hybrid universe. Like Goya’s The Colossus from almost 150 years earlier, Godzilla is so gigantic and terrifying that he appears either in separate scenes or, like his uncanny predecessor, ghost-like, a rear-screen projection set behind the miniscule men and animals fleeing his presence. As J. Hoberman has observed:

Sharing space with Godzilla is inconceivable—as opposed to King Kong, who was made to interact with humans and even fall in love. Godzilla is like a Matthias Grünewald altarpiece where the humans are shown in perspective but the monsters are garish and flat. As in the “Defiguration” paintings of situationist Asger Jorn, two wildly clashing representational codes are present onscreen. (Hoberman, 2012)

As Hoberman astutely notes, this visual separation in Godzilla is similar to the arrangement in Asger Jorn’s détournment paintings in which the artist defaces existing paintings by creating renderings on top of the originals; yet old and new do not blend, but rather collide, like a kind of Eisensteinian montage, to produce something other. The old world cannot become one with the modern age, but is subsumed by it into a new creation.

Godzilla likewise represents the imposition of the new on the old, the inconceivable destructiveness of the new atomic age. But he is a creation of our own making. Like Dr. Frankenstein’s creature, he is our punishment for tampering with nature and defying God. And yet unlike Mary Shelley’s monster, who despite his ungodliness was in fact a mirror of humanity, Godzilla is not human (although clearly a man in a latex suit), not even in the sense of Kong, who is ultimately seen by the end of the film as a Brobdingnagian and tragic version of man; rather, the King of the Monsters is human only in the sense that he symbolizes a dark piece of man’s mind, an unhealthy part, ripped out and expanded to an atomic scale and intent on destroying and killing on an “inhuman” scale. This is not Kong enraged at being made a Broadway spectacle—imprisoned and chained for entertainment—but pure spectacle as Godzilla attacks without thinking, without cause. He is a physical manifestation of the fear of the dark (most of his attacks come at night in the original film, and he remains unseen in the first several acts of carnage), or, more accurately, the fear of that which cannot be seen, the fear of radiation, of the possibility of sickness and death descending unseen. Godzilla is the embodiment of the slow death of shi no hai. It is no wonder then that it is the great ape that triumphs in the 1962 King Kong vs. Godzilla as man (Kong) destroys the monster that arose from his darkest self.

Ironically, filmmakers were perhaps less successful when dealing with the anxiety more directly. Akira Kurosawa’s I Live in Fear (1955), which shows how the dread of the H-bomb destroys the lives of a family, Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe (1964), shot soon after the Cuban missile crisis, or Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach, about survival after a nuclear attack, tended toward the overly dramatic, delivered in “serious” stark black and white (Hoberman, 2012). But these films, for all their self-importance, seem now in retrospect to be less effective at addressing the horrors of the times than the science fiction films in which metaphor works better than melodrama.

Godzilla leaves us spellbound. We are mesmerized by the way he stomps out cities, breathes fire, destroys, and destroys again. Susan Sontag, in her noted essay on 1950s science fiction films, “The Imagination of Disaster,” articulates this aspect of Godzilla’s appeal, beyond his existence as a metaphor for the bomb and as an essential means of coming to terms with something inconceivable:

Science fiction films are one of the most accomplished of the popular art forms, and can give a great deal of pleasure to sophisticated film addicts. Part of the pleasure, indeed, comes from the sense in which these movies are in complicity with the abhorrent. It is no more, perhaps, than the way all art draws its audience into a circle of complicity with the thing represented. But in science fiction films we have to do with things which are (quite literally) unthinkable … . Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art. In science fiction films, disaster is rarely viewed intensively; it is always extensive. It is a matter of quantity and ingenuity. If you will, it is a question of scale … . Thus, the science fiction film (like a very different contemporary genre, the Happening) is concerned with the aesthetics of destruction, with the peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc, making a mess. (Sontag, 1965: 42–44)

Culture then becomes a vehicle for both reconciling ourselves to the destructive potential in society and calling attention to—even embracing—our love of disaster, our inability to look away from catastrophe.

Atomophobia

It’s a drink that you don’t pour

Now when you take one sip you won’t need anymore

You’re small as a beetle or big as a whale

BOOM—atomic cocktail.

(Slim Gaillard Quartette, “Atomic Cocktail,” 1946)

The fear and fascination inherent in films like Godzilla, as well as the focus on the implications of the unleashing of the atomic genie, parallel the zeitgeist of the culture as a whole following World War II. After the dropping of the bomb, no one would ever be the same. Announcing the end of the war, correspondent Edward R. Murrow found little to rejoice about: “Seldom, if ever, has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear, with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured,” while H. V. Kaltenborn warned that “We are like children playing with a concentrated instrument of death whose destructive potential our little minds cannot grasp” (Boyer, 1994: 7). And less than a week after Hiroshima, Norman Cousins, in a piece for the Saturday Review of Literature, even questioned whether or not modern man was, perhaps, obsolete:

Whatever elation there is in the world today because of the final victory in the war is severely tempered by fear. It is a primitive fear, the fear of the unknown, the fear of forces man can neither channel nor comprehend … . It has burst out of the subconscious and into the conscious, filling the mind with primordial apprehensions … . Even assuming that he could hold destructive science in check, what changes would the new age bring or demand in his everyday life? What changes would it bring or demand in his culture? (Cousins, 1945)

While the US government carefully controlled the release of images showing the full extent of the destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the harsh reality gradually emerged and further fueled reactions (Roy, 2010). Just over a year after the bombs were dropped on Japan, the New Yorker dedicated nearly an entire issue to John Hersey’s article titled simply “Hiroshima,” which recounted the stories of six citizens of the city. In such chapters as “A Noiseless Flash,” “The Fire,” and “Details Being Investigated,” Americans could read in painful detail the real effects of the bomb on individual human beings and families (Hersey, 1946). Yet the reaction to the bomb in the post-war period was not merely anxiety and horror, but a complex fusion of responses intertwined in seemingly contradictory ways. Paralleling the fear and adjustment to life under constant threat was the optimism induced by the achievements and potential of science to lead to a better tomorrow. Born out of this duality, atomic culture abounded. For 15 cents you could buy an “Atomic ‘Bomb’ Ring” from General Mills; the Slim Gaillard Quartet gave us a number entitled “Atomic Cocktail”; jazz recordings were put out under the “Atomic” label; and the French “Bikini” bathing suit was an immediate success. Despite the clear dangers of the nuclear age, a Gallup poll taken a month after the bombs were dropped on Japan showed 69 percent of the public felt the development of the bomb had been a “good thing” (Boyer, 1994: 11, 22).

At the same time, the Social Science Research Council conducted an in-depth study that produced somewhat similar findings to the Gallup poll, although respondents had a more pessimistic view of the future. The majority of people polled felt Americans’ monopoly and control of the bomb would soon come to an end and that another world war was on the horizon (Boyer, 1994). Still, the late 1940s also witnessed a growing antipathy about the bomb. People learned to live with their fears and saw the potential in harnessing atomic energy. The cataclysmic, fantastic nature of atomic warfare made it nearly impossible for citizens to internalize its effects on a daily basis, causing Americans to cling to the notion that only the United States had nuclear capabilities. As Paul Boyer observes in By the Bomb’s Early Light, his study of US culture at the advent of the atomic era:

[Americans had] come full circle. For a fleeting moment after Hiroshima, American culture had been profoundly affected by atomic fear, by a dizzying plethora of atomic panaceas and proposals, and by endless speculation on the social and ethical implications of the new reality. By the end of the 1940s, the cultural discourse had largely stopped. Americans now seemed not only ready to accept the bomb, but to support any measures necessary to maintain atomic supremacy. (Boyer, 1994: 334)

Then came August 29, 1949, when the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb. This awe-inspiring power that had been controlled solely by the United States and allowed it to determine the future had suddenly become a destructive force outside of US control. Now, at any moment, as in producer George Pal’s 1953 version of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, utter destruction could rain down from “alien” places. Film critic Parker Tyler referred to this fear as “atomophobia” (Hoberman, 2012). The atomic “plot” had its first real twist.

In his 1997 novel Underworld, novelist Don DeLillo captures the intense psychological effect of this transition in US history:

It seems the Soviet Union has conducted an atomic test at a secret location somewhere inside its own borders. They have exploded a bomb in plain unpretending language. And our detection devices indicate this is clearly what it is—it is a bomb, a weapon, it is an instrument of conflict, it produces heat and blast and shock. It is not some peaceful use of atomic energy with home-heating applications. It is a red bomb that spouts a great white cloud like some thunder god of ancient Eurasia.

Edgar fixes today’s date in his mind. October 3, 1951. He registers the date. He stamps the date.

He knows this is not completely unexpected. It is their second atomic explosion. But the news is hard, it works into him, makes him think of the spies who passed the secrets, the prospect of warheads being sent to communist forces in Korea. He feels them moving ever closer, overtaking. It works into him, changes him physically as he stands there, drawing the skin tighter across his face, sealing his gaze … . Now this, he thinks. The sun’s own heat that swallows cities. (DeLillo, 1997: 23–24)

It is exactly this dramatic, catastrophic image of a city consumed that Chesley Bonestell, a talented illustrator of science fiction magazines and painter of Hollywood special effects mattes, produced in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet test, capturing the new sense of paranoia. Bonestell’s cover would confront readers of the August 5, 1950 issue of Collier’s magazine; it featured an illustration of an atom bomb exploding over New York City and the headline “Hiroshima, U.S.A.: Can Anything Be Done About It?” The editors’ preface explained the reason for the issue:

For five years now the world has lived with the dreadful knowledge that atomic warfare is possible. Since last September, when the President announced publicly that the Russians too had produced an atomic explosion, this nation has lived face to face with the terrifying realization that an attack with atomic weapons could be made against us. But, until now, no responsible voice has evaluated the problem constructively, in words everybody can understand. This article performs that service. (Lear, 1950: 11)

Dissolving the line between reality and fiction, the magazine presented stories as news articles and ticker tape feeds: “NEWARK NJ—HUGE EXPLOSION REPORTED IN LOWER NEW YORK CITY. IMMEDIATE COMFIRMATION UNAVAILABLE.” These pieces were accompanied by Bonestell’s terrifying illustrations with captions such as: “A cloud of black grime masked the lower city … . Where 100,000 people had lived—in an area roughly fifteen blocks long and twenty blocks across—there was now an ugly brown-red scar … . Beyond the rim of the scar, thousands of fires were lighted.” Or, “Wind that followed the bomb blast hit Brooklyn Bridge at 150 miles an hour and the floor blew down into the waters of the East River.”

Intense images and notions confronted Americans as their government comforted them. In pamphlets such as What about You and Civil Defense?, the government simultaneously promoted the notion that the Soviets posed an evil threat while also suggesting that Americans could survive a nuclear attack if precautions were taken. But many Americans questioned whether duck-and-cover drills or bomb shelters would really save them. While manuals, such as one published in Seattle, recommended shelters, they also had charts detailing the likely destruction. With captions such as “While giant skyscrapers with reinforced concrete … should withstand the shock very well, the masonry would be stripped off, girders twisted and people literally blown out of the top floors,” it was easy to be skeptical (Roy, 2010: 21). Occasionally, the absurdity of it all materialized into monuments; in Las Vegas, for example, Girard B. Henderson hired bomb shelter designer Jay Swayze to build a full-scale ranch-style house underground, complete with artificial grass and painted murals depicting favorite landscapes that Henderson remembered from his youth. Completed in 1978 and still in existence, the shelter is both a hyper-real version of the American dream and, like some kind of Disneyland dark ride, a reminder of the extremes of the time: doom and gloom recast as Technicolor heaven.

One of the essential changes of the period proved to be the deep infiltration of destruction into culture, not just in the cinema of science fiction disaster, but in all art forms. Destruction had been a component in art throughout history—including the seventeenth-century painter François de Nomé’s almost surreal and apocalyptic scenes, John Martin’s panoramic renditions of biblical pyrotechnics in the nineteenth century (that themselves influenced the early silent film spectacles of destruction choreographed by D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille), and pioneering photographer Roger Fenton’s interest in the ruins of Tintern Abbey and the Crimean War (among the first examples of war correspondent photography). However, after the Holocaust, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, after the emergence of the Cold War, after the Soviet blast that cast a dark shadow over the United States and launched the arms race, artists embraced destruction in more profound ways than ever before.