Collective Terror: The Nuclear Movie

Relevant links and references at the end of the transcript

Archival News Excerpt: Scientists, British and American have made the atomic the atomic bomb at last....

Pilot: When the bomb left the aeroplane that's the longest 50 seconds I ever lived. When it exploded it was like taking a great weight off my shoulders, it worked.

Natasha Mitchell: Rather chilling recollections there of the dropping of the A- Bomb on Hiroshima in August, 1945. Hello there Natasha Mitchell with you, great to have your company.

Today, collective terror and catharsis meet the celluloid screen here on All in the Mind.

At this week's G8 meeting in France the nuclear weapons programs of North Korea and others came under scrutiny. Today, we're tapping into how en masse we share our anxieties by making and watching movies that scare the pants off us. It's a sort of collective cinematic psyche if you like.

The dawning of the Atomic Age spurned a whole new exciting pop culture genre in particular, that of the Nuclear Movie.

So here's Sue Clark your guide today through the murky waters of the pop psychology of nuclearism and the apocalyptic.

Bela Lugosi: You will emerge a woman of superstrength and beauty... the bride of the atom.

Woman: You're insane!...

Bela Lugosi: I will perfect my own race of people a race of atomic supermen which will conquer the world! Ha ha ha...yees.

Sue Clark: Movies can thrill us, excite us, scare us and teach us. The nuclear genre of movies has done all of these things.

Mick Broderick is a lecturer in Media Analysis at Murdoch University. He has a 20 year interest in exploring the cultural manifestations of the nuclear era. What is the nuclear genre of film?

Mick Broderick: The range of films that have referred in some way to the nuclear age and what I mean by the nuclear age is referencing, mainly through overt means, representation of nuclear technologies or it may be a nuclear scientist. Just referencing the nuclear age within the discourse of the film itself.

Sue Clark: Nuclear movies also appeal to psycho-therapists because they play out all sorts of fears on both a personal and societal level. Carl Jung was one such therapist.
He was a great figure in modern psychology and gave us familiar terms such as extrovert, introvert, and archetype.

He's most famous and controversial contribution has been his concept of the collective unconscious. It's a kind of inherited predisposition.

Jung suggested that what he called archetypes populate both our personal and collective unconscious. We see them in our dreams, in our myths and in our movies. They're figures or identities in our imaginations that appear in different guises like the Shadow figure, or the Self, or the Child and they influence our behaviour.

Claire Odeon Hershman is a Jungian psychotherapist in Central London. She also teaches a course called "Myths and Monsters" at City University. For Claire, Jung's archetypes form the basis of so much of what we see on the screen.

Claire Odeon Hershman: The collective unconscious is to do with the idea that this is a universal phenomena, it's been going on since the beginning of time. It is believed to be some sort of memory that we have inside us that no one has been able to find but they keep repeating themselves.

So a baby is born and knows what to do with the mother, the mother has the baby the mother knows what to do with the baby. It's not a conscious thing it's an archaic memory and that is archetypal and it's from a collective unconscious, it's just the way things are.

If we are simply guided by what Jung called the Self which is always written with a capital S. Some people call it as divine, the higher power but it's that part of ourselves that we don't know that can guide us to recognise that we are the same as everybody else.

And we all have an inkling of Self through symbols, when you're moved or connected with something that you look at or you hear, that is awakening a memory that we probably have of the Self, which comes from a collective unconscious as Jung called it.

Sue Clark: How does this sense of self come to fruition if you like through movies, or can it?

Claire Odeon Hershman: On a simple level. Many dreams can be understood, and many films can be understood, as the journey that we make in order to grow up.

Movie excerpt: It was the belief that these ancient wise men, that in the beginning when the universe was in its infancy there had been a cataclysmic explosion which tore it asunder. Could this have been an explosion touched off by a nuclear bomb? Are we today on the point of repeating this cosmic suicide? There are some who say we are...

Sue Clark: The nuclear age dawned on July 16, 1945 with tests at the Trinity Site in New Mexico. And then on August the 6th 1945 an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and three days later, Nagaski.

It heralded a new era of films that featured the unmistakable mushroom cloud. For me when I see that cloud I think of death and I think of our planet becoming uninhabitable. It's a terrifying thought. Claire Odeon Hershman.

Claire Odeon Hershman: If we think about nuclear what are we thinking about? Are we thinking about a violent end or an explosive end? The fear of there being nothing I think. What you've got here is a new archetype, nuclear is a symbol connecting to the archetype which is 'neutral'. Nuclear power is neither good nor bad, it's what you do with it.

Sue Clark: So the nuclear event is the archetype of 'neutral'?

Claire Odeon Hershman: Well no, it's the archetype of unbelievable power isn't it? It's awe inspiring power and that's why it's an archetype because it's awe inspiring.

Sue Clark: Jung wrote everyone carries a 'shadow' and the less it is embodied in the individual conscious life the blacker and denser it is. Could our nuclear fears be the Jungian Shadow archetype?

Claire Odeon Hershman: Of course, it anhilates everything, it's neither good nor bad, it just kills everything or maimed mindlessly.

Sue Clark: It just does it, it's not like it can...

Claire Odeon Hershman: Yeah, there's no reason there.

Sue Clark: And the impact can't be lesser I guess.

Claire Odeon Hershman: There's no negotiating with the almighty or nuclear.

Sue Clark: It just is.

Claire Odeon Hershman: Yeah, it's the embodiment the image of the Shadow which is why it's so terrifying.

Sue Clark: Robert Oppenheimer was the leader of the Manhattan Project, America's effort to beat the Russians in producing an A-bomb.

In 1946 as nuclear paranoia escalated, he was asked if an instrument could be made to detect atomic weapons if they were smuggled into the United States. Oppenheimer replied, "there already is one, it's called a screwdriver and with it you can open every crate that comes into the country".

Mick Broderick: The way Hollywood responded to that threat was to actually depict a number of clandestine operations against the territories in the United States by boats bringing in these completed atomic weapons or parts of atomic weapons to be assembled in a home port and detonated.

So this was a time of strident anti Communism, a kind of hysteria about the potential use of atomic weapons on America - because America, right at the very start of its use on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, started to kind of think about oohh, what would this mean for Manhattan, what would this mean for Los Angeles? So in the popular press, for example, there were magazines and feature articles actually depicting what the smouldering ruins of Manhattan might look like.

In film you would have projects like the 49th Man or Port of Hell where you had agents battling against time to try and, if not dismantle, prevent the smuggling into the cities of enemy agents, and of course you could always read that as being the Soviets. So it's quite bizarre seeing these things repeated cyclically throughout the post war history - where currently of course we have great concerns about weapons of mass destruction, particularly radiological devices, not necessarily nuclear bombs.

So Oppenheimer's position in 1946 remains unchallenged, and in some ways cinema has been exercising our fears about this by representing it. Not so much softening us up for us, but giving us a sense of what it might mean as a speculative future to observe and in some ways cathartically live through that process.

Sue Clark: Mick Broderick cultural analyst from Murdoch University.

In his book "Nuclear Movies" Mick describes the 1950s as the fearful 50s and for me "Kiss me Deadly" is perhaps the quintessential nuclear film of the era. It features Detective Mike Hammer, who stumbles his way through an atomic spy scheme, discovering a mysterious box which contains radio active material.

Mick Broderick: "Kiss me Deadly" in many ways comes at the end of classic Hollywood studio productions film noir cycle. It kind of goes no holds barred in its very frank depiction of American mores of the time, violence, sexuality, hysteria, and the kind of odd quasi-security State apparatus that's apparent, you have local police in cahoots with the Feds. There's a whole sense of menace around the atomic age that's palpable within the film, but it's hardly gestured to it all. The spies and evil doers who are acquiring some unnamed nuclear technology that ends up engulfing them in a finale that is a metaphor for the catastrophe that awaits all of those people in the audience watching that, potentially.

You know they were doing air raid drills on a daily basis, there were public shelters being designed. So this stuff was absolute imminent in the public consciousness of the audiences at that time. What "Kiss me Deadly" did was in a sense evoke that apocalyptic sentiment using the Mickey Spillane novel, and kind of grafting another layer of menace and dread that's absolutely on the screen.

Sue Clark: Also at around this time there was a curious amalgam of serious and exploitation films concerned with atomic war and the acceleration of nuclear experiments. There was mutation, there were monsters and there was Mickey Rooney in the "Atomic Kid". Now on the surface this film would seem to be poking fun at the public anxiety on all things atomic, but there's got to be more going on there surely?

Mick Broderick: Essentially what happens is you have two characters stumbling around a Nevada test site unwittingly at a time of a domestic military explosion. In other words, during the 1950s the Americans were not only setting off Hydrogen bombs in the Pacific but they had their own domestic continental testing program similar to what we'd had in Maralinga.

So we had these two characters one of whom is Mickey Rooney stumbling across what he figures to be an abandoned building, when in actual fact it's a dummy building set up to replicate the effects of a normal house when an A-bomb goes off. And of course the A bomb does go off, but humour and the comedy around this film is - not so much that situation which of course is dire and terrible - but it turns it into this bizarre story about how Mickey somehow survives this, his metabolism kind of suddenly goes off the edge and he gives these kind of tell tale glows whenever he's attracted by nurses or you know, any member of the opposite sex.

So it tends to kind of look at some of the themes and symptoms around nuclear fear of nuclear anxiety and plays off them for comedy. It didn't really do very well at the box office but the real potency of the comedy, or its attempt to be potent, is really sending up the atomic age.

Sue Clark: I guess at this time too there was atomic tests going on weren't there and servicemen and women were.......

Mick Broderick: Marching into Ground Zero, they were literally getting out of fox holes a couple of miles from the point of detonation, standing up, walking with their weapons into Ground Zero.

Sue Clark: Another feature of the 50s nuclear movie was the alien in the UFO. Psychoanalyst Carl Jung said that flying saucer reports in reality and fiction reflected a psychological projection of nuclear fears.

The UFOs warned the earth that human aggression and nuclear weapons might not co-exist for long.

This was played out dramatically in the 1951 film "The Day the Earth Stood Still". But what did Jung mean, who is the alien and why do we need them? Claire Odeon Hershman.

Claire Odeon Hershman: Before the Second World War, Jung had a very important dream that he saw, I think it was a 'rivers of blood', nuclear winter sort of dream. And he felt that he foresaw that if we didn't grow up that we would destroy ourselves.

If we stand around going, "I must have what I want or I'll die, give it to me now", any of that selfishness stuff. I mean we can kill the Infidel, we can grab their oil, we can take their gold, we can do any of the monstrous things that we want to do, justifying it because 'little me' wants my own way.

But if you can somehow do the work, if you can believe in religion, or integrate it in some way, one can become less jealous, envious and competitive and realise that we have to pull ourselves together as a world.

Sue Clark: Because of this we created the UFO?...

Claire Odeon Hershman: It's part of us, it's a little warning from our unconscious to shape up, to smell the coffee, to grow up!

Music from James Bond film.

Sue Clark: The James Bond film phenomenon started in 1962 with the release of "Dr No".

20 films later we have "Die another Day". 007 was up against the nuclear threat on our behalf time and time again. This series started at a time when Britain was beginning to lose its place as a world power broker, but nevertheless Bond was there to save the day. Psychotherapist Claire Odeon Hershman.

Claire Odeon Hershman: He's a hero, he's any historical hero character isn't he, he's all the Greek myths rolled into one. He's Jason of the Argonauts, he's Hercules, he's another incarnation of the good old hero myth, we need heroes.

That's why we love James Bond, why we need him, he's fighting this good fight against the evil forces. And Spectre and Smersh they're the Greek monsters that he kills with his sword. He's King Arthur isn't he? You know, he's the Holy Grail and the Holy Grail of course is world peace.

Goldfinger is a wonderful, wonderful he loves cats doesn't he and he puts the two cats together and they fight and he's an evil, greedy person. And then there's the one that lives in the middle of the island, he's a mad scientist who wants world domination. And he's the dragon! He is the Western idea of the dragon, you know he wants all the gold, and all the virgins, all for himself. And he's also the embodiment of the Ego. "I will use my science, I will use my intellect", you see which again which is very frightening - the intellect, not the heart - "I will use my intellect for world domination, I will be the richest, most powerful man in the world".

In fact he'd be incredibly lonely because all he'd have would be servants underneath him and those who were terrified of him, but that's not important. "I must have what I want or I will die". And then we have the hero, we have none other than Sean Connery, who's Everyman isn't he, he's everybody's fantasy which is why he's so attractive, but he is the hero.

Sue Clark: And as you said he's the Everyman's ideal and I guess the Everywoman's ideal...

Claire Odeon Hersham: Well this is another really exciting concept about archetypal psychology - is that it's not sexist. Most respectable Jungians now can see that we can all heroic moments. We can all feel that, you know, "I'm going to do something". That moment where you feel like a hero. That feeling of hero is when you're in what's called in the grip of an archetype. If you want it's the flip side of the nuclear energy, it's a wonderful feeling, yes! You know the soul's high adventure.

Mick Broderick: What Bond does most effectively is marry technology, particularly nuclear science and gadgetry, with the villains that he's trying to thwart, with their own atomic materials or technologies.

Dr No, the first Bond film is a wonderful representation of that right through to you know the most recent Bond films where you have acts of nuclear terrorism that are thwarted. But he's also evolved with the times. Throughout the Bond series you often have 007 hooking up with CIA agents or other American allies in basically a gesture towards that alliance, the Atlantic alliance that we've just so recently seen in the Iraq war.

What Bond ultimately does is condense all of the apparatus of State, Defence, Intelligence into one person, like a super hero. And if you think about the underlying narrative of that, it's really telling us that if we have to rely on this you know mythological potent male hero to save the world, it doesn't put much trust in the agency of democracy, of representative government of the judiciary, of the defence forces.

Sue Clark: Mick Broderick and you're listening to All in the Mind on ABC Radio National, Radio Australia and the web. I'm Sue Clark and today we're taking our minds to the movies, the nuclear movies. And as we leave the seductive charm of James Bond let's enter the Cold War.

Music from Dr Strangelove.

Excerpt from Dr Strangelove: When it is detonated there will be enough radioactive fallout so that in ten months the surface of the earth will be as dead as the moon.

Sue Clark: Mick Broderick, Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick's satirical look at Cold War politics starring Peter Sellers has been described as one of the first films in the Cold War era to depict the military in a critical light, and to point out the reality of a possible nuclear incident. Was the audience ready for this film?

Mick Broderick: Strangelove came within a couple of months of the assassination of JFK so it was quite brave that Columbia actually released this film internationally within a couple of months because it is so devastatingly critical of not only the Pentagon, not only American politics and politicians but also the whole infrastructure and mind set of the nuclear age. So audiences did respond to that, it was so refreshing, black comedy, something that actually showed the discourse of the nuclear age.

You know, when General Buck Turgenson says "I'm not saying we won't get our hair mussed Mr. President, just ten to twenty million killed, tops you know depending on the brakes". What's comic about that is that it's told po faced, it's delivered straight. There is a kind of hyper-realism to Dr Strangelove that really does make you feel like you're sitting in on these war room conversations. So the very fact that they're mixing technical jargon with gags it gets through a layer of resistance, I think, that audiences would normally have around these subjects. If you can get a message through via humour you almost are almost kind of moving beyond whatever subjective resistance you might have to that topic, such as a global thermal nuclear war....

Sue Clark: In the 70s huge blockbuster disaster films such as "Earthquake" and the "Towering Inferno" kind of cornered the market. Did this mean that nuclear matters took a back seat?

Mick Broderick: Well culturally they certainly did. By the 1970s there were real moves towards disarmament, real moves towards arms limitation talks and treaties. The Cold War started to thaw a little bit so this provided a bit of a reprieve from overt representations of atomic themes.

Sue Clark: Yeah, and then things shifted again in the 80s and the nuclear defence shield over America was talked about and it seemed that East and West were locked into a titanic struggle over nuclear arms or nuclear disarmament, and I distinctly remember at the time feeling that a nuclear war might really actually happen. How did films represent this time?

Mick Broderick: The major response in the 80s was actually a television show called "The Day After" and that was the first attempt at really giving a depiction of what an all out nuclear attack might be on America.

At the same time you had a range of films that started looking at the technologies, "War Games" for example started to question why it might be that with advance technologies controlling the nuclear systems, that once human choice is taken out of the loop can we really rely on computers or can we really rely on automated systems to control our nuclear fate?

Sue Clark: Well the teenagers saved the day in War Games didn't they?

Mick Broderick: Yeh, you have a new generation, a younger generation that have actually grown up under the shadow of potential nuclear Armageddon saying to their political and their military masters, "No, no, we want to have a future".

Sue Clark: The turn of the century has also seen a flurry of film nuclear with "Independence Day", "Armageddon", "Terminator 1 and 2" and as recently in Australia at least, as early as this year the "The Sum of All Fears". These movies have bigger budgets and are spectacular viewing for the public with the effects and stuff that they use. But are their stories in any way different from those that have come before them?

Mick Broderick: Not really, I think the qualitative difference between that crop of films towards the middle of the 90s and the early new century is that we are actually on this millennial change and often that's tied up with apocalyptic thought and in some ways you can understand why popular culture through film wants to reflect those popular concerns.

We want to be scared, we want to be titillated, we want to think about what these deep questions may be about survival, what the new millennium may bring.

Sue Clark: Mick Broderick we've never actually had a nuclear war, it is, in the end, a product of our imagination. Why do you think this genre has fascinated and I guess in a way seduced the public over the last 60 odd years?

Mick Broderick: What art, or what creative outputs through film of what have you may hope to do for us is give us a sense of what this may be, what it may mean for us as a species. It's not contained by nation, creed, religion, race, everyone would be affected in a nuclear war so the stakes are high.

So in a sense the enduring relevance, if not popularity of these films, is knowing what the future may bring and in some ways wanting to anticipate it. If we can live cathartically through our fears by watching them on the celluloid screen, if our nightmares, our nuclear nightmares are up there as representations then we can collectively go with a cinema audience and experience and feel, perhaps it means that we can actually live our day in denial that these weapons of mass destruction are all about us.

Claire Odeon Hershman: Is it that want to take risks with our imagination? The challenge....the cinema is about imagination, it's the thrill of suspense, the thrill of being there for a couple of hours but then the safety of coming home to being alright.

Sue Clark: We need to suspend belief but be anchored in reality?

Clair Odeon Hershman: Yeah, yeah.

Natasha Mitchell: So be scared, very scared. London based psychotherapist Claire Odeon Hershman there and Sue Clark psychoanalysing the genre of the nuclear movie which I suspect isn't about to leave the screen in a hurry given the current climate of collective anxiety.

That's it for the show today. Thanks today to studio engineer Dave Bates and chow from me, Natasha Mitchell until next week.