23. Each of the aesthetic strategies discussed above (techno-war, abjection, postmodern) is developed in subsequent chapters [of A Bright Flash in Dark Rooms, see note on author], but it is worthwhile here to compare the development of the representation of nuclear war in two films, Above and Beyond (1952), which stands at the beginning of this history of films, and By Dawn's Early Light, a very recent film (1990). In the early development of nuclear war films, stories about the bomb could be linked to the stories about World War II, about the sacrifices and about the necessity of everyone doing his or her bit. The images tend to ape those of the documentary, especially where images are needed which have sufficient realism to convince the filmgoer of their authenticity. Footage from the atomic tests in the deserts of the American west, from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and later, footage of the even more impressive hydrogen bomb tests in the Pacific) was grafted into what we now would call docudramas such as Above and Beyond.

24. Of special importance in this film is the symbolic shift which substituted the bomb as the metonym of a technological system. Portrayed as lying at the heart of the most secret projects, at the center of the American war effort, the ultimate weapon which would end the war with a minimum of allied casualties, the atomic bomb contained in kernel form the characteristics and qualities of the system which produced it, a system which fused technology and the military. This portrayal helped to establish the tradition which subsequent films would build on, showing how the nuclear system required changes in people's lives.

25. In this film, Robert Taylor portrays Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay which dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. This film is remarkably like Twelve O'Clock High and similar war films in its rendering of the subplot of conformity vs. individualism, seen as the necessity of the maverick learning to be a team player. In fact, within this central dilemma is the narrative impetus which brings forth the other classic conflicts in American literature and cinema: adventure-domesticity, individual-community, worldly success-ordinary life (Ray 1985, p. 186). In this case the bomber pilot, chosen initially for this special mission because of his individuality, must in turn surrender each of his personally favored choices for the dictates of the mission and of the bomb. Above all, his individuality is sacrificed; he must become a corporation man. This necessarily carries him into the adventure of flying the plane, bringing up conflicts between him and his wife, Lucy (played by Eleanor Parker), but in the end all is justified when worldly success, defined ideologically in terms of the success of the mission and the delivery of the bomb, is finally made public. His wife understands at last what she had only wondered about before: his mission was truly more important than their marriage and private life, and so her sacrifices and losses were justified.

26. Some critics were disappointed with the segments of this film "concentrating on the personal aspect" of the history of the bomb (Crowther 1953). Crowther went on to call this segment of the film, "a meretricious sham of painful domestic relations." Another reviewer saw this concentration as a "considerable drawback ... that is handled in the picture in a trite, overlong, and crucially interruptive fashion" (New Yorker, 2 Feb 1953, p. 77). When the film "gets down to its main business," ie. the story of the bomb, this reviewer found it "straightforward and solid." Although it is primarily the acting of the domestic scenes which the reviewers dislike, they express their greatest satisfaction with the flight scenes, Crowther finding them realistic and "crisply and efficiently portrayed." Yet one must wonder if it is so much the acting which was upsetting to these critics as it was that the personal story interfered with the telling of a tale which all wanted to see: the tale of the atomic bomb which was still fresh in the public's mind.

27. Whatever their reasons, these critics, through their displeasure, illustrate the fundamental conflict of the narrative: the stories formed around the narratives of systems logic and technicism are incompatible with stories of human life. Systems values and human life are irreconcilable, and even the two story lines which develop from these two domains battle each other. Ideologically, the stories seem dissonant and demand a resolution in favor of one or the other. Especially when the conflict between the two of them is so one-sided, the technicistic will win, for as it emerges out of the structures of state power, the technicistic wraps itself in the trappings of ideology and myth. The dissatisfaction of critics suggests a flaw in what should be the seamless representation of the dominant, 'realist' reading. It suggests as well that life within the system is antithetical to human life.

28. The film works as a whole by setting up the traditional problem of individuality and establishing critique within this area. As a consequence of his accepting a part in the development of one aspect of the atom bomb project, Tibbets is in conflict with his wife and with the system. These conflicts are then contained within the necessary and justifiable sacrifice to the larger system which has as its core the secret of the atomic bomb. The film opens in real time so that the rest of the film is told as a series of flashbacks with an elliptical suspension of resolution.

29. Lucy is waiting at the airport for him to return, again. She tells us that she has always waited for the sound of engines which mark the return of her husband from service to the system. As she waits, she ponders whether she and Paul still have a marriage. It is her narrative which sets the central conflict of the film: domestic life vs. the demands of the nuclear system, the war machine. The conflict is set in her point of view, although we do see his side of it, and through the film she represents the familial, the domestic and, paradoxically for American film, the individual. She does not represent the entanglements of family and marriage, as in so many war films and adventure stories where the woman was often the domesticating influence which threatened the individuality of the hero. In such films the family was defined in opposition to the frontier and the quest. In this film, though, and in many films following the second war, the family is defined in opposition to the military machine and the telos of the mission. Life exists in a suspension outside of the military. The old conflict of the hero attempting to escape the familial is recast and recontained as the hero's striving to reconcile the two loyalties which are linked only at a superficial, ideological level while as narratives they are in opposition and mutually exclusive.

30. The hero in Above and Beyond still retains his individuality, but now it is defined in terms of his loyalty to his men, his pragmatism in the face of the bureaucracy and his family life in opposition to the military system's new demands. The first we see of Tibbets is in the cockpit of his plane on a bombing mission. He and his comrades are being badly mauled by enemy flak because they are forced to fly too low in the interests of bombing accuracy. This establishes the second point of critique: he is at odds with his superiors, in this case an armchair general who makes decisions based on statistics without considering his men. The protagonist's criticism is so harsh that it borders on insubordination and generates a running subtheme: the bitter and petty bureaucrat who is, still, stymied by the system and its justice.

31. However, it is precisely this criticism which calls the visiting general's attention to Tibbits. This general is looking for someone to test-fly and help develop the new B-29 bomber. Of four pilots under consideration, Tibbits is chosen over the objections of his commander. Thus, the critique raised by the conflict with his immediate superior is defused. The film shows that while there may be a few bad apples, a few incompetent commanders, the system as a whole, and most of the personnel in it, are dedicated not to their own beliefs but to the beliefs and values of the system. The system apparently wants those in command decisions to retain some element of the individual, of the maverick, and as we see later in the film, it has devices for ensuring that this individuality never gets too far out of hand. The most effective of these is security.

32. Security pervades the Manhattan project, and in so doing it provides the motivation for much of the subsequent drama in this film. The bomb is cut off from the ordinary world, isolated by the activities supervised by the security officer (James Whitmore). Actually, it is not the bomb which is cut off from people but people who are denied access to each other and to ordinary lives. Even Tibbets and his wife find themselves followed, investigated and handled. The military gaze, incarnated as Security, encroaches into the most intimate of domestic settings. When Tibbets' relationship with his wife begins to encroach on the mission, the security officer suggests that he send his wife away from the base, even though less senior personnel have their families here. Lucy even once approaches the security officer, demanding to know what about the base and the mission is so important. She threatens that she will find out. She believes that her desire to know is justified, and within a normal frame of human reference, it would be. She tells him that she wishes to know if it is the mission which is so important or if her husband has in fact changed, depriving her of the expected satisfaction of desire, cast in the myth of the day as the happy marriage.

33. Feeling her desire stymied, she does not seek other ways in which her desire may be satisfied because she does not understand what it is. The film does not explore alternative readings of motivation which might lead beyond 'appropriate' resolutions. The dominant patriarchal mythos, already firmly established in the culture, placed the obtaining of a husband as the focus of a woman's activity; the fulfillment of her desires is to be the production of the family. When this desire comes into opposition with the military system, with the necessity of duty - which is being established as the new patriarchal myth - the central conflict emerges, if only briefly. The new myth must contain the conflict, establishing new hierarchies of personal and social value.

34. We, the viewers, see that she cannot be taken seriously. We are, after all, already on the inside of the story through our identification with Paul Tibbets. The scene does not end on her but on the security agent after she leaves. He places her under surveillance, lest in her desire to understand her life she should jeopardize the mission. Almost every attempt which she makes to restore contact with her husband is short circuited or rebuffed. Lucy is cut off from Paul, and he is completely cut off from everything which is not the mission, not the military. This is part of the telos of the bomb. Although his men hate him and his wife doesn't understand, the system remains paramount in importance, supplanting the human relationships with command and control. The system even denies Paul the possibility of the company of other men as a substitute and emotional surrogate, a favorite plot rendering in American literature and film (Fiedler 1966).

35. Through the creation of a conflict between the person and the corporation, the possibility of resolving the tension between self and system was raised. This reflected in microcosm the new American role as a global political power. No longer could isolationism be entertained even as a fantasy. Similarly, the individual person could no longer escape the snares of civilization. The problematic separation of self from the system creates the dynamic narrative tension of such films, and this tension seeks resolution in an ideologically satisfying reconciliation. "The reconciliation pattern found its most typical incarnation ... in one particular narrative: the story of a private man attempting to keep from being drawn into action on any but his own terms." (Ray 1985, p. 65). Here it is the corporation - manifested either as the military or as the technological system itself - which is in turn formulated around the principles of the nuclear system which the individual must resist.

36. The individual mentioned here is, of course, male; women in this film don't have the option of acting on their own terms. The dilemna raised by the separation of self from the system, from the world of power, recapitulates a central problem with which women in the West have long had to contend. Only when this is presented as a male problem, though, is it considered worthy of dramatic, filmic treatment. Perhaps this is true precisely because it threatens to locate men in a position long identified as feminine. So the experience of powerlessness, of having to accept the will of others for one's life, must be reclaimed and placed within the male domain.

37. In the end, reconciliation comes not through the resolution of the conflict between Tibbits and the system, but after the completion of the mission. Only then does his wife learn of the supreme importance of Tibbets' having served the system, and only then does she accordingly devalue her existence with him to being less important. She does this willingly, lovingly. And so she, too, comes to serve the military machine. The film does not end with scenes of a happy life of reconciliation between Paul and Lucy. The hope of blissful domesticity is upheld, but the film doesn't deliver it. Instead, the film shows only that Lucy's sacrifices were worthwhile and necessary.

38. In the conflict between her local reality and the military-technological system which threatens it, we see a microcosmic portrayal of the dilemma of life in the industrial age. C. Wright Mills (1956, p. 321) wrote that:

"in every major area of life, the loss of a sense of structure and the submergence into powerless milieux is the cardinal fact. In the military it is most obvious, for here the roles men play are strictly confining; only the command posts at the top afford a view of the structure of the whole, and moreover, this view is a jealously guarded official secret."

40. Poor Lucy. Recruited first into the myth of being a good wife and keeping a happy home, Lucy is understandably confused and frustrated when the major self-object in her life suddenly ceases to be what she had expected. She did everything right, and the rules of melodrama (rooted in middle-class values) require a payoff. Yet to give Lucy what she wants and simultaneously maintain the valorization of the system would resolve the unresolvable cultural conflict which lies at the heart of the new myth. By placing out of reach the primary object of desire, ie. the spouse and marriage, these become even more desirable. Because her suffering was for such a noble cause, she inoculates the film readers against their own disappointments. The difference now is that fate, class, misfortune no longer stand as the immovable barriers to mythic fulfillment. Now the nuclear military system, and all that it stands for, assumes these burdens.

41. She cannot transcend her dilemna, for the system denies her access to the view which alone can explain her suffering. She must play Job to the military's Jehovah. Her connection with the system is indirect, through her husband, and so she has no way of meaningfully integrating her history, contained in the earlier myth, with the new myth posited by the military and the state. The ideology operating behind this film, motivating the action and processes of signification, suggests that her powerlessness is necessary. Understanding is not required, only obedience, loyalty, and patriotism. When she is afforded a fleeting view from the top, her vision of her own milieu is transfixed within the relatively much more important official structure. As a representative of the mundane world, she is given understanding of the nomos which justifies her sacrifice. This vision of the system stands as the modern, nuclear epiphany.