Spectacles of a Nuclear Empire: Opera and Film in the American Atomic Age, 1945–2018

"Spectacles of a Nuclear Empire: Opera and Film in the American Atomic Age, 1945–2018" examines the unique power of spectacle to produce and reproduce narratives of the United States' position as a global superpower in the wake of its use of nuclear weapons. The spectacle in question is the atomic bomb but also includes screenings or performances that narrate the atomic bomb's history. This work centers the films Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1964), South Pacific (dir. Joshua Logan, 1958) and On the Beach (dir. Stanley Kramer, 1959), public service announcements from the Federal Civil Defense Agency, and the operas Einstein on the Beach by Robert Wilson and Philip Glass and Doctor Atomic by Peter Sellars and John Adams. I claim that the spectacle is inherent to nuclear empire's use of the atomic bomb and constitutes the aesthetic strategy used to produce and circulate nuclear empire's hegemonic ideology. The spectacle of the atomic bomb coheres a public, one that includes spectators, victims, and witnesses, all of whom can testify to the ongoing violence of nuclear technology. These violences are made a spectacle while at the same time paradoxically occurring on the level of the ordinary or mundane. A public made manifest by the nuclear problem is first built imaginatively, and I propose spectacle as a cultural response to our nuclear age. I follow in the methods of critical theorists in trying to understand how culture continues to shape and obfuscate political attachments. My work offers one perspective on the relation between spectacular mediation and historical meaning-making, exploring it through the media of opera and film. The spectacle specifies—moreover, actualizes and materializes—the relation between aesthetics and ideology. In order to represent, reproduce, and circulate the beliefs of nuclear empire, the spectacle must be deployed as an aesthetic strategy. My work covers the long durée of the nuclear age, from the hot and cold fluctuations of the Cold War to a post-9/11 United States. While geopolitical contexts change over time, the spectacle as a means of narrating our nuclear age adapts to these historical developments. I hope that the historical critique will be one among many that analyze American narratives of exceptionalism. Ultimately, I claim that the ideological and aesthetic are distinct but interdependent spheres of influence, both necessary to establish and maintain the nuclear empire.