over the use of nuclear weapons." In Sontag's view, the mutant ants in the sewer systems of Los Angeles in Them! (1954), the giant octopus in It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955), and the oversized spider in Tarantula (1955), as well as human mutations like The Incredible. In her often-reprinted 1965 essay, "The Imagination of Disaster," Susan Sontag found in the cycle of science-fiction movies of the fifties evidence of "a mass trauma. To date, the most fertile field for uncovering artifacts of atomic paranoia in cold-war cinema has been the science-fiction genre. Though not unchallenged, this psychoanalytical assumption has been compatible with a major direction of film scholarship in the last two decades-an interest in what David Bordwell calls "symptomatic" or "repressed" interpretation, which seeks meanings in American movies outside the conscious control of their authors, yet revealing the ideological flaws and repressed anxieties of the culture which defines them and their audience. Just below the surface, powerful currents of anxiety and apprehension surged through the culture" (12). Social historian Paul Boyer, in his detailed study of the aftershock of Hiroshima, By the Bomb's Early Light (1985), similarly contends that "it would be wrong to conclude that Americans took the bomb casually or that its impact quickly faded. 6, 1945, bombing mission that changed the world.
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In a series of books stretching from Death in Life (1967) to Hiroshima: Fifty Years of Denial (with Greg Mitchell, 1995), Robert Jay Lifton has used the term "psychic numbing" to characterize our persistent national denial of anxieties about nuclear warfare, citing unrealistic but reassuring civil defense strategies such as duck-and-cover drills as an effort by the government to domesticate the fear. Lewis, a 27-year-old pilot from Ridgefield Park, New Jersey, logged a total of 36 flights aboard the Enola Gay, including the Aug. In polls through the early fifties, approval began tailing off and worries about nuclear warfare became more frequent, but on balance the positive attitude prevailed (Boyer 22-23).ĭespite these statistics, however, academic wisdom has remained that cold-war America was more troubled about the A-bomb than it was willing to admit to pollsters-or even to itself. And in a study conducted in the summer of 1946 by the Social Research Council, when asked, "How worded are you about the atomic bomb?" 65 percent of the some three thousand adult Americans surveyed claimed that they were either not much worried or not worried at all. Responding to another Gallup poll a month later, 69 percent considered it "a good thing" that the A-bomb had been developed. In an August 1945 Gallup poll, when asked, "Do you approve or disapprove of the use of the atomic bomb?" 85 percent of Americans surveyed approved. can serve to illumine the combined achievement of all."įew viewers at the time would have objected to Hollywood's speaking of the bombing of Hiroshima as an achievement. Still, the roll-up concludes, its words drifting above a picture-postcard view of the Capitol Building, "it is hoped that the story told here.
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Although several attempts were made to rewrite the script of the exhibit, congressional and public pressure eventually led to the cancellation of the exhibit in January 1995 and to the resignation of the Director of the Museum, Martin Harwit, in May.Ĭollected by historian Waldo Heinrichs, the Enola Gay Controversy Collection contains the various versions of the scripts of the planned exhibition and copies of correspondence, memos, publications, and the three volumes of “Revisionism gone wrong: Analysis of the Enola Gay controversy” issued by the Air Force Association."No one man was responsible," begins the opening roll-up of Above and Beyond, M-G-M's 1953 biopic of Paul Tibbets, thirty-year-old pilot of the Enola Gay. By mid-summer, the Air Force Association and American Legion led opposition to the exhibit, fearing that it would not present a balanced view of the events and that it would focus exclusively on the “horrors of war” and an alleged “moral equivalence” between Japan and the United States. Early in 1993, curators began to develop plans for an exhibit that would center around the Enola Gay, the B-29 Stratofortress bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, but opposition from veterans’ groups rose almost immediately. On January 30, 1995, the National Air and Space Museum capitulated to popular and political pressure and scuttled an exhibit they had planned to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War.