Chapter II, Part IV - The Myth of the 20th Century
After Hiroshima, the new, anxious religion of imaginary apocalypses and permanent fear infected our dreams and transformed our desires. Soon, we all spoke the language of the bomb. ‘Since the nuclear threat affected the whole human race and the fate of the world,’ Michel Foucault once said, ‘[the atomic scientist’s] discourse could at the same time be the discourse of the universal.’1 With our new, shared vernacular, we collectively rewrote our ideas of death and changed the way we lived our lives. The bomb, in short, had an ethical effect. It remade the self.
In America, the bomb transformed people’s relationship to entertainment, sex and leisure. By the 1950s, Las Vegas, Nevada was already popular for its casinos and its showgirls, for cheap risk and quick gratification. But now it became a tourist destination for those who wished to witness and feel the bomb’s power directly, to see firsthand the instruments our leaders used to gamble with our species’ existence. The US government conducted tests in the Nevada deserts north of the city. And from the city’s rooftops, several times a year visitors could see the dawn sky light up in brilliant white. Cocktails were served and jazz music played as mushroom clouds unfurled in the distant air, as nuclear fire devoured the desert sands and radiation spilled from the sky. Today these deserts are known as the ‘most bombed place on earth.’ Meanwhile the city became one of our world’s paradises for consumer desire, for glamour, gambling, sex, bodybuilding, shopping, and other American experiences.2 Today, it hosts pornography conventions; the country’s largest ever mass shooting occurred there in 2017.
Death rubbed against pleasure in nuclear-age Nevada. With bombs detonating on the horizon, tourists could enjoy modern life’s masochistic pleasures in Las Vegas. As displays of power and destruction, these violent spectacles had an undeniable erotic allure that the city harnessed in its culture. As the bombs exploded, Elvis Presley would perform his sex-drenched music to these tourists in Las Vegas bars, hips shaking before an audience desperate to see the man billed as America’s ‘only atomic powered singer.’ An early concert review describes teeangers screaming while Elvis ‘spread a vast amount of rock-'n'-roll radiation over the spacious Veterans Memorial Auditorium.’3 Hiroshima’s black-rain now erupted from the body of the country’s foremost sex symbol; people violently desired exposure to his radiation.
At the same time, authorities also established the atomic bomb beauty pageants, naming five women ‘Miss Atomic’ between 1952 and 1957. The last and most famous nuclear beauty, Miss Atomic Bomb, wore a mushroom-cloud dress, and was crowned a beauty queen as the US government conducted Operation Plumbbob less than 100 miles away. A photograph of her, circulated nationally, shows a young, beautiful woman, whose face is writ with an expression that lies somewhere between terror and ecstasy. A burning emulsion of pleasure and fear.4
This blending of sex and death spread far beyond Las Vegas and soon permeated US culture. An anecdote recounted by Noam Chomsky shows the bomb’s strange, terrible reach. In 1950 or so, Chomsky and his wife went to Boston’s red-light district to see a documentary film called Hiroshima. The atmosphere in the adult theatre had a hysterical edge: ‘So we went down to the red-light district... the movie turned out to be a documentary... it was a very poorly made but plainly authentic visual report photography of the actual events - you know, people running to the river with their skin flowing off and, you know, these hideous things we know about, and the audience was laughing. It was being shown as a pornographic movie. I mean that was one kind of reaction...’
Freud believed laughter was our way of expressing repressed sexual or aggressive urges, of venting steam to stop an explosion. Sensing the erotic power and unspeakable horror of what they saw, the audience around Chomsky transmuted terror into comedy. Laughing, they revealed a basic pattern for audience reaction tests in the 20th century—a great insight for marketers, entertainers and governments who hoped to exploit the unconscious ideas of their people.
References
Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings, 1972-1977. New York, Pantheon Books.
Footnotes
Power/Knowledge, p.128.
Authorities said these tests were safe for the residents. With the levels of radiation released into the air currents that, of course, was not true. Cancer diagnoses rose and people learned they were the collateral damage of progress.
https://www.elvisconcerts.com/newspapers/560522.htm