a sigh about bombs

something's been blowing me, fr.

To be in the heart of empire or nettled by its veins is to be IV-dripped its doctrines on a daily basis. If we’re lucky, we can sidestep the more blatant fast-food propaganda. Eating is a necessity, though and it’s hard to know how the things we consume affect us; what ideological micro-plastics are sneaking into our bloodstreams.

One such trojan horse in popular culture is the Hollywood spectacle of the bomb. The cinematic explosion slowly anaesthetising the public consciousness to the propulsion of death.

We grow up seeing these blasts as ground-bound siblings of the firework—roaring climaxes that punctuate the orgasmic destruction of a blockbuster’s villain, consuming the baddie absolutely in a lathering inferno and a pyrotechnic celebration of the hero’s victory. Linda dropping Sebastian from an elevator shaft ladder into the swirling pool of flames below in Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man (2000) demonstrates the oh-so familiar arithmetic of Hollywood’s narrative structure, one that coaxes us into understanding explosions as hygienic obliterations, pristine capital punishments, the cleanliest way to snuff out life.

In a lot of ways, that is exactly what an explosion is.

Demise delivered in a dense package, touch cordoned from culpability. I push a button here, death happens there. My finger is spared the squelch of blood. The bomb is fire-and-brimstone magic, causally coherent but, accountability-wise, as unfathomable to our caveman brains as arranging infinity into a row of matchsticks.

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The image of the vintage hero, unconcerned and swaggering away from the billowing fires that engulfs his foes, is embedded deep in our cultural psyche. The image mutated as Hollywood yearned for more: more “complexity”, more realism, more edginess. 

In the climactic scene of Bad Boys 2 (2003), Detective Lieutenant Mike Lowrey is held at gunpoint by the drug lord Hector Tapia in the middle of a Cuban minefield. Special Agent Syd Burnett aims her gun at Tapia and his criminal crony Carlos (Otto Sanchez) emerges to demand she drop it—while Lowrey’s partner and Syd’s older brother, Detective Lieutenant Marcus Burnett aims his gun at Tapia. (A gulf away from) a true Mexican stand–off. Syd obliges, throwing her gun at Carlos’ feet which launches a landmine into the air physics-defyingly, blasting Carlos back, giving Miles ample chance to park a bullet between where Tapia’s third eye would be. The druglord falls backwards, landing squarely on a landmine. His upper body bursts unceremoniously into gloopy wet chunks of viscera. A pause. Lowrey, who’s faith in his partner’s shot accuracy was wavering, checks his ear for a bullet-wound, finds none, and erupts into a celebratory shout. “Now that’s how you’re supposed to shoot!” Lowrey crawls towards Syd, yelling a procession of hilarious things before passionately kissing her on the precarious sand of an active minefield.

…Absolute Cinema.

Where climactic hellfire once washed away the villain in the flaming suds of total annihilation—an unsophisticated method of desensitising that simply told us not to think about the guy(s) in that building the hero is coolly strutting away from as they horrifically burning in agony because they deserves their puritanical comeuppance—Tapia’s gruesome demise in Bad Boys II is emblematic of a more refined strategy; condensing the spectacle of the blast towards a singular corporeal form, forcing the audience to engage with the cartoonish mutilation of the villain’s body blowing up. This is punctuated by a well-timed comedic jab to let us know that it’s all good. We experience the violent transition of death, see the exaggerated gore, hear the squelching of meat and dismiss it because that guy was a shit-bag and also our hero is funny and gets the girl. All is right with the world. 

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Oppenheimer (2023) is the ultimate example of the traditional structure. The sheer scale in which the atomic bomb dissolves all life within its blast radius is likely the reason why many criticised Nolan’s decision to exclude the impact of the mushroom cloud on the Japanese people. In a blast that big, suffering is not confined to the regime of villains and the criticism was that too many innocents lives were lost to not, at least, consider bestowing them the camera’s gaze, respectfully capturing their trauma and fate.

Of course, Nolan’s decision to omit the A-bomb’s devastation on Japan is no great deviation from the Hollywood playbook. J. Robert Oppenheimer may not be a John McClane or a T800 Terminator but he’s who we’re rooting for, more complex and more flawed than the archetypical hero with a nuanced, internal torture that mars his every expression after the successful detonation of the world-ending weapon he worked so tirelessly to create. Despite being based on real historical events, we’re still only obliged to follow the hero! To cut the camera from our protagonist strutting away unflinchingly from the heat-blast is bad maths! (even if he’s walking away from an act of genocidal slaughter with a single tear streaming down his face). We’re never supposed to deliberate on the villain’s right to life after the curtain falls—thus is the silent contract of the blockbuster. 

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I will be frank. I’ve been thinking about all this after discovering an israeli airstrike demolished a playground in Gaza that killed eleven children. The genocidal effort against Palestine and the devastations in Congo and Sudan have illuminated many to the consequences of the west’s incessant interventionism. There are many voices better suited than mine to highlight these atrocities, to trace their historical roots and reveal how the fruits of violence we are witnessing today have been able to blossom.

My thoughts brought me to how israel’s retaliation to October 7th is an endeavour largely reliant on projectiles, drones and airstrikes. The political, moral and legal justification for blowing up enemies is made acceptable by how the sanitisation of explosives has been erected in our psyche. It happens in the manufacturing of a headline that reports an airstrike killing. The importance of the death dissolves in severeness—11 died, a faceless quantity. Whoever’s hand steadied the rocket launcher is never even questioned. No-one cares who controls the drone. There is no assigned mass murderer because the explosion is hungry and free, untameable, able to chew up everything including people that it shouldn’t, abiding by its natural law of indiscriminate destruction. We’re all supposed to dip our heads at the news-screen and say, “such a shame.”

Hands that cause explosions aren’t culpable.

When a bomb drops, the military chain of command dissipates accountability until there is no-one to blame. Spontaneous combustion just happens to engulf a civilian or ten. It’s a “truth” in direct opposition to the “40 beheaded babies” claim—a falsehood that lubricated israel’s white phosphorus munitions endlessly.

The intention behind circulating the falsehood was two-fold: a) cement a boogieman (in the form of Hamas) and b) project a mental image of grotesque, islamic violence into the public psyche—one that requires physical presence and strong ethnic hands and gore-bloodied weapons and menacing human force. “40 beheaded babies” is a cipher like “knife crime”—the former smearing Palestinians and the latter smearing Black diasporans, painting both as savages doing savage things with their savage hands because of their savage cultures.

Narratively, the only way to correct them is to clean them in biblical flames.

I’ve been thinking about cinema’s role in defanging the consequences of explosives in our minds, how the obliterative violence of bombs is so “okay” culturally—how a part of our soul switches off at the mention of airstrikes and drones and bombs and explosions.

They erase people and leave only spectacle. I am writing this as something of a confessional: I want to learn to be disgusted by bombs, to train myself to see them in films and consider more who might be caught up in their fiery froth, to resist treating the bomb as a spontaneous force of nature allowed grace and be more resolute in recognising that its callousness as a tool of war is so much bigger than its blast radius.

I am inviting you to do the same.