Quotes: Cursive - The Sun and Moon / Flora Alejandra Pizarnik - The Galloping Hour / Sadeq Hedayat - The Blind Owl / Shinji Moon - It Took Time / Richard Siken - Crush / Cameron Awkward-Rich - The Child Formerly Known As
Art: Lawn Walker - Siamese Twins / René Magritte - La Reproduction Interdite / Simon Fellah - Doppelgänger
god people on twitter are so fucking dumb someone said (correctly) that it sucks that oppenheimer yet again focuses on the emotional experience of yet another tortured white man genius and completely glosses over the people actually impacted or killed by the atrocity of the bomb and the entire process of its creation (literally correct!!!!)
and everyone has been spending the next several days gleefully dunking on them like “oh so you’re mad the oppenheimer film was about oppenheimer? what did you expect?” “you want christopher nolan to make a film centering japanese voices? 🙄 lmao sure that would have gone well” “there is already a huge body of work in japanese cinema made by japanese filmmakers about their experience of the bomb, arguably all japanese cinema since that time had been affected by it, just say you’re personally uneducated and go”
and i’m just like. you are all SO dumb and being purposefully obtuse to dunk on this person and make them sound unreasonable when the actual point is like. we (society) should stop giving american white man cinematic auteur filmmakers massive budgets to make tortured white man biopics centering the emotional experience of what was it like for this tortured white man when he was committing atrocities!!!!!! the point is we’ve made enough of these films! hollywood has been making them forever!!! make something else!!
also everyone conveniently focused on the fact that the original tweet mentioned japanese people bc there is a wealth of japanese cinema about the bomb but they conveniently ignored the other group the original tweet mentioned which was native & hispanic americans who were massively impacted by nuclear tests done in secrecy in new mexico which is something a lot of usamericans aren’t even aware happened let alone something that hollywood is clamoring to make blockbuster films about. and like… yes oppenheimer is tortured on the day of the trinity test because of the existential horror of the bomb and i’m sure this is featured in the film, but that had nothing to do with the fact that the first bomb they dropped was on usamerican soil or with the real physical horrors that he actually inflicted on the usamericans downwind of the test site.
(and the tweet ALSO mentioned interned japanese americans which there ALSO is a dearth of stories about in usamerican media because there is no tortured white man at the center of it, it is just a horrific inhuman thing that the american government did to its own citizens, and the scotus decision that enshrined it in usamerican jurisprudence remains (well, functionally) on the books to this day with a direct straight line drawn to trump v hawaii in 2018. like. no one’s making blockbuster films about this in america despite this being a USAMERICAN story, not one that japanese cinema in japan should tackle, because it is not interesting to hollywood without a famous recognizable figure to place at the center of it. the stain of it is too fucking great and addressing any of this properly would be too “anti-american” so no one is going to touch it. that film COULD NOT and would not get made by any big studios.)
it’s so wild that the only way people can conceive of criticism of oppenheimer (or honestly any film) is within the film’s own existing framework, i.e. a massive blockbuster about oppenheimer directed by christopher nolan on a $100M budget with an insane marketing push (“you want christopher nolan to shoehorn in japanese voices into that??? wtf??? idiot”), rather than as a critique of what kinds of movies get funded and made in hollywood, and which filmmakers get to make films in the american film industry.
