“A House of Dynamite” Is the Wrong Metaphor for US Nukes
Kathryn Bigelow’s new film, A House of Dynamite, captures the horror and insanity of nuclear war. But by portraying the US atomic arsenal as an inheritance from the past rather than a product of our own time, it lets our political leaders off the hook.
Rebecca Ferguson in A House of Dynamite. (Netflix)
A House of Dynamite is written like an op-ed. Its characters speak in terse paragraphs that tend to close with punchy kickers. And true to the op-ed genre, all the film’s big ideas are communicated through metaphors.
“We’re talking about hitting a bullet with a bullet,” says a deputy national security advisor after describing ground-based missile defenses. “I call them rare, medium, and well-done,” says a Marine officer after passing a binder of nuclear strike options to the president, played by an uncharacteristically flat Idris Elba. Later on, the president says, “I listened to this podcast, and the guy said, ‘We all built a house filled with dynamite . . . and then we just kept on livin’ in it.’” Even the film’s title is a metaphor.
Cringeworthiness notwithstanding — facing Armageddon, the president really quotes “the guy” from a podcast? — this line summarizes A House of Dynamite’s main message: the problems posed by the US nuclear arsenal are impersonal, intractable, and inherited from the past.
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