"Fuck You. Fuck You. Fuck You" (or, The Hidden History of American Avant-Garde Poetry in Nolan's Oppenheimer)
I’ll keep the discourse portion brief.
Unsurprisingly for regular readers, I think about films in relation to horror cinema. This leaves me confused when leftist horror commentators are hellbent against Oppenheimer before settling down to watch movies where multiple people get stabbed.
I suppose there’d be some argument about the politics Oppenheimer is built on. I’d reply, “What, as opposed to franchises that rose to prominence under the shadow of Guantanamo Bay revelations like Saw and Hostel?” This is an intellectual mess to work through: horror movies aligned with reactionary views such as the USA’s complicity in torture, while the journalists that support that complicity complain these movies are sadistic and should be banned.
Putting aside leanings of the “torture porn” that marked horror cinema circa 2005, I’m surprised audiences are only now noticing the politics in Nolan’s films. This is the director who, in The Dark Knight Rises, wrote a plot in which nuclear energy should be given to billionaires in the hope they use it as a renewable energy source but, uh oh, those pesky disillusioned classes get in the way and want to make it go boom.
Nolan has said in interviews that American Prometheus provided his source material. I have as little knowledge of Bird and Sherwin’s book as I do of Oppenheimer generally. I’d like to think audience anxieties around mass entertainment and mass murder could be subdued if they watched Hiroshima Mon Amour - with that extraordinary, tender opening sequence - immediately after Nolan’s epic. However, I did notice an absence in Oppenheimer. As it focuses on a core team of scientists, it sidelines others. Bern Porter is one such figure.
Porter was among the scientists who didn’t know they were building the A bomb. A staunch pacifist who published antiwar propaganda throughout the early forties, Porter left the Manhattan Project after Hiroshima. From the article reproduced on Porter’s Ubu page, he is quoted as saying his decision to leave "wasn't wholly from guilt, nor could it be called strictly a compensating contribution to society. . . . My reaction from destruction was simply that I had to do something constructive with what limited talents and funds I had."
It took me a while to appreciate Porter. My first introduction, sometime around 2009, was hearing Kenneth Goldsmith call him, “…for all intents and purposes, America’s Bob Cobbing.” This sent my imagination into a whirlwind of guttural sounds, smears of ink and anarchic wordplay. The only Porter I had access to was on UbuWeb, which continues to hold a handful of his artist books and audio. It seemed like the community-making of Cobbing’s life was absent in Porter’s.
After better familiarity with Porter’s material, I realise my error. Alongside his prolific output, comparable to Cobbing’s, Porter gathered numerous younger writers in the American avant-garde.
Still, Porter’s found texts gives him a status all his own. If Cobbing’s founds prioritised the local, such as his fondness for dialect dictionaries, Porter cut from Americana. (This isn’t a perfect distinction - I have Cobbing’s Collaborations with Robert Sheppard, which includes a cutup of slogans.) They were working to the same end although Cobbing, so coy in his later interviews, wouldn’t have admitted it. As quoted here, Porter wanted to "twist American reality back onto itself”. Most of all, perhaps because of Goldsmith’s patronage, those outside of the contemporary American avant-garde know Porter for 1975’s The Last Acts of St. Fuck You.
It’s difficult not to see The Last Acts… in the shadow of two defining moments in Porter’s life: his discovering the truth behind The Manhattan Project and, in 1950, his father’s arrest for child molestation. The latter saw Porter excommunicate his family and begin travels that would see him visit Hiroshima. By any account - biographical statements, reminisces from those who knew him - Porter was a curmudgeon. Certainly, when I hear him in conversation, bursting with the joy of creativity. But a curmudgeon nonetheless.
The audio version of The Last Acts…, the version I’ll quote from, uses the alphabetised text as a score to be embellished with rants, grunts and improvisations. It begins, with textual inconsistencies and eccentricities left in:
In this episode there was a man, an ordinary man. He was born of parents by normal sexual intercourse between a mother and a father. He had parents. He went to school. He went to church. He went to the university. He went he went he went he went. And all of this activity, he was a common man. That is he went from plumping, he went from heating to refrigerating, he went from refrigerating to cooling… He was a common common common man. So common the pope in Rome discovered him and anointed him as saint. In his last days, his last days, is on his death bed. He was bedridden with sores and wounds and blood and the time came for him to pronounce his will. And he said I, I, now the great saint, I will get even. I will get even on all of those, all of those who have betrayed me, all of those who have lied to me, all of those all of those… I will get even. And I herewith, and I herewith, pronounce my will, which has now been called The Last Acts of Saint Fuck You.
And so begins an alphabetical tirade that swings from heresy (“The certifying of devils”) to absurdity (“The dispensing of allergies”) to the comedic (“The harassing of taxpayers”).
Porter may well be the unsung anti-patron of Oppenheimer discourse, with the negated ethics of The Last Acts… casting a shadow theatre over well meaning, but often facile, conversations grappling with complex products. Readers would do well to acquaint themselves with him, to be reminded we are against the murderous systems we are also complicit with by dint of being alive: our taxes and smart devices.
In our grief, we join Porter as he snarls, “Fuck you guys. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.”
Postscript
I have now seen Barbie.
It mirrors Oppenheimer significantly: a fantastic film which may or may not espouse actual horseshit, although I think this is more explicitly a problem in Barbie. What I’m about to outline strikes me as so blatant, I refuse to believe I’m the first to think it. Spoilers incoming.
If all women are Barbie, and Barbie is all women, then women can only be the products of a corporate imagination (i.e. Mattel). This is half-addressed in the film, with Barbies/women realising their desires are produced by the patriarchy. But the film can’t realise the terms of women’s emancipation - the identities they’re freed into - are also the product of a corporate imagination. As one of the CEO’s inferiors says (or ‘say’? I’m not sure which is correct) of Ordinary Barbie, “That is… Going to make money.”
Greta and Noah are more than capable of writing a film which subtly critiques the bleak impasses emancipatory politics can find themselves in. If this is what they’ve done then, firstly, fair fucking play, and secondly, it would make Barbie and Fight Club essentially the same film. I will be the first to attend back-to-back screenings. But I do get the feeling that this is not their intention.