Hiroshima
by Richard Steinberg
“White shadow on a blackened wall.
Picture of young boy standing tall,
Pointing skyward where ashes fall
On nothing.
“Are we gone without a trace,
A burning ball in empty space.
Even God turns away his face
From nothing,” Amanda McBroom
Horror.
Dark fantasy.
They’re the words, to the right of this column, that in part define the contributors to STORYTELLERS. Words that immediately conjure slightly indefinable images as they’re read. Ideas with so many subgenres and corollaries that even the most dauntless forensic philologist would come away truly daunted.
But, for the sake of this column, let’s settle on the following definitions:
Horror; a noun.
Formal: Feeling of repugnance and fear.
Informal: Something unpleasant, ugly, or disagreeable.
All of the above being reactions not judgments.
Our reactions contribute to our judgments, certainly. But aren’t usually determinant. We factor in our unique moral standards, our sense of right and wrong, even how we’re feeling emotionally and physically at that moment before making our judgment. A judgment that is seldom final, if we’re to call ourselves human.
A judgment that we as horror or dark fantasy writers must initially withhold if we are to succeed.
Initially – because judgments will have no effect unless the reader is led to it on their own.
As with the Amanda McBroom lyric above: state a fact of horror, then add a judgment.
FACTS WITHOUT JUDGMENT
On August 6th, 1945 at 8:15 AM a metal tube 3 meters in length weighing about 4 tons was dropped from a B-29 above central Hiroshima, Japan. Approximately one minute later a fireball of 15-meters radius formed in 0.1 millisecond, with a temperature of 300,000 degrees centigrade, and then expanded to its maximum size (6,000 meters) and maximum temperature (several million degrees centigrade) in one second. The top of the atomic cloud reached an altitude of almost 56,000 feet.
Intense thermal heat emitted by the fireball caused severe burns and loss of eyesight. Thermal burns of bare skin occurred as far as 3.5 kilometers from ground zero. Most people exposed to thermal rays within 1-kilometer radius of ground zero died. Tile and glass melted; all combustible materials were consumed.
The atomic explosion caused an enormous shock wave followed instantaneously by a rapid expansion of air called the blast; these represented roughly half the explosion’s released energy. Maximum wind pressure of the blast: 35 tons per square meter. Maximum wind velocity: 273 miles per second. Wooden houses within 2.3 kilometers of ground zero collapsed. Concrete buildings near ground zero (thus hit by the blast from above) had ceilings crushed and windows and doors blown off. Many people were trapped under fallen structures and burned to death.
People exposed to the released radiation within 500 meters of ground zero died. People exposed at distances of 3 to 5 kilometers later showed symptoms of aftereffects, including radiation-induced cancers.
The death count reached 140,000 (plus or minus 10,000) by the end of December, 1945.
About a week later, World War II ended.
FACTS WITHOUT JUDGMENTS.
But even in their plain and unadorned starkness, they equal pure, unadulterated horror.
They are also only a starting point.
In Shigeru Kayama’s original story – Kaijû no Gojira – the monster (who became bastardized as Godzilla) rose directly from Hiroshima Bay, stepped onto the beach, literally sniffed the air and looked down on the desolation, then turned to the west to attack the American occupation fleet.
Judgment based on fact expressed through lead character actions.
Then, Tomoyuki Tanaka was attached to produce the film. Tanaka didn’t see the Americans as the enemy, but rather the militarists in Japan as the enemy, and turned our favorite T-Rex away from Hiroshima and into Sapporo where the last of the WWII Tojo militants still held power.
Judgment based on fact expressed through political machinations.
When Takeo Murata came on board as Writer #2, Sapporo was saved and Godzilla attacked and destroyed a UN Council debating whether or not to extend the occupation government of Japan.
Judgment based on fact expressed through choice of victims.
Ishirô Honda, who later directed the film, fine tuned the above message into an attack on Tokyo; which he saw as selling itself out to the West.
Judgment based on fact expressed through cultural revulsion.
Finally, Joseph E. Levine bought the film – found himself stuck with the footage of the destruction of Tokyo – and came up with a compromise. Levine personally felt that the Hiroshima bombing saved more American lives than it took Japanese, so Godzilla’s birth was shifted out of Hiroshima Harbor and moved to anonymous islands where nuclear testing had taken place. In part, because Levine opposed atmospheric nuclear testing. In part to make it more palatable to an American audience that still supported the bombing of Hiroshima.
And then the ultimate. In 1998 Roland Emmerich took the US totally off the hook – the testing had been done by the French, you see – and destroyed New York.
Judgment based on fact, expressed through marketing concerns.
Fact: nuclear explosion(s) create (or awake) mutated, pissed off T-Rex.
Judgment: depends on who you are and where you’re standing as Godzilla breaks the surface of the ocean.
Fact:
Man kills mother and various showering guests at family motel.
Eastern European Aristocrat with sanguine tastes seeks new life in England.
Central European doctor seeks ways to prolong life.
Old guy wants to attract hot young chick.
Judgments:
Psycho . . . Dracula . . . Frankenstein . . . Faust . . . but only after judgments are gently and liberally applied to a preexisting scaffolding of fact.
So start there. Decide what the horror in your piece is; remembering that the horror – in horror novels, stories, or scripts – is almost wholly ineffective if that’s all there is. Think it through, consider all angles of it. What is it that leaves a feeling of repugnance and fear in your heart? What is the thing that you find unpleasant, ugly, or disagreeable?
As in writing a biography – and I genuinely believe that horror is closer to biography than any other genre – define your subject. Who are they, what is it, why is it worth writing about?
But please, withhold judgments at this phase. Remember that your reader wants to make their own, so your job is to come up with that central scaffolding which will support their judgments or tear them all apart. But you can’t lead anyone without a strong leash . . . and a nonjudgmental horror at the core of your story is the strongest possible.
The vampire – who is either good or bad by their actions, not by their condition.
The killer – whose reason for killing is more compelling than the acts themselves.
The community – so like so many others in the world until the lights go low and no one’s looking.
So you have your strong core, your framework or scaffolding, now decide what your judgment is. Tougher than it might seem.
The Hiroshima analogy is one of the simpler ones; most people have already reached a one or zero conclusion in their binary logic on the event. But what is it that you have to say about what?
Again, horror for horror’s sake is a colossal waste of everybody’s time. Your story needs to be painted on a horror canvas, perhaps even with horror images, but the overall tableau must not be horror as well. As Dracula was about Victorian morality, and Psycho a fictionalization of a true story used to showcase the phony idyll that that the fifties chose to see itself as, what will your horror story say? What conclusions will you lead your readers to reach?
The evil horror destroyed by the symbols of the church symbolizes the power of Good over evil.
The horror performing good works destroyed by the symbols of the church symbolizes the tyranny of belief systems that cannot accept variance.
The horror who prevails over the symbols of the church represents man’s growth into a self-made heaven or hell without the gentle poetry of God.
The horror by which great power, insight, or tragedy is gained, represents the unwritten slate of a new born babe.
The horror of a nuclearly desolated landscape, with a single colorful flower forcing itself up through the ash and debris to bloom and bring a fragrance of something other than death to the place, well . . .
“When the night has been too lonely
And the road has been too long
And you think that love is only
For the lucky and the strong,” Amanda McBroom
The fact of too many of our lives.
“Just remember in the winter
Far beneath the bitter snows
Lies the seed
That with the sun’s love
In the spring
Becomes the rose,” Amanda McBroom
A judgment of those facts that I personally pray is the write one.
Believe!
Related posts:
- Vincent’s Mirror
- A Wretched Lot Of Old Shriveled Creatures
- THE GGI
- "Wow, but What About Me?"
- DEFINING HORROR: Nine Musings on The Nature of Horror
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Comments
Here’s a column I’ll be reading twice. The morning’s chaos has me in its thrall at the moment, but I’m struck by the uniqueness of this essay. I suspect there is some semantical wiggle-room here. My knee-jerk reaction after a few lines was that this will require me to work in some other terms that say some of the same things to me that the word “judgment” says to Richard. Maybe terms like “rationalization,” “wish fulfillment,” “closure,” “justification,” “propaganda,” “persuasion,” “manipulation,” or some bastardized combo of them all. But by the end I began to feel that the chosen term was the most correct. “Judgment” carries the most freight and has the coldness that should be at the core of logic. In a considered rendering of a theme, that should be pivotal, whatever the passions and biases of a particular writer. Hell, I’m talking through my hat. Need to read the thing again when I’ve got a little time. Good column, though, no question.
– Sully
Thank you Richard =and= Amanda for an essay (and lyrics) that bears frequent rereading and much thought. Could you do “judgmental” next? I find the very word horrific. -13.
Very apt comment, Janet, as “judgmental” is a word that many, if not most, writers of my acquaintance stare down on a regular basis, particularly those whose forte is exploring the dark side.
Excellent essay, Richard. Your example of the original Godzilla, movie and story, its depth and perspective viewed objectively, is most refreshing. (I’ve read the original Kayama story, as well as early screenplay treatments. The original 54 version is one of my favorite movies. Ever.)
Thanks for the great contribution.
–M
Very, very well put, Richard. Perspective is everything, and without some important perspective on the part of the reader, a story is just a flat pond with no ripples.
Facts can be like statistics if used properly, you can use them to create sensations, to lead readers to places you need them to be for the story to work…but only if you lead, rather than trying to front-feed your own reactions to someone who has yet to experience the facts leading up to it.
Dave