Kiss Me Deadly (1955) review
The fallout in Kiss Me Deadly (1955): a film about nuclear politics
“Manhattan Project. Los Alamos. Trinity”. And suddenly he yields. This is too much, even for a private eye. Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955) turns 1950s L.A. into a Kafkaesque world of paranoia, strangeness and nightmare. The third-person plural pronoun is purposefully used and abused ominously throughout the film without explanations: “They took her away”, “they tried to get in”, etc. Who are they? The government? And yet we don’t even know what this means anymore – it’s a vacuous statement.
Kiss Me Deadly is about the sublime un-presence of power and authority in the nuclear age: it’s ridiculous to think of a democracy when a few man control a gadget capable of ending the world with a bang. The fragility of such a world: its Archimedean point is a bomb, set off with a remote. The film utilizes this implicit premise – which rules life ever since August 6th, 1945, Hiroshima – and lets it blossom in noir style: a private eye too curious for his own sake; shadows in dark alleys and fast cars; two mysterious short-haired blondes who resemble each other too much and pretend to be someone else; a small mysterious artifact that people kill for.
It is a modern tale of hubris. Like in Greek tragedy, the characters in Kiss Me Deadly are constantly warned not to pursue it any further, as Tiresias warned Oedipus. Stop now! Only in Kiss Me Deadly, a noir tale for the nuclear age, the truth in question does not concern the hidden horrors of personal identity, but those of a political order predicated on nuclear power. Nuclear politics? An oxymoron.
Politics – power as exercised by humans on humans in their living-together – becomes impossible with the advent of the nuclear era. The atom bomb is not up for debate, discussion – it is not accessible and yet it is the main, most decisive item in the world’s inventory, since it contains the capacity to annihilate all the rest. And yet it is beyond the scope of politics. The detective’s investigation in Kiss Me Deadly, thus, is entirely political: he seeks to unravel this inconvenient truth: there is no true politics anymore, but just a sham, for power’s grown too strong to be restrained, controlled, divided, changed, or subjected to any process exterior to it.
Power, that is, nuclear power, is too overwhelming, literally ready to set the world on fire, and one must get out of its way. Don’t look back, don’t ask questions. Helping a hitch-hiking blonde on a dark road is too much already: one must not get involved, but merely do as one is told, finding satisfaction in marriage, cars, vacations and other low-risk niceties that do not require truth. Look away, fella! –– “Curiosity killed the cat”.
