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Popular Culture Review
very healthy. They loaf and sleep during the midday heat, but
are active enough in the early morning and after 3 p.m.^
The next passage is remarkable not for its condescension (their
language is, of course, “simple”), but for how it links language, knowledge,
imperialism, and modernity.
A few [natives] could read and write their simple language,
and Juda, the local chief, could speak and understand a little
English. The outside world they knew little about, and cared
less. Then the U.S. Navy decided that Bikini was the place to
test the atomic bomb, and almost overnight the natives found
themselves in the Atomic Age.”*^
Markwith’s description reminds me of Thomas Pynchon’s definition of
a miracle: one world’s intrusion into another.
Markwith explains that he staged some of the shooting of his
documentary and this provides an interesting, if unintentional, commentary on
the creative nature of the enterprise.^ According to Markwith,
There was the usual discussion over camera and light angles,
the concealment of microphones, the placement of “stars” and
“extras,” with much peering through a viewfinder and a great
deal of shouting and running about. Finally the Duck
[DUKW] was jockeyed into place.. . the sound camera
mounted on the bow, “mike” lines buried in the coral, the
[native] minister instructed to screen the one mike from the
camera with his body, and the second mike suspended in a
palm tree.^’
So perhaps the Bikinians are not being introduced to modernity, but rather
postmodemity; the documentary film, a simulacrum of the Navy’s Active reality.
Brian McHale argues that postmodernism in literature (and I would add
television and film) is defined primarily by the “ontological dominant,” by
“worlds.” McHale refers to “zones” or “the zone” (McHale, 10-11, 45; a good
example being Pynchon’s “The Zone” in Gravity's Rainbow). This postmodern
obsession with the ontological began, 1 believe, with the explosion of the first
atomic bomb at New Mexico’s Trinity Site. Oppenheimer’s famous declaration,
“I am become death, shatterer of worlds,” is perhaps more revealing than it
seems on the surface. The otherworldly atomic bomb indeed shattered worlds.
Although its effects would not immediately be felt in popular culture, the atomic
bomb foregrounded ontological concerns: the splintering of worlds and a
fascination with questions of what is real.
According to Perry Anderson, “Modernisrh was powered by the
excitement of the great cluster of new inventions that transfomied urban life in
the early years of the century: the liner, the radio, the cinema, the skyscraper, the
automobile, the aeroplane.” Postmodernism rises from the catastrophe of World