Bidding ^Tarewell to Bikini^
29
War II. As Anderson notes, “It was the experience of the Second World War
that abruptly changed this whole Gestalt. Scientific progress now for the first
time assumed unmistakably menacing shapes, as constant technical
improvement unleashed ever more powerful instruments of destruction and
death, terminating in demonstrative nuclear explosions. Another and infinitely
vaster kind of machinery, far beyond the range of daily experience, yet casting a
baleful shadow over it, had arrived” (Anderson, 86-87).
Less than a year after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the
United States unleashed this “vaster kind of machinery” in Bikini Atoll. And,
unintentionally. National Geographic s coverage of the event highlights the
ontological issues. To return to Markwith’s essay, the author refers to his
endeavor as a “moving-picture” revealing, again inadvertently, the fictional
nature of the enterprise; there is a blurring of the line between documentary and
moving-picture. The Marshallese become “stars” and “extras”—they are actors,
but not active participants in this story. Palm trees become props. And one might
conclude, the official statements about the islanders’ voluntary relocation is a
script written by screenwriters and just as fictional as The Big Sleep, a
Hollywood film of the same year. (In one of the many newsreels about the tests,
a Navy official notes that they will be exposing enough film to make “eleven
Hollywood productions”).^ The tragedy is that the Bikinian “actors” will never
return home after a long day of shooting on the set. This filmic Bikini is a
distinct and alien world—or zone—from the one the residents know. In fact, it
has no reality outside of its celluloid existence—perhaps real only in the minds
of American officials