[COLUMN] Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite is a Modern Take on a Cold War Template | by Darren Mooney

NOTE: This piece contains spoilers for Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite, which is now streaming on Netflix and is a worthy addition to the canon of nuclear thrillers codified by Doctor Strangelove and Fail Safe. If you want to watch it knowing as little as the characters, feel free to bookmark and come back. If you’ve already seen it, let’s launch into it.

Early in A House of Dynamite, Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) arrives in the White House Situation Room to find one of the screens playing news footage rather than relaying situationally-relevant information. “That is not the feed,” Olivia is informed as footage plays of the (one of the recent) California wildfires in Butte County. “Same monitor was acting up yesterday.”

This small dramatic beat sets up two big recurring motifs that simmer across A House of Dynamite, the nuclear thriller from director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Noah Oppenheim. The first is that almost nothing works over the course of the film. As a nuclear missile races towards the city of Chicago, the United States’ military apparatus scrambles to overt catastrophe and to clearly identify the source and the cause of this strange attack.

This is difficult, as the country’s surveillance mechanisms missed the launch of the missile from somewhere in the Pacific, only picking it up while it was already in flight. Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso) speculates this miss could be due to “a cyber penetration of our command-and-control systems.” General Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts) cuts in, “Which would strongly suggest a sophisticated, coordinated assault that is only just beginning.” It could also just have been a malfunction. There’s certainly evidence in the film to support that possibility.

Two ground-based interceptors are launched from Fort Greely in Alaska, in the hope of destroying the missile before it can touch down on American soil. Secretary of Defense Reid Baker (Jared Harris) demands to know what the chances of success are for a launch like that. Pressed, Baerington admits that the interceptors have a 61% chance of success when successfully fired. “So it’s a fucking coin toss?” Baker gasps. “That’s what $50b buys us?”

Baerington is more correct than he could possibly know. The first of the two interceptors fails to fire, effectively halving the chance of stopping the missile. The second interceptor misses. The system just doesn’t work. For all the time and money invested preparing for this moment, the infrastructure is not strong enough or sturdy enough to withstand the impossible pressure being placed upon it. A House of Dynamite reinforces this idea over and over again.

In the midst of the crisis, the President of the United States (Idris Elba) is literally unable to talk to his Russian counterpart because the two separate phone systems – the one he is using to talk to his subordinates and the one used to talk to Russia – cannot be integrated. FEMA official Cathy Rogers (Moses Ingram) has to take a phone call with Olivia Walker discussing the crisis publicly on the office floor because the staff “couldn’t connect it to [her] office.”

Much of the discussion of A House of Dynamite involves comparisons to Cold War nuclear thrillers like Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb or Sidney Lumet’s comparatively underseen Fail Safe. These are a good frame of reference. It’s interesting that this anxiety is back in the consciousness, with Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, the stage adaptation of Strangelove and even Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.

However, the fear of Cold War thrillers like Doctor Strangelove and Fail Safe was that these systems would work too well. In both movies, something happens that triggers a series of automated events as part of a larger system that the humans are incapable of stopping because it moves too quickly and efficiently. “If you want to know, that's what really bothers me,” Congressman Raskob (Sorrell Booke) admits in Fail Safe. “The only thing everyone can agree on  is that no one's responsible.”

In some ways, this fear reflected the broader anxieties of the Cold War era, where American popular consciousness tended to imagine the Soviet mind as alien and abstract. In Fail Safe, Professor Groeteschele (Walter Matthau) argues that the communist mind is as cold as any machine. “These are Marist fanatics, not normal people,” he contends. “They're not motivated by human emotion such as rage and pity. They are calculating machines.” Groeteschele is obviously wrong, but he has ironically built a defense system that works just like the imaginary enemy constructed in his head.

A House of Dynamite is a post-Cold War take on this classic nuclear template. It rejects the clear binaries of the Cold War thriller – “us” and “them.” It denies the characters and the audience the comfort of a single clearly defined enemy. Over the course of the movie’s runtime, it is never explained where the nuclear missile came from, who launched it, and what their motivation for that action might be. The characters have to cobble together theories without the necessary information.

NSA analyst Ana Park (Greta Lee) speculates that it could be North Korea, collapsing and hoping to leverage a nuclear threat into aid. “If you’re losing a board game, you might as well topple it,” she proposes. Brady cuts across her to point out that the same logic would apply to Russia. "The Chinese navy has been experimenting with AI-assisted launch systems, so this could be a technical mishap,” Park also suggests. Nobody in A House of Dynamite actually knows anything substantive.

Major General Steven Kyle (Gbenga Akinnagbe) speculates to Brady that it could be the North Koreans or the Russians. “Or some fucking sub captain woke up, found out his wife left him, and snapped,” he offers. This unknowability only raises the stakes. As the Russian, Chinese, Pakistani, Iranian and North Korean fleets begin to position themselves aggressively, Brady warns the President that their motivations are impossible to parse and so they must all be viable targets.

“Perhaps, as Mister Baerington suggested earlier,” Brady offers, “they are simply and innocently responding to our posture. It is also possible that they’ve seen our homeland is about to absorb a catastrophic blow, and they are readying to take advantage of that. Or this is all part of a phased, coordinated assault, with far worse to come. I simply don’t know.” Along with the dysfunctional systems, it’s this unknowability that defines A House of Dynamite as a modern take on the genre.

Bigelow deliberately structures the movie to withhold information even from the audience as much as the characters. The film opens with the missile being launched – but it is launched in darkness and all that the audience sees is the plume of smoke and fire. Bigelow declines to show the weapon hitting Chicago, leaving open the possibility that “a lot of times, they don’t even detonate.” She also doesn’t show the decision that the President ultimately makes about pre-emptive retaliation.

The film adopts the fractured non-linear narrative of something like Weapons, effectively playing out the twenty minutes between the detection of the missile and the second of impact from three different perspectives. As in Weapons, this serves to create a sense of fragmented information – the audience is watching three blind men describe an elephant, and only gradually getting a clearer picture over time. Snippets of conversations are heard in one segment of the film and played out in full or contextualized in later segments – screams heard in one segment are explained in the next.

A House of Dynamite is in some ways a film defined by its absences. The President is entirely absent from the first third of the movie. In the second third of the film, he is present as a blacked out screen only present through voiceover on conference calls. Several key characters – including Baker and Major Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos) – literally abandon their posts leaving empty chairs. Even the human elements of the system cannot consistently and reliably function under that level of pressure.

This is the second big recurring thematic motif suggested by that malfunctioning monitor in the corner of the White House Situation Room. A House of Dynamite is obviously and specifically about nuclear annihilation, but it is also more broadly a movie about the collapse and decay of American institutions. Bigelow shoots the film so that it is haunted by the ghosts of American history, past glories and modern decline.

Baker works in the shadow of a portrait of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the President who oversaw the post-Second World War American global order, who built the nation’s interstate system and much of the infrastructure that still defines American life. Much of the infrastructure that Eisenhower oversaw has not been properly maintained, and is in a state of decay, with many roads in poor condition and leading to tragedies like bridge collapses. It is a nation literally falling apart.

That malfunctioning monitor in the Situation Room provides an interesting counterweight to the immediate threat of nuclear annihilation, as news footage streams a constant series of slower-burning existential threats: forest fires in California, a credit crisis involving Goldman Sachs where “consequences may be long lasting”, skyrocketing rents, and long-overdue infrastructure bills. These are obviously less urgent than a nuclear missile, but they speak to a greater erosion in the social fabric.

A House of Dynamite is not overtly or specifically about the Trump era. It feels much less heavy-handed in its political commentary than something like Don’t Look Up. It is mostly a film about relatively competent people trying to do the best that they can in an impossible situation. Of the anonymous President at the center of the film, the head of his Secret Service detail Ken Cho (Brian Tee) notes, “They’re all chronically late narcissists. At least this one reads the newspaper.”

Still, it’s also hard not to think about the Trump era when watching A House of Dynamite. The President’s Secret Service codename is “Icon”, suggesting a celebrity more than a politician. He is introduced doing a photo opportunity rather than engaging in the business of actually governing. Cho calls him “the star.” Baerington walks to the White House down what was “Black Lives Matter Plaza”, but which Trump renamed “Liberty Plaza.”

There is also a sense of tension between Washington (and America) as it existed even a decade ago and how it functions today. Bigelow constantly frames shots in the Situation Room to include the photo of Barack Obama receiving word Osama Bin Laden was dead, a shot that Trump has tried to emulate. The cast includes Anthony Ramos and Renée Elise Goldsberry, two of the breakout stars of Hamilton, a defining political and cultural text of the Obama era that was a source of conflict into the Trump administration. Even the choice of Chicago as the target of the missile seems pointed.

A House of Dynamite is about the consequences of the decline of America’s systems and structures in a chaotic world. Almost every safeguard designed to prevent catastrophe from happening fails, despite the competence and decency of the people trying to navigate those frameworks. It resonates in the middle of a massive government shut-down, the third in seven years – not counting two more threatened shutdowns. The governmental apparatus is fundamentally broken.

As the crisis begins, the President is addressing a group of young basketball players at a publicity event. He’s lecturing them about cooperation. “If our country’s gonna fix the world’s problems, we’re gonna have to work together,” he explains. “Teamwork, as we have been talking about.” However, as in those classic Cold War thrillers, teamwork is impossible – but in A House of Dynamite this is true not just across geographical borders, but within the system of American governance. The unknowability of human beings and the dysfunction of broken systems is a recipe for disaster.

The real threat in A House of Dynamite is not to the ten million people who will likely die in Chicago. By the end of the first run-through of those twenty minutes, the audience already knows that Chicago will be hit. The real threat is what happens next – when America responds to that devastation. Without a single clear opponent, there is a strong logical argument for targeting every potential opponent. America has enough power to, in the words of (Lieutenant Commander Robert Reeves (Jonah Hauer-King), “end it now, once and for all.” With “it” potentially being the entire planet. Why not topple the board?

A House of Dynamite suggests that the failures in these sorts of systems inevitably build to a critical mass, which is a disaster waiting to happen in a nation as powerful as the United States. The President describes the country as “a house filled with dynamite”, and it seems like it’s only a matter of time before some failure causes a wild spark.