A House of Dynamite is written like an op-ed. Its characters speak in terse paragraphs that tend to close with punchy kickers. And true to the op-ed genre, all the film’s big ideas are communicated through metaphors.
“We’re talking about hitting a bullet with a bullet,” says a deputy national security advisor after describing ground-based missile defenses. “I call them rare, medium, and well-done,” says a Marine officer after passing a binder of nuclear strike options to the president, played by an uncharacteristically flat Idris Elba. Later on, the president says, “I listened to this podcast, and the guy said, ‘We all built a house filled with dynamite . . . and then we just kept on livin’ in it.’” Even the film’s title is a metaphor.
Cringeworthiness notwithstanding — facing Armageddon, the president really quotes “the guy” from a podcast? — this line summarizes A House of Dynamite’s main message: the problems posed by the US nuclear arsenal are impersonal, intractable, and inherited from the past.
A House of Dynamite is not an antiwar movie. It’s not even an anti-nuke movie — at least not in any robust sense. Instead, it’s an impotent and unserious exercise in handwringing.
The film illustrates the insanity of the American doctrine of nuclear deterrence (the suicidal idea, axiomatic since the 1950s, that to avoid nuclear attack we must credibly threaten to destroy the world). But it also places that doctrine beyond the bounds of political contestation by presenting it as an inevitable holdover from a history nobody asked for and for which no one is at fault.
I don’t know whether the podcast Elba’s character references is real. Considering how much oxygen podcasts suck up these days, especially for news-junkie liberals like screenwriter (and former NBC News head) Noah Oppenheim, I suppose it could be. But I’m not about to go scrubbing through the archives of Pod Save America looking for it. Instead, I’ll go…
Auteur: Jonah Walters
