What is it to eradicate trauma? Is it to snuff it out altogether by “simply” repressing it, entering a fugue state about it by blotting out certain portions of one’s history altogether? Or is it “rechanneling” it into something—or someone—else? In effect, letting that something or someone else “possess” it for a while. Claim ownership of it…and all merely because you told them the story of your trauma and they, in turn, find something relatable in it. Something tantamount to trauma bonding, but not in the sense that a trauma was shared in the same way, same place or even the same time as another person. Granted, the trauma of World War II was a shared bond between the majority of the world, with almost every country participating in the war without a stance of “neutrality.” But one trauma in particular could never be understood by anyone except those who lived in Hiroshima when it happened. That dropping (a word that makes the act sound so casual) of the bomb on August 6, 1945.
While Alain Renais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour was released in 1959, the film’s writer, Marguerite Duras, states in the treatment for the script that the setting is Hiroshima in the summer of 1957, making it just barely over ten years since the bombing that altered the state of that city (and its people) forever. The film makes it clear that, on the surface of things, it’s easy to forget or brush aside a collective trauma in order to cope, to “move on” (as though one ever actually can). Or, as Don Draper once put it, “This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened.” The governments of the world are certainly in agreement, as markedly evidenced during the immediate period after the war, billed as the “post-war boom.” In other words, a capitalistic wet dream, filled with all the “modern comforts,” advertised at an assault rifle pace via every possible medium (call it “advertising and consumerism as antidote” or “…as agents of denial”). Especially for women who obviously wanted their washing machines and dishwashers and vacuum cleaners to be top-of-the-line. Or their girdles to be as “aerodynamic” as possible. However, “Elle” a.k.a. “Her” in Hiroshima Mon Amour has other pursuits in mind. Namely, participating in a movie “on Peace” in Hiroshima. The irony, of course, is that the movie she’s acting in seeks, ultimately, to recreate the same horrifying images that resulted from the city’s bombing.
Sure, there are staged “protests” filmed (creating that meta movie-within-a-movie effect) to emphasize the “peace” message of it, but there is something exploitative about a movie that would seek to “repurpose” such imagery—even when just presented on protest signs—for what would fall under the category of “entertainment value.” Resnais and Duras clearly want to make this statement in a bid to underscore the “Hollywoodization” of the war. Treating it like spectacle and “story fodder” so soon after it happened. Hell, even while it was happening (see: Casablanca [to be mentioned later], Desperate Journey, Dragon Seed and All Through the Night, among others). Although one might accuse Resnais and Duras of doing the same, their exploration of the effects of war is far more rooted in knowing that they will never actually be able to make any sense of it, or its fallout (literally and figuratively). As Duras puts it in her synopsis, “Impossible to talk about Hiroshima. All one can do is talk about the impossibility of talking about Hiroshima.”
“Lui” a.k.a. “Him” (Eiji Okada) was “spared” from the tragedy of the bombing in that he wasn’t actually there when it happened. Instead, he was fighting “for his country” elsewhere. And the family he was fighting for as well got “lost” to the bombing. Yet, twelve years later, he’s soldiering on. Just as Elle is, despite the horrors she endured during the war, too. Horrors she will tell him of soon after their initial tryst, worn down by his eager interest in her, in addition to his intense desire to possess her…and her trauma. One might even call the pair oddly enraptured, titillated even, by their respective trauma to be able to find romance in a place like Hiroshima. Indeed, Duras noted, “[Their affair]—so banal, so commonplace—takes place in the one city of the world where it is hardest to imagine it.” For it’s true, even now it feels impossible to envision Hiroshima as a place for any kind of love or romance. Not after what happened there. Not after it was so irrevocably tainted. Resnais and Duras work together to accent this absurdity, with the latter insisting that it’s not really important to depict the scene of how and where Elle and Lui met, for “chance meetings occur everywhere in the world.” And yet, it seems the traumatized attract the traumatized, or “wound attracts wound.” Perhaps there is no better epicenter for that kind of attraction than Hiroshima, and especially so soon after the war had ended.
Although any city can “rebuild” after a tragedy, that underlying layer of what occurred always remains, lingering just beneath the surface (something Germany also knows plenty about). Resnais and Duras eerily convey that reality with the opening scene of the two lovers embracing in a manner that looks less “sexy” than it does emulative of the bodies left in the atom bomb’s ruins. Hence, their arms and torsos covered in ashes meant to look like the thick and heavy remains of the mushroom cloud. This gives way to a subtle transition to their bodies cloaked in the sheen of sweat from a night of passion. But the implication has been made clear: the trauma of Hiroshima is never far behind. And that’s part of the reason a love affair there seems so incongruous, impossible even.
By the end of the film, Resnais and Duras make it apparent that this is, in fact, the case. For only the truly naive would try to make a happy ending out of the final scene. One that occurs after Lui follows Elle into a bar/club called Casablanca. Not a coincidence, needless to say. Resnais’ allusion to the film of the same name more than hints at the idea of this love being doomed from the start. Another romance begat from the trauma of war, and that could only exist in one time and place, but never beyond it.
Genna Rivieccio
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