Hiroshima mon amour: The horror of forgetting
"Sometimes it's important to ignore the difficulties this world presents. Otherwise, it would become unbearable."
Last year, I visited the 9/11 memorial in lower Manhattan for the first time. I’m not sure why it had taken me so long. I had gone downtown years before when the area was still being rebuilt and transformed — when you could still get a sense of the blow the city had taken — but I hadn’t seen it finished. It all felt new. It was, in a certain kind of way, remarkable. The tourists and the residents streaming about, surrounded by gleaming office towers, a space-age transit hub and a glittering performing arts center. It was an active, busy place, with the memorial serving as sort of an emotional anchor but more embedded within the city than set apart from it.
About one-half of the 16-acre plot reserved for the World Trade Center complex was devoted to the memorial and the accompanying museum. The rest was kept for commerce. After the attacks, some in New York, including then-mayor Rudy Guiliani, insisted that nothing should be erected on the site save a memorial, that it should become a sacred space.
That argument did not win out for reasons of practicality, insurance and real estate values as much as anything. But it should not have been surprising. Paving over and building atop the site of an unspeakable tragedy strikes me as a natural human impulse, and perhaps in this case, a distinctly American one. We want to honor, we try to remember, and ultimately we move on.
We do that when we, as a society, suffer a collective loss. And we do that in our own lives when we suffer a personal one. If we can.
A man and a woman lie naked in a hotel bed as ash falls about them. The first images of Hiroshima mon amour, surreal as they are, are perhaps the most indelible. We soon realize they are strangers, that they met the evening before. That the man seduced the woman and that she likely wanted to be seduced. He is Japanese. She is French. “You were bored in a way that makes a man want to know a woman,” he had told her.
It is 1959, just 14 years after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, annihilating the town center, killing 140,000 residents, and bringing World War II to an end. That city is forever gone, but a new one has replaced it. After the war, the Japanese government made rebuilding a top priority. The name of the place where the lovers are staying says it all: “Hotel New Hiroshima.”
As in many new romances, wordplay is foreplay. And theirs is filled with allusions to what has come before. They explore — and push — each other.
“You saw nothing in Hiroshima,” he tells her.
“I saw everything. Everything,” she replies.
He is unmoved. The truth, of course, is that she couldn’t possibly understand the history that he has lived. He was away, with the army, when the bomb struck. But his family, his home, everything he knew had been incinerated. He is a survivor.
Meanwhile, she is an actress, protected somewhat by artifice, there to make a film about nuclear non-proliferation. In one scene, she and her lover are swarmed by extras in the movie, carrying signs with images of the bombing, the past pushing back at the present. She tells him she has toured the museum, seen the images of the ruined flesh, the mangled children, the flattened buildings. She cried for Hiroshima. She empathized. Didn’t that matter?
I looked at the people. I myself looked, thoughtfully, at the iron. Iron, burned and twisted. Iron made vulnerable as flesh. I saw the bouquet of bottle tops. Who could imagine such a thing? Human skin, floating, surviving, still in the bloom of agony. And stones. Burned stones, shattered stones. Anonymous locks of hair, that Hiroshima's women, when they awoke, discovered had fallen out.
He won’t have it. “The whole world rejoiced” when the bomb was dropped, he tells her. It stings like an indictment. She was in Paris at the time. She felt “amazement that they dared, amazement that they succeeded. And for us, the start of an unknown fear. Then, indifference. And fear of that indifference.”
At its heart, Hiroshima mon amour is about that fear of indifference, the “horror” as the man says “of forgetting.” Throughout the film, the two lovers make reference to the fragile nature of memory, how the act of forgetting is almost synchronous with the experience itself. We build memorials, we set aside spaces, we fill rooms with images and remnants all because it is the human thing, even against our will, to forget, to travel with the present.
“Like you, I have fought with all my might not to forget,” she tells him. “Like you, I have forgotten.”
The Hiroshima that was leveled, that served as a terrifying example to the world of the might unleashed by the splitting of the atom, was wiped away. Now there was another Hiroshima, newly built structures surrounding the bomb site, which has been turned into a park promoting peace. The demolished city exists only in the memories of the survivors.
My daughter is 18. She wasn’t alive when 9/11 occurred. She’ll never understand. To her, it is a matter of history, lumped in with the rest of what came before. Maybe she’ll visit the memorial one day. Maybe it will all hit home. But that’s unlikely.
As a film released in 1959, Hiroshima mon amour was groundbreaking, primarily in terms of narrative. It moves freely between the present and the woman’s past in France, when she suffered heartbreak and shame during the war. Its director, Alain Resnais, said then that in his film “time is shattered.” We take such fractured narratives for granted now (hello, Quentin Tarantino), but this was at the forefront of what became known as the French New Wave, movies that toyed with structure, perspective and morality, films that ripped up the handbook.
U.S. audiences, those few who came out to watch a French-Japanese production featuring subtitles, most have been thrown by the frank sensuality of the piece, so used were they to Hollywood films that featured chaste couples like Doris Day and Rock Hudson flirting in pajamas over a telephone line. Both the unnamed protagonists are married to others, but never seem to be feel guilt over their choice. They are comfortable finding a connection beyond their conventional lives.
But more than that, American movies hadn’t yet portrayed World War II from a Japanese perspective, nor had most likely moviegoers been exposed to the visceral effects of the Hiroshima detonation.1 Even now, the Oscar-nominated film Oppenheimer, an earlier entry in this series, chose to not show the actual bombing on screen. If you saw the movie, you can understand why. It would have stopped the narrative in its tracks. Can you really care about what happens to Robert Oppenheimer’s career after you see thousands upon thousands die by fire?
We were taught in our American history classes that President Truman made the decision to drop the bomb to save lives, both those of allied soldiers who were prepping to launch a ferocious assault on the Japanese mainland and Japanese citizens in other cities beyond Hiroshima who would have been victims of a continued firebombing campaign. It’s interesting to note (and largely not taught) that there were many within the U.S. military who did not think using the bomb was necessary to win the war, including then General Dwight Eisenhower2 and Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander of the Pacific fleet. Japan would have ultimately surrendered regardless, they argued.
The morality of the decision has been debated ever since, with some historians suggesting that the use of a nuclear weapon against civilians amounted to a war crime or even terrorism. Others have argued it was a means to intimidate the Soviet Union at the dawn of what would become the Cold War or prevent Japan from being partitioned as Germany and Korea would be. 3
Hiroshima mon amour, however, does not concern itself with the ethics of the decision to employ the bomb. Its focus is more primal. Our lovers move through the city in the evening, at times parting and reuniting. Slowly, she reveals her darkest secret, a forbidden romance with a German soldier after her hometown in France fell under Nazi occupation.
The intensity of her new affair reminds her of that one, and it becomes clear that she is hoping to use it to push away the lasting memories of her heartbreak for good. But that idea also frightens her. “Forgetting so much love is terrifying,” she says.
In its closing scene, the metaphor promised by the film’s title becomes explicit. “Your name is Hiroshima,” she tells the man. His love has allowed her to pave over her loss, erect an inner memorial and build something new in its place even if that, too, does not last. We aren’t meant to linger over the past, the movie seems to say. Regret can be consuming, even poisonous. Better to take a moment to remember and then move on.
But there remains danger in forgetting entirely, the film tells us, both in romance and in history. Once the suffering by the victims of Hiroshima is erased from our collective memories, what is to stop it from happening again? Indeed, the woman says as much.
“A time will come, when we can no longer name what it is that unites us. The name will gradually fade from our memory. Then it will disappear entirely,” she says.
This site is, in fact, dedicated to the idea of remembrance, of marking history and serving in its way as a means of avoiding the horror of forgetting. A film such as Hiroshima mon amour makes the point more poetically than I could ever hope to. It is beautiful. And humbling.
WHERE CAN I WATCH IT: Hiroshima mon amour is available on the Criterion Channel or is rentable.
HEY ISN’T THAT: Emmanuelle Riva, who stars as the unnamed woman, had a rather remarkable career. Fifty-three years after filming Hiroshima mon amour, she was nominated for an Academy Award for her role in Amour (2012). She lost to Jennifer Lawrence. Riva died in 2017.
DUST CLOUDS: Large-scale public protests over nuclear weapons arose in Japan in mid-1950s over what was known as the “Lucky Dragon” incident. A Japanese tuna fishing boat, the Daigo Fukuryū Maru, and its crew was contaminated by the fallout from a U.S. thermonuclear test in the Pacific. The boat’s chief radioman died of radiation exposure and was considered the world’s first victim of the hydrogen bomb. Japan itself was barred from developing nuclear weapons as a result of its terms of surrender at the end of the war.
WHAT ELSE I’M WATCHING: TV: Tokyo Vice (S2, MAX), Route 66 (S1, Prime), Curb Your Enthusiasm (S12, MAX), Vigil (S1, Peacock). Movies: Anatomy of a Fall (Triet, 2023), American Fiction (Jefferson, 2023).
SUGGESTIONS: nucleartheater@gmail.com
LAST ENTRY: Rocky IV (1985)
NEXT ENTRY: Who do you call upon for a delicate prisoner exchange with the Soviets? Tom Hanks, naturally. It’s Bridge of Spies (2015).
Many of immediate images coming out Hiroshima were censored by the U.S. military and kept from American newspapers. Televised news didn’t exist.
Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs that he had told Secretary of War Henry Stimson in 1945 that he "was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon." Some historians have questioned whether Ike was being honest about that exchange or simply trying to burnish his legacy.
The United States has not formally apologized to Japan for dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, it was a point of some contention when President Obama became the first American president to visit Hiroshima in 2016. The U.S. has apologized for the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.