Test

Someone I love has been sick and hospitalized and I’ve been feeling anxious. so I decided to watch a film about nuclear testing (Grey’s Anatomy, my go-to for comfort, seemed like a bad idea for obvious reasons). It’s not the one you’re thinking of. This is a Russian film called Test (Испытание) which I saw years and years ago around the time it came out in 2014, and have had in the back of my mind ever since. It’s set in Semipalatinsk, a remote part of Kazakhstan, where a lot of Soviet nuclear testing was carried out, and it has kind of a fairytale feel to it.

It’s basically about a love triangle between a young girl living with her father on the steppe and two young men who court her. She’s absorbed in her own emotional life, thinking about love all the time. Going about her dreary, isolated day-to-day routine, she smiles like she has a little secret. The film, which has no dialogue, pays a lot of attention to these expressions and to the small details that make up this world. One of the suitors is brooding and needy; he can sense maybe that he has competition. The other is much bolder and more charming. When they first meet, he stares at her like he wants to consume her, like he’s been struck by lightning, the way it feels when you’re blown away by someone. Later, he comes knocking on her window and takes her to see a mural he’s made of her face. An intensely weird form of courtship but one she seems to relish.

You start to forget the film doesn’t have words because it’s so expressive. The girl’s father suffers from some kind of severe PTSD, ostensibly from fighting in the Second World War. He seems to think he’s flying a plane at times. After he’s exposed to fallout rain and develops radiation sickness, the girl is left alone. Her two lovers wrestle it out over her and the mural one comes out on top (through the force of sheer persistence).

Lavrentiy Beria, in charge of the Semipalatinsk testing program, claimed that the steppe was uninhabited to justify carrying out bomb experiments in the region. Over decades, 456 nuclear tests were done there. There’s a documentary (much darker than the film although maybe not more harrowing in its overall effect) about the ongoing disabilities and birth defects caused by nuclear fallout in the area. During the years of testing, local people were evacuated haphazardly and sometimes exposed to the blasts or to their aftereffects. The region is still extremely radioactive and will remain so for centuries. It’s almost inevitable, given this background and the foreshadowing, that a bomb will go off at the end of the film. It happens while the girl is outside playing cat’s cradle with her winning suitor. The earth crumbles and collapses, everything in the path of the explosion is swept away.

The film made a huge impression on me when I first saw it and I’ve thought about it a lot. Both the tender parts of it, the love story, the girl’s small rituals of brushing her hair, scrapbooking with leaves, blowing on her tea, and also the violent ending. It felt like a visual language I hadn’t seen before, a gentle kind of horror. It feels most in the tradition of Soviet cinema, dreamlike, oriented towards the natural world, attentive to the lives of ordinary people and to how the world is mediated through their experiences. I think I found it so striking because most of the films I grew up with and most of the ones produced now in the US are antithetical to this kind of collectivist viewpoint. They tend to be about a hero, about a miraculous happy ending, about how small and insignificant people’s lives are, about the linearity and limits of history.

For The New York Review of Books, Elaine Blair writes about the difficulty of finding visual or verbal language to describe sexual violence. The problem with our available lexicons, to her, is that they are heavily charged with erotic meaning. “The public,” she writes, “is liable to slip into modes of media consumption more appropriate to entertainment than to community news.” It’s challenging using an eroticized vocabulary to describe something that should be unerotic. Blair runs through the responses of filmmakers to this problem, solutions that often end up leaning heavily on flashbacks or on tropes to do the work for them. So Sarah Polley, director of Women Talking “draws on the technical conventions of horror films so that we may be duly horrified by sexual violence…Though with the language of horror comes a rich store of visual references to works whose political commitments are more doubtful.”

There’s a similar problem with showing other kinds of violence, maybe that they’re also eroticized in some less formal way. The conventions of horror films tend to make violence look banal anyway. You have to subvert tropes to shock people. In 1989, a group of psychoanalysts met in Hamburg at a conference called “International Psychoanalysts Against Nuclear Weapons.” One of their organizing members was Hanna Segal, a disciple of Melanie Klein, who was staunchly against nuclear weapons and who described their proliferation as an existential threat to the psyche as much as to life on earth, deforming our processes of community building and our night terrors. “The threat of nuclear annihilation,” she wrote in 2002, looking towards decades of endless war, “profoundly changed the nature of our collective anxieties, turning the normal fear of death and understandable aggression into the terror of actual total annihilation.”

What I think is powerful about Test is how it soothes those anxieties. Although there’s a tense undercurrent to the film and it deals with profound isolation and trauma, it’s not immediately apparent what the stakes are. To a viewer like me, primed on decades of high narrative stakes and romantic arcs that always work out, the ending was shocking and unexpected. It gives perhaps a new sense to annihilation, one that is hard to achieve through faceless suggestions of violence.

The thing is that there’s so much else to worry about. I’ve been worrying about my lease situation, my little romances, my sick relative, whether what I’m wearing can be a day to night outfit. But all of these anxieties, in our age of anxiety, are layered on top of deeper ones: how to live well, how to fully inhabit the self, how to believe in an ongoing future. Fanon believed that disalienation — a state of being he saw as unfettered selfhood not mediated through the socio-psychological prison of caste or class or race or capitalist labor — would become a vehicle for revolutionary politics. To know yourself, according to him, you also had to dismantle society. Fanon’s descriptions of how this will happen tend to be vague, and then to be utopian. It’s another thing there’s no real lexicon for.

Here’s a dress I found at a secondhand clothing store a while ago, probably made by some doom-minded fashion design student who was reading a lot of Hito Steyerl. It was way too big for me or I would have bought it. After all, I’d love it if we made it.