Panic reigns in A House of Dynamite, the new Netflix thriller from The Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow. Or it ought to, at least. The film is set in the minutes before a nuclear missile of uncertain origin strikes the mainland US. It’s a terrifying proposition, and through the splintered perspectives of the characters – security officials, military experts, and even the US president himself – we see just how quickly a nation can be rattled to its core. In the face of this calamity, though, we are shown a world of pervasive competence, of intellectual seriousness: the complex infrastructure developed to deal with a crisis exactly like this. For all the good it does them, the adults, as they say, are in charge.
Yet there’s a glaring hole at the centre of A House of Dynamite. Bigelow’s movie is ostensibly fixated on a sort of logistical hyperrealism – a granular play-by-play of a somewhat plausible (depending on who you ask) nuclear scenario. And yet it all ends up being a completely absurd fiction. Told in triptych, the film re-examines the same chunk of time – the half-hour or so when the missile is in flight – from multiple perspectives, the last focusing principally on that of the president, played by Idris Elba. Referred to only by his job title, Elba’s character is hardly a movie Potus for the ages: he’s conflicted and overwhelmed by the situation, a fallible but mostly rational leader. And he’s noteworthy because of just how little he resembles his real-world counterpart. Because the US doesn’t have Idris Elba as president. They have Donald Trump.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that A House of Dynamite should have been set under a Trump presidency. It’s hard to imagine the brash, petulant and – let’s face it – grimly comical figure of Trump existing within Bigelow’s earnest reality. That scenario would lend itself more to satire than political intrigue. (It’s telling that critics have drawn parallels between A House of Dynamite and Stanley Kubrick’s iconic satire Dr Strangelove – that film, made and set amid escalating Cold War nuclear tensions, was initially conceived as a straight-faced thriller, only for Kubrick to conclude while writing it that the only appropriate tone was farce.) And yet, this is our reality: if there were a missile launched at the US, it would be the former Apprentice star who would be tasked with the questions of retaliation.
From a storytelling standpoint, it’s completely understandable why Bigelow, or the film’s writer, Noah Oppenheim, would balk at the inclusion of even a passingly analogous Trump-like character. (President Ronald Rump, played by, oh, let’s say… Jim Belushi?) Trump is a man not just known for his combative and juvenile personal comportment, but also his impulsivity; not only would the tone of the film have to conform to his personality, but the narrative, too. But what is the alternative? In situating itself within this cleaned-up, Trump-less reality, A House of Dynamite fundamentally fails in its attempt at realism. The whole thing feels stuck in a political moment that no longer materially exists. It feels, in other words, very Obama-era. (Though it should be said that Elba’s president is pointedly not an Obama stand-in, in characterisation or framing.)
A generous reading might suggest that this is the whole point. A House of Dynamite is a fiction, and its deviations from reality only serve to heighten the film’s messages about nuclear peril. It is the best case scenario for a worst case scenario. “If this is the sort of mess that would happen with fully competent, cogent people in every level of command, what on earth would happen without them?” But there’s limited value in such a thought experiment. In the end, it serves only to euphemise the surreal political reality of modern America – even if the conclusion it reaches is one of fatalistic defeat.
There is a reason that Dr Strangelove remains a classic to this day, long after the Cold War became a lukewarm memory. And it’s the same reason that A House of Dynamite feels out of date even now, less than a week after coming out. Even at the best of times, there is no level-headed, sane response to the idea of nuclear armageddon: the idea that millions, or billions, of lives are just a few button-pushes away from oblivion is for most of us too bewildering to even contemplate. But Trump, a boorish, preposterous ex-reality TV star, has brought the absurdities of modern politics to the surface, and made them impossible to ignore. He is the man behind a nuclear arsenal. That is the world we live in. A House of Dynamite lives somewhere else entirely.
‘A House of Dynamite’ is available to stream on Netflix
