Richland

“Toxic Land”

Hannah Goodwin (Mount Holyoke College)

Irene Lusztig’s Richland appears, at first, to be simply a close investigation of one town’s troubled relationship to a past of mining the plutonium that was an integral ingredient in the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We see parades celebrating this history as well as events commemorating the lives lost; we hear staunch defenses of the high school’s mushroom cloud mascot as well as voices articulating the need to change it; we hear rosy recollections of happy childhoods and see tears shed over family members who have died of radiation-induced cancer. But as the film unfolds, letting us sit with some of the townspeople as they slowly reveal perhaps a bit more than they meant to, we realize the film is much more than just an exploration of these tensions in one town: it is a quiet indictment of American patriotism and the stories we tell about what it means to be American.

The film is built around a series of interviews with Richland residents, including several that are punctuated with the reading of a poem from Kathleen Flenniken’s collection Plume, which recollects her childhood in Richland and the damage done by radiation. This regular interjection of Flenniken’s voice lends the film a kind of symmetry in keeping with the architecture of a town built “almost overnight” in the 1940s for a new nuclear workforce. These interviews, which are almost all with white residents of Richland, foreground an impulse to preserve the American suburban fantasy of happy families and safe neighborhoods. This seems innocent enough when it comes to the local Alphabet Home Preservation Advocates, a group that, we hear, aims to restore in full historical fidelity the quintessentially suburban “alphabet homes” that housed the almost exclusively white workforce of the 1940s/50s uranium miners. Such preservationism is accompanied by a sense of nostalgic desire on the part of many interviewees to remember their upbringing as idyllic, their families as perfect microcosms of a thriving nation. They recall childhoods in which children played freely outside, fathers worked hard and provided for their families, and neighbors were always friendly to one another. But the film allows disquieting truths to taint these warmly remembered, sepia-toned images of mid-century harmony. A poem read aloud by one interviewee summons an image of children gleefully chasing after a truck as it spews clouds of insecticide, breathing in its sweet fumes. The poem’s reader, who remembers doing this himself, recounts how the children would drench their t-shirts with the insecticide so they could ball them up at night and inhale the scent in their sleep, too. This vision of invisible particles filling innocent young lungs evokes the larger question of toxicity that permeates the film and the environs it depicts. Throughout the film, we see a landscape that has been poisoned with radioactive material, and at various moments we hear about people who have died prematurely, the possibility of contaminated fish in the food supply, and land rendered useless for the human future.

Almost everyone in Richland seems cognizant of the town’s contamination at this level. Whether they eat the local fish, whether their own fathers suffered from cancer, and whether they are willing to criticize the industry that took this environmental toll, they know that the radioactive material in their soil, water, and wildlife is not a good thing. But the film goes further, using this physical contamination to echo an equally sinister but less openly acknowledged toxicity: the poison of an American patriotism that is tainted with insidiously casual racism and that turns a blind eye to the havoc postwar capitalist values have wrought on the environment and on people across the globe. In one scene, we follow a woman who grew up in Richland as she shows us around the neighborhood where she was raised, reminiscing about her “fun” and “sheltered” upbringing. When asked about the racial profile of her neighborhood, she comments that of 440 students in her high school class, only two were black. But she is quick to normalize this—it was not “any different from the 50s anywhere in the US,” and in contrast to a nearby town that was explicitly “closed,” she suggests that whiteness “was just the nature of things” in Richland. Lusztig does not outwardly challenge the woman’s understanding of how planned developments were made to be so white but lets us stew in the flicker of discomfort the woman evinces. Another interview is similarly telling: what begins as one resident explaining his push to change the school’s mascot from the mushroom cloud turns into a rambling soliloquy on Robert E. Lee’s decency and the banality of slavery. At another juncture, Lusztig makes explicit the racial unease of this town’s politics, as she films Japanese artist Yukiyo Kawana telling an all-white audience at an event celebrating reconciliation between Richland and Nagasaki that as the only person of color in the room she is “quite uncomfortable.” Notably eliding Japan’s own colonial, military, and nuclear legacies in pursuit of its critique of US policies and actions, the film includes Kawana’s admonishment that the town has not adequately acknowledged the indigenous tribes whose land has been wrested from them to serve the military actions of a nation they never consented to being a part of. This is one of several junctures at which the film reminds us that this land that has become a symbol of white nostalgia is the homeland of indigenous nations. These tribes’ continued presence on that land is evident in the film’s opening shots and in a frank interview with a local chief and his family, who express an ongoing responsibility to the land that contrasts with the way the nuclear production complex treated it as disposable.

As the narrative of innocent white suburbia gives way, Lusztig thus gestures to a wider critique of American exceptionalism and patriotism that are couched in innocent town pride and quaint, child-friendly rituals like the Atomic Frontier Day parade. Hope lies in the less dogmatically patriotic future evoked by a thoughtful conversation among a diverse group of high schoolers. One young woman, a daughter of immigrants, speaks of her love of America that is not without criticism and shame. As the students look to change what one young man refers to as Richland’s “romanticization of nuking people,” she asks: “Who’s ready to fight for what they believe in?”