In the wake of the Second World War, the fear of sudden annihilation from nuclear weapons left its mark on new routines of domestic quasi-military preparedness and on art, both in subject and in tone, as in Robert Aldrich’s film noir “Kiss Me Deadly,” from 1955 (which I discuss in this clip). The potentially catastrophic implications of the drama’s MacGuffin (which, for once, is no random object of pursuit but a matter of grave import) are matched by the movie’s hectic tone. It’s a tone that’s found throughout the world of postwar art and plays a special role in visual art. Abstraction arises when artists are confronted with a world that defies representation. The cosmic vastness, shrieking explosiveness, and radiant stillness of Abstract Expressionism—all works of the immediate postwar era—suggest any number of stages of apocalypse, whether total destruction, violent rebirth, or a return to the silence of infinite spaces. In music, the works of Stockhausen and Boulez, Babbitt and Xenakis suggest the Pollock side of the equation; John Cage suggests the Rothko term. In movies, the turn to melodramatic extremes inflected even the keen visual rationalism of Roberto Rossellini. In Hollywood, paroxysms of frenzy were virtually everywhere, in comedies and in musicals as in violent dramas, and Aldrich was their unchallenged master.
DVD of the Week: “Kiss Me Deadly”
