Trivializing the True Peril

In “A Fearful Sum Recalculated” (Perspective, June 23), Kenneth Turan speculates that perhaps we went to see “The Sum of All Fears” in order to educate ourselves emotionally about what would happen in the event of a nuclear strike at home. He hopes we will learn something from watching the realistic depiction of the nuking of Baltimore. I sense that Turan wanted to say something more critical of the film but backed off for some undisclosed reason. Let me say it for him.

The destruction of Baltimore is used as a mere plot device and an excuse to move on to a much bigger ticking clock in the movie’s second hour. The filmmakers give us a story in which a large American city is nuked, then they proceed to make us feel as though the loss is somehow acceptable because the destruction of the entire world is gonna be a lot worse, if Ben Affleck doesn’t get there first to stop it. (Please, don’t make me laugh.)

These filmmakers have trivialized our worst fears by making the blast into little more than a scary special effect with few real consequences on screen. Yes, the blast is convincing, but we don’t even pause with the characters to mourn the tragedy. Instead we are whisked onward to deal with the unfolding international crisis. It’s an unhealthy, potentially dangerous thing to show an audience, and it only serves to blunt our real emotional responses and make us think unconsciously that a nuclear blast would be something we could recover from. We could, but it would be awful. They don’t tell us that in this movie.

Hollywood continues to serve up mass destruction on a glossy, half-baked platter dripping with computer-generated imagery, and calls it realism. It isn’t. We continue to pay 10 bucks, and become more and more desensitized to real violence and to the dangerous world we live in. Someone speak up. Kenneth Turan isn’t going to.

BILL KARYDES

Los Angeles

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What J. Robert Oppenheimer mournfully recalled while watching the blast at Trinity Site in 1945 was actually the traditional translation from the Bhagavad-Gita: “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.”

DAVID R. GINSBURG

Santa Monica