Media and Ambivalence| “Destroyer of Worlds”: Individual Narratives, Mass Atrocity, and (Moral) Ambivalence

Abstract

This article addresses the confluence of two events in the summer of 2023: the release of Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-winning film Oppenheimer and the Biden administration’s decision to sanction the use of cluster munitions in the Ukraine War, via the lens of (moral) ambivalence. This analysis takes seriously the uncanny timing of these developments—one depicting the start of Cold War conflict in Hollywood style, the other marking the real-life continuation of that same conflict—to understand them as a single discursive event that offers a window into the storytelling modes that guide Western political life. I argue that Western narrative modes that privilege the individual as the central node through which we understand mass atrocity allow a vacuous moral ambivalence to emerge as the primary affect toward catastrophe wrought at the hands of U.S.-deployed and -sanctioned weapons. I suggest that a more rigorous, productive, and justice-oriented ambivalence is possible when we take a relational, historically oriented approach to discourses around mass violence.