“I shall never forget my first sight of what was the result of the atomic bomb,” Pedro Arrupe, S.J., wrote, years later. At the time he was the superior general of the Society of Jesus, a role he held from 1965 to 1983. But in 1945 he was an ordinary Jesuit in ministry, living in a community just outside of Hiroshima, Japan. After the bombing he and other Jesuits traveled to the ruined city to help, Arrupe using medical training from before his priestly life to tend to the wounded.
It was on the road that he got that “first sight”: a group of young women in their late teens or early 20s, staggering away from the city, covered in blisters and burns. The Jesuits saw worse as the nightmarish day continued: “[W]e soon began to raise pyramids of bodies and pour fuel on them to set them afire.” The memory would never leave him.
This week the world commemorates the 80th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But remembering this singular event is complicated. In the United States, we are hesitant to frame it as a tragedy because that risks tarnishing our heroic self-image: We rue the destructive power of the bombs while simultaneously affirming that our actions were totally justified. It is no less complicated on the global scale: We all recognize that this anniversary marks the birth of a new kind of existential terror, the knowledge that humanity can eradicate itself with the push of a button. But any push for global nuclear disarmament gets branded as naive or dangerous. So, truly, what does it mean to remember the bombings when we seem so dedicated to learning nothing from them?
“Hiroshima Mon Amour” (1958), directed by Alain Resnais and written by Marguerite Duras, is an attempt to reckon with memory and forgetting. A collaborative French and Japanese production, the film was filmed largely in the then-newly rebuilt Hiroshima. The film follows two nameless lovers, a French woman (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese man (Eiji Okada), as they wander the streets of Hiroshima. Like the city itself, both are haunted by the ghosts of the past, traumas that keep them from moving on or growing closer.
In “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” memory is a wound that will not heal. The Woman remembers a forbidden romance with one of the German soldiers who occupied her hometown, and his violent death. The Man was a soldier in the Imperial Japanese Army, and his family died at Hiroshima while he was far away. Some experiences, the film suggests, scar us so permanently that they become a part of us; the atomic bomb scarred the entire world. Just as the film’s protagonists exist eternally in the “after” of their losses, we exist in the “after” of the atomic age. As long as the capacity to eradicate ourselves exists— and as long as we have not developed the wisdom to ensure it never happens—that wound will never heal.
At the same time, the film regards forgetting as inevitable. Love, pain and sorrow all lose their intensity over time. In some ways that’s a mercy: If the memory of pain hurts as much as the pain itself, we couldn’t bear living. Even an event like the bombings becomes smaller in memory. The Woman recalls her response to the news in France: “Amazement at the idea that they had dared, amazement at the idea that they had succeeded. And then too, for us, the beginning of an unknown fear. And then, indifference. And also the fear of indifference.” The Man doesn’t respond directly, but we can see that it’s not so simple for him, for whom the impact was much more personal.
Maybe we, the audience, feel compelled to judge her. But I know I’m not so different. I see pictures and videos of horrors happening elsewhere in the world, and by the time I scroll to the next post in my feed I have already compartmentalized it, set it aside so that I can continue with my day. This isn’t indifference, but with enough repetition it can become a sort of forgetfulness. And forgetting the world’s suffering is a dangerous thing.
So what does “remembering” mean, on the anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? In the film we see a city trying to regain control of its own story: The camera moves through the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, gazes up at signs at a nuclear disarmament protest, lingers on a tour bus with ATOMIC TOURS printed on the side. The line between commemoration and commodification is razor thin. It’s easier to turn a disturbing historical event into a curiosity, a bumper sticker, a day on a calendar, than to reckon with what it really means.
I think about Pedro Arrupe’s phrasing: “I shall never forget…” In some ways, I’m sure, he couldn’t. But I don’t believe he remembered simply to wallow in the horror. I believe he remembered because it spurred him to work for a better world, a world closer to the dream of peace that God has for us all. He knew that true remembering requires action.
“Hiroshima Mon Amour” is not a comforting or easy watch. But this is the sort of memory that should make us uncomfortable, so that we keep that dangerous, urgent memory alive. We can’t move forward unless we reckon with the past. If we want a future, we can’t afford to forget.
“Hiroshima Mon Amour” is streaming on the Criterion Channel.
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