“Desert Specters: Haunting Myths of the Spectacular Bomb in Opera and Film”

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023) and Peter Sellars and John Adams’ Doctor Atomic (2005/2018) are spectacles that produce and reproduce narratives of the United States’ position as a global superpower. These spectacular depictions of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the genesis of the US nuclear weapons complex hail specific spectators. My work attends to the different media affordances of each form in order to trace the contours of sublimation—how we aestheticize through spectacle and ultimately reify the ideologies structuring the nuclear complex.