'A House Of Dynamite' is Obama-Era Fan Fiction Disguised as a Cautionary Tale
What if someone launched a nuclear missile at the United States? But not the current United States, some fairytale technocrat United States in which everyone was competent?
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A House of Dynamite feels sort of like an Aaron Sorkin remake of that Ice Cube War of the Worlds adaptation that takes place entirely inside of Ice Cube’s computer. Only rather than being trapped inside a computer, A House of Dynamite is trapped entirely inside a conference call. It’s a movie supposedly about the threat of nuclear war that is actually about important people talking on phones. Allegedly, it’s directed by Kathryn Bigelow, though the Kathryn Bigelow who directed Point Break and The Hurt Locker has never felt further away. Perhaps A House of Dynamite is actually a different kind of cautionary tale: one that warns that getting too close to the military-industrial complex (like working hand-in-glove with the CIA on Zero Dark Thirty, say) will rot your brain.
A House of Dynamite, hilariously, even uses a Rashomon-type structure, where it reverses in time and retells the same story over again, from the perspective of different people on the conference call. What are the calls about? Someone has launched a nuclear missile at the United States. The title, in fact, is a reference to what it’s like to live with the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation. We get to relive the same 18 minutes, between launch and impact, over again three times, as Very Important People face the decision whether to retaliate, to wait and see; to warn their loved ones or let them carry on as normal for as long as possible.
“I listened to this podcast,” the fictional US president played by Idris Elba says, “and the guy said, ‘It’s like we all built a house filled with dynamite.’ Making all these bombs and all these plans, and the walls are just ready to blow. But we kept on living in it.”
Yes, the title for this movie, written by former Today Show producer and Zero Day writer Noah Oppenheim, is sourced to a fictional podcast, listened to by the fictional president (the Pod Save Jons must be furious at the snub, since this was obviously the podcast he was listening to), as a way to describe what it’s like living with “all these bombs and all these plans.” (I keep hearing it in Dr. Dre’s voice, rapping “all these bombs and all these plans/and somebody here gone FUCK…”)
It would be hard to argue that a movie about how humanity has produced enough weaponry to destroy the Earth and still just sort of has it all lying around—has even made contingency plans for someone using it—would ever be irrelevant. And yet this one is filtered through so many layers of media-brained artifice that it’s hard to take any of it seriously. Can something be a cautionary tale and a naive fantasy simultaneously?
In one aspect, A House of Dynamite purports to ask “what would happen if someone actually launched one of the many nuclear ballistic missiles the world has lying around at the US?” But really it asks, “what would happen if someone launched a nuclear missile at the fictional, idealized version of the US that exists only inside the minds of the Professional Managerial Class’ most stubborn dead enders?”
Yes, Idris Elba plays “POTUS,” who is only ever referred to as “POTUS.” It is a hallmark of the authority-worshiping Aaron Sorkin house style to include as many arcane acronyms and cutesy nicknames as possible, so that you understand that the characters are extremely important and yet you should also want to be their friend. We don’t actually see “POTUS” until the third retelling of the nuclear tick tock, but we know it’s Idris Elba, because we’ve already heard his voice on the conference call in the first two (and who else sounds like Idris Elba, really?). It combines to create a sort of Chekhov’s Elba effect, as if the movie’s expectation is that we’ll react to finally seeing him the way Will Ferrell in Elf reacts when he hears Santa is coming to the department store.
What would it be like for the president to hear that the US is under nuclear attack? In A House of Dynamite, POTUS Elba hears the news during a public appearance at Angel Reese’s basketball camp, where he’s bantering with the WNBA star and shooting Js in a suit and tie to the delight of the assembled schoolchildren (this after having spent the previous five minutes of screen time answering “how’s your jump shot?” from various functionaries). Eventually an underling comes to whisper in POTUS’s ear, spoiling all the fun, and a mob of Secret Service guys abruptly hustles POTUS out of the arena.
It’s worth asking, what is the fantastical element here? It is not, actually, the president of the United States learning that his country is under attack during a pubic photo op with schoolchildren. We know what that looks like. It looks like George W. Bush getting a deer-in-the-headlights look on his face and then continuing to read “The Pet Goat” to second graders for seven more minutes. We constantly make memes about it. Further, it’s not super hard to figure out which president Noah Oppenheim and Kathryn Bigelow were imagining when they conceive of the president as a suave, 40-something black guy who’s great at working the crowd and worried about his jumper. And so A House of Dynamite’s central narrative conceit becomes all too clear: it’s a movie that asks “what if the United States was under nuclear attack while an even cooler version of Obama was president?”
Other characters include Rebecca Ferguson, as Captain Olivia Walker, who works in the White House Situation room. She eventually finagles a way to get her cell phone out of the Faraday Box where she keeps it while on duty so that she can warn her husband and child (WhiHoSitRoom professionals have families too!). Not every family is happy, of course, as represented by Major Daniel Gonzalez of the 59th MDB (Missile Defense Battalion) who is just starting his shift after a phone fight with his wife when he’s called upon to fire the GBIs (Ground Based Interceptors). Of course, every story like this needs an Evil Military Guy (STRATCOM General Anthony Brady, played by Tracy Letts) urging massive retaliation, and a Good Military Guy (Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington, played by Gabriel Basso) doing his darnedest to convince the president that, actually, sir, it’s maybe not such a good idea to escalate this into a full-scale nuclear war. This binder full of data I have even proves what a bad idea it is!
“Binder Full of Data” might actually have been a more accurate title, as it covers most of the action in A House of Dynamite. Does a character having a family who they call on the phone or stare lovingly at in framed desk photographs count as character development? A House of Dynamite sure thinks so. The most pressing dilemma comes for SecDef Reid Baker, who has to figure out how and whether to warn his estranged adult daughter, who is living in Chicago, the very city they believe the missile is set to strike. Eventually Baker cracks under the pressure. “A guy who cracks under pressure” is presumably why they cast the great Jarred Harris as Baker. Harris is one of our finest actors but possibly one of the world’s least convincing Americans. You can tell at a glance that that man’s lips have never touched chicken-fried steak; he reads “British” at 500 paces.
There is, perhaps, something worth exploring in the absurdity that is humanity keeping around all these destructive weapons that exist only to destroy us; to making all these elaborate contingency and counter-contingency plans about what to do if someone uses one, instead of making the only plan that would matter: how to get rid of them, forever. It is, I suppose, somewhat like “living in a house made of dynamite.” Only, I’m not sure an idealized fictional president quoting an idealist fictional lib podcaster is the best way to deliver that information.
The fairytale of functioning institutions run by hyper-competent technocrats who love their families and give each other cute nicknames cuts directly against the potential realities of mutually-assured destruction. In fact, isn’t one of the main barriers to our own self-preservation the fact that we keep assuming the adults are in charge? Give us the version of this movie in which the conference call is between the collection of crypto lackies, Nepo Baby grifters, and racist podcasters that currently run the government. Then we might really be scared. (Also, a lazy-eyed podcast host who calls himself “Ka$h” and gives his pals collectible skull tokens with his favorite comic book character on them as the director of the FBI is far funnier and more entertaining than these fictional Valedictorians Wearing Suits. As always, the Dem establishment simply lacks the imagination).
It’s fitting that the reaction to A House of Dynamite, Netflix’s number one most-watched movie in the US as of this writing, has largely come down to a referendum on whether it has a good ending. A movie that takes place entirely between the launch and impact of an ICBM, in which the potential of the attack is never realized and the adversary never named, is, of course, defensible on the grounds of art. Does it matter who is attacking us, and do we really need to see the mushroom cloud, if the focus of the story is on how the people in charge might handle it? I can see the case for saying “no,” but when the movie in question is otherwise such a comic book fairytale of elite institutions and powerful cool guys written by a former access journalist, it absolutely feels like dereliction of duty. Art can get away with subverting audience expectations. This is fan-fiction, put your name on it.
