For those who found Oppenheimer less than forthcoming about its subject’s real feelings toward the use of his terrifying invention at the end of World War II, this documentary on the town created by the U.S. government to produce the plutonium used in the device that destroyed Nagasaki may suffice as a thematic antidote, though I also found it to be oddly complementary in tone and style. Richland was established by the U.S. Department of Energy in 1943 to house the men and women who worked at the Hanford nuclear reactor, which was located on a vast Indian reservation on the plains of Washington state. Even after the war was over it was maintained to provide fuel for America’s nuclear arsenal, producing over time some 17 metric tons of weapons grade plutonium. Director Irene Lusztig strikes out on two paths. The first profiles Richland’s distinctive image of itself as a pioneering “home town” of the nuclear age, with a high school sports team called the Bombers (B-52s figure prominently on the uniforms), a town logo that utilizes a mushroom cloud, and a general attitude, at least among its older residents, that very important work goes on here. The second path explores what the town’s industry has wrought, including the largest environmental cleanup project in the world, an epidemic of cancers that most people are reluctant to talk about, and a world reputation as a place that stands for horrible, violent death.

Lusztig cleverly uses a published book of poems by local writer Kathleen Flennikin, read by various residents throughout the film, to comment on the schizophrenic nature of the town, since Flennikin clearly feels warmly about her upbringing while harboring fear and loathing for what the homey facade hides. The authorities who built the fine ranch houses and excellent infrastructure saw it as representing the fulfillment of the American Dream that the nuclear age implied—JFK visited Richland only weeks before he died—and people were grateful even while they were being tested on an almost daily basis, because, in the end, they were all willing guinea pigs. At one point a local woman shows Lusztig a graveyard filled with babies born in the late 40s and early 50s, a testament to how the people who managed the project were learning as they went along. Lusztig also spends time listening to the Native Americans whose land was taken and then poisoned, and which they are now reclaiming inch-by-inch as engineers and technicians go through the back-breaking labor of testing and removing thousands of tons of soil. “Actually, all they can do is move it,” says one elder about the task. Another goes as far as to identify with the Japanese victims of the initial product of Hanford, though he admits that the Japanese “got the worst of it.” 

Richland eschews an onslaught of statistics and hardcore facts for an impressionistic overview of an American mindset that will be perfectly recognizable to viewers who aren’t Americans. Old-timers, including one Black man who worked his whole life at the plant, speak in frankly racist terms about how the victims of the bomb got what they deserved but that it is all now just water under the bridge. (“If not, we’d all be speaking Japanese”) One former school teacher who campaigned to remove the mushroom cloud logo from the town’s iconography and was ostracized for doing so nevertheless vehemently justifies the use of the bomb on camera. As a corrective, Lusztig has a group of multi-ethnic high school students sit in a circle and discuss their own feelings on the subject. They invariably mock the attitudes of their parents, with one girl saying that the only people who discuss the issue of the town’s problematic legacy are those who have no power to do anything about it, but Lusztig does manage to find one voice that cuts through the fog of curated nostalgia. Yukiyo Kawano, a Japanese artist whose family is from Hiroshima and who now lives in Portland, has fabricated an installation in the shape of the atomic bomb made from the hair and kimonos of her grandmother. During a public presentation in Richland she says that “reconciliation is essential,” but is also quick to express her discomfort with the way the town still glorifies its being and purpose, and there is nothing that anyone present can say to refute her. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).

Richland home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 Komsomol Films LLC