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I Live in FearWhat Kurosawa's forgotten film about the bomb captures about post-9/11 America.

By Fred KaplanPosted Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2008, at 12:59 PM ET

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Many movies in the 1950s, American and Japanese, played off fears of the Cold War and the bomb, but for the most part in metaphors—monsters hatched from radiation (Godzilla) or aliens invading from outer space (too many to mention). I Live in Fear confronted the thing itself—and not just the fear of it, but the more common phenomenon: the suppression or evasion of the fear and the complacency that this engenders.

It's remarkable that this film was made, in the only country where atom bombs were dropped on cities, and so soon after the fact. In March 1954, a year before this film was shot, the United States tested a hydrogen bomb on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. The fallout cloud, which spread across an area of 7,000 square miles, drifted over a Japanese fishing boat, called Lucky Dragon No. 7, and covered 23 crewmen with radioactive ash. The next year, the number of American nuclear tests tripled. More than 30 million Japanese citizens signed petitions against testing, to no avail. There actually were reports of people moving to South America, especially Brazil, for the same reason Nakajima wants to go, though how many isn't known.

In the film, most people go about their business as if nothing disastrous had happened, and most real Japanese people seemed content to do the same. In any case, they stayed away from I Live in Fear, which proved to be Kurosawa's first box-office flop since his great success, Rashomon, which had won the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival and introduced the world to Japanese cinema. His studio decided not even to offer this new film for export. It wasn't shown in the West until six years later, at the 1961 Berlin Film Festival, where it drew much excitement. (Berlin was going through its own Cold War nuclear crisis at the time.) The New York Film Festival showed it in 1963, but it didn't receive U.S. theatrical release until 1967 and didn't play in Los Angeles till '71. It remains one of Kurosawa's least-known works.

In the United States, a couple years after I Live in Fear came out in Japan, Norman Mailer wrote an essay called "The White Negro," which began: "Probably we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years." Mailer was celebrating a new type of person, the hipster—the "American existentialist" or "white Negro"—who responded to this fate with rebellion. But the vast majority of people, in America, Japan, and probably everywhere, kept going to work and paying their bills as they always had. Kurosawa captured the "psychic havoc" on that side of the fence—and what happens when one otherwise upstanding citizen snaps out of the spell, stares into the abyss, and feels in his bones there's no way out.

In the weeks and months after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, many of us, especially in New York City, feared to ride the subway, shuddered at strangely shaped bags, conjured mushroom clouds over the Empire State Building, and contemplated moving, if not to Brazil, then at least across the Tappan Zee Bridge, where life might be safer. But at some point, we put the fear aside, ignored it, or suppressed it as the only way to snap back into some semblance of normalcy.

This is the turbulent terrain that an American update of I Live in Fear—a film about our own "psychic havoc"—might cover and somehow dramatize: the line between obsession and obliviousness, between whimpering terror and blithe denial; the undeterminable toll on our "unconscious minds" from embracing either course; and the question of whether it's possible to lead a fully conscious, sane life on some road in between.

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Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and author of Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power, due out in February 2008. He can be reached at .

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