A terrible beauty: the nuclear sublime in Philip Ridley's The Reflecting Skin (1991)

This article explores a filmic treatment of the dynamics of an American nuclear sublime - the awe-inspiring effects of atomic explosions. Critiquing the kind of visual abstraction involved in the nuclear sublime, the film links a nuclear aesthetic to commodity fetishism and empiricist methodology, which, in privileging appearances, are essentially reductivist. The film suggests that this kind of abstraction negates critical faculties, aligns the individual with dominant thought and practice detrimental to the self, and turns the subject into its own enemy.