CURA.

Sophie Cundale: Half Life started as a film. I saw it clearly as a feature film, then realized that the film I envisioned would be unmakeable, for various reasons, mainly that the locations are epic - laboratories, geological sites, deserts - and since the protagonist is a vat of nuclear waste…it would probably need a ton of special effects. I just couldn’t conceive of how to make it without it costing millions. So instead I started transcribing the film into a book, which now feels like the right vessel. That was about 18 months ago. Octavia Butler says that persistence is the most important attribute for a writer, so my plan is to just keep with it.

SC: The waste communes with Pearl through time, through excavating particular memories and feelings, regurgitating and twisting them for sensorial effect. In a sense, the waste itself is using a cinematic language to seduce Pearl, through these sequences Pearls’ character is revealed, both to herself, the waste and the reader, who can enter her memories as fully described scenes, a sequence of ‘rosebuds’ that together form a kind of sub-plot. This zooming in and out, as you described, gives us the sheer scale of the waste, its history in relation to the minutiae of Pearl’s life. This cinematographic use of scale, of montage, flashbacks, is because with this project I've been transitioning towards writing from film-making. This feels liberating because the imagination is immediately available, the pen is always ready to shoot, in a sense, you just have to pick it up with intention. There is of course a huge difference between writing a book and making a film, but at the same time, cinema and literature are always going to feed each-other. I’m attracted to authors whose work has been repeatedly translated to film, for e.g. Stephen King, Daphne Du Maurier. Suspense is a huge element in their writing, which as Hitchcock would have it, is the lifeblood of cinema.

SC: This time last year, I went on an elaborate research trip to the sites that were central to the story since it had gotten to a point where my imagination was failing to build enough of a picture. Hanford is where this episode you’re referring to happened. Hanford is where most of the story is set, it was one of the main sites of the Manhattan project, the place where the tons of nuclear waste produced by it is still buried. I’d been searching around on the map before my trip, and bang in the middle of the Hanford site was a place called Pearl. It seemed an obvious sign that I had to go there. So I’m there in Hanford with Pearl in the satnav, and because I'm still not really 100% sure about the sides of the roads, I accidentally drive past a big mirrored box which I thought was just a mirrored box but was actually a security checkpoint. This meant I was driving on the wrong side of the road into a classified nuclear reservation without stopping. After a few minutes I got pulled over by three security guards in SUVs with flashing lights and sirens, who then held me there for well over an hour. When they questioned me I kept pointing to the map, and they were just puzzled, saying, ‘Pearl doesn’t exist, it’s not a place’ they’d never heard of it! It was all quite Goosebumps novel. At first they let me drive off, but very soon after stopped me again because the ‘case’ had been elevated to a higher authority. One was on their phone and I asked their colleague who they were calling. It was the FBI. We then had to wait another half an hour while the FBI rang Interpol. And I just kind of sat in the rental car eating an apple, trying to act calm but quite worried it was all about to go very wrong. They also had guns and my main reflection was of course, that had I not been an english speaking white woman, this could have been very different. My privilege in that moment was searingly clear. This was also significant in a way, more than a Mr Bean-esque anecdote. This character is leading me into places that I shouldn't go. And whether that's in reality places that I'm not allowed, places that are forbidden, or whether that's within myself. That seems to be what Pearl wants.

SC: I interviewed a Nuclear Engineer working in the UK at Sellafield who said, about nuclear waste, ‘it's the most dangerous material on Earth,’ which sounds like a tagline for a b-movie.

SC: Exactly, also in the sense that this attraction becomes Pearl’s hamartia – or what she believes is her salvation. So there's something of a B-movie sensibility about this odd scientist falling in love with this bad substance. B movies often explore bizarre forms of erotica, collisions of taboo and fantasy, horror and arousal, and that too is what Half Life is aiming for. On the subject of B movies, RIP Roger Corman who died today (9th May 2024), he was a pioneer B movie director of insane titles such as Attack of the crab monsters. I’m sure this influenced that iconic scene with Divine and the lobster in Multiple Maniacs (just as much as acid). In terms of taboo, aside from the abject quality of the waste there's something about the timelessness of the material also, because its time span is so beyond us that it has this kind of immortality, which is transgressive because all humans die. Romance narratives are built on star crossed paths – falling in love with an immortal being is a classic theme, typified by vampires, but also Greek mythology – when gods fall in love with humans, it’s the crossing of an essential boundary. Which doesn’t usually end well. In one myth, Eros asks Zeus for her lover Tithonus, who is human, to be made immortal like herself, but she forgets to ask for eternal youth. Tithonus began aging so Eros turned him into a cricket. With the waste, you've got the godlike aspect, not just eternal but untouchable. Humans cannot detect radioactivity with their senses, only on a cellular level where it mutates them. Pearl physically cannot touch it. If she does, she dies. And that's the star crossed-ness, the conundrum. When you're working with high level radioactive waste, you're separated by 6ft of lead glass, using robotic arms, in a hot cell. There's something about this distance that creates an imaginary, this erotic imaginary, or to borrow from Barthes, an image repertoire, that is created in the absence of something desired. In terms of the morality of creating a romantic lead from this dangerous substance and having her fall in love with it, I don’t know… this material is murderous. It's the dregs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That is really what it is. It's incredibly abject, it's the residue of total horror and it's completely rejected now, there's no place for it at all. So much of it is living above ground, or just beneath, in leaking tanks. There's no repository for this stuff. It just sits and decays and rots and leaks. And that's how it’s being treated, the problem is being ignored. Almost like it never happened. In the nuclear museums I visited, the devastation it wrought in Japan is like a footnote to the story of scientific progress and winning the war. The narrative is still that the bomb was a necessity to end the war. To defeat the Nazis. Which isn’t true. So many people argued at the time the bomb would be a war crime, an atrocity, they issued reports and warnings about alternatives to the bomb that would bring about Japan’s surrender. The bomb could not have been dropped without British consent and complicity, it’s a shared legacy. One of the people I interviewed for the book worked at Google DeepMind. And they were saying that The Manhattan Project is, I’m paraphrasing here, but a case study of putting a technology into action without examining the consequences. Oppenheimer touches on this point where during the Manhattan Project, there was a chance that the bomb would ignite all the nitrogen in the atmosphere and kill everything on the planet. And then the ending of the film, which is a lot like the spinning top in inception, Nolan doing his Nolan thing, asks whether the reaction they feared - the one would kill the whole of humanity - has already begun.

SC: Apparently at DeepMind, there's a meeting room named after Richard Feynman, an American theoretical physicist. In the middle of the gathering table is a lamp in the shape of a mushroom cloud. Apparently there’s been discussion as to why it is there, is it distasteful, should it be removed? Is it some kind of Promethean icon, warning, or as my contact put it ‘a simple reminder that when you play with big forces (the atom, intelligence) you might release something catastrophic into the world as casually as you might turn on a light switch,’ which makes me think of God’s ‘let there be light’ line, ‘...could also just be tasteless atomic kitsch.’ One of the main things they’re trying to tackle is the alignment problem, which is how we align the values of AGI (that is, AI systems that are generally smarter than human) with the values of humanity, and whether we would even want that, because the values of humans can be completely inhumane. As we are currently witnessing right now with the genocide happening in Gaza.

SC: Now I’m thinking of Frankenstein's monster. There's this scene where he's outside hiding in a bush, looking through the window of a house at this very sweet family that he's been stalking in a friendly way, helping out by bringing them berries and stuff because he can see the injustices of poverty they are suffering and wants to help. At some point they meet him and completely reject him, banish him as if he is a monster and his heart is broken. It’s not his fault, it’s their biases, it’s their judgment. Which then became his. What happens if it's the opposite, what would it mean to fall in love with Frankenstein’s monster? Why would this happen? In movies and on stage, he is kind of hot, bearing the hallmarks of romantic lead, brooding, misunderstood, scarred, simultaneously super masc and soft vulnerable, broad shoulders, square jaw, sensitive soul… there is potentially something desirable about him, potentially seductive, but going beyond that? They say in writing courses, to have a premise moment, a ‘what if’... So then let’s try, what if you fell in love with nuclear waste? This bad material, the baddest on earth. Why would this happen? This love feels to Pearl like a calling. Something only she was made for. Pearl’s desires do not align with conventional systems of consumption, of relation, she is prone to disgusting habits, self abnegation, she knows her desires are abject. Which brings us round to the eating disorder aspect. She finds having a body very difficult, she wants it gone.

SC: Yes it burdens her. It weighs her down. She conceives of her body as a receptacle, as a vessel that needs to be empty and light, to be filled. This relates to historical fasting practices by holy women from the 13th and 14th century, such as Catherine of Siena, who conceived of their body as channels, where hunger is to give space to receive word, visions, or as Simone Veil said, to leave space in your stomach for God. Pearl feels that what she has to do in order to hear it, in order to commune with this entity, is to be empty and unveiled, flayed, the skin being at its thinnest, so there is less and less of her to separate them, she wants to disappear, to be tiny, on the atomic level, for there to be no boundary between her and the substance. That's one of her strongest impulses. This vocational aspect of what the communion demands of her is making sense of this ‘disorder’ that she's been labeled with ever since she was little. Maybe she just wanted to eat things that she wasn't allowed to eat, and then that was seen by the adult world as fussy eating, and then that fussy eating became anorexia or pica. These are all just labels, essentially, but Pearl’s condition is a kind of combination of a few different things. Bulimia and anorexia might be co-morbid, pica and anorexia might be co-morbid, e.g. people might eat wet paper, you know, in order to fill their stomach so that it's not being filled with food, the binge eating before a purge, one might reach for food from a bin. These holy women, nuns, mystics, beguines, would eat abject things, scabs of people, of the ill and the poor that they were treating or feeding, even lick the pus from their wounds. All to demonstrate their piety, their dedication, their self-sacrifice. The visions these practices brought them were then written down in ‘Vitae’ either by themselves or biographers, usually by their followers in hagiographic form, vivid descriptions of licking Christ's wounds, drinking his milk, drinking his blood. So alongside fasting there is the ingesting of bodily fluids, but not just the life giving ones, also the infected, the diseased, the dangerous… And that kind of, also somehow relates into Pearl’s kind of strange spirituality and sexuality. This tank is leaking, like wounds, breasts, a body, and so it becomes very obvious to Pearl, over the course of their communion, what she has to do to herself, which is to ingest this toxic substance, to allow herself to be consumed by it, become one with it.