Monochromator deconstructs selected films under a shared monochrome to reconstruct them for social relevance, putting the cinematic, the cultural, the artistic and the political in dialogue. In 1945, the United States was reborn as the empire we experience, through the hard military power of the atomic bomb and the ‘soft’ capitalist power of corporations such as Mattel. Monochromator takes ‘Barbenheimer’— the summer blockbuster phenomenon of 2023 — as the headlining story of ‘Birth of a Nation’. That birth accompanied various deaths. In Refraction, we uproot and replant the phenomenon of Barbenheimer through a trip to Walmart. In Wavelength, we displace Barbie and Oppenheimer. We look at their spatial, existential, and democratic contexts, and imagine if Barbie were a biopic and Oppenheimer were a fantasy. In Interference, we look into the said and the unsaid of Barbenheimer. Table of Contents Refraction 3 Editor’s Letter: Birth of a Nation / Alex Heeyeon Kil Wavelength 20 Weighted Hopes, Harmonic Synthesizer / Jina Lee 27 Invented Places, Faraway Follies / Sharon Lam 41 Now I am Become Death: Creation and Existentialism in the American Imaginary / Forrest Cardamenis 49 American Narcissus / Kenneth Geurts 65 The Postfeminist Delusion / Nicole Froio 83 Manhattan, Mattel, and the Democratic Myths of America / Will DiGravio Interference 97 Birth of a Nation was the Death of Indigenous Peoples / Monochromator Editorial Team 103 Dolls of War, War of Dolls / Daeseon Lee 111 Behind Enemy Lines: On the American Blockbuster / Rafaela Bassili 127 We Cannot Care For Who We Are Unable to Relate to / Rosalia Namsai Engchuan Published by Monochromator Press Based between Berlin and Seoul
