Glacial Errata, No. 29

One

“There NEVER was a woman like Gilda.”

There is an emptiness in the story of Gilda and its afterlife that I cannot quite shake. Initially, Margarita Carmen Cansino was only able to get bit roles in Hollywood, usually cast as an exotic foreigner, but things changed once she adopted her mother’s maiden name to appear more “All American.” As Rita Hayworth, she became a star, appearing alongside Fred Astaire in You’ll Never Get Rich and Gene Kelly in Cover Girl. But it was her role in Gilda that cemented her image as an international icon.

Like any good noir, Gilda concerns itself with surfaces—the bright, brittle appearances of the world which are revealed to be utterly untrustworthy. The problem that characters in a noir like Gilda eventually understand is that the visible world is false, and yet they cannot—despite their flailing attempts—ever discover a truer, more solid ground underneath it. Attempting to get at the truth of the matter behind a world of surfaces only opens up a vertiginous abyss that swallows everything.

“Men go to bed with Gilda, but wake up with me,” Hayworth later quipped, rather bitterly.

Two

On July 1, 1946, the fourth atomic detonation (after Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki) took place in the Bikini Atoll, as part of Operation Crossroads. Able was a 23 kiloton device, dropped from the plane Dave’s Dream and detonated 520 feet over a dummy fleet at 9:00 in the morning. Five ships were sunk in the test. (Having been detonated above ground, it made only a shallow crater below the water—5 meters deep. The second shot—Baker—made a deeper crater of 30 meters a few weeks later.)

When Rita Hayworth learned that the bomb had been nicknamed after her as a tribute to her “bombshell status,” she was horrified. As her then-husband Orson Welles later recalled, “Rita used to fly into terrible rages all the time, but the angriest was when she found out that they'd put her on the atom bomb. Rita almost went insane, she was so angry.... She wanted to go to Washington to hold a press conference, but Harry Cohn wouldn't let her because it would be unpatriotic.”

Weirdly, the bomb nicknamed Gilda missed its target, for reasons that were never adequately explained. The bomb detonated about 700 meters off course from its intended location, which led to a subsequent investigation. Various explanations were offered: crew error, ballistics problems for a still relatively new type of weapon, atmospheric conditions. But none were ever deemed conclusive and the mystery remained unsolved.

Three

In Stephen King’s novel, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, a prison break is effected by use of a poster of Rita Hayworth. Behind her image, a hole is slowly chiseled out of the wall, a slow-forming black abyss that’s literally papered over. And yet it signifies freedom. Eventually, the prisoner Andy Dufresne will escape through this hole—and never look back.

Four

In David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, a nameless woman (Laura Elena Harring) survives a horrific car crash, but is suffering from amnesia and has no memory of her own name. When Naomi Watts’ Betty Elms discovers her and asks her name, Harring’s amnesiac, realizing that even her identity has become a black hole of unknowing, sees a poster of Gilda, and gives her name as “Rita.”

Five

But perhaps at this point I want to say less, rather than more. It’s clear there’s a divide between Hayworth the woman and the image of Gilda that she created onscreen, an image that took on a life of its own, both to her credit and (at times) her horror.

But I’m not a Hayworth biographer, and I don’t want to risk over-simplifying this story into something that makes her into a tragic figure without agency. Nor do I want to create some line of thought that would turn an all-too-human person into some kind of unknowable cypher. Not everything is abyss.

Instead I want to end with this passage from Cal Flynn’s Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape:

…in 2008, when an international team of researchers returned to [Bikini Atoll] to inspect the lagoon, they found to their surprise that a thriving underwater ecosystem had formed in the blast crater over the intervening decades. It looked, as one coral scientist commented in wonder, “absolutely pristine.” While above water the island remained eerily abandoned—uninhabited except for the caretakers of a tiny tourist initiative—and its groundwater and coconuts unfit for human consumption, the lagoon below was a whirl of kaleidoscopic life. Less so than before—twenty-eight species of coral were still missing—but, nevertheless, now as one of the most impressive reefs on the planet, where corals grew as huge rocky cushions the size of cars, or as dendroids twenty-six feet tall, with slender branching fingers.

A team from Stanford University dived the crater again in 2017 and found it was even more densely embroidered with life. Hundreds of schools of fish—tuna, reef sharks, snappers—flashed through limpid waters. It was, reflected lead Professor Stephen Palumbo, “visually and emotionally stunning.” In a strange way, the new reef had been protected by the atoll’s traumatic history—as a direct result of the lack of human disturbance, the fish populations were even bigger, the sharks more abundant, and the coral more impressive.