‘Pachinko’ Answers ‘Oppenheimer’ in How Episode 5 Depicts Nagasaki
Even in this age of volume stages and limitless digital tools, there are some things that simply cannot be filmed. Or at least, film can't capture the totality of them. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have to be high on that list, though atomic imagery has informed everything from "Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind" to "Godzilla Minus One." To tell even a part of the story of either bombing is an extreme challenge. Yet that is exactly what Episode 5 of " Pachinko " Season 2 does with the opening of "Chapter 13."
The Apple TV+ series threads a very fine needle, making some stylistic choices and setting some rules for itself in order to have its depiction of Nagasaki stand apart from the rest of the series and yet not feel like some foggy, moralizing history lesson. The most obvious choice is that the 13-minute sequence unfolds in black and white, but there are also other, subtler decisions that make it feel like the grinding gears of a trap as it shuts.
" Pachinko " employs intertitles, for one — as is typical for the series, they run in English, Korean, and Japanese — that keep showing us the date, but it also pairs these with loud, single ticks of a clock as the little vignettes of Yoseb's (Han Jun-woo) work in a Nagasaki arms factory slide closer to August 9, 1945. The camera feels restrained, if not completely static, limited to the same regimented movements as Yoseb when he's under the watchful eyes of the Japanese foremen and army guards at the factory.
Series creator and showrunner Soo Hugh has always looked for ways to make the small choices or dreams deferred inside the Baek family feel as monumental as time itself; again and again, the show combines a psychological focus on character with elegant visual metaphors that amplify their feelings, losses, and loves to the audience.
Placing the camera on the other side of a burning furnace, so that we can already see flames licking at the factory workers days before it will all be obliterated? That's a very "Pachinko" way of letting an image be about more than just a single moment in time. So too, in a quieter fashion, does the way the montage of Yoseb's week keep returning to the factory smokestack, as stark as a tombstone against the sky. Both hit the audience like a sledgehammer.
But Hugh told IndieWire on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast that crafting that long prelude really took a lot of experimentation and that there's no real, "right" way to solve the problem of depicting the devastation wrought by America's bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She was very interested, naturally, in Christopher Nolan's approach in " Oppenheimer " — suggesting the physical horror of the bombs' effects on a crowd of elated Los Alamos workers, at one point, but keeping the focus firmly on Oppenheimer's (Cillian Murphy) ability to see the horror and wonder of physics at work in the world.
"Nolan's such an artist. I'd be very interested in talking to him about how he decided to depict the atomic bombing — of course, he depicted the tests, not the bombing itself. But he must have struggled with the same question of, 'How do you really, truly visualize, oralize, this kind of... just... how do you do it?'" Hugh said.
It took "Pachinko" more than one try to figure out how the series would do it. Initially, there was a plan for the bulk of Episode 5 to follow Yoseb in Nagasaki, and then, after the bombing, Hansu (Lee Min-ho) would arrive in the wreckage to look for and miraculously rescue him.
"It felt too similar to Episode 7 in Season 1," Hugh said. That episode depicts the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 and is one long, horrifyingly unbroken view of that natural disaster from Hansu's perspective. In diving too far into the lead-up of the bombing of Nagasaki, even though it all provided context and wrenching tragedy for Yoseb, mirrored the structure of the earlier episode and so ran the risk of becoming a trend — a "Pachinko" disaster episode, which could have potentially diminished the importance of both historical events within the series.
"Once we realized the pacing of this feels like we're just redoing ourselves, we shortened everything to that long prelude," Hugh said. But "Pachinko" wasn't done sharpening the prelude just in the first few cuts of the edit, either. The episode was shot entirely in color — and crucially returns to color before the title card of the series (no dance-off opening credits in Episode 5, for obvious reasons) so that we're eased back into the series' normal visual style. It only switched to black and white late.
"We didn't make the decision to go black and white until we were in the color grading suite, at the very end. We edited it all in color," Hugh said. "With [colorist] Joe Gawler, who's just amazing and he had just done a beautiful black and white film, 'El Conde,' I was like, 'Let's try it. Let's just take it out. Let's see what the black and white looks like.' And it was really powerful."
Powerful is a good thing to strive for in a series like "Pachinko" or a film like "Oppenheimer," both of which have serious themes they want to explore but don't necessarily want to be caught being didactic — in "Pachinko's" case about both the atomic bombings and the American firebombing of Japan, the devastation of which has been represented in all sorts of films (most recently in the opening of "The Boy and the Heron") but isn't widely known.
"The question is, how do you show it without recreating this enormous [thing], which we didn't have the resources to do. Do you cut away and add a chyron? Like, we played with that in post. Do you stop and add a chyron saying, 'On this night, thousands of people died.' And yet when we did that, it felt like we were getting a history lesson," Hugh said. "I wish we could figure out a way to really show the audience just how devastating it was."
