Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is a Crime Against Humanity
Movies are back.
This, it seems, is what everyone is taking away from the unprecedented Barbenheimer phenomenon, which out of nowhere rocketed ticket sales from post-pandemic lows back to blockbuster levels. Two bizarre and bizarrely ill-matched movies released on the same weekend that somehow, instead of undercutting each other, ended up boosting each other, entirely through the power of Internet memes.
What a strange time to be alive.
There is, really, nothing quite like modern Internet culture, a culture where incongruity and bizarreness and the power of a single ephemeral joke are valued, literally, above all else--and are powerful enough to get millions of Americans out of their homes and into movie theaters. Chesterton in the 1910s said that there had never been a power like the modern press: and he was right. But he hadn't seen nothing yet.
This is supposed to be an essay about the movie Oppenheimer, but discussing Internet memes is not a bad place to start. For what makes Oppenheimer so horrifying, at least for me, is the degree to which it associates and intertwines and simply and precisely treats as the same thing the power of mass media and the power of mass destruction.
Let me start over. I saw the movie Oppenheimer recently, and hated it as I have never hated any work of art produced by human persons before. It is the only film I have ever watched that made me absolutely livid with rage and sick to my stomach and unable to speak coherently for hours thereafter. I am still mad about it.
This is not precisely because it is a bad movie. In matter of fact, it is a clumsily made movie in many obvious repects--but rehearsing these would be largely besides the point. This is very much a film that does what it sets out to do, that makes the point it wants to make, that conveys what it wants to convey, to such a degree as to almost qualify as a genuine revelation.
That being said, what it aims at, what it reveals, what it piously and intently worships, is, in my humble opinion, evil--and not just any evil, but precisely the evil of our time and place and society, the underlying belief and devotion and preoccupation behind all the most central and mainstream trends and all the most wasting moral and intellectual and social and political diseases of the world since 1945. And the movie loves this, and wants us to love it, too. And that is why I hate the movie.
The Great Myth
Let me start over.
(I fear that this essay will end up being unusually incoherent. I am in general not someone prone to anger, to a very unusual and often somewhat pathological degree. I am angry at this movie, though, and it makes it harder to arrange my thoughts.)
Somewhere in the second hour of Oppenheimer, I became overwhelmed by a feeling of what can only be described as deja vu, as if I were experiencing something I had experienced, not just once, but a thousand times before, from my earliest childhood. All at once, the story unfolding onscreen in front of me took on an uncanny, dreamlike familiarity. By the end of the hour, I was all but convinced not only that I had seen this story before, but that it was, in fact, every single modern American televisual story I have ever seen. It was Star Trek--but also Star Wars. It was Saving Private Ryan--but also The Mighty Ducks, Big Bang Theory, James Bond, The Godfather, Vertigo, Psycho, The Searchers, Iron Man... Perhaps most obviously, it was precisely and literally Avengers: Endgame, also a film in which a group of plucky nerd stereotypes led by an aesthetically-dominating sociopath spend hours standing around brightly-lit rooms making snappy technobabble talk as dramatic music plays until they successfully pull together to invent the Ultimate Weapon and use it without a second thought to murder their enemies. Adding to the sense of uncanniness, both movies also star Robert Downey, Jr.
On a more mundane level, watching Oppenheimer for the first time was a bit like reading the Lord of the Rings after watching the films, or reading The Iliad after seeing Troy, or seeing a WW2 submarine film after seeing a hundred sci-fi imitations, or, indeed, seeing any truly famous work of American cinema after seeing it referenced and homaged in numerous other movies and television shows. Ah, you think to yourself wisely, so this is the original event, the narrative, the scene, the moment, which I have seen nodded to and adapted and replicated again and again and again, for as long as I can remember.
Yet the experience of watching Oppenheimer finally took me, disturbed and unnerved and helpless like a man in a dream or a vision, beyond the realm of film and media altogether. As Cillian Murphy wandered in a suit with a cigarette in hand around a pasteboard film-set Western town, I began to wonder: was this not the original, not merely for American art, but for America itself? Surely America could not possibly have existed before Oppenheimer and the War and the Bomb? Perhaps there were people in the continental United States, perhaps there was even a government--but without this story, these values, they could not be the same thing at all.
This was not, I think, a random impression, but one which the film itself aims to produce. At its best, as well as its worst, Oppenheimer proudly, insistently, obsessively tells you: this is it: the Ur-story, the overriding narrative, the origin story, of American cultural and political and scientific power. This is the founding myth of the American Empire.
Intellectual Pornography
Of course, the reality of the film Oppenheimer is more complex.
After all, despite Nolan's pretensions, Oppenheimer is in fact a movie made in 2023, shamelessly ripping off of other films rather than being ripped off by them, distorting the story it tells rather than telling it truthfully.
It is also a film that on the most straightforward filmic level is almost hilariously nonsensical and uninteresting. Put most simply, this is a film roughly 90% of whose total running time consists of scenes of white men standing or sitting around boardrooms and meeting rooms and hotel rooms and Senate hearing rooms talking stylized technobabble nonsense as pounding, dramatic, epic music plays.
Four or five times during this film I laughed out loud in utter disbelief at the bizarre, parodic effect of this basic juxtaposition. Somewhere around the film's third hour, I became overwhelmed by a feeling of incredulity and something approaching fear that this utterly stilted, inert, incongruous bowl of lukewarm oatmeal was supposed to be blockbuster entertainment for the masses, and in my panic turned around in my seat to scan the packed theater around me, searching desperately for...I don't even know, some spark of sanity? Some sign that I was not alone in recognizing the silliness and lack of interest of what we were all watching? Some sign that the normal, ordinary people of the world were still normal and ordinary and not merely the power-obsessed snobbish self-deceiving perverted wannabe pseudo-intellectuals the film was obviously made for, and thus were rightfully bored out of their skulls? Were the masses of America really enjoying the 400th meeting scene in which men in suits spoke slowly and impassively as Cillian Murphy stared at the screen in riveting close-up and failed to emote? Did they even feel compelled to pretend to enjoy this 400th meeting scene? If they did, I felt in some inchoate way from the very depths of my shattered psyche, then truly all was lost, and there was no hope for America.
It would perhaps be easiest to describe the ways this film is dishonest and absurd by sketching its rough structure. Christopher Nolan, in his infinite wisdom, chose to divide his movie about the Atom Bomb and the End of the World as Portrayed Through Its Mostly Negligible Emotional and Career Effects on Smart People into rough thirds. The first third consists of a non-biographical biographical sketch of Robert Oppenheimer's life in academia up to the Manhattan Project. The second third, and by far the best part of the film, consists of the Manhattan Project itself. The last third consists of a series of unbroken meetings and Senate hearings portraying in loving detail the process by which Robert Oppenheimer was crucified by being forced to answer questions from suited men in meetings and then losing his security clearance.
The first third can best be classified as "intellectual pornography." This is a not uncommon American narrative style, but I don't know of any film that has taken it so far, with such effect. This is a biographical film that totally ignores its subject's entire childhood and young adulthood and parents and background and formative relationships as obviously unimportant compared to endless and endlessly repeated scenes of him writing on chalkboards and staring off into space. Within the first half-hour, watching the second or third montage in which an impassive Cillian Murphy stares vaguely past the camera into the distance, thinking, interspersed with shots of him writing on chalkboards and nonsensical images supposed to represent "what thinking about physics feels like," as epic music played, I laughed out loud in utter incredulity. At this point, I was certainly enjoying the film, if only, as we used to say in the 2000s, ironically. Half-an-hour later, however, after about the fifteenth consecutive scene of smart men engaging in technobabble, my ironic appetite was well and truly sated and enjoyment had turned to nausea.
Put simply, the first hour of Oppenheimer is perhaps the most extreme instantiation I have ever encountered of the American symbolic media mode of intelligence as a form of aesthetic and stylistic power. This genre has also been known, not without reason, as "what stupid people think smart people are like." This latter description, while amusing, is not precisely correct. The principal divide, rather, between the actual reality of intelligent discussion and debate, and its filmic/aesthetic facsimile, comes in the focus or end of the discourse. Put simply, most intelligent people, and an even larger proportion of unintelligent people, tend in their intellectual engagement to be primarily focused not on the visual aesthetics or verbal styles they exhibit as they talk about, say, quantum physics or Herodotus or the rules of Settlers of Cataan, but rather on the content of their discourses, or in other words what the hell they're talking about. The American symbolic mode of "intelligence," however, is totally uninterested in the content of these discourses, but only in the stylistic and aesthetic effects produced by people talking about them. Put another way, Oppenheimer largely consists of what the writers of Star Trek referred to as "technobabble": meaningless, deliberately arcane jargon meant to give the viewer a satisfying aesthetic sense of the intelligence and competence and hence coolness of the characters while avoiding any recognizable content like the plague.
I have called this mode "intellectual pornography," and this is not so much an insult as the most precise and philosophical description possible. After all, the evil of pornography consists precisely in taking the visual and sensual means of sexual intercourse and union between persons and elevating them to an aesthetic/stylistic thing-in-itself that is then used or exploited for immediate power in such a way as to contradict sexuality's actual personal content and ends. What pornography does for the human faculty of sexuality, Oppenheimer and art like it does for the human faculty of reason.
Hence, Oppenheimer shows a profound (and understandable) disinterest in the content of physics, which is conveyed at a level four or five steps below your average Youtube video explaining quantum physics with MSpaint drawings. It is, however, profoundly interested, not to say obsessed, not to say delighted, not to say aroused, by the aesthetic and stylistic effect of smart people talking about smart things. The first third of this film is dedicated largely to the proposition that these smart things that smart people talk about are in fact deeply sexy and deeply powerful, and for that reason worthy of our rapt attention and devotion.
This thesis of the film is put most clearly, if also most absurdly, in the film's treatment of women. In the film's first sex scene, a topless Florence Pugh in the act of having sex with Cillian Murphy pauses to walk over to a bookshelf and name-drop Freud and Jung in a way that shows absolutely no awareness and gives no hint who these people are; she then abruptly and fittingly pulls a book off the bookshelf at random and asks her paramour silkily what language it is in. When he tells her it is Sanskrit (another term that conveys nothing to the audience) and explains that it is a passage where Vishnu (who?) reveals his divinity (or something?), she responds with a smitten "you can read this?" Apparently deeply aroused by Cillian Murphy's claimed ability to read a dead language, she proceeds to open the book and hold it over her bare chest as she advances towards him and demands that he translate a sentence for her right now. As he does so, she collapses on top of him and they begin having sex again.
I quite literally could not believe my eyes watching this scene, which has to rate among the most bizarre and least erotic ever put to film. When, in almost the next scene, Oppenheimer meets his future wife, played by Emily Blunt, and she immediately demands, doe-eyed, that he "explain quantum physics to her," after which (and a "seductive" explanation at roughly a fifth grade level) she immediately informs him that she will leave her husband for him, I nearly lost my mind in the theater.
This is not, I rush to assure my audience, in fact how women, or indeed any normal human being, relates to obscure technical topics and those who know about them. Topless women do not in fact throw themselves at you, demanding that you translate Sanskrit for them, and it would be an error to think that learning Sanskrit will help you find them; nor do women commonly approach you demanding that you explain quantum physics to them; nor do they in my experience decide to leave their husbands after you use a few technical words in their presence. This is, as we say in American, merely an example of the magic of cinema.
Nonetheless, as I said, these scenes convey the thesis of the film's first hour, and indeed its entire run-time, with much more cogency than the repetitive, boring scenes that surround them. Put simply, deceptively simply, the thesis of the film is that intelligence is technical knowledge and skill; and technical knowledge and skill is power; and power is sexy.
By the end of first third of the film, I was feeling both extremely nauseated and somewhat attacked: nauseated, because I had just watched an hour of revolting, profoundly stupid pseudo-intellectual pornography; attacked, because it was stupid revolting pornography that felt in some strange way aimed at me, or at least people roughly and externally resembling me. There are many men, young and old, in America today obsessed with the aesthetics and style of "intelligence" understood as mastery of obscure technical topics and discourses, and convinced that in some way it will bring them power, or at least women. The Internet and its ubiquitous cultural forms more than any other media regime in history relies on and exalts the aesthetics of intelligence; so that, I suppose, most of us have spent inordinate hours of our lives being subjected to these aesthetics and/or seeking them out and/or attempting to wield them to our own purposes.
But what good does it do a man if he looks aesthetically and symbolically intelligent but understands nothing?
"The Triumph of the Will"
Well, if this film is to be believed, perhaps he might just end up being the most important person in the history of the human race.
It is for the most part unfair to judge Oppenheimer by its uninspired, hollow, maudlin first hour; or even by its even more uninspired, hollow, and maudlin third hour. The core of the film, and all its best moments, come in the second part of the film, in which we chart the birth, progress, and ultimate success of the Manhattan Project.
I would like to be able to praise the film for something, so I will praise it for the historical specificity and detail of this plotline. In particular, while the science continues to be vague technobabble, we do get a good sense of a few military and scientific personalities and their disagreements with each other--as well as of the much more important facts around the American decision to be the first and only world power to use nuclear weapons indiscriminately against civilians. The film makes it very clear that the key final steps of the Manhattan Project took place after the defeat of the Germans, and thus without any rival nuclear threat to justify them; it also makes clear that the decision to drop the Bomb on Japan was not the result of military necessity, but of the desire to completely crush Japan combined with an overwhelming desire to finish and use the ultimate weapon and demonstrate America's sole possession of it to the world.
It also, perhaps most importantly of all, makes clear that one of the greatest war crimes in the history of humanity was greeted in America with little short of universal, celebratory glee. The film's best scene without a doubt is the one where Oppenheimer delivers a rah-rah speech celebrating the bombing of Japan to what can only be described as a highschool pep rally, all the distinguished scientists of the Manhattan Project and their wives crammed onto bleachers in a gym passing around liquor and making out and cheering hysterically. Perhaps the film's second best scene is the Trinity test in the El Paso desert, presented at once as a stereotypical rag-tag science project and a quasi-filmic spectacle, scientists stretched out on lawn chairs and in cars wearing sunscreen waiting for the climax and then cheering it wildly like a fireworks display.
It is in this central part of the film, too, that the film, at times intentionally, at times unintentionally, does in fact get at some much more important and basic historical truths about the significance of World War Two and the Manhattan Project and the Atom Bomb. Among these truths is the obvious fact that academia and science, far from a bastion of intellectual insight or moral truth, have for the last century functioned principally as the amoral and obedient slaves of political and economic and military power. Having seen many scientists and physicists at work in the hallowed halls of academia in the film's first part, we then get to see them for the rest of the film devote themselves and all their knowledge and understanding to the creation, use, and perfection of the ultimate weapon. Many of these scientists at various points express moral reservations or even clear moral rejection of this project and the uses to which it will be put--but all, without a single exception, end up going along with it anyway, thanks to their no-doubt commendable sense of professionalism and commitment to the discipline.
Oppenheimer himself is portrayed as the most abject kind of moral fool and coward, seemingly completely uninterested in any moral questions or implications or anything outside of the technical and logistical challenges of the project--except when challenged by his fellow scientists, when he offers vague, half-hearted, and contradictory arguments about the necessity of beating the Nazis and/or helping the Jews and/or bringing world peace and/or demonstrating divine power to humanity and/or about their own lack of responsibility and authority as scientists and technicians to decide what the bomb is actually used for, arguments which always succeed in persuading his interlocutors nonetheless.
A stereotypical Jewish scientist refuses to make a bomb that will kill both the innocent and the guilty--and then immediately folds to Oppenheimer's insistence that "they have no choice" because of Nazi persecution of the Jews, after which he spends the rest of the film and, seemingly, the rest of his life working for the government in the A-Bomb and then H-Bomb programs, merely offering by way of compensation the request that the scientists not have to wear military uniforms, since "they need us for who we are." After the Nazis are defeated, a group of scientists meets to oppose the continuation of the project, only to be immediately persuaded by Oppenheimer's muttered insistence that the Atom Bomb will usher in "an era of peace such as mankind has never known"--and then a few scenes later are seen to a man hysterically cheering the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Another scientist tries to get Oppenheimer to present a petition not to bomb Japan to the military-government meeting tasked with picking a target, only to be rebuffed and largely ignored--and then at the end of the film is shown making a rousing speech in defense of Oppenheimer and against the film's villain.
Whether intentionally or not, the film makes the case very clearly that organized science and academia are and at least since 1945 always have been the obedient slaves of governmental and political power, and are full of abject moral cowards largely indifferent to mass death and destruction, willing to express vague reservations, but in the end infinitely more invested in professional networks and career advancement and technical power and finishing their own projects on time and under budget. And indeed, it is impossible to understand the modern American institutions of government, industry, business, and science, without understanding the unique way in which they were all brought together during the World Wars in service of military and nuclear domination of the world.
I am giving, here, the most interesting reading of this part of the film I can. Apart from the things discussed above, much of even the film's best hour is, as stated above, little more than a filmic recapitulation of Avengers: Endgame. That is to say, it is rousingly-scored, visually interesting, snappily edited, featuring well-acted, clear, archetypal characters, and nonetheless consists largely of stereotypical scientist nerds and stereotypical hardened military dudes standing around rooms doing technobabble and getting into contentless cliched personality fights but ultimately pulling together in the face of long odds while the stereotypical sociopathic genius Cillian Murphy smokes cigarettes and poses and does his best to look cool and remote and in control in every single frame he appears in.
Technical Power is Neither Sexy nor Tragic Nor Poetic
The best way to address this aspect of the film, however, is to deal with its final third, when things, as they say, really begin to go off the rails. Even from a regular audience perspective, this last hour is stultifying to a degree I am not sure I have ever encountered in a film. After about an hour of visually-interesting, snappy drama involving a clear plot and well-drawn if stereotypical characters, we suddenly turn on a dime and enter an endless succession of largely identical, and indeed frequently partly repeated, meeting scenes in three small sets with about five actual characters. And yet, bizarrely, the film clearly treats this as in some sense the denoument and climax to the film, the crucial crux to which everything, including the Manhattan Project itself, has been building.
On the face of it, this decision makes little narrative or intellectual sense. Its most immediate justification would seem to be simply that Christopher Nolan apparently decided that he couldn't do the story of Robert Oppenheimer without the essential Hollywood narrative features of an obvious ranting villain and a plot twist. The idea that the story of Robert Oppenheimer demanded or even allowed for these things will strike most sane people as bizarre and absurd and rather shameful--yet it apparently gave Christopher Nolan little pause. Still, the decision having been made to incorporate these crowd-pleasing, time-tested filmic features, I would imagine any sane person would assume that the plot twist and villain would have to have something to do with the film's central plot of the Atom Bomb and World War Two and Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the End of the World. I would again imagine (or perhaps hope) that such an imaginarily sane person would be as flabbergasted as I was to discover that the film's central villain and plot twist have nothing to do with Naziism or Hitler or Harry Truman or Stalin or Japan but rather center on the injustice of the government process that resulted in Robert Oppenheimer losing his security clearance.
Let me repeat that for emphasis: this is a film, and a filmmaker, so utterly without shame or artistic conscience or basic historical or social or political understanding to attempt to convince us that the true singular villain of the story of Robert Oppenheimer and the Atom Bomb was a historically-obscure mid-level government bureaucrat, and his great crime an underhanded effort that resulted in Robert Oppenheimer losing his government security clearance.
Allow me to repeat that again: this is a film that literally includes the Atom Bomb and World War Two and Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the projected nuclear annihilation of the human race, and yet chooses to center its dramatic narrative around the inventor of the Atom Bomb being denied a government security clearance. We see every step of this process, far more steps in far more detail than we see of the actual creation of the Atom Bomb, endless minutes of testimony by Oppenheimer and all the other prominent characters in the film, and for good measure even flash-forward to yet more scenes in which American Senators ask other characters about this process in retrospect after which these characters withdraw to another room to talk about it again.
Losing this security clearance is portrayed, for some reason, as a horrific and tragic event, the monstrous, unjustified punishment of a genius by a cruel, ranting villain. At least dramatically, it is straightforwardly portrayed as worse than the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It is almost impossible to even take in this decision and this portrayal, let alone comprehend it. Yet I do believe that Christopher Nolan's decision here is not merely filmic hackery, but deeply programmatic for understanding the film and the philosophy behind it.
The film, after all, begins with a rather maudlin epigram summarizing the myth of Prometheus: that he stole fire from the gods to give it to man and that he was punished by being tied to a rock and tortured for all eternity.
When, then, in its third hour the film suddenly turns on a dime and randomly reveals that the bureaucrat we have been seeing in random insert scenes is in fact a ranting villain with a deep grudge against our hero who has dedicated his life to losing Oppenheimer his security clearance, when we watch in mind-numbing detail as government bureaucrats question Oppenheimer's decisions and loyalties and he defends his record and decisions and continually asserts his own loyalty to the US government and lack of genuine belief in communism or anything else and his lack of moral opposition to the A-Bomb or the H-Bomb, and above all when we see characters describe this rather polite and mundane process as equivalent to "tarring and feathering" him and putting him through hell and tearing his life to pieces...we are, really and truly, supposed to remember this epigram, and see it all as the inevitable sequel in which the god-like genius is punished by the gods he had defied.
It may seem obvious, but the story of Oppenheimer does not, in fact, particularly resemble the story of Prometheus. Far from stealing fire from the gods of his world, Oppenheimer was put in charge of a multi-million-dollar project by said gods and then richly and handsomely rewarded for it; and far from being tied to a rock and tortured for all eternity, he merely lost his privileged position of continued power and responsibility, after which he retired comfortably and went on to receive further awards and accolades. This is rather as if Zeus first gave Prometheus some fire and the materials and means to transport it and told him to take it to humanity and then later, I don't know, spoke rudely to him at a feast on Mount Olympus once.
Even here, though, the film suggests not merely that humanity or the government or at least our bureaucratic villain is in some inchoate way trying to punish Oppenheimer for his Promethean genius, but more directly and immediately that Oppenheimer to some degree acquiesces in this process out of a sense of moral responsibility for what he has done, leading to a desire to be punished or at least withdrawn from further responsibility. The film's villain, in his evil villain rant, insists that he is giving Oppenheimer exactly what he wants by removing him from a position of responsibility for the H-Bomb program and the coming arms race and allowing him to be remembered only as the genius who started it all. This speech is so over-the-top, and so immediately contradicted, that it is hard to take it at face value: but there is clearly in the film's view some truth in it.
Even this faux-Promethean storyline, however, is ultimately still in service to the film's overriding goals, as Nolan uses even Oppenheimer's very sense of moral responsibility to prove him once and for all the most significant and meaningful and important person in history. Robert Downey, Jr's bureaucrat is a former shoe salesman who has jealously held a grudge for decades against a genius who is clearly above him. His true sin, as it is revealed especially in the glowing testimony of the scientist spoken of above, is simply that he is an Oppenheimer denier, an Oppenheimer disbeliever, an Oppenheimer heretic: that is, that he does not properly respect and revere and recognize Oppenheimer, his stature, importance, status, genius, and so has tried to deny him the prestige and position and tragic responsibility that is rightfully his. In the film's black-and-white (in both senses) moral universe, this makes him perhaps the only actually evil character in the movie.
Yet his deepest sin in contrast to Oppenheimer, and what the film ultimately suggests makes Oppenheimer a true genius, the truly most important person ever to live, is precisely that Oppenheimer, almost alone among the characters in the film, recognizes the weight and importance and significance of what he has done by inventing the atom bomb. This sense of the atom bomb's importance, notably, does not really ever rise to the level of a genuine moral stance of rejection or repentance--it is at worst merely a loss of nerve, a kind of nervous breakdown (as Truman suggests), and at best (in the words of the government bureaucrats interrogating him) a moral qualm, one that makes him recommend not proceeding with the H-Bomb program for alleged technical reasons, but not actually refuse to proceed or even not try to maintain his position on said program. He merely recognizes the moral gravity of what he has done and is doing, while continuing to do it anyway.
Ultimately, the film suggests, Oppenheimer throughout the film has wanted to be the one to make the Atom Bomb, while clearly knowing full well that it would be used to kill innocents and that it could lead to the destruction of the human race. He offers at different points contradictory reasons for why the Atom Bomb should be made--but these never seem to be the real reason at all. Most likely, as both the villain and the film itself ultimately suggest, he merely understandably wished to participate in the most important event of human history and become the most important human being to have ever lived.
While working on the Manhattan Project he at several points disclaims all responsibility for the Bomb's use, protesting that he is a mere technician who could not make moral or policy decisions; but later in the film does definitely contradict this by acknowledging a real moral responsibility for the Bomb after all. That Oppenheimer does ultimately recognizes the gravity, even the moral gravity, of what he has done does not, in the film's moral universe, at all contradict his stature and power and importance; it rather dramatically underscores it. In the end, Oppenheimer is really and truly the Prometheus who made the bomb.
I have put this deliberately in fairly abstract terms--but it is, again, not really what the film itself seems interested in. It is much more interested in the coolness of Oppenheimer, his significance, even his depth in feeling vague moral guilt and responsibility for having enabled the destruction of the human race. Matching this solipsistic focus, an earlier scene has Oppenheimer viewing footage of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki--footage we ourselves are never allowed to see, focusing entirely as the camera does on Oppenheimer's muted reaction of discomfort. Ultimately the film ends with Oppenheimer directly declaring his belief that he has in fact set in motion a chain reaction that will destroy the human race, after which a montage plays of said destruction portrayed artistically--and then we end on Cillian Murphy's impassive, vaguely bummed-out visage. Even the extinction of all life on earth is ultimately only one more thing that makes Oppenheimer cool.
The Great Lie
Why does the Atom Bomb matter? Why does the destruction of the human race matter?
In the answers to that question lie perhaps the greatest divide in modern life and morality.
The basic viewpoint exemplified by the movie Oppenheimer, put simply, is that the Atom Bomb is significant because it is more powerful than anything else in history, because it can destroy the human race, and because power is ultimately the only interesting and meaningful and significant thing there is.
This is the one and only thing that really ties together the film as a whole and its various focuses and obsessions. Oppenheimer, in himself, is not an interesting character at all. We get little or no sense of him as a person, his interests, desires, likes and dislikes, even his beliefs. As the film portrays him, he is simply a technician who happens to work on a particular project but who is otherwise a vague, uninteresting moral coward not human enough to hold a single real belief or make a single genuine moral choice or even have a particularly strong reaction to the death of the human race. He lives and dies in service to broader systems and processes; and the worst thing that happens to him in his life is losing his government security clearance.
For the film, though, Oppenheimer is the most significant and important character in human history, ultimately and precisely because, in the act of being the person to make the choice to create the Atom Bomb and so set in motion the destruction of the human race, he became in some sense the most powerful person in human history. In his youth, he was significant because he was intelligent and so powerful and so able to make the Atom Bomb; in his old age, he was significant because he was morally troubled in recognizing that he had in fact made the Atom Bomb. In between, he was significant because he made the Atom Bomb.
In this, the film's ideas and their execution blend perfectly into each other This is a film obsessed with the aesthetics of intellectual power, the aesthetics of political power, even the aesthetics of bureaucratic power. Its endless scenes of powerful men in suits with bombastic music playing are intended to do nothing less than convince us that these men are interesting and dramatic, just as interesting and dramatic as a car chase or an explosion or a sex scene, precisely and solely because they are powerful. And in a sense, Nolan is not only right but profoundly insightful in recognizing that real power in America has very little to do with our filmic heroes and aesthetics of adventure and wonder and action, that in fact power in America is all about scientists wielding technical power and men in suits meeting in little narrow rooms to decide whether people live or die.
The most famous line attributed to Oppenheimer is a misquote of the Bhagavad Gita to the effect that he "has become death, the destroyer of worlds." This quote is used twice in the film: once as he is having sex with Florence Pugh, and a second time when he successfully tests the Atom Bomb. This is as much to say: sex is sexy because it is powerful, but the Atom Bomb is even more powerful than sex, and so sexier. All values are unified under the rubric of power.
Thus, what Nolan ultimately aspires to do in this film is to really and truly unite the American screen aesthetics of power with the actual real-world realities of power. He wants to use the filmic techniques designed for swooping space-ships and use them on impassive men in suits, to get us to worship them as we worship Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.
This is not as crazy as it sounds. For after all, as the film's very existence as a blockbuster hit reminds us, aren't the Bomb and the Screen (and the accompanying development and finessing of techniques of filmic power) simply the two defining things of post-WW2 America, the greatest society and Empire and blockbuster franchise in the history of the human race? And if the American Empire, if everything American after 1945, has depended on the power of the Bomb and the Screen and (as the film nods to pseudo-cleverly in a scene where Oppenheimer wryly asserts that "birth control isn't my department") the Pill, aren't these things all more or less the same thing? Or at least inspired by the same spirit, in service to the same ultimate end?
Ultimately, the film is as preoccupied, obsessed even, with its own aesthetic and technical power as a blockbuster film as it is with academia or science or government or the atom bomb. When we have finished the film, we are forced to ask ourselves: is the movie Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan significant because it is about Robert Oppenheimer, the most important man who ever lived, who made the atom bomb? Or is Robert Oppenheimer who made the atom bomb merely significant because Christopher Nolan made him the starring character of the movie Oppenheimer?
I have said that there are two fundamental viewpoints on the significance of the atom bomb and the destruction of the human race. The second, and, I believe, correct one depends entirely on the recognition and utter rejection of the first view. In a sense, it even depends on the specific revelation, and the specific case, made by Oppenheimer.
Put simply, the atom bomb is significant because it is not significant, because it is boring, because it is ultimately nothing more than an unusually large puff of fire, but because in existing it happens to destroy a great many other things much more interesting and significant and meaningful than itself. Power itself, in itself, detached from content and meaning and reality and goodness and truth and beauty and in short being itself, is boring. Whether meaningless and contentless intellectual power, or meaningless and contentless political or bureaucratic power, or even meaningless and contentless filmic power, it is only significant insofar as it destroys things more valuable and more meaningful than itself.
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was merely a very large and uninteresting campfire that in expanding outside its proper place snuffed out the lives of tens of thousands of people living intensely vital and meaningful lives, lives full of genuine moral choices, genuine intellectual beliefs, the genuine apprehension and creation of beauty and goodness. It was nothing--its victims were everything, the victims the film Oppenheimer refuses to show us, and values only for their impact on the feelings of a cowardly technician.
If the portrayal of the film is correct, then Oppenheimer, the man who created the Bomb, was almost as vain and empty and boring as what he created. He was a mere technician, a man of meaningless, contentless knowledge, a moral coward incapable of the apprehension of truth or beauty or the making of a genuine moral choice, who merely happened by his exercise of those faculties to more or less accidentally create a large forest fire that happened to destroy a great number of lives vastly more meaningful than his own.
If, as the film in its closing moment insists, we are going to be inevitably destroyed by nuclear fire, let us not die bowing down in worship before the god-like power of the fire and the god-like genius of those who brought it and served it and the god-like insight of those who make movies about it. Let us remember that the bombs are nothing, that their creators are slaves of nothing, that their worshipers are worshipers of nothing--and that even if they happen to destroy all of us they will still be nothing. The only thing that will matter will be what is consumed by the fire--and it will still matter nonetheless.
Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer will not.
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