Oppenheimer: Blinded by the Light
"The important thing isn't can you read music, it's can you hear it. Can you hear the music, Robert?"
In the opening chapters of Christopher Nolan’s epic Oppenheimer, the young physicist is shown as suffering from almost rapturous visions. He can’t keep the tangled waves of light out of his mind; he can “see” the quantum universe. It separates him from others. It makes him special. It makes him a freak. Like Mozart, he can perceive a world that he can barely comprehend, much less explain.
Genius is always a tricky thing to portray in film. Think about Tom Hulce as the young Mozart in Amadeus or Ed Harris splashing paint frantically in Pollock. Most of us, including filmmakers, have no idea what it’s like to be seized by a kind of inspiring madness. Some creatives call it a flow state, when you are plugged into something infinitely larger and more encompassing than yourself. When a hand not yours guides your own.
For a brief early moment, the film approaches something on the level of a work by Terrence Malick, a merging of man and nature. It’s striking. So much of Nolan’s output has pitted a protagonist against a hostile landscape. Think The Dark Knight, Interstellar and Dunkirk. But the biggest battle in Oppenheimer is internal. A hero at war with himself.
And here is where I warn: Spoilers ahoy. Proceed with caution if you have yet to see the film – and you should.
In the year 2024, with an election approaching that again promises to put differing versions of reality to the test, it’s somewhat of a relief to be able to write about a movie that honors science. That honors brilliance. That sees value in a Picasso. Our culture now runneth over with anti-elitist takes, to the point where the pursuit of knowledge itself can be viewed with suspicion. We live in a society now where people place equal value on opinion and fact. They are competitive currencies.
Oppenheimer rejects that cynicism, although it certainly can’t be characterized as an optimistic film. But it does promote the idea that a group of idealists can share a common vision and work toward a common goal. It is a movie that believes in process as a reward. It shares that with a favorite Cold War film of mine, Apollo 13. Smart people doing their job to the very best of their abilities. It even contains a “let’s round up the team” sequence. In that way, it’s almost hopeful.
Of course the problem in this instance is the goal is building an atomic weapon, one that some on the team fear could trigger the end of all life on earth. The race with the Nazis to develop the bomb provides the rationale for moving forward, but it’s fair to question whether the kind of teamwork I just outlined can be celebrated in a context such as this. Oppenheimer grapples with the same question.
The conflict of Oppenheimer, or to be more precise, within Oppenheimer, involves a curious mix of hubris and naivete. It is pure hubris for anyone to believe they can unleash the forces of the atom. It is naive to think that they can have any control over what happens afterward.
Indeed, in the early sections of the film, as the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) flirts with the Communist Party as World War II approaches, he is warned that he can’t see what’s coming. He can’t have an affair with a libidinous radical (Florence Pugh) and be the first man up for the Manhattan Project. A choice must be made.
Later on, with the bomb successfully tested, it appears to come as a shock to him that the military no longer has any use for him. “We’ll take it from here,” General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), says in the movie’s greatest moment of understatement, as he packs up the truck carrying the bomb.
Much of the film, in fact, revolves around Oppenheimer’s trusting soul: He absurdly believes he can influence what the United States will do with the weapon he created; he thinks he can halt the development of an even more powerful hydrogen bomb; he has no idea a Russian spy lurks among his team, and he never sees coming the trap laid for him by disgruntled Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) in the form of a secret tribunal reviewing his security clearance.1
The film expertly straddles the two pivotal eras in which it takes place: World War II and the early years of the Cold War, which in the story – as in real life –seem to almost blend together with one beginning just as the other ends. The contrast is clear. While World War II was a patriotic struggle of self-sacrifice against the dark forces of fascism and genocide, the Cold War will be a shadowy, more opportunistic conflict where paranoia rules and loyalties are eternally questioned.
The criticism of Oppenheimer has largely centered on Nolan choosing to almost exclusively show events from his protagonist’s point of view. That means the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are never shown and the true victims of the arms race – Japanese civilians – are granted no voice. I tend to think that younger viewers who packed the theaters last summer were savvy enough to understand the human toll of the attacks as well as the American rationale for them.
In the end, that was Nolan’s artistic prerogative. To me, the film isn’t suggesting that Oppenheimer himself was a victim of any kind. He may have been due some penance. As the Red Scare mushroomed in the late 1940s and early 50s, truth and integrity were set aside, expertise was discarded and many lives were ruined. That was the fallout with which Oppenheimer concerns itself. I’m grateful so many people turned out to see it.
WHERE CAN I WATCH IT: Rentable on just about every platform.
HEY ISN’T THAT? Where to start with this exceptionally deep cast? I’m tempted to list Downey. He’s been in our faces for so long as the smarmy Tony Stark that it’s downright jarring to see him filled with a buttoned-down bureaucratic fury. It’s a triumph for him and a welcome return to real cinema. You might remember Josh Hartnett as the next hot young actor in the early 2000s in films such as Pearl Harbor and Black Hawk Down. He plays Berkeley physicist Ernest Lawrence, who recruits Oppenheimer to the Manhattan Project. Want to go deeper? Physicist Kenneth Bainbridge is played by Josh Peck, who starred in the Nickelodeon comedy series “Drake and Josh” 20 years ago. How do I know that? I have an 18-year-old daughter, that’s how. Also, I have no life.2
DUST CLOUDS: One of the more fascinating aspects of this newsletter project is examining the roots of the arms race and the Cold War. As Oppenheimer lays out, the United States was worrying about the threat posed by the Soviet Union even before Nazi Germany fell. As German forces retreated, the Soviets installed puppet governments in Eastern Europe. That led George Kennan, a top State Department diplomat, to write in February 1946 what became known as the “Long Telegram” – a more than 5,000 word document that proposed a policy of “containment,” the strengthening of Western institutions to counter the spread of Soviet influence. Days later, while giving a speech in Missouri, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill warned of an “iron curtain” that had descended across the European continent. To be sure, though, the film also seems to suggest that once you build the most lethal weapon in history, you start casting about for new enemies and reasons to build more of them.
ARMAGEDDON INDEX: 8/10. The test detonation at the Trinity site in New Mexico did not in fact trigger a chain reaction that destroyed all life on Earth, but there was, as the film details, a nonzero chance of that happening. Whew.
WHAT ELSE I AM WATCHING: I’m in Iowa covering the Republican caucuses, so it’s mainly been TV ads by Ron DeSantis attacking Nikki Haley and ads by Nikki Haley attacking Ron DeSantis. Not great content.
LAST ENTRY: North by Northwest (1959)
NEXT ENTRY: Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)
I’m struck by the similarities between this film and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, which we covered two weeks ago. Both movies culminate in star-chamber-style proceedings, with the accused denied basic rights. The difference is that, in Oppenheimer, the U.S. was staging the proceeding for one of its own. Paranoia ultimately always leads to repression.
I like to think I’m the Oppenheimer of bad pop culture.