Two thirds of the way through Oppenheimer, I asked myself “Why did Christopher Nolan make this picture?” Because, except for a few cheesy nits, which I will most assuredly pick later, what we have gotten, about two hours in, is essentially a pseudo documentary, a laboriously accurate, $100 million reconstruction of the events leading up to the creation of the first atomic bomb by the United States during World War II, as if someone covered the walls of a great library with massive, painstakingly rendered photo-realistic paintings copying pictures taken from someone’s Los Alamos scrapbook, showing all the leading characters in earnest conversation while they came up with the bomb. To what end?
Well, in the last hour, I found it, because the last hour is devoted to, essentially, the martyrdom of Robert Oppenheimer, who died, it seems, for our sins rather than his own, picturing Oppenheimer as an apolitical, almost angelic, political innocent ravaged by all too political wolves, anti-communist hysterics who guaranteed the Cold War and extinguished all hope for an enlightened, peaceful world, leaving us, their descendants, to live in the broken world we still inhabit today, a world in which we lambs hide in corners while the snarling, vicious wolves still hold sway. It is, in essence, an exercise in intellectual self-pity.
In this film Nolan displays the same overall strategy/technique that I found so irritating, and indeed so bewildering, in Dunkirk—though the tone of Dunkirk is as triumphant as that of Oppenheimer is defeated. The majority of the film is devoted to an impassive, god-like view of events from above, randomly dotted with utterly banal movie tropes right out of Louie B. Mayer’s Hollywood, tropes so shamelessly manipulative that master manipulator Steven Spielberg would refuse to stoop to them—most of the time, anyway—only to sacrifice that god-like view to an obvious and ponderously underlined moral.
One cheesy nit comes early in the film—I think it’s early, early both in terms of runtime and in terms of the chronology of events1—when we see an angry and unhappy young Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) preparing a poisoned apple for an irritating instructor, which happened in real life. What didn’t happen was legendary Danish physicist Niels Bohr picking up the apple and preparing to take a bite out of it when Oppenheimer snatched it out of Bohr’s hand, thus preserving the “Copenhagen Interpretation” of quantum mechanics, as it’s vaguely and not very historically called.2 Why throw in such a pointless and ridiculous piece of manufactured melodrama, one that is, furthermore, entirely irrelevant to the plot? Why not show Oppenheimer helping John Lennon buy his first guitar? Why not have him tell John “Oh, don’t worry about getting your hair cut. It looks better long!” That would work!
Much worse is the first encounter between Oppenheimer and his eventual nemesis, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), at the famous Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, when, in 1947, Straus offers Oppenheimer the directorship of the institute, which he accepts. The setup makes no sense to me: how was Straus, who was a member of the Atomic Energy Commission at the time, in a position to offer Oppenheimer the directorship of the institute? How come Oppenheimer is portrayed as already resident at the institute, when he wasn’t, while Strauss is a newbie? The whole thing is really set up to show an encounter between ultimate culture hero Albert Einstein—Oppenheimer’s buddy, supposedly—and Strauss, with Strauss mistakenly (as we later learn) feeling that, thanks to Oppenheimer, Einstein dissed him.
The whole portrayal of Einstein here, and later in the film, is utterly abysmal. Nolan chubs him up by about twenty pounds to make him look like a teddy bear. We see Einstein throwing rocks in a pond, looking like a five-year-old boy. Then a gust of wind comes along and blows his hat off and he waddles after it with all the nimbleness of a panda bear. He’s so cute!
Later in the film, but earlier in time, in the 1930s, we see Oppenheimer showing some tenderfeet the beauties of the New Mexico countryside. “This is beautiful,” one of them says. “Tomorrow will be even better,” Oppie says. “Where are we going?” “Oh, a little place nobody never heard of. It’s called [PREGNANT BEAT] Los Alamos.”
The rest of the film, as I say, is pretty straightforward until after the bomb goes off. We see that Oppie likes to sleep around just a little; that he hangs out with communists; that Kitty, the woman who eventually marries him, is a bad mom, Oppie coming home from work and finding her nursing a fifth of scotch instead of their son—“I’ve been listening to that fucking kid all day”, she tells Oppie, but fortunately some dear friends are happy to take the poor child off their hands—permanently, it seems. Who knew it was so easy? The war comes and the great names show up, like the recruiting scenes in Seven Samuri, Edward Teller, champion of the “Super” (hydrogen bomb) presented as a sulking, evil genius, a Mordred or Judas in their midst. Thrown in the middle is an entirely fictitious trip to Princeton by Oppie for more cuteness from Einstein, Al introducing Oppie to legendary German mathematician Kurt Gödel, explaining jovially that “poor Gödel is afraid the Nazis will poison him. He doesn’t know he’s safe here!” Which is just a wee bit bizarre when you know the real story: Gödel wasn’t afraid the Nazis wanted to poison him; he was afraid everyone wanted to poison him—everyone except his wife. He refused to eat food unless it had been prepared for him by his wife, and when she became so ill she had to go to the hospital and could no longer care for him, he starved himself to death. Not so cute!
Once the bomb goes off, of course, the plot thickens. Oppie develops pangs of conscience about the bomb, particularly when the early, not terribly realistic idea that the United Nations could actually function as a meaningful “world government” is exposed as nonsense, and the “dream” of international control of nuclear energy vanishes, and the Cold War begins.3
The actual explosion is not as dramatic as hyped, according to me at least. Apparently, no CGI was involved, but so what? Since I lived through almost all of the atomic era (I was born in 1945), I saw a great many images of nuclear fireballs, both fission and fusion, both film (all black and white, I think) and color photos, many of them hydrogen bombs, of course, which were far more powerful than the Trinity blast, and those images looked more infernal (according to my aging neurons) than those served up by Nolan.
The film has been criticized—justly, I think—for not attempting to depict the bombing of Hiroshima. But, even if it did, the film probably also would not show the millions of victims of the Japanese Empire, the millions throughout Asia cheering at its demise, nor could it have depicted the terrible suffering imposed upon the Japanese people themselves by a stunningly brutal and incompetent military regime that destroyed everything it touched. Several years in, there was a strong reaction against the use of the bomb—Strauss himself was one of those who “remembered” that he had been against its use—but, in fact, to my mind, the bomb’s use ended the war more effectively than anything else could.4
After the war, Strauss was appointed to the Atomic Energy Commission, created by President Truman with the idea that nuclear energy—including weapons—should be under civilian control. As the Cold War heated up, Oppenheimer’s “record”—his pre-war social set, composed almost exclusively of left-wing scientists and their left-wing wives—and his prestige, together with his opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb and a general advocacy that the U.S. “surrender” its atomic monopoly to some sort of world organization to avoid a nuclear arms race—coupled with his widespread fame, made him increasingly inconvenient to Strauss, who was intensely suspicious of the Soviets—and just about everyone else—and had many personal resentments of Oppenheimer as well, as detailed in the film.
Strauss decided to wreck Oppenheimer’s credibility by revoking Oppie’s security clearance—not a difficult task, really, since Oppie had much to lie about and had lied on occasion. But the process, a brutal and grueling one, deeply unfair and deeply humiliating to Oppenheimer, broke his spirit and turned him into, in my eyes, a professional martyr, preaching the doctrine of peace and understanding with a painfully earnest naïveté —as though one could get good things merely by wanting them enough.
Nolan clearly identifies with Oppenheimer’s pose—which, though very young at the time, I always thought it to be—of fawn-like innocence and tormented wisdom, picturing him over and over again in agonized close ups, images that, to a veteran film goer, recall the images of Jean Seberg as Joan of Arc in the 1957 Otto Preminger film, or Florence Delay in Robert Dresson’s 1962 Trial of Joan of Arc, even though it must be said that the 54-year-old Murphy looks considerably more emaciated than either the 19-year-old Seberg or the 21-year-old Delay.
Because it’s “there”, I guess, Nolan intercuts Oppenheimer’s humiliation with Strauss’s own humiliation five years later, when, in a serious political mud fight, Senate Democrats took the almost unprecedented step of rejecting a president’s choice for a member of his cabinet, voting down Strauss’s nomination as secretary of commerce in 1959. Nolan shows us the process as it played out in public in the Senate’s committee hearings, but has no interest in the back story, which is in itself quite interesting and also “curious”.
First of all, it’s “curious” that Strauss wanted to be secretary of commerce in the first place. According to Wikipedia, Eisenhower was immensely impressed by Strauss, and offered him several powerful positions, all of which he turned down, for various reasons. Why secretary of commerce, a decidedly minor cabinet post? One can only guess that Strauss was attracted to the rank—it would give Strauss and his wife a higher status socially than they had ever possessed—and it wouldn’t be a demanding position—more of an elegant retirement. The opposition, appropriately enough, was entirely personal, and did not come from the left wingers who idolized Oppenheimer. Instead, it came from Sen. Clinton Anderson, a decidedly moderate Democrat5 who hated Strauss for his autocratic demeanor and clear contempt for Congress, and contempt for Democratic senators in particular. Anderston was chair of the Senate committee with jurisdiction over nuclear energy and felt that Congress, not the AEC, should be in charge of nuclear energy, while Strauss felt the opposite. Harry Truman, who, as the picture makes clear, did not care for Oppenheimer, did not care for Strauss either, probably feeling that Strauss had repaid the kindness Truman had shown him by appointing him to the AEC in the first place by smearing the Democrats, and Truman’s own administration, with accusations of softness on communism. John F. Kennedy did vote against Strauss’s nomination, as the picture gratingly announces in its last minutes, but probably more consequential was the vote cast against Strauss by Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, who stayed out of the fight until the end.
Strauss’s demise, however satisfying, is irrelevant to Nolan’s overall message— that Oppenheimer was right, that if we don’t disarm we will blow ourselves up. The only problem is that Oppenheimer’s tormented predictions of doom haven’t come true. In fact, it’s arguable that U.S. possession of the atomic bomb discouraged Stalin from using military force to oust the western powers from Berlin immediately after World War II. It’s quite possible that Stalin, after the enormous suffering the Soviet Union endured during World War II was not willing to risk an immediate war with the West, but it’s also possible that he was willing to do so. In any event, the fact the U.S. had the means to inflict virtually unlimited destruction on the Soviets without the use of a gigantic army (10-15 million, at least) served as a check on the Soviets. It’s also true that the U.S. and the Soviets were both reluctant to take the precautions needed to “guarantee” that an accidental encounter might trigger a nuclear exchange—the Cuban Missile Crisis could have spun out of control with unnerving ease. And today, our Military Intellectual Complex continues to waste hundreds of billions of dollars on preparations for doomsday that are entirely unnecessary, because, despite endless lies to the contrary, no one thinks they can win a nuclear war!
Afterwords
The question of whether Oppenheimer was an actual member of the Communist Party rather than simply an inveterate leftist is well explored in this piece in Commentary (not my favorite AIPAC mouthpiece) by Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes.
Time magazine, a bit surprisingly, offers a remarkably detailed and dispassionate take on Strauss’s political demise in real time here.
1. In the film, Nolan jumps around a lot so that past, present, and future all blend into one, creating tension by making us look forward to what’s coming next, not so that we’ll know what will happen but rather to understand the full significance of what has happened. To give us some clue, the scenes leading up to and including the development of the bomb are shown in color, while Oppenheimer’s fateful hearing before the special committee convened by his great adversary, Lewis Strauss, then head of the Atomic Energy Commission, and Strauss’s own fateful hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee are in black and white.
2. According to Wikipedia, the term was apparently coined by legendary German physicist Werner Heisenberg in the 1950s as a way of graciously giving pride of place to Bohr in the development of the contemporary theory of quantum mechanics, which Heisenberg unsurprisingly did not confer on Bohr in “real time”, to the extent that such a thing exists.
3. The split between the Soviet Union and the bourgeoise western democracies guaranteed that there could be no “world government” at the time and the prospects today don’t seem any brighter. Even in 1945, the “dream” of world government was really a fiction of unconscious western elitism, which gave no thought of input from South America, Africa, or Asia.
4. I have written several posts affirming my belief in the necessity of the bomb’s use, collected here.
5. Anderson was so moderate that he used to go to the White House with his wife and play bridge with the Eisenhowers. He very likely partnered with Mamie, who refused to play with Ike, because he would yell at her if she made a “wrong” bid. Presumably, Ike wouldn’t yell at Mrs. Anderson.
