Stealing Fire

A few words about "Oppenheimer"

Photo: Sergi Viladesau

J. Robert Oppenheimer admitting his belief that they did, in fact, start a chain reaction that would destroy the world is an incredible moment to end a movie with. “Oppenheimer” builds to it in such a way that produces the perfect gut punch. But it’s what comes directly before it, Einstein's monologuing, that has struck me. A few moments earlier, Kitty admonishes her husband for his attempt at martyrdom, telling him that despite being tarred and feathered by the AEC security clearance appeal hearing, he will not actually be forgiven. Oppy responds, "We'll see." In contrast, Einstein has a different view. His words, technically speaking, come before all the McCarthyite shenanigans, but he speaks to something darker even than Kitty suggested. Rather than denying Oppy forgiveness, Einstein tells him, his country will in fact forgive him, honour him, as we see in the flashforward to the “Father of the Atomic Bomb” being presented the Enrico Fermi Award by LBJ. Einstein’s words are a warning to Oppy, and a message to the audience, that the forgiveness won't be for him. Rather, it will be the country, the world, humanity, all of us, assuaging our guilt as a species at having created such a monstrosity.

Reading American Prometheus before "Oppenheimer" came out has inevitably pitted the two against each other in my mind. As adaptation, Nolan's work is extraordinary for its wide scope, capturing so many moments and details from the book, compressing events while maintaining a fealty to the general truth found in the historical record. There's a difference in perspective, though. It's not entirely surprising that the writers of American Prometheus, one of whom having worked on the tome for the better part of 25 years, would have a strong affection for Oppy. Nolan does not seem to share this view, not in the same way.

It's not that the book doesn't feature all the contradictory details of Oppy's life and actions. There are far more and far clearer examples of his moral complexity and complacency in it, which would be too much to capture in one film, even at three hours long. Bird and Sherwin's biography produces an image of Oppy as a contradictory man undone by his actions, but also tragically undeserving of the fallout. The book overstates the degree to which the security clearance hearings were an example of promethean tragedy, setting it up as one of the most astonishingly despicable cases of anti-communist hysteria, a notion that doesn't totally square with all the public support Oppy had in the aftermath and the celebration of him by Democrats in the '60s. Many others experienced far worse. The authors also add another layer of tragedy—a much more interesting one in my opinion—related to the way the Oppenheimer affair helped to push American science further away from the public good, supported by government, and toward a corporatized endeavour.

Christopher Nolan is uninterested in that second factor, at least within the context of the film, and as for the tragedy of Oppy's tarring and feathering, well... he seems suspicious of Oppy's intent in putting himself through it more than anything. Nolan's Oppenheimer is not a man undone by his actions, not really. He is, instead, a man who undid the world. But he is not a man alone. It took the industrial might of the world's most powerful nation. It took three centuries of physics. It took the machinations of politics, the men in rooms in all their venality and pettiness and cruelty. It was humanity, ultimately, that created the atomic bomb. It was humanity that stole fire from the gods, and it's humanity that will be chained to a rock and tortured for eternity.

But we'll tell ourselves stories to cope. We'll justify the use of the bomb even when it's abundantly clear its use was hardly a necessity. We'll say that if America didn't do it first, someone else would have gotten there. We'll look at decades of arms race and detente and imagine it's all fine because we haven't blown ourselves up yet and maybe we never will. We'll forgive Robert Oppenheimer. We'll forgive ourselves.

It's a shocking thing to have the foremost blockbuster filmmaker of our era produce a work of grand Hollywood spectacle, splashed onto the biggest screens, the biggest canvas imaginable, that concludes, "We're fucked, and it's our own fault."

How Nolan gets us there is remarkable, truly. An almost kaleidoscopic opening act, taking us into the perspective of a man who, as is, can barely cope with the world changing beneath his feet. The film essentially begins with Oppy attempting to poison his teacher, a troubling anecdote played in almost cutesy fashion. We learn only later, during that scene with Florence Pugh's Jean Tatlock, that the incident resulted in serious repercussions and several years in psychoanalysis. As the film skips forward through time, Oppy's unknowability is danced over, always present, but taking a backseat to his growing assuredness as a leader, culminating in a very Batman-esque sequence of him ditching his assigned military garb for his trusty suit, hat and pipe. A darkly heroic scene in the film, coming almost immediately after David Krumholtz's Isidor Rabi expresses his sorrow and moral qualms with turning a great lineage of physics toward the construction of a weapon of mass destruction.

In the film's second act, the construction and testing of the bomb, the allure of science at work begins to curdle. No longer engaged by a life of theory, art, philosophy and political activism, making the bomb real remains exciting in part, but also scary, and an opportunity for those skeletons Oppy hubristically thought he could put behind him to emerge. The sequence with Casey Affleck as a military officer who actually killed communists in Russia, interrogating him over the Chevalier incident, brings to the film an unbelievable sense of menace. Jean Tatlock's suicide (or possible murder) weighs over everything. The first time we hear the loud stomping from Oppy's big speech after the Trinity test is actually in connection with Tatlock's death. The consequences of Oppenheimer's actions become frighteningly real, and at every point he chooses to move forward not with great courage, but out of inertia and cowardice. He is building the bomb. It will be built. It will be used. He cannot stop it. He will not try. And when the deed is done and the course of all human history is irrevocably altered, all he's left with are nightmarish visions of guilt and feeble attempts at mitigation.

There's a sense in which President Truman's ugly response to Oppy's "blood on my hands” remark, that nobody in Hiroshima or Nagasaki cares who built the bomb, represents a truth. It may be an evil truth, but it is a truth nonetheless. Oppenheimer was not, in fact, the centre of the universe. He was just the guy chosen to run the lab at Los Alamos. To lead a team of hundreds in designing and assembling "the gadget." The responsibility was hardly his alone. In the third act, following the extraordinary bomb test sequence and the even more extraordinary celebration speech, Nolan brings to bear the petty terrors of the American bureaucracy, not to present the martyring of a man, but as illustration of the untrustworthy hands to which the powers of the universe were bestowed. Strauss gets his comeuppance, but it is meaningless in the face of the enormity of nuclear apocalypse. Whatever momentary satisfaction is had, Nolan yanks it away. All that's left are the consequences, and the terrifying notion that we may not have control over them. As Einstein didn't. As Oppenheimer didn't. How we conceive of our responsibilities given the unstoppable chain reactions that make up our reality is left for the audience to wrestle with. Nolan gives us no answer.