Murphy portrays the titular character as an almost impenetrable figure who is brought to his breaking point by the enormity of the job he was given.
It’s hard to imagine a film about the life and work of a physicist, one without the possession of some latent superpowers à la Dr. Jon Osterman, being a blockbuster Hollywood hit. But that is exactly what Christopher Nolan has pulled off with his latest film, Oppenheimer, released on July 21, 2023, having already tallied a massive gross of $400 million worldwide in its first ten days, finishing only behind Barbie.
The physicist in question, J. Robert Oppenheimer, isn’t just some run-of-the-mill, tweed-suited, scientist, but the acknowledged father of the atomic bomb. Aside from the film’s profound historical themes, which continue to be relevant with North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, as well as Russia’s ongoing military aggression and Vladimir Putin’s belligerent threats to make use of their nuclear arsenal, the film’s success is also owing to Nolan’s stellar reputation. It probably doesn’t hurt that film features some truly exceptional performances by the likes of Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Kenneth Branagh, Rami Malek and Gary Oldman; all driven by a powerfully compelling portrayal of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Cillian Murphy.
Many Americans may be familiar with Robert Oppenheimer for his status as the father of the atomic bomb, while being forever remembered for his infamous invocation of the Bhagavad Gītā at the sight of the Trinity explosion. But these are mere fragments and he, like many notable figures from history, has since been subsumed as an indistinguishable part of the historical period in which he lived. In Murphy’s dazzling performance, Oppenheimer is brought out of the historical shadows in which his mythic status as the mastermind of Lieutenant General Leslie Groves’ Manhattan Project is secured.
Part bio-pic, part defense of Oppenheimer’s legacy, Murphy portrays the titular character as an almost impenetrable figure who is brought to his breaking point by the enormity of the job he was given. The result is the image of a man that takes its shape as much as imagine through Murphy’s sensitive and thoughtful handling of the dialogue as it does by the subtlety of body language, eye movement, facial expression and gesture, which combines to show how his ambitions and lack of control over his desires clouded his judgement and causes him to lose sight of the responsibility that comes with great knowledge.
In so doing, Murphy brings Oppenheimer’s flaws to the fore of the story. Most prominently, this includes his fragility and need for approval become significant forces that drive his visionary thinking. Taking these features of his personality into account, along with the litany of accusations of disloyalty leveled against him in the aftermath, much of which is also covered in the film, Groves, writing in Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project, was unwavering in his confidence for Oppenheimer, stating, “he accomplished his assigned mission and did it well. We will never know whether anyone else could have done it better or even as well. I do not think so, and this opinion is almost universal among those who were familiar with the wartime operations at Los Alamos.”
"The film succeeds in presenting Oppenheimer as a person trying his best to make good out of a horrible situation despite his inherent shortcomings, failings and mistakes."
Within an historical context burdened by the terrible weight of so much death and destruction, the film succeeds in presenting Oppenheimer as a person trying his best to make good out of a horrible situation despite his inherent shortcomings, failings and mistakes. He was the kind of person who, as his friend and fellow physicist, Edward Teller put it in the film, could “see beyond the world we live in,” as terrible and horrifying as it certainly was at the dawning of World War II.
Besides the weighty historical context, the film frames the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer as one that cannot be properly understood outside of the context of a period that was marred by the widespread disregard and rejection of historical truth—drawing obvious parallels to our own contemporary moment—and shaped by a social milieu where the greatest rewards were so often won by the selfish, venal and cruel. The complexity of Oppenheimer’s life and the activities he involved himself with in support of the war effort are made all the more compelling within a meticulously rendered narrative whereby he bears witness to some of the most traumatic events of the twentieth century. Namely, World War II and the European rise of fascism, to the almost unimaginable barbarity of the Holocaust and the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The moral context of the story is further complicated by the broader impacts of a series of “red scares” that plagued 20th century American history, culminating in the hysteria of McCarthyism. The emergence of this uniquely American form of thought-policing spread like a virus from the 40s and well into 50s, being itself awash with anti-Semitism as the fates of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg dreadfully illustrates. The intersection of these larger social pressures and events, combined with Oppenheimer’s own Jewish identity, can be seen as instrumental in a series of chance events that led him into the fulcrum of a military industrial complex born of the cold irrationality of mutually assured nuclear destruction.
This is a reality that is all-too familiar for those who grew up between the 1950s through the 80s, living in a world that seemed to be teetering on the brink of nuclear annihilation. While, thankfully, it’s a fate that we have so far managed to avoid, it’s a theme that was explored and replayed in a wide range of novels from the Cold War era, including, Neville Shute’s On the Beach and Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, along with an array of films from Fail Safe, Wargames, The Day After, Terminator, DefCon 4 to The Dead Zone and Watchmen, giving the Cold War its shape and duration, while also charging the satire of Stanley’s Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove with such absurdity.
Such books and films, along with the preceding events noted, are reflective of matters of such vast significance, that when combined in the calamitous ways they have, make the creation of the atomic bomb seem a tragic, yet inevitable, necessity. As Oppenheimer laments on the choices before him in one of the film’s pivotal scenes, “I don’t know if we can be trusted with such a weapon. But I know the Nazis can’t. We have no choice.” Such a view was not unique within the scientific community outside of the Axis powers, with so many having fled the intensifying anti-Semitism and violence of the Third Reich after its rise to power in 1933.
The lack of any other viable options given the enormity of the threat represented by Nazism is reflective of the discoveries Richard Rhodes traces in his elaborately detailed account of the development of scientific knowledge that led to the creation of nuclear weaponry in The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Focused on efforts to reveal the secrets of the atom that started in earnest in the early twentieth century, Rhodes brings emphasis to a common sentiment on the creation of an atomic bomb as expressed by the German physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, who “felt that if it were to be made, it would be worst for the entire world, even for Germany, if Hitler were the only one to have it.”
The film is not remiss in dealing with the deep moral questions surrounding the decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan. In a scene following the bombing of Hiroshima whereby Oppenheimer addresses the people of Los Alamos, his enthusiasm for the successful use of the weapon he was instrumental in creating gives way to the expression of the vengeful desire that he only wished they could have completed their work sooner so the bomb could have been “used against the Germans.” This is an expression that speaks to a demand for retribution shared, perhaps, by many people of the time due to Germany’s perpetration of שׁוֹאָה, or the Shoah, by the Nazi regime, which grew into such a massive human tragedy through the silence and inaction of so many others as it was occurring.
The intensity of this scene is deepened by the distortions of sound and light the viewer experiences as a reflection of an atomic blast through Oppenheimer’s point of view as he speaks to the Los Alamos community. By the end of the speech he has become nearly overwhelmed by guilt as he is visited by the ghosts of incinerated Japanese killed with the detonation of his heinous scientific creation. Aside from the indirect images of the bomb’s devastation, Nolan does not include any other images of the bomb’s devastatingly destructive effects on either the city of Hiroshima or the people who were there on that fateful day.
This sense of abject terror in the confrontation with a thing so utterly monstrous as to seem inhuman and unimaginable is something the Japanese were forced to grapple with since the earliest accounts of the devastation began to emerge. The bomb exploded at approximately 8:30 am local time on August 6, 1945, just as many of the people of Hiroshima were going through their morning routines. Some were just having their breakfasts as others headed to work and children just starting their school day. Still others lay asleep in their beds, lost in dreams from which they would never awaken.
In Unforgettable Fire, editors from the Japan Broadcasting Company offer a harrowing glimpse into the horrible moment of the bomb’s explosion:
It exploded 570 meters above the ground in a light blue flash. The diameter of the fireball was 100 meters and the temperature at its center was 300,000º C. Soon after the explosion black and white smoke covered the whole city and rose thousands of meters high. The pressure of the blast directly under the center of the explosion was from 4.5 to 6.7 tons per square meter. Wooden houses within a radius of two kilometers of the hypocenter collapsed and completely burned from the wind and heat. The fires continued for two days. Some people who were near the center of the explosion literally evaporated and only their shadows remained; others were turned to charred corpses. Those who survived were badly burned. Usually their clothes were scorched and burned so they were practically naked. Their skin peeled off and hung down . . . Friends and relatives trapped under collapsed houses were crying for help. But flames surrounded them so closely that they were about to burn.
Later large black drops of rain poured down. It was a deadly rain which contained mud, ash, and other radioactive fallout. Through burning flames and pouring black rain there was an endless line of injured people heading for the outskirts of the city. The burns on their hands made the skin hang down. Their hands looked like those of ghosts.
The death toll from the bombing of Hiroshima itself is estimated at 70,000, with at least another 130,000 deaths from injuries and the effects of radiation poisoning within 5 years. Who knows how many more succumbed to the effects of physical injury, cancer and psychological trauma in the years and decades after caused by the horrors of that day and the radiation sickness that followed, which would be referred to in a Japanese government report of the time as an “evil spirit.”
In testimony given before the US Senate’s Special Committee on Atomic Energy in 1945, General Groves, in responding to a question about residual radioactivity after the bombing, incredulously claimed, “there is none. That is a very positive “none.”” In attempting to justify such a bold claim to ignorance, he attributes the innocuous dispersal of any radiation emitted from the bomb as a function of the height from which the bomb was detonated, reiterating the assertion that “there were no aftereffects from radiation.” He follows this up with the even more plainly dishonest statement that “no one suffered who was not exposed at that moment, and the casualties, as far as we can determine, resulting from that were relatively small.” Given his intimate knowledge of the research, data and testing done at Los Alamos of which he was in charge it is simply not plausible that such claims represented his true understanding of the devastating effects of the atomic bomb’s use.
Speaking directly to the experience of that atrocious event, Ronald Takaki shares the testimony of numerous eyewitnesses to the horror of the attack in his book, Hiroshima: Why American Dropped the Bomb. An especially disturbing picture is created by the tailgunner aboard the Enola Gay, George Caron, in describing his view of the moment of the bomb’s explosion: “the mushroom cloud itself was a spectacular sight, a bubbling mass of purple-gray smoke and you could see it had a red core in it and everything was burning inside....it looked like lava or molasses covering a whole city.”
The testimony of the Japanese people who lived through the hellish blast Caron witnessed from above is especially distressing. A child named Sanae Kano observed, “at the river, I saw people who were burned black and were crying for water....The fire wardens were shouting at them telling them it was dangerous to drink the water, But many people went into the river anyway and drank the water and died.” Another survivor, Yoshiaki Wada, describes the scene on a bridge over the river: “some were burned black, some had blistered skin that was peeling off, and some had pieces of glass in them all over.”
Such accounts take us into the depths of human suffering that endure as sources of deep trauma through the generations. The experience of this event, like the pictures collected in Unforgettable Fire, served as the inspiration for art as people struggle to make sense of the unimaginable. One especially influential example of how the terror of nuclear weapons became integrated into Japanese culture is through the story written by Shigeru Kayama and adapted into a screenplay by Takeo Murata and Ishirō Honda as ゴジラ Gojira (Godzilla). A film that has become one of Japan’s most enduring contributions to science fiction and popular culture.
The terrible sense of internal conflict and regret Oppenheimer displays in the scene described above mirrors the larger public’s reaction to the physical spectre of the atomic bomb that Paul Boyer reflects on in his study of the cultural ‘fallout’ of the atomic age, By the Bomb’s Early Light. Although the bombing almost immediately forced Japan’s unconditional surrender, an issue that is still hotly contested with historians led by Gar Alperovitz claiming that such a result was already imminent and that the decision was a political rather than military one, as Boyer notes, “the surge of fear that swept American after August 6, 1945, was a spontaneous and authentic response to the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
As is often the case with powerful works of art, the most serious limitations are not in what is presented to audiences but that which is left out or overlooked.
As is often the case with powerful works of art, the most serious limitations are not in what is presented to audiences but that which is left out or overlooked. In the case of Nolan’s Oppenheimer, for all its powerful acting and scenes of deep moral conflict, the horror Boyer speaks of is largely absent. Related to this, we find the glaring omission of the perspectives of Pueblo and Hispanic people on whose land, and near to whose communities, Los Alamos was constructed. This in oversight that gains its most compelling appeal due to the aftereffects of the first atomic bomb’s explosion at the Trinity site.
Besides a few references Oppenheimer makes to nearby “Indians,” and his wearing of a silver and turquoise belt buckle in the film, Pueblo people appear as little more than the vanishing specters native people were commonly presented as in America’s dominant history and literature of the early 20th century. This, despite the regular interactions the scientists and military officials had with a significant number of Pueblo people who worked at Los Alamos and made up a large percentage of the more than two thousand civilian employees, as Jon Hunner details as in his book, Inventing Los Alamos: The Growth of an Atomic Community.
Besides these more formal interactions, scientists and their families, as well as military personnel, took regular visits to Santa Fe and the nearby Pueblos during feast days, saint’s days and other ceremonials open to the public. In her book, 109 East Palace, Jennet Conant (the granddaughter of James B. Conant) details one occurrence that took place in September 1944 in which “the entire British mission, almost to a man,” requested a Saturday off so that they could “see the traditional Corn Dances in San Ildefonso.”
The impact the atomic bombs created at Los Alamos had on the surrounding Pueblos, as well as the Diné (Navajo) due to the extensive uranium mining on their reservation, are themes that figure prominently in the Laguna writer, Leslie Marmon Silko’s breathtaking novel, Ceremony. Near the story’s end, readers are given an account of the atomic blast at the Trinity site as witnessed and understood by the Laguna people, with one reflecting in disbelief, “you know, I have never understood that thing I saw. Later, there was something about it in the newspaper. Strongest thing on this earth. Biggest explosion that ever happened...” The wisdom of the Laguna is conveyed through the reaction of the protagonist’s grandmother, “she was shaking her head slowly from side to side. ‘Now I only wonder why, grandson. Why did they make a thing like that?’”
The answer Silko provides centers on evil, an immortal presence and a force her story represents in the form of witchery. The wide-ranging effects of which are prevalent throughout the novel, resulting in everything from drought, alcoholism, conflict and warfare, to a pervasive sense of hopelessness and despair that leads to fractured conceptions of self and identity. These horrid effects aside, evil takes its most terrifying form through the power of words in a story about a “witches conference,” told to the protagonist halfway through the novel.
In one the novel’s most powerful scenes, readers are transformed into listeners and participants in a storytelling performance in which the horrors of nuclear war were long forewarned. In this story within the story, Silko provides a mythic framework that is predicated on performative language. The witchery that is “set in motion” through the power of words begins with the creation of Europeans in “caves across the ocean” who grow to “fear the world” and “destroy what they fear.” Alienated from the world, these people will eventually set off in search of new lands to conquer. This, of course, results in the colonization of the western hemisphere, which brings genocide to the Americas. Thus, out of the aftermath of Columbus, the story continues:
Up here
in these hills
they will find the rocks,
rocks with veins of green and yellow and black.
They will lay the final pattern with these rocks
they will lay it across the world
and explode everything.
Set in motion now
Set in motion
To destroy
To kill
The realization of this terrible vision culminating in the discovery of uranium and the work of scientists in breaking the code of the atom comes to pass not just through intentional effort, as shortsighted and destructive as they may be. These are, at their core, events that were materialized through the reckless use of words and ideas born of a state of alienation from nature and the earth.
This encapsulates a reflection and a theme that draws us back to the interactions between the scientists of Los Alamos and Pueblo people that Conant and Hunner detail, recalling the profound questions of cultural perception and being N. Scott Momaday poses in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, House Made of Dawn. In a scene that intersects with the context of Los Alamos described above, readers follow one of Momaday’s main characters, the self-loathing and vindictive Angela St. John, on a trip to see a different corn dance. This time in Cochiti Pueblo.
Imprisoned in a Western mindset, Angela perceives the performance of the corn dance as little more than an exotic display, merely “beautiful and strange.” Deprived of a means to truly connect, she instead fixates on the incommensurable vision and purpose driving the dancers in their actions who “were grave, distant, intent on something that she could not see....held upon some vision out of range, something away in the end of distance. Some reality that she did not know, or even suspect.”
The impasse that traps Angela in this scene seems reflective of a question that could also be asked of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the other scientists of Los Alamos. Given their intellectually sophisticated understandings of cosmology and the nature of the universe, I wonder whether they might have been able to see anything more in the dances they witnessed? If they had, would the results of their work have been different?
This, perhaps, is the most haunting question that lurks within the shadows of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and a matter his viewers are deprived from even being able to consider as they leave the theater with the image and presence of both the Japanese and Pueblo people rendered as little more than shadow and chimera. Unseen and unheard within the tumult of such a significant event in the history of our shared world.
