The most interesting part of Jon Else’s 1981 documentary on J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, The Day After Trinity, are the interviews with local witnesses of the first atomic explosion. One woman remembers her husband getting her out of bed to show that “the sun’s rising in the wrong direction.” A farmer describes the fur of cattle and pets becoming white after exposure to fallout. Another woman recalls her sister asking about a bright light; when Else asks why this was unusual the woman answers, “Because she was blind.” With no context to go on, it would appear that a miracle had taken place at the 5:30 in the morning in the middle of the New Mexico desert in July of 1945. One where the the blind could see, animals changed color, and which seemed to turn the earth upside-down. But even those with full knowledge of the test were no less awed. They talk of a penetratingly bright light followed by a Kubrickian array of color and a wave of sound rolling endlessly across the plain and into the mountains.
The actual explosion is documented, but seems to do little justice to the above language. Christopher Nolan certainly took that language into account in its recreation in Oppenheimer, sparing no resource in depicting what was then and continues to be a seismic scientific revolution of a star being brought to earth and weaponized. (Contrast this against the demonic seance depiction favored by David Lynch.) So when Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer describes its “divine power” to the Secretary of War in the following scene, you know he is not exaggerating.
The test is the centerpiece of Nolan’s three-hour film, though it does not come in until well near the two-hour mark. It’s a suitable suspense-escalator to be sure, but also a reminder that this miracle was the product of an unprecedentedly intricate and secretive, not to mention expensive, logistical undertaking, assembled in emergency circumstances and with a great deal of uncertainty surrounding it. Once triumph is reached it is easy to set aside the precarious nature of the course that brought us to it. In this case, would the device be completed before the Nazi’s completed their own? Would it work? And if it worked would it fry the planet’s atmosphere? The Trinity test gave unambiguous answers to all three, and all in the favor of the bomb’s makers. And in that moment, their triumph is also yours; it is only everything that follows that becomes hopelessly tangled.
“Tangled” is a good word when considering Oppenheimer, which takes (at least) three narratives, splices them up, and arranges them in almost collage-like fashion, jumping through different points in time, switching from color to black-and-white, and burying the Big Ideas under an astonishing amount of political and procedural minutiae. If there is a coherent framework anywhere in there it is Oppenheimer’s conflict with Lewis Strauss, a bureaucrat few have heard of outside of his news cycle but who is enlivened by Robert Downey Jr.’s artfully petty portrayal. A few who have seen the film were put off by these choices, not least of all Anthony Lane, and that’s fair. The political intrigues and intergovernmental squabbles of the mid-20th century seem entirely alien today. (Doubtless the decades of neglect of the Spanish Civil War in our educational curricula is coming back to haunt us.) And someone whose sole passion is to become the Secretary of Commerce seems like a curious choice of antagonist given the surrounding options. But through it all, Oppenheimer is a film that lives up to its promise, and even these arduous details are not out of keeping with its wider point as this humble viewer chooses to see it.
Oppenheimer is actually not that complicated a film. As the newest addition to American cinema’s canon of operatic demystification, you’ve certainly seen at least one version of it before, maybe its crown jewel Citizen Kane. But you’re more likely to link it with the more recent spate of such films, starting with There Will Be Blood, which take their central Great Men out of their self-imprisoning Xanadus, and out of their own heads, so as to place them in wide-open spaces, where ambition does not separate so easily from eccentricity, nor success from failure, nor action from consequences. And each Great Man serves as a pillar to be knocked down, however meditatively, whether capitalism in Blood, spiritualism in The Master, medicine in The Mountain, or applied science in First Man. Oppenheimer is comparably light on the science, at least in comparison, as Alyssa Wilkinson points out, to the machinations of power itself. Though I’d say powerlessness is more precise.
It doesn’t hurt that Nolan’s Oppenheimer is imbued with that complicating elixir of antiheroism that has delighted American viewers for decades. The film does not shy away from his antisocial formative years. In the first 10 minutes, he is already trying to kill one of his professors. Nor does it slight his intellectual restlessness. He fills his free time taking in cubist painting and modernist poetry. He can lecture in Dutch and read Marx in the original. A nude, writhing Florence Pugh all but forces him to translate Sanskrit out loud. (His complicated love life is somewhat glossed over, but portrayed fairly.) He is nonetheless a dynamic teacher who imports quantum mechanics into America’s lagging science regimen. And yet more importantly, he is a man of theory over execution. He is quite at home studying things from afar, mainly black holes, and once fission is discovered his own thinking can’t make sense of it, even as someone demonstrates it in the next room. A scientist by vocation and an aesthete by temperament, somehow Gen. Leslie Groves, perhaps the film’s true genius, sees in him just the person who can marshal an R&D project of so massive a scale and on such theoretically precarious grounds.
But the more concrete the bomb becomes the more Oppenheimer’s attitude shifts into something more ambivalent, if not ambiguous. He tut-tuts his colleagues who harbor reservations about its use. Yet he adopts those very reservations, albeit more circumspectly, toward the military who want to use it. Suggestions that it be used for merely demonstrative purposes, to show what we could do if the Japanese don’t surrender, are laughable. The myth that we warned them in advance is thankfully dispelled. (By that point we’d already been firebombing Japan into bones and rubble.) When Edward Teller (played with verve by Ben Safdie) proposes and re-proposes the much more devastating hydrogen bomb, Oppenheimer acquiesces, again in theory, only to attempt to prevent its building and testing once it gets approval by Strauss, leading to the confrontation between the two men that results in having the former’s security clearance revoked.
Oppenheimer spent the remainder of his life in the wilderness but not necessarily in obscurity. He becomes a Cold War martyr. By the 1950s he is depicted has having adopted the liberalism of Eleanor Roosevelt: high on ideals about world peace and global cooperation as brokered through a United Nations with an enforcement power that never emerges. There would be no secrets between nations regarding atomic weapons, and the successive thermonuclear weapons (weapons not of defense but of genocide) would be undoable if not unthinkable. He is sensitive to his status as a moral authority, and yet the world around him is cold to his moral guidance. A postwar America, as the 1982 documentary Atomic Café attests, was one that had no qualms being defined by the bomb, and was immune from being haunted by it; at least before the peak of our space program when it could afford to be neither. This attitude is best displayed in the legendary, if somewhat embellished, meeting between Oppenheimer and Harry Truman (Gary Oldman), who cannot conceal his contempt for Oppenheimer’s remorse. “Do you think the people of Hiroshima give a fuck about who made the bomb?” Truman seethes. How much lower can you go once the President of a now-confirmed world power tells you to fuck off?
What the viewer is left with is not so much a man who is listened to as a man who, with the right charm offensive, can be talked into anything. His dalliances with leftist politics—toothless adventures in discussion groups over the Spanish Civil War and doomed professorial union organizing—are tools to corner him but lack any sense of a commitment. His Marx-reading does not impress the fellow-traveling Jean Tatlock (Pugh). Teller’s insult to him as a “sphinx” may give him too much credit. For all of his eminent intellectual gifts and drive to see the Manhattan Project through to completion, Oppenheimer is also kind of a poser and someone whose desire to be above politics merely revealed an inability to play politics. This assured some advancement for him but hurt his colleagues and friends who were hounded out of their professions.
Oppenheimer sympathizes with the protagonist’s postwar views and rejects the short-sighted ambitions of the people who sidelined him. It takes the liberal view, but it’s the gloomier liberalism of Reinhold Niebuhr and Lionel Trilling, that which was sensitive to fate if not fatalist outright and keen on lyrical paradox over doctrinal clarity. Once the atom bomb was proposed, by the scientists to Roosevelt, you could say the taste was in America’s collective mouth, even as they knew nothing of it. If it was going to be built it was going to be used. Scientists are not miracle-workers. They make mistakes even when they accomplish their objectives. An evil thing can be developed for a concise purpose of good just as a good thing can have far-reaching negative consequences. I guess it’s left to the viewer do determine what the film is saying: one particular scientist is a flawed cog in an elaborate wheel just as we all are in one way or another or that he should have been more confirmed in his convictions and said No early and often. Certainly if you wanted a shorter movie, you’d be happy with the latter.
Watching Oppenheimer made me recall what Robert McNamara said about Gen. Curtis LeMay in Errol Morris’s 2003 documentary The Fog of War. McNamara had served under LeMay as he commanded the unrelenting firebomb campaign over Japan and had, it seems, enough sense to admit to the future Secretary of Defense that if they lose, they were getting tried for war crimes. LeMay’s March 1945 bombing of Tokyo alone was far more devastating in damage and casualties than either atom bombs. We’ve only used nuclear weapons those two times in a war setting, while firebombing had a brutal renaissance in the war in Vietnam during McNamara’s tenure. And if we hadn’t used them those two times, the firebombing would no doubt continue.
If Nolan dispelled the myth of a man he nonetheless reinforced the myth of the idea for which he is known. There is a serious terror in nuclear weapons, but a terror that comes with not a little romance attached to it. America harnessed a miracle in the desert and clings to that miracle, whether in fear or in pride, in the recesses of its soul while dishing out brute force upon the world. At least until someone majorly fucks up.