Sunday Pages: "Oppenheimer"

A film by Christopher Nolan

Dear Reader,

Ben Shapiro, the creepy rightwing podcaster, went to see Barbie on Thursday, and was so put out by the experience that he produced a 45-minute reaction video bashing the enterprise. “All you need to know about #BarbieTheMovie,” he tweeted, regarding a live-action movie about a child’s doll, “is that it unironically uses the word ‘patriarchy’ more than 10 times.”

The good news for Shapiro is that the other half of the “Barbenheimer” movie pairing is the perfect antidote to the pro-feminist, pro-LGBTQ, cotton-candy-colored wokeness of Barbie. Oppenheimer is not only a film about the patriarchy, but a patriarchy in which the nerdiest of nerdy men, who in real life looked less like Ryan Gosling and more like Ben Shapiro, were able to both beat the fascists and score with Florence Pugh, all because they were, without question, the smartest guys in the room. For what was the race to build the first atomic bomb—a weapon of mass destruction so potent its authors knew there was a slim chance the first detonation might have a ripple effect and consume the entire planet—if not the greatest and most consequential dick-measuring contest of all time?

This contest, Oppenheimer won. He and his team beat Heisenberg and the Nazis. And he did it his way. He had the military build a town in the middle of nowhere—in Los Alamos, a place he knew and loved—and he made sure that the scientists could bring their wives there, wives who, during the three or four years this was going on, passed the time by hanging laundry out to dry, drinking excessively, and making babies. That sounds like a Ben Shapiro fever dream.

The historical Oppenheimer, incidentally, was not someone Shapiro would like. He was communist-adjacent, in the era when that meant wanting FDR to go even further, do even more. He cared about people. He tried to help the anti-fascists in Spain, the Jews in Germany. Politically, he was what we’d now call “woke.” At one point in the film, he says to the general in charge of the Manhattan Project (and I’m paraphrasing): “You didn’t pick me in spite of my leftist background, but because of it, so you’d be able to control me.”

To be sure, J. Robert Oppenheimer is wonderful cinematic fodder. He’s a brilliant physicist, who revolutionized that discipline in the United States, who out-Einstein’d Einstein; he’s also Jewish, and well aware of what the Nazis were doing to his fellow Jews in Europe. At rise, Germany has managed to split the atom, which the Americans had been convinced could not be done. It’s only a matter of time, they all realize, before they develop an atomic bomb. And “Oppy” has to make the choice: use his unique genius to beat the Nazis to the finish line, or refuse to involve himself in the creation of a “gadget” with the potential to end life on earth. The stakes could not be higher. And movies are all about the stakes.

There are also less obvious ethical dilemmas Oppenheimer had to contend with. In 1945, the Soviets were still our allies; should we not be sharing this awful new technology with them? Thankfully, most of the people involved landed on the correct answer: no fucking way. But all it takes—all it took—is one Manhattan Project spy to point the Russians in the right direction and kickstart the Cold War. There is also the question of whether or not to use the bomb at all. The general explains his thinking on this, with regards to Japan: “We need to do it twice. The first time, to show that we can do it. The second time, to show that we can keep doing it until they surrender.”

And yet, for all of that universe of material to mine, Oppenheimer ultimately fails as a motion picture. It left me cold, and I suspect most viewers will find it tedious and boring (as my son did; he lasted an hour and bailed). Perhaps to dazzle us with detail, and simulate the complexity and compartmentalization of the Manhattan Project itself, writer/director Christopher Nolan establishes not one but two framing devices. The first is a small, closed hearing, in which Oppenheimer, after the war, is fighting to retain his “Q” security clearance. The second is a Senate confirmation hearing involving Lewis Strauss, former chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and Oppenheimer antagonist, whom Eisenhower has nominated to head the Department of Commerce. Not one but two hearings! I regret to report that it’s not twice the fun; it’s more like double-majoring.

There is so much going on, so many characters coming in and out (almost all of them white dudes who look a lot alike), that I found it impossible to keep track of them all, let alone connect emotionally to any of them, including the eponymous physicist. Oppenheimer is a biopic. Not only that, but Oppenheimer, the character, is in almost every scene of a three-hour movie. And yes, he is complicated, and yes, it’s a great story, and yes, he got dicked over royally, and yes, we should all learn the truth. But watching the film, I found that I didn’t really give a shit. I didn’t care. The only real touching, human moments, for me, were in the relationship between Oppenheimer and the general, which was complicated but oozing with mutual respect. My guess is that Nolan was so deep in the weeds of his research that he forgot that most people in the Year of Our Lord 2023 have never heard of J. Robert Oppenheimer. I could sense which moments he thought would be big moments—mic-drop moments, nuke-exploding moments—but most of them, for me, either didn’t go far enough or missed the mark completely. Unlike in real life, the bomb didn’t go off.

The pleasures of the film are in the casting and the namedropping. It’s fun to watch the president from Scandal preside over a closed hearing where Jerry West from Winning Time grills Oppenheimer. Matt Damon, 20 pounds overweight and with a terrible mustache, is delightful as the general. Rami Malek has a brief but eventful cameo. Ditto Casey Affleck. Kenneth Branagh, who looks like he could be my handsomer cousin, has a few solid scenes as Niels Bohr. It took me half an hour to realize that it was Robert Downey, Jr. beneath all that makeup as the bad guy, Strauss. And I never would have guessed who played Harry Truman (in what was the best scene in the movie not involving a clinically-depressed Florence Pugh en déshabillé in a hotel-room chair, looking like a lush oil painting come to life).

If you’re a history buff like me, it’s satisfying to hear names being dropped and try to remember who’s who and who did what: Einstein, Bohr, Fermi, Heisenberg (I guess before he set up his meth empire), Spanish Civil War, atom bomb, hydrogen bomb, New Mexico, Los Alamos, Truman, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. And I certainly have a better understanding now of who Oppenheimer was, what he did, why he did it and how. But that would have also happened if I read the book on which the film is based, or, for that matter, his Wikipedia page.

My other son saw Barbie on Friday. (He somehow resisted the urge to make a 45-minute video about the experience.) His review: “Eh. It was okay.” That’s pretty much how I felt about Oppenheimer.

Before last night, I knew Oppenheimer from the cool Sanskrit quote (which is used in the film in not the way you might expect). When I got home from the theater (it was not sold out, by the way), I looked it up, thinking I might delve into the Gita for “Sunday Pages.” But the context was different than what I expected. Oppenheimer is talking, years after the fact, about what the scientists felt at Los Alamos once they realized what they had done:

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that one way or another.

Those five sentences, delivered in this haunting video, are more emotionally arresting than Nolan’s entire big-budget film.

The other Oppenheimer quote I have long known does not appear in the movie at all. Its worldly wisdom, melancholy, and hopefulness never fail to move me. I leave you on this lovely Sunday morning, Dear Reader, with these words to ponder:

“The optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist knows it.”

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ICYMI

Our guest on Friday’s episode of The Five 8 was political commentator and KHive charter member Candidly Tiff: