COAPN Volume 48: Oppenheimer Review- Villain? Hero? Does it Even Matter?
In 2014, I went to see The Imitation Game with all the enthusiasm of a World War II history buff and fan of Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley’s collective acting prowess. I wept in the theater and came away rooting for Ben to get an Oscar and convinced the world was a worse place for having allowed homophobia to bury the great deeds and genius of Allan Turing for as long as it had. Bigots buried the history of the man who helped defeat the Nazis, and they should be ashamed, and he should be lauded as the hero he was.
Last week I walked away from Oppenheimer questioning my received version of history and the very idea of heroes and villains when slaughter on the scale of which atomic weapons are capable is a reality.
In no way do I want to minimize the atrocities committed in WWII or the need to put a halt to them. The Holocaust is still a nauseating reality whose impact upon generations still exists and evolves today. The devastation left in the wake of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are likewise wounds on the psyche of humankind, as is the horror visited on China and the South Pacific by the Empire of Japan. But the list I just made exemplifies the complexities the film Oppenheimer left me pondering. All these humans, divided by superficial differences, visited horror on one another, and getting out a measuring stick to decide which was worst is a more complicated task than most of the world would like to admit.
In small, Oppenheimer is a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the so called “Father of the Atom Bomb” and how his life progressed from an ambitious student to a man haunted by his own invention. In the hands of Christopher Nolan’s brand of layered storytelling, the film does surprising justice to the complexities of the man, the era, and the circumstances that birthed the atomic age and the consequent shadow of doom under which humanity now lives. The film is structured in Nolan’s trademark non-linear style. He throws the timeline to the wind, nimbly tripping among overlapping events that include a 1959 senate confirmation of Lewis Strauss, Oppenheimer’s climb through academia to the head of Physics at Berkley, the 1954 security clearance hearing to which Oppenheimer was subjected, and finally the years on The Manhattan Project. In addition to the scrambled timeline, the film inhabits dual perspectives, that of Lewis Strauss and J. Robert Oppenheimer himself. Nolan differentiates points of view using black and white for Strauss, and color for Oppenheimer. From this seeming chaos of elements, Nolan constructs a coherent story. By weaving these events and perspectives around one another, Nolan is able to present traditional story arc movements as more than simple narrative climax. The best example is the scene depicting the successful test detonation of the bomb. By this point in the movie, the audience has already seen Oppenheimer's crushing guilt over successfully creating such a weapon, seen him sow the seeds of his own professional destruction through friendships with communist party members, seen his mangling of his personal life by sacrificing it on the altar of ambition to become the director of the project, and seen the many bruised egos he left in his wake banding together to humiliate him. Exposition and denouement play out parallel to the film's rising action, converge at what normally is climax, and continue past it. The result should be an incomprehensible muddle, but instead is a tale as layered as critical literary theory and as clear as hindsight. It's a masterclass in storytelling, but also a style unique to the artist who envisioned it. I have no doubt future filmmakers will learn from what Nolan did here, but only Nolan's unique voice could have told this particular story in this way. And this story is too complicated for a simple hero races against time to outwit the baddies plotline.
To lay the success of the film solely at the feet of Christopher Nolan is a disservice to film as a collaborative art form and the collaborators that made this piece possible. Among those collaborators, Cillian Murphy shines in the title role. He has always been an actor with arresting presence and surprising depth given his mastery of stillness as an acting tool (or as my sister puts it, "He has the most expressive stone face in cinema."). But here, he has achieved something remarkable. He matches the complexity of the film’s structure and subject matter in his performance. He glides from lonely grad student, to confident academic, to haunted pawn of the powerful with a grounded credibility that anchors the sprawling snarl of a movie around him. His charisma gets the audience invested and keeps us hanging on every frame the man inhabits. There is also a surprising softness to Cillian's Oppenheimer that I enjoyed, particularly after six years of his icy portrayal of Tommy Shelby on Peaky Blinders. The softness keeps the audience from dismissing Oppenheimer as a cold academic monster who only cared about fame. Cillian Murphy portrays a human, vulnerable to all the frailties of that humanity. He leaves the audience reluctant to sit in judgement. Instead, it is left feeling would I or anyone else have fared any better? Do I even have the right to ask?
I didn't come away from Oppenheimer convinced he is a hero of World War II unfairly pilloried by his political enemies. That would be a criminal reduction of the story I watched. I came away enveloped in hard questions. Oppenheimer was initially motivated by, "We have to beat the Nazis to the bomb to prevent them from using it." Nazis were for him synonymous with evil and enemy. But in 1940s America, where officials interred Japanese citizens in camps, where the effects of Jim Crowe and segregation were in full roaring swing, where people were still recovering from a depression ignited by the rich devastating the economy in a stock market crash nigh a decade earlier, how deserving of the moral high ground were these men in the halls of power? Why, except by their own measuring, did they deserve it? Did their possession of it justify accepting the statistical possibility of igniting the planet's atmosphere? If so, why? Because Oppenheimer was "brilliant?" Because his rich parents nurtured his potential? Because he was genetically connected to the people the Nazis were slaughtering like cattle? Because of these justifications, in the present there are over 13,000 (1) nuclear weapons on earth, dormant only at the whim of a handful of humans. We live in that reality because Oppenheimer granted himself moral superiority, good guy status, and was backed up by those in power. These are complexities I left Oppenheimer contemplating.
I opened talking about The Imitation Game, a film I still enjoy and admire. But it only challenged my worldview on two fronts. My internalized homophobia and the unfairness of sexism that even in wartime plagued Kiera Knightley’s character, Joan Clarke, who was just as brilliant as Turing but with infinitely better people skills. The rest of the film, however, very much adheres to a goodies, baddies, yay we win perspective. It even hosts a pivotal scene where, like in Oppenheimer, its heroes find themselves holding the power of life and death in their hands as a result of winning their race to crack Enigma. The "heroes" pass this power into the hands of spies and governments, those humans designated as powerful. It's very tidy. It belies the messiness of reality where Oppenheimer highlights it instead.
After all this emphasis on complexity, it is still possible to draw from the experience a simple conclusion. It's a rose colored, unrealistic, impossible to achieve conclusion. But humanity needs to be kinder. Humans need to be kinder to one another. We need to stop fixating on surface difference as an excuse to hate one another. We need to see each other, every one, as valid, as deserving of life. But as long as a few are happy to see division when they come out on top, that won't happen. As long as we countenance, I’m saved while you're damned, smart while you're stupid, rich while you're poor, pretty while your ugly, white while you're black, yellow while you're brown, straight while you're queer, and in all those constructions find one better than instead of just different from, humanity will keep finding itself ensnared by constructed complexities.
"Jesus, you overthought that. It's just a movie!" is a viable response to the meandering analysis I just offered. But I'm going to try to move forward in the world a little kinder than I did before I watched it.
Thank you for reading,
B
image source: universal pictures. https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/article/everything-we-know-about-christopher-nolans-oppenheimer/
