“is anyone going to tell the truth about what’s happening here?”
on oppenheimer, and squaring belief with reality
By and large, Oppenheimer is a story seeking balance. Balance between interiority and display, between fire and gravity, between talking and doing, between intellect and practicality; the man in the title never seems quite comfortable with his feet staying in one place for too long. In a career-defining performance as the physicist and -- more importantly -- manager, Cillian Murphy often reads equally interested in exposing the contradictions of others’ beliefs as he is in taking pleasure in his intentionally equivocal own opinions. Despite making his work in a field that begs for surety, Christopher Nolan relays the story of someone that’s repelled by the necessity of such guarantees in physics towards more abstract forms: poetry (The Waste Land), painting (Picasso galore), music (a record I couldn’t identify and don’t care to, because Ludwig Göransson’s score here -- the only music that matters, maybe has ever mattered -- is overwhelming to the point I get goosebumps whenever I think of it), and chaos (bouncing balls and broken goblets). The historical record, as I understand it, sketches the physicist as a young man loved science, but Nils Bohr teaches him to need art so he may understand science. Oppenheimer hears the music in one ear, and with the other he tries to read it. Only by hearing it can he begin to see what it says.
And so begins a trek from Cambridge to continental Europe, where Oppenheimer becomes a man of culture first and scientist next: he learns Dutch well enough to lecture in it on quantum mechanics; he reads all of Das Kapital in German, presumably sometime close to his first meeting with Heisenberg. The goal here is vague, and the journey is not linear or any other shape. It’s a shape that does not yet exist and the absence of definition nonetheless boosts its resonance, for a time. Oppenheimer’s snowballing worldliness -- a chore even then mostly available only to the offspring of well-to-do families -- fosters an intellectual confidence, which in turn boosted his profile among American physicists, as he discovers upon a return to Berkeley to found a quantum physics department. There, he begins his life’s ultimate balancing act: continually tempting himself with Communist ideas and befriending Party members while never himself joining for the sake of his role in the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer’s steadfastly constructed and elusive interest in Communism proves withering in the face of a United States military that repeatedly proves a zero-tolerance rule for the ideas Oppenheimer dithers in and his colleagues mostly commit to wholeheartedly. A line that echoes throughout every viewing of Oppenheimer is when Josh Hartnett, as Oppenheimer’s friend, colleague, and counterpart, Ernest Lawrence, tells Oppenheimer to leave his support for the Spanish Loyalists out of the classroom and that he doesn’t want to use his classroom to espouse his liberal politics: “I wanna vote for [integration], not talk about it.”
For the next 150 minutes, Oppenheimer continues to run into less forgiving allies. General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), who recruits Oppenheimer to run the atomic lab at Los Alamos, protects Oppenheimer despite his gruff disagreements with the scientist’s temperament and principles. When the atomic bomb project ends with the Trinity test, the military leaves Oppenheimer and his fellow scientists in the New Mexico dust and when the military-industrial complex does turn its attention back to Oppenheimer, it’s no longer as a scientist. It’s as a Jewish New Deal Democrat and, in the eyes of President Truman, an obnoxious and self-indulgent coward. Oppenheimer eventually runs into anti-Communist bureaucrats, with their sights set on his associations from before Los Alamos and a revocation of his security clearance. After Trinity, Nolan turns more of his focus to these hearings and meetings which make clear that Oppenheimer is not a well-regarded figure in a post-atomic world, for reasons Oppenheimer sometimes is and sometimes isn’t responsible for. The film’s culmination is a scene witnessed from three different perspectives, each of which hones in slightly more than the last on a conversation between Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein. It reveals Oppenheimer’s apocalyptic anxiety in clearer relief than ever while also shedding light on the paranoia metastasizing in the mind of Lewis Strauss, (played by Robert Downey Jr.) Strauss set these bureaucrats on Oppenheimer’s trail because he assumes Oppenheimer is about to get him. The devastating final scene reveals that that is not only not the case, but that Oppenheimer barely thinks about Strauss at all. Strauss’s mistake was to assume that Oppenheimer plays with power as shrewdly as Strauss believes himself to, but Oppenheimer lives out a disgraced life that is mostly the consequence of radical honesty, not radical politics.
That Oppenheimer incidentally brings Strauss down with him is mostly an accident, but demonstrates the severity with which Oppenheimer believed in his own internal moral operations. Nolan displays Oppenheimer’s projection of his own beliefs with a lot more nuance than the character sometimes deserves, and it is a bizarre balancing act -- one where the man on a wire is in greater danger if he manages to stay on the tightrope than if he were to fall. Oppenheimer as played by Murphy has more of a commitment to the idea of ideas than he does to any one idea specifically; he prides himself on his chameleonic intellect, impossible to pin down but convinced (and pleased to be so) that he is on the right side of affairs. This absence of definition, of commitment in all forms, makes him a target of the Red Scare but, in the eyes of actual American Communists, someone who doesn’t necessarily require much in the way of defense. Not that they have bigger fish to fry, but Oppenheimer was as dismissive of a CPUSA card as he was mournful for the results of his work at Los Alamos. He had the smarts, but never the solidarity. This is an acceptable answer for no one, who want him to pick a side so they can stick him to it. Fitting a narrative in this way is a sort of fission reaction. Communists like Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) expect him to join the party simply because he has leftist sympathies, while his critics square these sympathies with an anti-Americanism that never makes the amount of sense that they hope it would.
Oppenheimer strives to understand the world, and he’s plenty aware of how smart he is, especially as the film moves further forward in time and his influence as the architect of the atomic bomb spreads faster than his reputation as a supporter of loyalist Spain. But he doesn’t always show off that understanding; he seems more interested in always being right, sometimes for the better but often not. His genius is convenient. Without this added artistic and critical sensibility, the movie suggests that Oppenheimer would not have had the moral capacity to regret the results of his work at Los Alamos. Nolan tries to add as much nuance as he can to a depiction of the scientist as a tortured victim, brought down by the myopic anti-intellectualism of the raptors who didn’t understand the gray areas in which Murphy’s Oppenheimer thrived. But then he brings out the performative element of this ambiguity by which Murphy works to avoid looking pleased. Both Nolan and Murphy succeed, often, and these brief failures are still nonetheless elegant. Murphy plays Oppenheimer as someone who enjoys his importance, if for no other reason than to justify his own self-import, but it sometimes looks as though he wished he was the most anonymous man alive.
This perceived victimhood remains stuck to me even after four viewings. Oppenheimer is terrified of the world, of the atoms that compose all of it; his adversaries throughout the film are mortified by the way he attempts to lean into this fear, acknowledging he’ll never fully understand it until he feels it, until he uses it. There’s a sense of compromise that causes the frame of this movie to shudder, that Oppenheimer is never aware of. He can’t bring himself to not be wholly consumed by the aftermath of his work, even if -- and the movie is ABUNDANTLY clear about this -- he was merely responsible for the bomb’s construction and not its use. His regret is pathetic, and in the eyes of those who decided what the bomb would be used for, far more dangerous than the weapon itself. As James Remar demonstrates as the Secretary of War Henry Stimson, the only way to approach the mind’s dilemma about the bomb is blunt ignorance, wielded so casually as to become a blade in a battle decided by bullets, at best.
The compulsion with which Oppenheimer seeks to bring balance to every force around him is perhaps in Nolan’s eyes overmatched by the fury with which everyone around Oppenheimer views this protagonist’s quest as a sort of uncertainty which cannot stand. One of the early scenes from the timeline where we see the hearing that revoked Oppenheimer’s security clearance is Roger Robb’s introduction. As Robb, Jason Clarke easily slides into a sinister register, but it’s a tone exaggerated by the perceptive complexity of someone like Oppenheimer. Were you happier in Europe? Robb asks Oppenheimer. It sounds like editorializing, a leading question were this an actual trial: Were you happier over there? In the land of your comrades? is what Clarke seems to imply. No, he wasn’t happier in Europe. But as Murphy’s stare deepens alongside his thoughts, it grows more and more likely that it was in Europe that Oppenheimer was awakened to some other alternative to American happiness. His problems were much more intense, borderline apocalyptic. But Nolan cuts again and again early in the first act to a fluffy-mopped Murphy looking more sullen as college-age Oppenheimer than the gaunt, forlorn one we see in the 1950s timelines. I wasn’t happier there, he reminds himself. But that is where I learned to hear the music I could only read before. That must count for something. That’s the reason I found happiness in the US in the first place. And it’s why I’m in this room today.
Oppenheimer’s lasting effect on me is almost the opposite of how I’ve responded to Nolan’s films in the past. I don’t find anything to engage with in The Prestige aside from looking for bread crumbs; The Dark Knight is mostly undeniable but I hang up on the rudimentary philosophizing of that movie’s final half-hour; Inception is probably the most pleasurable to me of his movies, the most rewatchable, but I’ve given up on it making sense on any level; Interstellar is such a severe undertaking that I still remember viscerally how I felt watching it in theaters in 2014, and I sort of don’t think it can get better than that first time. Dunkirk’s sly simplicity is why Dunkirk rocks; and Tenet fucks, but it hurts. “Blue balls cinema” is maybe the best way to describe Tenet that I can think of. Oppenheimer is more interior than any of these movies except for maybe Inception, but it’s so much rawer and unequivocal towards its subject: Inception is self-serious to a bitter end, and while Oppenheimer is not unserious (Nolan can’t make an unserious film), it is capable of splitting the atom between empathy and sympathy. Does it balance the two? Perhaps not. But even if it’s a movie that projects balance -- at least an aspiration for balance -- it isn’t a stable movie, strictly speaking. Half the characters don’t believe in the truth of historical events, and for what it’s worth this is a movie about anxiety as much as history; when the man spelling them out together uses a lightning bolt gifted from the gods, must we care either if it adheres to the record?