Oppenheimer (2023)

[djross]

Faced with the threat of great evil, a brilliant but fallible man, possessing deep hidden knowledge of the greatest mysteries of the universe, descends into the sublunary world, attempting to save it. Yet, despite the fact that he himself is not unaware of this world’s injustice, what he does not perceive is the degree of its corruption by power and sin, and what he therefore fails to grasp is that his dream of becoming a hero is bound to come at the cost of his soul. But by paying the price of admission to the theatre (and it is therefore very much a moral imperative to see this movie at the cinema), and by taking this piece of consumer entertainment as something Very Serious, the audience is given to understand that it has, thereby, done the work of repaying that cost, of honouring and rehabilitating that ambiguous soul, of remembering history and its victims, and of successfully assuming the burden of carrying on into the future with the ambivalent Promethean task of pursuing a form of existence marked by knowledge of the darkest cosmic fire.

This bombastic bomb-movie follows the familiar Nolan prescription of generating affect by employing a constantly slowly-moving camera, frequent cuts, an ominous score and having actors underplay their emotions. One imagines that Nolan is the kind of guy who finds science and scientists quite interesting, yet, unsurprisingly, the physics and engineering are kept to an absolute minimum, and any dialogue connected with these domains is never allowed to rise above the superficial, if not reduced in fact to purely metaphorical remarks of the kind that refer to the activities of men and women as “bodies meeting and exploding with energy” and suchlike.

About midway, problems develop in the balance between being a persecution story and a self-persecution story, and the increasing focus on Strauss as an increasingly caricaturish villain (motivated by a feeling of having been personally slighted by Oppenheimer) starts to seem a bit ludicrous, and as a result the whole thing drags out just in order to say…what? That the protagonist succumbed to hubris but was remorseful and self-torturing…and therefore should not have been persecuted…because in any case he was a hero who understood the meaning of the Nazi threat, and so should be celebrated for what was really a kind of self-sacrifice…but who himself knew better than anyone that he was a destroyer of worlds, and of the world, which is to say, of our world? The filmmakers seem unsure: wanting to leave it to the audience to decide for themselves is fine, but the feeling one has is that, in the end, it lacks both a genuinely “political” dimension and an “existential” one. Instead, it is too much like a cross between a high school history textbook (the physics textbook stuff is really only alluded to in vague terms) and an exercise in fancy movie mechanics. Or, in other words, one is left suspecting that neither Nolan nor the writers were themselves touched very deeply by the events they chose to turn into blockbuster entertainment, or, at least, not in the way Kurosawa and Kubrick were driven by rage or horror to reflect on the terrifyingly apocalyptic reality of the insane new world opened up by the work of this “brilliant but tragic figure”.

On a more personal note, in addition to the fact that my father played an unknowing bit part in the Manhattan Project, another thing he told me is that, when he shifted from the east coast to the west coast some years later, he drove across the country (he refused ever to fly), and along the way stopped in Reno, naturally in order to visit the casino. While enjoying the gaming room that evening, an announcement came over the loudspeaker that an atomic test would soon take place far away in the Nevada desert, and that anyone who wanted to see it should make their way to the casino rooftop, where it would be possible to observe the event. He took the opportunity to witness the blast, and, even though the detonation was occurring hundreds of miles away, all of a sudden night turned into day, and stayed that way for quite some time. He’d never seen anything like it. He also said that all of the other patrons ignored the announcement and just kept gambling.

I also remember discussing with him the question of whether it was still possible to do anything about the proliferation of nuclear weapons. My father’s recollection was that, as soon as the news came through about what had occurred in Hiroshima (which means: from the moment when this at-the-time government accountant heard that a bomb capable of causing unimaginable destruction had been dropped in Japan, causing him to suddenly understand what that huge amount of Manhattan Project money was going towards), it was obvious that the world had changed forever, and that we had, indeed, entered a new apocalyptic reality. Years later when he spoke to me about it, his feeling was that a small window of opportunity had existed when it would have been possible to deal with this situation: specifically, if the determination existed to kill all of the scientists who knew how to build the thing and destroy all of their work. However serious or otherwise he may have been about that suggestion, it is a possibility that has long been closed off, and the world has decided to mostly just live in the comfortable denial that this doomsday threat is still hanging over their heads. My point, however, is that fashioning Oppenheimer as a predictably tragic protagonist does perhaps reflect a failure to really summon up the imagination or the courage required to measure up to the immeasurable historical meaning of this invention. In short, I cannot help but imagine that my father might have been as likely to disapprove of this film as I equally imagine might be the case for Peter Watkins.

[rotacirav]

But by paying the price of admission to the theatre (and it is therefore very much a moral imperative to see this movie at the cinema), and by taking this piece of consumer entertainment as something Very Serious, the audience is given to understand that it has, thereby, done the work of repaying that cost, of honouring and rehabilitating that ambiguous soul, of remembering history and its victims, and of successfully assuming the burden of carrying on into the future with the ambivalent Promethean task of pursuing a form of existence marked by knowledge of the darkest cosmic fire.

This is so perfectly put that I really regret you didn’t include it in your mini-review.

Years later when he spoke to me about it, his feeling was that a small window of opportunity had existed when it would have been possible to deal with this situation: specifically, if the determination existed to kill all of the scientists who knew how to build the thing and destroy all of their work. However serious or otherwise he may have been about that suggestion, it is a possibility that has long been closed off […].

Aside from the morality of such a solution, I’m fairly certain it would have been invented again — if those scientists could do it, so could others with state-of-the-art scientific knowledge, as they in fact did in the Soviet Union. (See also Robert K. Merton, “Singletons and Multiples in Scientific Discovery”.) And the idea of the entirety of humanity agreeing not to invent it again is very naive since this creates an unstable equilibrium: it’s a very large-scale but textbook example of the prisoner’s dilemma.

There is a nice play by Friedrich Dürrenmatt about this problem which is probably not as worn out in the English-speaking world as it is in the German sphere: “The Physicists” (1961 — the same year as Merton’s paper, incidentally). In it, a physicist makes discoveries that could lead to even more terrible weapons, and to prevent their development hides as a patient in a mental institution. But he is followed there by spies from both sides of the Cold War, and in the end the knowledge falls into the hands of the asylum’s director, the only one who is actually mad. “What once has been thought cannot be withdrawn.”