I saw Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer at the Capri Theater and dined on the fried catfish plate that was delicious and finished with the apple cobbler. In a lifetime of going to movies, the Capri offers the nicest, most complete experience yet. Even better than when I saw Silent Running and Escape From The Planet of the Apes there.
I’ve always felt a great deal of existential tension about the work of J. Robert Oppenheimer. As a teenager, I read that a 13-year-old boy built a working atomic bomb for a science fair project. It was even the subject of an episode of Barney Miller. I took this to mean that I should learn to build one. Along the way, I learned that the story about the 13-year-old boy was greatly exaggerated. He lacked not only the plutonium but also the shaped-charged explosives to make his model work.
The segments of a California orange inspired Oppenheimer’s team to create shaped charged explosives in such a way that it created an implosion into a small container of plutonium with sufficient force to break apart the atomic bonds in the plutonium. They made a bomb powerful enough to use the fingers of God to split apart the basic structure of the universe, making an even bigger bomb.
My knowledge of this never settled well with me. To excise it, I made a folded paper model of Fatman and Littleboy; the devices dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There’s a sequence in Nolan’s film where they crate up Fatman and Littleboy and drive them away on the back of trucks, leaving Los Alamos, through Jornada del Muerto, in correspondingly large and small crates, out of the laboratory out into the history books: fame and Infamy. Seeing them, I thought: “Hello, old friend.”
I’ve made excruciatingly detailed scale models of these devices in folded paper, then destroyed them when it began to concern me that keeping them around was an imperfect reflection of my mental state. Maybe it was. When I met some of the worst people I’ve ever known on the internet, I imported those files into Blender and made a .obj file out of them, which I then imported into a virtual world filled with truly objectionable people. I’m not sure what my point was other than to say this exists, and you exist, and I can’t really break it down further than that.
There have been several films about the creation of the bomb; this one goes from Oppenheimer’s early years in Europe through the trinity device test and ends with Oppeheimer’s confrontation with the McCarthy era insanity.
Like many turn-of-the-century Jews, Oppenheimer once entertained the possibility that communism might provide his people with the safe and beneficial environment they desperately wanted. You saw this sort of worker’s philosophy working its way through art and literature, and science in an era when men believed in the concept of a better world. Many intellectuals saw the Russian experience with communism as a deformation of the optimism felt in the early worker’s movement. Oppenheimer, like many turn-of-the-century Jews, felt a great sense of betrayal when Russian communism became what it became.
There have been many historical investigations into Oppenheimer’s history with communism, and no one has ever been able to come up with more than that. Like many intellectuals, he would be criticized for his involvement in the Spanish Civil War and the communists there. There was a strong sense of antisemitism in the McCarthy era persecution of pre-war communists. In the theater where I saw the movie, a woman cackled anytime communists were mentioned. I’m not sure what that portends, but it’s been my observation that the communist witch hunts have returned.
Nolan used his trademark cinematic style to portray the guilt Oppenheimer felt about what his creation became. This was clearly the strongest of all the themes explored in the film. The effect is really very strong in a Dolby-enabled theater. I doubt it will have the same emotional impact on a home system.
Clearly, Barbie will be the most successful film this year. Oppenheimer might be the most important. Like a lot of important films, some people won’t enjoy it. The intensity of it becomes a different sort of entertainment from what some people pursue. Murphy as Oppenheimer and Downey as Strauss are standouts. Much has been said about the performance of Florence Pugh and Tom Conti as Einstein.
It’s a movie about people much smarter than anyone you know discussing the basic structure of the universe and how to unlock the awesome destructive forces of God himself. The sequence covering the trinity test itself comes at the end of the third act. It’s powerful and effective at putting you into that scene, that moment in human development.
In the bible, it talks about God’s power to smite entire cultures, and he did. Before Oppenheimer, that ability was reserved for God. Based on the book, The American Prometheus, Oppenheimer stole the fire from Olympus and gave it to men. I’ve never lived in a world where this power didn’t exist. The year before I was born, the Russians sent missiles with atomic weapons to the island nation of Cuba. Mississippi was well within striking distance.
As a physicist, Oppenheimer pondered the death of stars; as a leader, he gave us the means to bring about the death of humanity. Only a physicist could do that.
