As I sat watching the Hollywood blockbuster Oppenheimer all I could think of was Edward Said. In his famous essay “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims,” Said argued that there was no way to understand the ideology of Zionism----the idea of Jewish racial supremacy---without examining the experience of those who suffered from it, namely Palestinians like himself.
Not really. It can’t cover everything. The main fault is not actually showing the consequences of the dropping on the bomb.
I’m going to copy paste a previous set of comments I wrote about this:
If someone thinks that the movie boiled down to: Great Man shouldn’t be stopped by annoying government to do their awesome research, then I think they need to improve their media literacy.
Movies can be serious. That’s fine and sometimes necessary, depending on the subject matter. Saying a movie is bad because it is not ‘fun’ (whatever you mean by that) is either unclear or asinine. I agree that Nolan’s films are pretty humorless but that’s not why people go to his films. I’d also have prefered his films if he smoothed out the flow between high-brow seriousness as a tone with other moods and tones.
Regarding the Great Man Theory: The film is obviously centred around Oppenheimer. Nolan is one of the last Hollywood filmakers making classical dramas and epics. The film is mainly about his tragedy. It is what it is. We can critique it for not expanding its interest (and I certainly would in relation to the actual consequences at Hiroshima and Nagasaki) but honestly I think we should also try to appreciate individual stories for what they are, recognizing the strengths when they’re there. The film does portray both the theoretical and practical achievements of the scientists and engineers that were necessary for Oppenheimer’s work (which was itself extremely historically important). It was obviously not perfect.
His tragedy is linked to how his understanding of reality, translated into practical and technological reality, and his hypocritical and morally cowardly choices about the practical consequences, give us a man who was brilliant but not wise, intelligent but naive. He wants to play God. He wants divine power. In this way the movie if philosophical. If you don’t like the theme of people who, literally, find their understanding of the deeper levels of reality (they are foundational physicists, they study the fundamental nature of the physical universe) translated into real practical consequences (which isn’t fundamentally different from the turning or use of Marxist knowledge into or for concrete, practical political activity, with its both positive consequences and negative consequences), then that’s on you. It’s a naturally, actually existentially important discussion about the relationship between knowledge and power and how that creates tragic situations (impossibility of ‘moral’ choice). I also would have thought that more people claiming to be Marxists would have appreciated the theme of the problems of the relationships between theory and practice.
I’m honestly suprised that few people seem to have caught on to what seems to me to be a key possible interpretation: the film is a tragedy about a hypocritical genius who matyrs himself after acquiring ‘he thinks’ divine power. Oppenheimer is trying to play God, and he is suffering the consequences of trying to play God. This is why the film loops back round at the end to Einstein, who reminds Oppenheimer that he cannot control the consequences of his achievement. If he wants to reach for divine achievement, he must pay a price (not a deserved price, of course).
This is also why the scene with Truman is important (not just because they correctly portray him as a slimy sociopath; albeit, incorrectly, as more charismatic than he actually was). Recall Truman says to him: “Do you think the people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki give two shits about who created the bomb? They care who dropped it. I did…Don’t let they crybaby back in here”. Truman’s voice changes here, becomes less charming and more menacing. He is calling out Oppenheimer’s bullshit, like many of the people around him, notably Einstein. He’s reminding him of his limits as a human individual. He is not in power in this society. The imperialist state is in power, and nuclear weapons are now part of this power. Remember also that Oppenheimer looks away from the images of Hiroshima. I’ll come back to my criticism of this below, but this reflects Oppenheimer’s hypocrisy and moral cowardice again: he is not God. When God drops a church roof on a room full of his followers, he’s looking the whole time. God, or a god, can take responsibility, indeed claim the right, to the divine violence they unleash. Oppenheimer cannot.
That also underlines the importance of the Bhagavad Gita, which is about how a warrior, Arjuna, is inspired to do what is necessary in war by being shown divine power. The power of Vishnu (Krishna) is compared to divine power, ultimate power to destroy the world that comes from a deeper understanding of reality, which in the case of Oppenheimer and the scientists around him boils down to quantum theory and nuclear physics. The most chilling and critical interpretation of Oppenheimer as a person is that he is perhaps precisely convinced to not oppose the use of the bomb because he sees its ‘divine’ power. Perhaps he also thinks it necessary to end the war, but he himself later admits that the Japanese seem to have been near defeat and basically ready to surrender. His choices become a farcical imitation of a tragic myth.
I appreciated how they didn’t avoid the fact that Oppenheimer was an obvious communist-sympathiser, and that his broader circle of friends, family and lovers were filled to the brim with communists. The communists are obviously portrayed the most heroically and positively in the film. Some people seem to think it portrayed the unionization and communists negatively, which I really didn’t see at all. Like I really don’t know how people came to this view if they watched the same movie I did. This feels either like media illiteracy or contrarian reaching. Also: the more anti-communist the character became, the more vile they proved to be.
People might not like communists portrayed as broken, disappointed, and cynical about their past life as communists or bitter over their past political choices, but if you think that doesn’t exist then you clearly haven’t spent much time amongst communists and ex-communists. The joke in the movie that, since Oppenheimer has read all three volumes of Das Capital, he was better read than most communist part members, was honestly funny as it is often true. Also, it portrayed Oppenheimer as engaging in actual militant practice as a syndicalist, and part of its critique of him lies in his moral ambiguity, in his inability to state clearly what he believes politically, and the fact that he lets all of that fall to the wayside in his desire to ‘see God’, or ‘become God’, in any case to access divine power, and then matyr himself over it.
It also made clear that his relationships to women were deeply problematic. As his communist lover tells him: ‘you can come and go as you please; that’s power’. A woman scientist at Los Alamos argues with a colleague over the effects of the radiation on her reproductive system. Oppenheimer’s wife is confined to the role of housewife and clearly suffers from depression and alcoholism. Of course, I would never call it a feminist piece of film-making. That’s not Nolan’s focus. I would agree that the lack of characterization of women was a noticeable flaw.
A minor criticism is that Nolan has this tendency to write overly serious scripts where he feels the need to say some things instead of telling them when the latter would be more effective. For instance in the ‘Man of Steel’, which he wrote (bad movie imo), we see a young (child) Clark Kent reading Plato’s Republic (which opens with the question: ‘What is justice?’, which is smacks of superficial profundity, as you can just explore that more properly through the narrative and visual language of the film. In Oppenheimer, they make sure you know he was not just a brilliant theoretical physicist, but also read modernist literature (Eliot’s masterpiece, The Waste Land), listened to modern classical music (forget who; Stravinsky), looked at Picassos and read Sanskrit (true and impressive honestly). It was fine but it could have been more naturally incorporated, whereas here is felt a bit forced.
My main, and I think also the most serious, criticism I would have, is that they did not actually show the consequences of nuclear war. They show that Oppenheimer is a hypocrite, and he suffers both from pride (a desire to play God), but also a moral hypocrite: unlike God, he cannot look at his works. If he wants to take credit for creation, he should also take responsibility for destruction. If Nolan had really wanted to make a film about nuclear horror, instead of Oppenheimer’s tragedy, or if he had wanted to expand the tragedy out from the subjective sphere of one man to the socially objective consequences of his actions, then the films honestly shouldn’t have ended with the surreal vision of the world burning, but with 10 minutes of actual footage from the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima. That’s how you provoke the audience. CW obviously, but if anyone wants to see a film that actually does this, check out: Hiroshima Mon Amour.
As for not showing more detail explaining that the reason for dropping the bomb was one of anti-Soviet Cold-War logic, which is ofc correct, I don’t think you can force this into a biography without making it seem forced and clunky. There was not really a way for Oppenheimer to have that kind of paper proof of the internal workings of the state on hand. That obviously raises the question of how you manage to incorportate info which is important like that. Like maybe you have a digression from his story but I’m not sure how to do that well.
By-the-bye, by any technical measure, and in terms of visual craftmanship, the film is a marvel. I honestly can’t remember seeing a film recently at a similar scale. This is one reason why many people, and not only people with casual interest in movies, flock to see Nolan’s films. That might not speak to you, for whatever reason, which is fine, but this is a legitimate thing for someone to talk about when they liked the movie. People liking things because they find them visually beautiful is natural. This doesn’t mean I think it is the most visually beautiful or movie of all time, but it is good to let people know that if they want to go see it just for that then that’s fine. The sound-design was also the most impressive I can remember in a film, although that might be a bias of having seen it in cinema. The narrative structure and cinematography were very, very impressive imo; why would be a more technical and aesthetic discussion. For instance, the visual harmonies between his meditation on internal atomic structure, the deaths of stars as they collapse as based on chain reactions, and the culmination in the construction of the atomic bomb, also based on uncontrollable chain reactions, extending metaphorically into the uncontrolable social and political consequences of nuclear weapons, was beautiful imo. If you watch films for cinematographic, superficial as they may be, then I think the film is worth watching. It’s also worth watching as an exploration of alienation of a scientist in the form of the fact that no matter how deep his scientific knowledge, it does not allow him to control the consequences of his knowledge.
I should add that I’m biased as I’m a sucker for stories about the wonders and horrors of science as well as history.
Also, my brothers and sisters in Christ: you presumably knew, or could have known, that the film is 3 hours long. That’s on you. Some people (myself included) love long films. Sometimes you want a longer run-time in order to flesh out the story, especially if it’s an epic or biopic. If you were bored that’s a shame but the people I went to see it with were pretty gripped from start to finish.
i actually would be an Oppenheimer movie defender if there had been a third-act pivot to reality, even though i share your criticisms but with much more umbrage and lack of respect for nolan.
i don’t care what sort of ‘technical achievement’ the effects department created for their Bomb Graphics in the film, actual nuclear footage is terrifying not least because it’s real
I don’t really know what you mean by ’ Oppenheimer defender’. I don’t like Nolan as a person. It’s not a personality contest. I’m watching a film and honestly while I’m watching I’m not thinking about Nolan’s personality, i’m thinking about the quality of the film I’m watching. I also don’t necessarily care much about technical achievement for the sake of technical achievement in the context of a movie. It’s justified aesthetically by how it is used. In this film is was used expertly (not simply by Nolan, but by the massive team of workers to made this film) with the sound design to try and capture some of the sick thrill that Oppenheimer experiences as he accesses ‘divine power’. If you didn’t feel that that’s fine, but it is there.
i’d be the Oppenheimer defender, the suggestion you made is one i liked so much it’d overcome the intense ill will i feel toward other parts of the film
you don’t have to self-flagellate & justify about why you liked it, i’m not accusing you of anything and if i was, why would it matter if you liked it? it’s freak behavior to act like appreciating a work of art is an automatic endorsement of every bad thing about a creator and every problematic element of the art
Okay I think we just misunderstood each other. i wasnt suggesting you think that.
lmao self-flagellation the last of my fetishes.
I aint saying that appreciating it is an automatic endorsement of their persons. That’s nonsensically reductive. I’m saying the opposite. Miles Davis was one of the greatest American artists of the 20th century and also a massive dick.
Cool, another pithy new buzzword from the wonk-net. Gonna place this on my shelf next to “disinformation” and throw them at anyone who disagrees with my views.
grow up