Oppenheimer: A Mushroom-Cloud Rorschach Test
Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer invites you to make your own interpretation of the creation of atomic weapons.
Duck and cover: Oppenheimer has detonated in a theater near you. The movie is a three-hour-long chain reaction that feeds on personal and historical dilemmas. Like the best cinema, it will leave spectators feeling like an unseen force has just swept through them, leaving behind different perspectives and interpretations.
Predictably enough, the movie narrates the life and fate of J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy). Also predictably, director Christopher Nolan alternates between multiple timelines, set primarily around Oppenheimer’s two main interactions with the U.S. government: as an indispensable leader in the Manhattan Project’s development of nuclear weapons and as a target in a bureaucratic vendetta.
Oppenheimer’s relationships with his calling as a physicist and with his family, friends, colleagues, and nation provide the fissile material in these narratives. The movie both shines and stumbles in this immense list of characters (played equally immensely by a large panoply of actors), causing some occasional difficulty in understanding who’s who and what conflicts are playing out.
At the personal level, Oppenheimer is about individual and professional dilemmas and decisions. Is it right to justify our own actions with the specter of what others might do instead? What cost are we willing to bear to challenge prevailing views? Can the torments we suffer atone for the harms we inflict? These are not pleasant questions to confront, but they are as relevant to those designing weapons of mass destruction as they are to any moviegoer, regardless of their occupation.
At the historical level, the movie deals with achievements that define our species. The film’s climax is the Manhattan Project’s detonation of a nuclear bomb at the Trinity test in July 1945. Appropriately enough for a story in which quantum physics plays a leading role, it is a superposition of human triumph and of human tragedy.
We witness this through an allegory of human history: Oppenheimer on horseback, nomadically wandering the New Mexican desert; Oppenheimer building a city at Los Alamos; Oppenheimer establishing commercial and intellectual exchanges with other distant places; Oppenheimer facilitating a clustering of scientific and technical talent that produces an incredible breakthrough; Oppenheimer trying to control the forces he has unleashed.
This progression through several stages of civilization gives humanity, in tragic irony, the power both to control novel amounts of energy and to destroy itself. Ever since the Trinity moment, the world’s most civically minded people might just be the arms control experts that have helped reduce proliferation and limit nuclear weapons testing and use.
The character-centric perspective limits what the filmmaker chooses to show us. Oppenheimer offers only hints of the bomb’s catastrophic effects on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and close to nothing at all on the damage caused by American atomic tests on communities in the U.S. Southwest and in the Pacific. Apocalypse lurks on the periphery of the movie, not in plain sight. This is for the worse in confining to the subtext these important realities; it may be for the better as it does not reduce them to a sideshow. Inserting cutscenes to show the two cities’ bombing, for instance, would be gratuitous and achieve neither greater humanity for victims nor a more “complete” movie on the subject.* The impact of atomic use and testing merits being at the center of its own narrative, and that would require a wholly separate film.
Nolan is more subtle, encouraging the audience to exercise their empathy without instructing them to do so. In a thundering scene of jubilation after the Trinity detonation, the director superimposes glimpses of the atomic bomb’s destructive effects on the Americans who surround Oppenheimer. This is the most tangible portrayal of the weapon’s harm and a foreshadowing of the threat it would pose to its own creators in the decades to come.
In what it shows and what it doesn’t, Oppenheimer becomes an epic reflection on who we are and how we have become the global civilization we are today. At least one person at my screening cheered at the Trinity explosion. I suppressed tears of grief. This is a mushroom-cloud-shaped Rorschach test of a film.
* Interested viewers can find a touching chronicle in John Hersey’s classic article Hiroshima — journalism, not spectacle, for those who seek a graphic account. A final, optimistic view of human progress could include an image of Hiroshima and Nagasaki today. Exemplifying human resilience, they have been rebuilt into thriving cities with institutions dedicated to the universal message of “never again.”
