Thoughts on Oppenheimer
Science, Power and Technocratic Dystopias
Christopher Nolan, The Frustrating Genius
I have seen all but two of Christopher Nolan’s films, Interstellar and Tenet, his last two films prior to his current offering, Oppenheimer. I have long had a love/hate relationship with his movies, which are always visually interesting and engaging, but generally frustrate or disappoint me in equal measure.
To give an example: it always bothered me that Harvey Dent is portrayed as some sort of savior for Gotham, whose fall from grace will some how plunge the city into despair in The Dark Knight. I understand the symbolism—he becomes Two Face, and doubles the putative Savior that is Bruce Wayne/Batman. But Nolan insisted on making his trilogy dark, gritty and “realistic,” and no matter how hard I tried, I simply could not believe the population of a major city knew or cared who their District Attorney was, much less that they would commit collective hari-kari because he broke bad.
It didn’t matter, because the film is still compelling because of his visuals, the performances, etc., but it always bothers me. Nolan is a bright guy, but I think he outsmarts himself story wise more often than not. For very different reasons, he reminds me of my other directorial bete noir, Ridley Scott, whom I also love/hate, who also suffers from similar story ailments (of which more anon).
Oppenheimer is no exception to this, and despite being overshadowed by Barbie (seriously), is on pace to be a world wide hit. The film is in some ways just as dark as some of his earlier films, such as The Prestige, which border on the nihilistic, though with something of a twist (perhaps). I’ve always thought the “philosophy” these films espoused, if that’s what it was, were silly and pretentious, but I’ve always admired Nolan for trying to make you think, while still making entertaining films. This is why I find Nolan so interesting, despite my reservations. Like Scott, who brought back the historical epic with Gladiator, who else besides Nolan could make a summer blockbuster from the biopic of a scientist?
Oppenheimer (2023)
If you don’t know the story, Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) was the head of the Manhattan Project, which developed the first nuclear bomb in 1945, which the United States then dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His name is inextricably linked with the atomic age which he helped initiate.
As a film, Oppenheimer is visually stunning, and at times, an exciting film. There are some wonderfully executed scenes, and the sequence leading up the first successful detonation at Los Alamos is masterful. Nolan switches from color to black and white at certain points in the film, for reasons that aren’t apparent to me, but everything looked dazzling from my vantage. The guys at Red Letter Media complained about the amount of background music, especially in the first part of the film, but I thought it worked well enough. As they mentioned, Nolan likes loud audio in his films for whatever reason, but it didn’t bother me.
The performances are mostly excellent. I have always like Cilian Murphy, who plays a gaunt, conflicted title character superbly. Perhaps he does not care about such things, but I hope he wins as Oscar for his performance. But he is not alone. The cast is amazing: Emily Blunt plays his wife Kitty, Robert Downey Jr. plays his political nemesis Lewis Strauss (more in a minute on that), Matt Damon as general Leslie Groves, Gary Oldman as Harry Truman, just to name a few. They all are wonderful, and I guess actors must like working for Nolan because he seems to get amazing performances from them in every film.
But then there is the story. Some people have complained that the film is too long, and I do think it could have been a half hour or so shorter and not lost anything. The reason people feel it is too long, in my opinion, is—you guessed it—problems with the story.
The main problem with the story, and the reason the film is probably too long, is that there are actually two stories, two whole movies contending with each other in Oppenheimer. The two stories aren’t necessarily unrelated, but they don’t fit together very well, for reasons I will explain shortly.
The first of these stories—and the one that comprises the bulk of the film—is the Misunderstood Genius-Martyr. In this story, Oppenheimer is an open minded but naive scientists, idealistic and tolerant (he has communist friends!), persecuted by neanderthals who misunderstand and misrepresent our hero.
(Note: the rest of the essay will contain Spoilers)
The film is told out of sequence, through a series of flashbacks, with the main thread being the confirmation hearing of Lewis Strauss, the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, before Congress. Strauss we find out wants to punish Oppenheimer for having humiliated Strauss publicly before Congress and opposed his hard-line stance on sharing nuclear secrets with the Soviet Union, by taking away his security clearance and damaging his reputation. Oppenheimer is hauled before an inquiry board headed by the FBI, and throughout the movie, his interrogation forms the spine of the film.
Early on we are treated to a young Oppenheimer studying in Europe, meeting Famous Scientists like Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg (where Oppenheimer also attempts to poison a teacher he dislikes—yikes!) before returning to America to bring Enlightenment in the form of theoretical physics to the knuckle-draggers of America, specifically at Berkley. There, we find that Oppenheimer is an idealist: he befriends several communists, supports the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, and tries to unionize scientists at Berkley. He also, crucially, takes a lover at one of these communists party gatherings, Jean Tatlock (played by Florence Pugh).
In the middle of the film, however, things take a turn, and what I take to be a second story tries to emerge. In it, Oppenheimer the idealist (theoretical physicist) is tapped by Leslie Groves to lead the Manhattan Project. He gets them build a whole town near his ranch in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in order to get the best scientists to work on the project by allowing their families.
The film picks up with the race to build the bomb and beat the Nazis. Oppenheimer begins to have moral qualms about what he is doing, and Nolan links this to his personal life. When he first meets Jean Tatlock, they make love, but after they do, she takes down a book from his bookshelf, and asks him to read a passage. The passage is a familiar one: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” a line from the Hindu poem Bhagavad Gita. This is the passage Oppenheimer, in a later interview, said came to mind upon first witnessing the detonation of the bomb at Los Alamos.
Nolan thus links the creation of the bomb with Oppenheimer’s sexual peccadillos, as he marries Kitty but keeps seeing Jean. Later in the film, Jean commits suicide, and when he reveals his affair to Kitty, she angrily tells him “you can’t sin and expect their won’t be consequences!” (or words to that effect. She definitely used the word “sin” though.)
Thus, as the film crescendos with by far the best sequence in the film, Nolan seems to pivot to a different story, which is basically Ian Malcolm’s comment from Jurassic Park incarnate: “they were so worried about whether or not they could they never stopped to think if they should.” Jean’s suicide, and the detonation of test bomb, which leads to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, give us a cautionary tale, The Savant Tortured by His Creation, sort of like Victor Frankenstein. This culminates in what I thought was the best scene in the film: after Japan has surrendered, Oppenheimer gives a speech to a crowd of cheering scientists, which morphs into a scene of nuclear destruction, with people’s flesh being torn off their bodies—haunting and amazing.
Unfortunately, the film doesn’t end there, and picks up the earlier story. Lewis Strauss is denied his cabinet post because scientists rally behind Oppenheimer, but he his security clearance is revoked. In a tie off, the film returns to a scene earlier in the movie, when Albert Einstein says something to Oppenheimer, when he is first brought to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton by Strauss. Einstein warns him people will misunderstand what he has done, because genius’s like them are so complex and hard to understand. Oppenheimer replies by saying that, after all, he fears he has set off a chain reaction that will destroy the world (a reference to the fact that Oppenheimer and co. weren’t sure at first if detonating an atom bomb wouldn’t destroy the earth’s atmosphere). But his reply also refers to the Cold War nuclear arms race, and the films ends with a scene of the Earth being consumed by fire.
“The Play’s the Thing, Wherein I’ll Catch the Conscience of the King”
The second of these stories (The Savant Tortured by his Creation) was the more compelling of the two. But Oppenheimer seems more focused on the first. As the film started, I thought it might turn into pure hero worship, with Oppenheimer as the uncomplicated embodiment of scientific progress. The middle part of the film upends this, but then returns to the political realm, with Strauss successfully getting him stripped of his security clearance. This part of movie was the least effective, dominated by characters sitting in rooms and giving long speeches.
Nolan presents Oppenheimer’s plight as some sort of persecution, and the film wants us to sympathize with him as a scientist being persecuted for political reasons. I am not sure why. The film itself makes clear that Oppenheimer was very political; at one point in the film, Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, tells Oppenheimer he is a politician and long since ceased to be a theoretical physicist (this was while working on the bomb at Los Alamos). Oppenheimer played at politics after the war, and sometimes you get burnt when you do that. Losing your security clearance isn’t persecution; it’s not like Oppenheimer was put in prison or loses his job. It’s revealing that Nolan apparently thinks this is some sort of martyrdom.
This is because Oppenheimer is a perfect symbol for the contradictions of how modern society, especially our global elite, thinks of science. We are usually told that it is about a disinterested search for truth but in fact modern science is not merely about truth but also power. Francis Bacon never said “knowledge is power” but that was his basic idea and that of philosophers like Rene Descartes. They wanted science not just to give them knowledge of nature, but power over it. But they also famously purported to be disinterested truth seekers, disengaged from the world they wanted to control.
Oppenheimer embodies this contradiction perfectly. He wants to be a scientist, a disinterested seeker of truth, but also wants to be a committed activist, one who uses science to promote his politics. The problem is the two things are difficult, if not impossible to combine. There is a reason Plato said that governments will be just when philosophers are kings. It was his way of pointing out that the pursuit of truth is corrupted by the pursuit of power. Sages in the ancient world separated themselves from society for that reason. (Oppenheimer’s interest in ancient Indian religious texts is interesting in this regard.)
But as Teller notes, he gives up theoretical concerns for politics. Strauss, in a speech later in the film, bitterly accuses him of wanting to be known as the father of the bomb, even as he uses that reputation to pursue his political agenda. Oppenheimer naively thinks he can do both, but events prove him wrong. And yet for some reason Nolan presents him as misunderstood rather than having contradictory aims.
The same conflict—between science as truth seeking and science as power—bedevils contemporary liberalism. Liberals love technocratic expertise, and have long harnessed it for gaining political power. Contemporary liberals largely see politics this way: experts govern society and the plebs are supposed to follow their enlightened leadership (hence all the “trust the science” nonsense.)
Like Oppenheimer, they want to have their cake and eat it too. Like Oppenheimer, they want to be disinterested seekers of truth and passionate activists at the same time. “Trust us we follow the science, but also give us power over your lives” is the barely concealed message of liberal nostrums about everything from climate change to transgenderism. And the corollary of this is that people who don’t “trust the science” shouldn’t have power but only be subject to it, wielded by enlightened, liberal technocrats. For liberals, politics simply is legal and technical procedures, which is why a film like Spielberg’s ponderous Lincoln, is ostensibly about slavery and the Civil War, but is really about Enlightened mandarins got the 13th Amendment passed through congress.
Chris Nolan, Poet Laureate of Liberalism?
Our elites have one great fear, and it is not that they will accrue too much power. It is that it will fall into the hands of the wrong people—the people in whose name they purportedly govern. Be it American politicians whining about Fascism or Chinese bureaucrats with their social credit systems, our contemporary elite fears nothing so much as that the “masses” who they see as backward and dangerous, should gain power. And so every political decision is turned into an emergency to justify taking more and more control of the lives of the masses, since these technocrats believe they will destroy the world if that happened.
Viewed in this light, Oppenheimer is a kind of horror movie for globalist elites: the power meant only for the scientifically enlightened, those on the “right side of history,” falls into the hand of troglodyte Morlocks. The result of this could only be the catastrophic destruction of the whole world.
What’s not clear to me from watching the film is whether Nolan agrees with this or if he is critiquing it. I tend to think he agrees with it, if only because the film spends so much time on the rather tedious legal chicanery used to strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance. If it seems I am harping on this too much, remember, a security clearance is not a matter of either human or civil rights, but of access to power, which liberals think technocrats like “Oppy” deserve. And in real life, liberals practically worship at the altar of Oppenheimer: in 2022, Jennifer Granholm, President Biden’s energy secretary, restored Oppenheimer’s security clearance posthumously. Don’t say our elites don’t have religion, or fail to commemorate their saints.
Oppenheimer certainly was on the side of the liberal angels. The film is mostly positive about his support for the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War, never mentioning the left-wing violence against the Catholic Church that precipitated it. His openness to sharing nuclear information with the Soviets is contrasted with Strauss’s anticommunism, and conservatism: at one point, Strauss tells an aide that he knows Henry Luce, the conservative publisher of Time Magazine, an obvious “bad guy” (and both men, of course, are Jewish, which the film doesn’t investigate too much). For all its visual sophistication, Oppenheimer comes off as a bog standard liberal morality tale—commie lovers good, commie haters bad.
It’s true that the film shows his moral agonies over the creation of the atom bomb, and as noted above, links this with his womanizing. Which is interesting, obviously, because it replicates another conundrum of contemporary liberalism: they want complete sexual liberation (i.e., power) but also claim to respect everyone’s autonomy at the same time. Oppenheimer wants to have his piece on the side and his respectable wife too. (I suspect Nolan really does dislike his womanizing. Nolan’s films are a husband-wife collaboration, as his wife Emma is his editor, and he has four kids, which sounds rare for a famous filmmaker.)
But the arc of the film suggests Nolan’s believes Oppenheimer must be forgiven his sins, because he is one of the Enlightened Ones, and that the only real problem is that bad guys like Strauss get power, which they shouldn’t. Because they are not open-minded, tolerant, technocratic savants, this naturally means they will destroy the whole Earth. Only the Oppenheimers of the world have a right to wear the One Ring.
Again, I’m not necessarily sure that’s the message Nolan wanted to send. Probably, he wants us to see in Oppenheimer’s efforts to build the bomb a cautionary tale AND that he was a persecuted martyr for science. If that’s the case, he is trying to have his cake and eat it too, just like his protagonist, and is just as unconvincing.
The sort of technocratic liberalism the film embodies could do worse for its poet laureate than Nolan, who is in his prime as a filmmaker. But then it says something I found the last thirty minutes of the film so dull, as they focus on the political maneuverings of Strauss et. al. This isn’t just because Oppenheimer isn’t a hero to me, but also because I know the globalist liberal narrative well enough to know exactly how it was going to end. It is impossible not to know, because it is beamed into our heads, every minute of every hour every of every day, 24/7. All that was left was more speeches, which, despite the quality of the performances, nearly put me to sleep. If the film really does represent the worldview of our global, technocratic, managerial elite, it is telling that not even Nolan could make it as fully convincing, or even as fully entertaining as his films usually are.