By Michael F. Duggan
I saw Oppenheimer when it came out last year and bought the DVD a couple of weeks ago. It is a long and complex film, and I remember thinking in the theater that it would be a perfect “two night” movie to watch at home (it is a large film and should be seen at least once on the big screen). I have since watched it four or five times on the small screen.
It is a tale of two Kafkaesque hearings, the 1959 Senate confirmation hearing for Lewis Strauss (“Straws”) to become (or not) Eisenhower’s second Commerce Secretary, and the hearing at the Atomic Energy Commission, a kangaroo court designed to deny the renewal of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance in 1954. The Senate hearing, “a trial about a trial,” is the “present” and is shot in black and white. It is the point from which we flash back to the earlier hearing, and to the rest of the film, which is a biopic of the development of the atomic bomb and Robert Oppenheimer’s role in creating it, and the consequences for both Oppenheimer and the rest of us.
The film is a set of dichotomies: then and now, loyalty and disloyalty (and infidelity), suspicious government officials and free-thinking physicists, hot war and the Cold War, conventional war and nuclear war, Nazi enemies and communist allies who become enemies, Oppenheimer/fission/atomic bomb and Teller/fusion/hydrogen bomb, today’s man (Einstein 40 years earlier and Oppenheimer in 1945), and yesterday’s man (Einstein in 1945 and Oppenheimer in 1954), Einstein’s opposition to quantum mechanics and Oppenheimer’s opposition to the fusion bomb, and of course the theme of one purgatorial hearing as a payback for an earlier one—call it the dichotomy of revenge-driven ambition and subsequent karma.1 What unjustly happens to Oppenheimer finds just parallel in what happens to Strauss at his own inquisition. The words used to characterize events in the earlier hearing echo in the latter.
But the issue of karma is not limited to Strauss and his final comeuppance. Oppenheimer himself fairly obnoxious at turns and disses Strauss multiple times. He is openly rude to his brother, Frank Oppenheimer’s, working class fiancé, Jackie, twice. He also disrespects David L. Hill (twice), a young scientist on Fermi’s team at the Metallurgical Lab in Chicago. Hill is possibly the only unblemished character of the story, having been treated with incivility, yet still doing the right thing when it mattered. He also signed Szilard’s petition opposing the use of the atomic bombs on Japan. The minor slights by Oppenheimer could have easily led Hill to oppose him, or remain silent, during the Strauss confirmation. And yet he does the right thing. Through him, the more important current of karma wins out.
The film is a pleasure to watch: epic scenery, world class acting, and tight editing (a necessity for a three hour, one minute film). Cillian Murphy and Downey are especially good (I always thought that Robert Downey Jr.’s best performances were portrayals of brilliant but flawed people, but here he shows himself to be a wonderful villain, whom he plays with depth, insight, and understanding. It is Murphy’s character who is brilliant and flawed). There is also a constellation of wonderful performances of the veritable Who’s Who of physicists that worked on the Manhattan Program. It is telling that big Hollywood names play secondary and even smallish roles in this picture. In terms of capturing the personalities of secondary characters, the movie is minutely accurate.
There is also cinematic artistry here. The expanding ripples of raindrops in a puddle as the film begins, are reprised for a fleeing moment as the shockwaves of “super” bombs radiating out from cities on a map, and finally again as raindrops in the pond at the Institute for Advanced Study at the film’s ending. The story in general is one of ripples and effects. They they are raindrops in a puddle, nuclear shockwaves, and the Butterfly Effect ripples of unintended effects set in motion by one’s earlier actions. On a sidenote, when I saw the film in the theater, at the point where suspenseful music suddenly stops with the detonation of the first atomic bomb, I found myself plugging my ears for the minute and 41 seconds it takes for the shockwave (the bomb’s “ripple”) to reach the observers at remote locations (and the audience). On another sidenote, it may be the best historical-political feature film since Reds.
The writing is tight and at times historically foreshadowing (Oppenheimer references a “wormhole” in an apple just as Neils Bohr is about to bite into it). We find parallels in the language of the of the two hearings, that neither is a trial or court, that those asking the questions are not judges, that their purpose is not to convict but to “deny,” that there is “no burden of proof,” the prosecutorial dunning, “I’m asking you,” the fact that the events in question in both hearings happened “so long ago,” and the observation: “who’d want to justify their whole life?” As regards the musical soundtrack, I am not sure if it is a work of genius I don’t understand, or just intermittently distracting.
The only issue I had with the writing are a few present-day usages that crept into the script: Strauss talks about a need to “pivot” in his strategy at the hearings (Kitty Oppenheimer also uses this modernish term) to which a young Senate aide says “I don’t think we need to go there.” Oppenheimer gives a “heads-up” to a military security officer, and regarding the violent tendencies of another intelligence officer, is told that the FBI “talked him down.” In a similarly anachronistic vain, Strauss says that he and Oppenheimer “agreed to disagree,” and both Oppie and one of his tormentors quietly exclaim “ouch,” when they are respectively insulted and informed of who will be prosecutor for the AEC hearing. There is also a tendency for the dialog to explain events to the audience, but this I suppose is necessary in an exceptionally complex film about physicists and highly technical matters. Also the soundtrack varies from the interesting to the distracting. But these are minor considerations, and should be ignored.
One scene from real life that was omitted from the film, or softened, is when Einstein questioned Oppenheimer on the wisdom of fighting for his security clearance, and then called him a narr, or “fool,” in Yiddish. Just because you’re smart doesn’t necessarily mean you’re sensible. There is a scene that gives a watered-down version of the actual one, without the name-calling (and Oppenheimer’s statement to Einstein, “Damn it, I happen to love this country,” was actually spoken to his friend and Institute colleague, George Kennan, a character curiously missing in the film).2
Perhaps most compellingly, Oppenheimer, portrays its hero sympathetically but with his flaws in plain view, and its antagonists with both their flaws and understandable bases for sympathy. Likewise, Oppenheimer’s opponents are not cartoonish bad guys acting without motives. Strauss is depicted as an ambitious, insecure man whose malice grows from this sense of inferiority vis-a-vis the overt and implied scorn, and outright humiliation, by those he considers to be his betters. William L. Borden (David Dastmalchian), the man who blows the whistle on Oppenheimer, is shown as a righteous true believer convinced that he is doing the right thing for national security reasons. Edward Teller is portrayed as a brilliant, ambitious, and arrogant man with a vision and logic of his own who might have been right. It would have been all-too easy, and inaccurate, to have written him off as Dr. Strangelove. All the same, at the film’s ending, we fully understand why Kitty Oppenheimer (Emily Blunt) snubs his extended hand.
Oppenheimer is about a time when American thinking was both large and small. It was a time when a brigadier general in the right job could tell a subordinate to “Build him a town. Fast” (which is a little reminiscent of the laconic advice that the five-star George Marshall gave to George Kennan on designing the European Recovery Program, or Marshall Plan, to “Avoid trivia”). It was a time when the U.S. fought won a world war only to embrace the Military Industrial Complex in a rapidly-escalating Cold War and the arms race that accompanied it. It is one of the largest and most important stories in all of human history (which Leslie Groves, played by Matt Damon, melodramatically observes in less delicate language), and this movie tells it without losing any of its scale or significance.
The movie’s ending comes together beautifully, drawing in all of its many threads and underscoring one last dichotomy, half of which has hung over humanity ever since the Manhattan Project. At Los Alamos, Edward Teller theorized that the nuclear chain reaction might not stop, that it might continue beyond the uranium or plutonium fuel and ignite the Earth’s atmosphere. Obviously this did not happen at Trinity, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, or any of the other times atomic or hydrogen bombs were detonated. But in a sense, it did continue. There is a final flashback to a meeting of Oppenheimer and Einstein by the Institute Pond. Oppenheimer suggests to Einstein that perhaps he did initiate an ongoing chain reaction, not in a singular, never-ending atomic explosion, but by devising the weapon. The Trinity explosion initiated another causal sequence of events: the nuclear arms race and an ever-increasing club of nuclear-armed nations. He gave humans the capacity to destroy ourselves with nuclear fire, a capacity as real today as it has been at any time since 1945. Oppenheimer gave the world The Bomb, thus the title of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin upon which the film is based: American Prometheus (the movie attributes the Oppenheimer-Prometheus comparison to Bohr), although it could have just as easily been American Frankenstein.3 Epic tragedy may be dead in literature, but it lives on in history, in human events. The movie ends with a dark, cautionary prophecy.
With things going badly in Ukraine, and with Russian officials warning about the possible use of tactical (“battlefield”) nuclear weapons there, it now takes little imagination to realize the enduring power of Oppenheimer’s adumbrate and his invention.
Notes:
- Dichotomies and juxtapositions abound in this film. In addition to the ones mentioned above, there are plenty of others: insiders (physicists)/outsiders (non-physicists), scientists/soldiers, relativity/quantum mechanics, the powerful/less powerful, theoretical physics/experimental physics (and then applied, engineering), the Yiddish-speaking side of the Park/the other side of the Park, Trinity/Vishnu, physics/New Mexico, New Deal Democrat/Communist, Chicago/Los Alamos, the bomb/”gadget,” ambition/regret and denial, efficiency/security, arms talks/the super bomb, Los ALamos/the Institute for Advanced Studies, Oppenheimer’s paper on blackholes/the start of World War II, the two halves of a split atom/the two hydrogen atoms fused together, security/inefficiency, the just/the unjust, Germany/Japan, probability/certainty, a chemical reaction explosion/an atomic explosion, plutonium/uranium, the morality of developing and dropping the atomic bomb/the morality of developing the hydrogen bomb, a U.S. atomic monopoly/international control of atomic weapons, the U.S. bomb/the U.S.S.R.’s bomb, sunshine/shadow, the means/the end.
- For the account of Einstein calling Oppenheimer a “narr,” see Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus, The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, 495. Regarding Oppenheimer’s statement to Kennan, see pp. 4-5.
- Of course the subtitle of the novel, Frankenstein, is The Modern Prometheus. Although American Prometheus provides far greater detail and information, it is striking how closely the movie follows the book.