Father of the Bomb
As I have gotten older, it’s become harder for my childhood fears to be realized on screen in a way that stops me in my tracks. Maybe it’s because one of them came true (pandemic) and didn’t kill me. Maybe it’s because I am more brave than I was when I was a child (lol). I really don’t have much of an idea as to why this is.
When Oppenheimer was announced I knew I had to see it in theaters. From fifth grade through seventh grade I was paralyzed by the thought of Nuclear war. I have a (diagnosed) anxiety condition that tends to fixate heavily on one thing for an extended period of time. For a long time it was germs, then the weather (shout-out tornado alley) and then in fifth grade I read Z for Zachariah. I was tangentially aware of the atomic bomb and ever-present threat of nuclear war- but this book opened my eyes in a way I couldn’t ignore. From that point on my mind was consumed by threats of an impending nuclear war that never came.
Sometimes I would look out the window at a sleepover and see a flashing light from a plane. “Here we go” I would think, assuming that the first target an enemy of the US would hit with an atomic bomb is Bloomington, Indiana. I didn’t say this fear manifested itself in a rational way. Bizarre-looking clouds were surely exhaust from rockets with nuclear warheads on the end- any minute now we would be getting the “goodbye and farewell” news bulletins.
This winter I watched Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet”. “Tenet” has the piercing anxiety of a person who has only lived in a world with the possibility of mutually assured destruction. Seeing the way Christopher Nolan is able to play off of the existential fear of a world on fire due to human error was when I knew Oppenheimer was going to be exactly the kind of film I would want about the building of the atomic bomb.
And it was.
Oppenheimer doesn’t pull punches or make justifications. It is a movie about a “tortured” genius using his genius to do something terrible, and it’s up front with that. Robert Oppenheimer is not a sympathetic figure and never has been. You can tell this film was written by a child of the Cold War.
“You don’t get to commit sin and then ask us all to feel sorry for you when there are consequences,” an incredible line delivered by Emily Blunt, is really the thesis of the film. Sometimes remorse isn’t good enough- a hard truth to recognize, but a truth nonetheless. It’s an emotion that exists in the gray area between eternal guilt and forgiving yourself. You can recognize you did something horrific- you can regret it and you can apologize- but that doesn’t undo what was done.
The perspective changes throughout the film between black and white (the events as they happened objectively) and color (the events through the eyes of Robert Oppenheimer). Many critics in the lead up to the film’s release thought that this would be a way to explore Oppenheimer’s remorse through a sympathetic lense. This wasn’t the case, rather it explores these feelings objectively- yes Robert Oppenheimer is remorseful, but does that matter? What does remorse really mean when your work results in something as horrific as the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The whole time you know Oppenheimer’s work will lead to something horrible. Hell, he knows it. But the film doesn’t tell the story in a way where we as an audience are expected to feel sorry for him. How could we?
Oppenheimer is a childhood fear realized on screen. The visions Oppenheimer has were exact thoughts I would lay in bed paralyzed by. The shot with the exhaust from implied rockets above the clouds was straight out of a late-elementary school nightmare. The shot of the woman melting under the heat of an atomic explosion was something I would imagine happening to myself and my family. This movie would have paralyzed me with dread at eleven, and it did the same at 20.
I think that this is a story that needed to be told and I think Christopher Nolan was the right person to tell it. He’s critical of Oppenheimer, and on an underlying level, of humanity. The film doesn’t tell you how to feel- it tells you the things that happened. Whether or not it was through Oppenheimer’s eyes, this is a film that delves deep into what remorse means, and if it even really matters.