Oppenheimer
This is a story about annihilation.
This is also a story about atomic physics as a metaphor for the triumphs, flaws, and vicissitudes of the human condition.
In Oppenheimer, director Christopher Nolan, uses the urgent and high-stakes historical contexts of World War II, the Cold War, and the precarious positions of the world's foremost physicists therein (many of whom were Jewish) as a wire frame upon which he expertly dresses a beautiful, complex, and deeply felt human story.
The long arc of the film is the interplay between layers of competing, parallel forces, all threatening obliteration. Many of these forces—Capitalism, Communism, McCarthyism—are bigger than any one individual, and yet still, some individuals—Oppenheimer, for one—are forces unto themselves. And wherever any such forces should meet, there are produced shockwaves and tectonic shifts that leave nothing undisturbed.
Physics: God at the Dice Table
Starting from the top, at the highest level of the film’s thematic layers, there is the grand mystery of atomic physics. Of course, the film is framed around the Promethean accomplishment of harnessing nuclear energy. On one hand, marshaling enough power for humanity to free itself from toil, and on the other, delivering more than enough of the same in the hands of weak men for humanity to drown in its own meanness, stupidity, and pride.
It is through this lens of physics that we are introduced the spectres of force, attraction, collision, critical mass, annihilation—themes, that while very much presented in their academic context, are also then mirrored and repeated in kaleidoscoping fashion across their social, political, and interpersonal meanings throughout the film.
In the scientific context here, the theme of annihilation is quite literal but largely esoteric. It is considered in terms of chance, odds, and unfeeling mathematics. This is perfectly summed up by the Manhattan Project’s galaxy-brains at Los Alamos taking bets on whether the test of the atom bomb would start, in that moment, an immediate chain reaction that would ignite the atmosphere and engulf the entire world in flames—something that they had concluded that any use of an atomic weapon had a non-zero chance of achieving. Annihilation.
Politics: The King’s Disease
Beneath the treatment of pure physics, the next conceptual layer is that of the byzantine and clandestine political dramas of Cold War. Here, the antagonistic parallels of Truman-McCarthy Capitalism and Soviet Communism, engage in an endless, brinkman's duel with atomic Mutually Assured Destruction—annihilation clothed in the Great Game of the modern nation state power.
America and the USSR, Capitalism and Communism, McCarthyism and Popular Activism these are the opposing strong forces that define this subtext of the film. In this regard, annihilation takes social and political meaning. The US and USSR are aptly likened to jousting scorpions each with the power to kill the other but only at the cost of its own life. While Oppenheimer (and many of his colleagues) seem inexplicably bent on remaining politically unaligned – a dangerous and naïve play when straddling two hegemonic systems that both equally view insufficient blind devotion as tantamount to betrayal.
Underscoring this, the few exceptions to this rule—like Benny Safdie's Edward Teller and Christopher Denham's Klaus Fuchs—are portrayed as the film’s more villainous types. The former, regarded as the father of the hydrogen bomb is subtly depicted as a self-serving McCarthy jingoist as well as an unassuming madman seeking to create weapons for which "there are no targets large enough..." While the latter, is revealed to be a traitorous Soviet spy, and the audience understands, therefore fully deserving of condemnation as well.
As an aside, here I will mention that it is this Cold war thread of the film that blesses us with Casey Affleck's US Intelligence Officer Boris Pash - his 5 minutes of screen time is, hands down, the best acting in the entire 3 hours-long and impeccably well-acted and well-cast film.
Providing an interesting parallel to the scientists' wager on wether the atomic test would be, literally, the end of the world—the theme of annihilation in the political context is slower and more diffuse but also much more real in the human sense. It is an ever-present, creeping thing that, in the film, plagues Oppenheimer with visions of the global nuclear holocaust that would befall us should ever the "better angels" of our political systems fail.
So in this way, the question of the Los Alamos bet remains unresolved, even to this day. While the world does not (and has not) ended from use and successive testing of atomic weapons, how can we know for sure that we are not just in the opening acts of an unstoppable chain reaction that ends with death from above—everywhere. Our civilization washed away in the warm glow of so many other suns. Annihilation.
People: Bodies in Motion
Finally, at the bottom, or perhaps "foundational," subtextual layer of the film, we find the central characters of the film themselves—the two most prominent of these being our "protagonist," Cillian Murphy's Robert Oppenheimer and his nemesis, RDJ's Lewis Strauss. These two men are shown as singular and opposing strong forces in their own rights—albeit, forces that are twisted into a collaborative antagonism under the auspices of the US atomic program. (Cold) War makes strange bedfellows indeed.
Strauss is a stand in for America's Cold War bureaucratic chauvinism. His character provides a window through which the viewer may catch a fleeting glimpse of the occult inner workings of Washington's infinite machine circa 1955. Moreover, he is a petty, cynical, and vindictive puppet-master, walking in shadows and pulling strings across industry, military, and state, all in a cruel and deluded personal crusade to discredit and humiliate Oppenheimer over various slights and disagreements, some real and many imagined.
Oppenheimer on the other hand, represents a certain scientific naïveté—that of untethered genius pursuing the dream that scientific rationalism might illuminate the path to a better, freer, safer, and more just world. And yet, even in this, Oppenheimer himself is a contradiction, and certainly not without his own deep flaws and inner darkness.
He attempts to poison his Cambridge professor for drawing attention to his mediocre lab work (the real story of which is even more bizarre than the movie depiction). He is a pathological womanizer, moving like a free radical, tearing through social spaces carrying on affairs, some secret and others less so, with several of the wives and girlfriends of other scientists in his orbit.
He plays as equal parts wild-eyed egomaniac and sad, piteous martyr/victim—at once leading the world into the era atomic weapons, relishing in his spotlight as "Father of the Bomb" but simultaneously passive-aggressively demanding that the world, or at least those around him, pity and coddle him for the grotesque and needless suffering he indirectly unleashed upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki the personal sacrifices he had to make in the pursuit of science...
And in the end, these two men—Strauss and Oppenheimer—manage to cancel each other out in sorts. Strauss, with much back-handedness and double-dealing, successfully maneuvers to have Oppenheimer's security clearance revoked during the height of Red-Scare McCarthyism, destroying his reputation, consigning him to academic exile, and definitively ending his career in the sciences. However, just a few years later, the chickens come home to roost for Strauss as well and Oppenheimer, it seems, has the last laugh. It is the public revelation of his petty jihad against Oppenheimer that ultimately ends Strauss’ political career (making him the only presidential cabinet nominee to fail to win confirmation between 1925 and 1989). Though not covered in the film, both men go on to die in relative obscurity, estranged from their respective life's work—but then again, one of these men is the namesake of the film and other, well, would be all but forgotten if not for the film. Annihilation.
Conclusion: Dark Knight Physics
Some have asked, perhaps rightly, why Nolan—best known for the mind-bending action thrillers and the acclaimed Dark Knight franchise—would choose to focus on the mundane lives of the scientists, military functionaries, and bureaucratic careerists found crawling around the institution of the atomic bomb, barnacles clinging to its awe-inspiring and terrifying largess.
However, I see this point quite differently. In fact, Oppenheimer watches very much like a Dark Knight film in that the hero and his many adversaries (though Oppenheimer has "counterparts" more that adversaries) are separated only by the thinnest degrees—where the excesses of the latter serve to draw out and amplify the flaws of the former until they are barely distinguishable at all.
Strauss is a mind not entirely unlike Oppenheimer's but maxing for power and politics rather than science and discovery. Matt Damon's Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves presentation as a pudgy militarist belies an MIT engineering background and a technical mind. Edward Teller's villainous "grand evil" is simply wanting to develop a bigger bomb than Oppenheimer though necessary. Similarly, Klaus Fuchs' only real difference from Oppenheimer is that he allows his political sympathies to become a traitorous compromise.
It is for these reasons and the many more explored further above, that I find Oppenheimer, to be a fascinating watch. Oppenheimer is The Dark Knight meets PhD physics and bureaucratic sprawl—that Nolan could draw out such a captivating and enjoyable story from such unlikely material is a masterful achievement and a testament to his cinematic talents, were one ever needed. If you haven't yet—go see it. If you have, consider watching it again. Its that kind of good.
Is this a “Bitcoiner Movie”: Yes – history, science, technology, statism, paradigm shifts
Most “Bitcoinery” Quote or Moment: “This isn’t just a new weapon, it’s a new world…”
Verdict: 4.9/5☢️