[ ‘Oppenheimer’ and the anguish of creative destruction]
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ATOMIC FRANKENSTEIN  
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R. Howard Bloch, Ellen Handler Spitz
July 30, 2023
The American Prospect
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_ ‘Oppenheimer’ and the anguish of creative destruction _

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan’s
film, Universal Pictures

 

Christopher Nolan’s _Oppenheimer_ is historically and dramatically
rich, morally complex, psychologically sophisticated, epically grand,
visually stunning, perfectly paced with a heart-stopping soundtrack,
extraordinarily well cast and acted—a wondrous blend of science,
politics, psychology, and art. It may garner almost as many Oscars as
there were Nobel Prize winners among the myriad scientists working
under J. Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan District Project in the
race to produce an atom bomb between the spring of 1942 and summer of
1945, when the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended World
War II.

In keeping with Nolan’s fascination with the fungibility of
time, _Oppenheimer_ moves fluidly between four time periods: the
protagonist’s (Cillian Murphy) early adulthood when he was a student
at Cambridge and Göttingen, and then a young professor at UC
Berkeley; the war years spent at Los Alamos, New Mexico; the
excruciating hearings of a special board convened by the Atomic Energy
Commission during the McCarthy era to examine the father of the atom
bomb’s loyalty to the U.S., which ended in the devastating removal
of his security clearance; and the confirmation hearings in 1959 to
consider the appointment of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) as
Eisenhower’s secretary of commerce. Strauss (pronounced
“Straws”), a prominent member of the AEC despite the lack of a
college education, had appointed Oppenheimer as director of the
Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton after the war, yet
Oppenheimer had later publicly humiliated Strauss in congressional
hearings about nuclear policy. The man in high office with no
credentials had come to hate the world’s most famous scientist.

The splitting of the atom serves as rich metaphor for the splitting of
a mind, of a personality, of consciousness, and of ethical conscience.

_Oppenheimer_ is a cubist movie, both in its fraught relation to
color and in Nolan’s weaving of disparate planes of time
associatively into scenes that represent the feelings, conscious and
unconscious, of what it must have felt like to be Oppenheimer in a
world that, as in a Greek tragedy, first worshipped and then crushed
him. At one point early in the film, the young Oppenheimer gazes for a
remarkably long time at Picasso’s 1937 contorted painting “Woman
Seated With Crossed Arms,” while reading Eliot’s “The Waste
Land.” Nolan evokes other icons of modernity—Stravinsky and Freud,
and Einstein, brilliantly played by Tom Conti. The father of
relativity hovers, in several pointed exchanges with Oppenheimer, like
a tutelary Moses who has led the way, not only scientifically but also
by alerting Roosevelt to the possibility of an atom bomb, yet who will
not make it fully into the atomic age. The Mosaic resonance is
amplified when Oppenheimer consults Einstein about Edward Teller’s
(Benny Safdie) calculations that an atom bomb might ignite the
atmosphere and asks him what to do if Teller’s theory proves
correct. Einstein answers: You stop. You go no further.

Nolan bases his film on Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird’s 2005 Pulitzer
Prize-winning biography of Oppenheimer _American Prometheus_. But the
film, which makes the book come alive, departs from it in important
ways. Nolan answers the question that haunts the book: Why, given
Oppenheimer’s psychological instability and his propensity for
surrounding himself with Communists in the 1930s, did Gen. Leslie
Groves (Matt Damon) select him to direct what was then the world’s
most important scientific project and potentially the key to U.S.
victory in World War II? Never mind that Oppenheimer had never run
even so much as a single scientific laboratory. For starters, Nolan
focuses dramatically on Oppenheimer’s attempt to poison his
Cambridge adviser Patrick Blackett (James D’Arcy) by injecting
potassium cyanide into an apple left on the teacher’s desk. Later,
when asked whether he hated Blackett, Oppenheimer unforgettably says
no; he liked him. Even before this, when asked whether he was happy at
school, Oppenheimer answers no; and in flashbacks characteristic of
Nolan’s cinematography, we see him roiling in bed tormented by
nightmares in which galaxies seem to be exploding and
splintering—dreams that foreshadow the fragmentations to come. Above
all, Nolan drives home Oppenheimer’s status as fellow traveler. His
brother Frank (Dylan Arnold) and sister-in-law Jackie (Emma Dumont),
his best friend at Berkeley Haakon Chevalier (Jefferson Hall), one of
his girlfriends Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), many of his graduate
students, and his wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) were all card-carrying
members of the Party. Oppenheimer himself espoused leftist causes,
from the Spanish Civil War to the organization of a Bay Area teachers
union. The FBI garnered all this, as we are shown in what now seem
like quaint scenes of physical surveillance: tracking of license
plates at local gatherings in support of radical causes, the tapping
of Oppenheimer’s phone, and the clunky sifting through his garbage.
(This was the basis of part of the file used against him in the 1954
hearing before the AEC.)

J. Robert Oppenheimer testifies before the Senate Military Affairs
Committee in Washington, October 17, 1945. AP PHOTO

Nolan makes use of this foregoing evidence, both political and
psychological, to confront the question head on as to why Oppenheimer
was chosen to direct the Manhattan Project. He has Oppenheimer say to
the Army head of the project and his military handler, Gen. Groves:
“I know why you selected me: because you knew that you could control
me.” Indeed, Groves, who was privy to Oppenheimer’s past, knew
that he had been approached by his friend Chevalier about passing
nuclear secrets to the Russians and had said nothing at the time. For
Oppenheimer, who hoped to have a hand in future nuclear policy, this
could be devastating.

The control begins almost immediately after Trinity, the first
successful nuclear explosion in mid-July 1945. Germany had surrendered
in May, and the question that tormented those who had worked at Los
Alamos and elsewhere then became whether to drop the A-bomb,
originally intended for Germany, on Japan. Some 250 scientists working
on the project, led by Leo Szilard, who along with Einstein had
written to Roosevelt, signed a petition urging restraint. Yet
Oppenheimer, whose voice was the only one that might have made a
difference, refused to sign. By the time Oppenheimer met with
President Harry Truman (Gary Oldman) to discuss global nuclear policy
in October 1945, he had become visibly meek. Having refused to speak
out publicly, he now confesses privately to Truman that he has blood
on his hands. Truman responds with a handkerchief and _sotto
voce_ calls him a crybaby.

Moral complexity builds. One of Nolan’s great achievements is his
portrayal of Oppenheimer’s entrapment in the soft fascism of the
McCarthy era. His interrogation by Roger Robb (Jason Clarke), in the
absence of any evidentiary protocol, is worthy of the Soviet show
trials of the 1930s, and stands as a powerful warning of what may be
coming to the U.S. if the virus of authoritarianism settles more
firmly in the current political landscape. At the very least, it is a
lesson about the ways in which social commitment can come to bite when
the political climate begins to shift. Nolan contrasts Robert
Oppenheimer with his brother Frank, who urges him to remain loyal to
his principles and says that he won’t live his life afraid to
“make a mistake.” The shift works both ways, however, as Lewis
Strauss’s nomination as commerce secretary later on was rejected by
the Senate in a balloting in which a young senator from Massachusetts,
none other than John F. Kennedy, cast a negative vote because of
Strauss’s role in the Oppenheimer affair.

Nolan departs from _American Prometheus_ by emphasizing
Oppenheimer’s relationship with Jean Tatlock, a Bay Area
psychiatrist and organizer for the Party. In perhaps some of the most
unerotic sex scenes in modern cinema, they make love while Tatlock (on
top) requests that Oppenheimer read words from a book of Sanskrit,
which return after Trinity as the famous quotation from the Bhagavad
Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” This is
IMAX without climax. It foreshadows Tatlock’s own destiny, for
Oppenheimer, before other worlds are destroyed, destroys Tatlock’s
world. He abandons her, as a result of which she commits suicide.

Nolan also focuses on Kitty Oppenheimer in a way that is absent from
the book. Movingly played by Emily Blunt, whose facial expressions
suggest perpetual suffering, she becomes for the most part an
alcoholic albatross around the great scientist’s neck. Yet, late
in _Oppenheimer_, Kitty is the only person who sees through the
machinations of Lewis Strauss and who faces the AEC inquisitors head
on, urging her husband to man up and refuse the role of martyr. Here,
Kitty is on a par with Einstein, who cautions Oppenheimer that he
loves his country too much by submitting to such an interrogation.
Einstein’s warning recalls to mind the _Apology_ of Plato, in
which Socrates, too, assents to his trial, the outcome of which is
likewise foreseen. Oppenheimer’s fellow scientist and companion
throughout, I.I. Rabi (David Krumholtz), however, had always thought
it was his friend’s failure to come to grips with his Jewish
identity that made him so timid, so unsure of himself. Indeed, at one
point in the film, Edward Teller accuses Oppenheimer of not knowing
who he is. And Rabi, portrayed as gentle, humane, and initially
unwilling to participate, notes that the A-bomb would fall upon the
just and the unjust alike, words eerily echoing Portia’s lines on
the quality of mercy from Shakespeare’s _The Merchant of Venice_.

Tom Conti as Albert Einstein and Cillian Murphy in a scene from
‘Oppenheimer’ Universal Pictures

Paradox animates Nolan’s film. When, as a theoretical physicist,
Oppenheimer first hears of the splitting of the atom, he says in
astonishment: It’s impossible! His colleague Ernest Lawrence (Josh
Hartnett) smiles and tells him to look into the adjacent lab: They
have just done it. Theory, he quips, can take you only so far.
Oppenheimer swerves; he assembles a star-studded cadre of scientists,
many of whom are reluctant to be involved and must be persuaded.
Cigarette dangling from his lips, he plunges into the Manhattan
Project as director.

Nolan’s psychological portrait of him seems to channel Mary
Shelley’s riveting _Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus_ of
1818, in which an equally obsessed scientist loses touch with family,
fiancée, friends, and everyday life in order to pursue his goal of
turning fantasy into reality, in his case, by creating a living human
out of fragmented corpses. Caught up in the process, Victor
Frankenstein fails to imagine the consequences. Nolan’s Oppenheimer
is also charged with turning thought into thing, in this case a thing
that destroys other things. In both cases at nigh unbearable cost for
creators, created, and victims. As Shelley models her scientist
Frankenstein on Ovid’s sculptor Pygmalion, so Nolan, after Bird and
Sherwin, forms his Oppenheimer as an avatar of Hesiod’s Titan
Prometheus. Like Prometheus, Oppenheimer steals fire and is punished.

Watching the movie as it expands and thunders in our eyes and ears, we
gradually grasp that the splitting of the atom serves as rich metaphor
for the splitting of a mind, of a personality, of consciousness, and
of ethical conscience. Scene after scene,
Nolan’s _Oppenheimer_ reveals its protagonist’s uncanny capacity
to focus and to ignore, simultaneously. Emotionally captive in the
element of intellectual paradox (light is neither wave nor particle
but both), Robert Oppenheimer, like the stars he studied in his youth,
remains remote, unresponsive to other real persons. We and our bodies
are mostly composed of empty space, he explains to Kitty at their
first encounter. Cursed with a blindness to human consequences, he
hurts those who love him. “You said you’d always answer,” Jean
Tatlock accuses. Robert and Kitty’s off-camera baby cries and cries,
unheeded. Pain accompanies each human interchange, and we begin to
wonder whether it is only with such blindness that Oppenheimer could
have gone forward and not joined the other scientists who, after
Trinity, did not want to use the bomb against Japan. Wisely, Nolan
eschews any footage of the horror. Sparing us, he does not absolve us
but pushes us even harder to exercise our own underemployed
imagination and moral judgment.

At several points, during the lead-up to Trinity, Gen. Groves sternly
warns Oppenheimer that security depends on compartmentalization.
Compartmentalization is an idea not unrelated to fragmentation, to
splitting. Here once again, Nolan unveils connections between public
and personal, between science, politics, and psychology. He forces us
to recognize how compartmentalization may be necessary for this
project not merely for security’s sake. To stay in touch emotionally
with the fallout, literal and figurative, from the atom bomb could
paralyze those who make it, and, as Einstein warned, have to stop. To
Nolan’s Oppenheimer, the women in his life, and the innocent
Japanese victims who would perish, were remote, like the crying baby:
unheard. And though when asked once by Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh)
whether he could hear the music as well as learn the notes and
Oppenheimer answered yes, there were registers of human music to which
he was cruelly deaf. Apropos, one of the most chilling scenes in the
three-hour-long movie depicts jubilant cheering at the success of
Trinity. After three years of toil, sacrifice, and uncertainty, the
scientists have finally done it: come in under the wire. Watching
their faces and hearing their voices, we sit silent row by row in
darkened theaters throughout the globe. How eerie and ominous their
cries! Unlike them, we know what happened next. We know that
Frankenstein’s monster is still on the loose.

Read the original article at Prospect.org.
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Used with the permission. © The American Prospect, Prospect.org,
2023. All rights reserved.

_R. HOWARD BLOCH is Sterling Professor of French and Humanities at
Yale University._

_ELLEN HANDLER SPITZ is Senior Lecturer in Humanities at Yale
University._

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