Oppenheimer

“If you are a scientist, you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and its values.” 

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Hiroshima

The film Oppenheimer can be appreciated on multiple levels.

As a work of cinematic art, it is a tour de force. You will not recall a more sublimely crafted film in recent years.

Christopher Nolan’s mastery of the presentation of time, his use of filmed, as opposed to digital, visual effects to depict both the external and internal worlds of Oppenheimer, and the carefully woven climax of the film, all demonstrate a director at the height of his powers and confidence. Cinema lives on.

As a character study, it is a tale of brilliance being stifled by petty jealousies; of a man haunted by questions of global destruction whilst paradoxically in the midst of bureaucratic persecution; of genius plagued by its role in history, its utility in a time of great cruelty.

This character study is exemplified by the scene in which Oppenheimer speaks to the personnel of the Manhattan Project after the successful test of the Trinity bomb, expressing his wish they had completed the bomb in time to decimate Germany. Oppenheimer begins to see skin peeling off the faces of his own people, hearing grating screams, interspersed with bizarre silences and blinding lights:

The scene is only matched by the film’s conclusion, when a conversation between Oppenheimer and Einstein, seen multiple times from the point of view of Oppenheimer’s antagonist, Lewis Strauss, is finally shown from the point of view of Oppenheimer himself, and we see, in a sense, the end of the world.

The film is thus also a meditation on the role of science in our technological age.

Oppenheimer’s sentiments above (‘it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world’) have given me pause these past few years.

Humanity has a broken and dangerous relationship with the technology that both shapes modern science and is in turn shaped by science. Policy does not determine our use of technology, but rather vice versa.

Should we unreflectively, without due concern as to the nature of the essence of technology, simply seek to conquer more and more of nature, reducing it, and ourselves, to ‘stock’, to ‘standing-reserve’?

In the film, Oppenheimer himself appears resigned to this endless conquest of nature, if not in thrall to it, all the while slowly facing up to the tragic implications therein.

Clearly, he has a point that somebody is going to discover the secret forces within the atom. Why not him? Why not the US?

But how does an intelligent man equally believe that such secrets should be shared with Stalin so that nuclear power can be globally managed?

Nolan refrains from dwelling on these reasons.

The bomb, as the film explicitly states, created a new world, a world in which humanity had the power to destroy itself, a world in which nuclear weapons and their prioritization meant that war planning would forever embrace the World War II area bombing of civilians on a mass scale.

This is something new. The entire covid response, for example, would never have been possible or thinkable if the bureaucracy created around the possibility of nuclear war had never come into prior existence. Our world is shaped, to a large extent, by the technology of nuclear weaponry.

The film frequently returns to the notion that the scientists of the Manhattan Project could not utterly rule out or reduce the theoretical chances to zero of the first bomb setting off an atmospheric chain reaction that would destroy Earth. They even bet on it jokingly before the first test. Yet, of course, they went ahead, because ‘theory only gets you so far’.

But questions of science and the scientist, are for me, less significant than the film’s evocation of history, not only in its depiction of World War II, but of the forces that led to that global conflict and emanated from it.

It is here that the film runs into serious problems, and these are problems to do with twentieth century ‘court mythology’ (which I have previously discussed); the false historical narratives that plague not only the film, but us…