Oppenheimer: Good versus Evil can be confusing and enlightening.

 Oppenheimer, power, atomic bomb, movie, psychoanalysis, psychology

I have been pleased and surprised that Oppenheimer – along with Barbie – has been a blockbuster hit this summer.  Who would have thunk it?  The New Yorker characterized it as a history channel movie being told with flashbacks instead of in straight narrative form.  Actually, I think it is much more subversive than that.  I think it is a story of good and evil, but our American expectations of what is good and what is evil gets stirred up in ways that are, in the American Exceptionalist Lexicon, heretical.

Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy, is a brilliant, but therefore otherworldly person.  He can feel his way into the quantum world of the atoms that make up our world.  Elements that give the illusion of solidity to a world that is, in actuality, mostly empty space.  Atoms deceive us, apparently, by the speed of their revolutions and the intensity of their bonds with other elements.  Oppenheimer can feel the intense, energy filled field that gives us the illusion of a pleasant, serene landscape.  But he is also smart enough in the world of symbols to be able to learn a foreign language in two months to a level of mastery that he can deliver a complex lecture on physics in that language, so he is not stuck in the world of feelings and intuition, but can function in a world of politics and problem solving. 

So, in some ways, its not surprising that this hero, who is labelled as exceptional from the get go, has novel ways of approaching both personal relationships and political ones.  He imagines, at some point (and the movie is taken to task for dramatizing this moment with less historical accuracy than most of the other moments) that he can eliminate someone through poisoning them.  Fortunately (which is a matter of perspective), the poisoning does not take place, and (again in something that is not included in the movie’s narrative) the authorities who discover this aberration decide that his virtues outweigh this lapse of judgement and allow him to move forward in his life without punishment.  But we know that he is both exceptional and has an odd sense of judgement – and an odd faith in his ability to allow his feelings to inform his actions, even to the point of engaging in what traditional values would categorize as immoral activity.

For example, we are asked to evaluate his morality when he woos a married woman and steals her away from her husband.  The marriage he breaks up seems to be one of convenience and he seems to genuinely be interested in the woman.  She is not fleshed out in the film except as an alcoholic who is not a very capable mother and she is someone who is humiliated when Oppenheimer’s affair is brought to light in the inquest that is set up by his one-time supporter but ultimate nemesis Strauss (pronounced Straws, and played by Robert Downey Jr. who gets to show off his acting chops) who sets up a kangaroo court to get Oppenheimer removed from the Atomic Energy Commission because they disagree, and to get Oppenheimer back for having publicly made a fool of Strauss.

If that last sentence was too much – whether or not you’ve seen the film – it clarifies that there are many moving parts here.  One of the reasons that Oppenheimer’s wife’s character is not fleshed out, I believe, is that there simply isn’t enough room in this film for all of the historical characters who are portrayed and who are necessary to the creation of a world changing instrument.

The Atom bomb was not created by a few tinkerers applying Einstein’s theory to bomb construction.  There were hundreds of minds, and many more people working to get the raw materials – the fissionable uranium – to come together in a highly crafted package with multiple complicated systems leading to detonation - with uncertain effect.  And there was a cataclysmic shift in our relationship to the universe and to each other when they successfully accomplished their task.

The task that this movie set for itself was to help us be able to feel as viscerally as Oppenheimer did, what that shift means to us.  I think it succeeded.

We saw this film on vacation at a run-down theater in a relatively small town where every seat in the theater was sold out.  We were just down the hall from the theater showing Barbie, and some pink clad kids snuck in to catch the double feature (they must have had some kind of pass or paid for both films because all seats were assigned and filled).  When the bomb exploded – and I don’t think that is a spoiler – we do have nuclear weapons and used two of them in the Second World War – the silence in the theater was deafening.  I don’t know that I have ever been in a room with that many people who were that rapt.

Of course, the silence of a nuclear explosion is followed by a deafening roar.  Sound doesn’t travel as fast as light, but when it gets there, it is as loud as the explosion was bright – and then there was more noise at the raucous celebration of the success held by those who had worked on the task.  That celebration felt out of place to me – and clearly to Oppenheimer – the orchestrater – the person who had the greatest right to feel proud and even jubilant about their shared achievement.  But he did not.  He felt not just the room shake from the applause cascading down from the wooden bleachers, but the world itself vibrating with the realization that a new power had been unleashed on top of it – a power with the potential to annihilate everything else of beauty that this world had created in the billions of years since it first started spinning as a molten rock around another nuclear reaction at the core of its planetary system.

I want to go back and watch the film again.  We had hoped to see it in IMAX, the medium that was used to shoot it, but those screens were sold out until the end of the run by the time we returned from vacation.  But it was not the spectacle that I want to return to.  This is a complex film with hints about how to decode it.  Strauss’s perspective on events are shot in black and white.  Oppenheimer’s are in color.  But we had to figure this out in real time – no one gave us a program that explained that.  There were competing ideas about how best to accomplish the goal of the weapon – fission versus fusion.  There were children not being tended to and spies being protected and things going on all over the place.  The fog of war seemed to be not just on the battlefield, but in the preparation for it, and in deciding how to manage the aftermath and the specter of living in this brave new world.

I think I got most of the pieces, and probably could have written a cogent summary closer to seeing the film, but what sticks with me a month and a half later is the affect, not the politics.  It is the feeling that we are no longer masters of the world precisely because we have mastered one of the world’s great secrets.  Yes, this group of people needed to work on a doomsday device to prevent a very different kind of doomsday, but having the destructive power that we now do, it feels not like whether we will use our doomsday devices again, but when.  And that is chilling.

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