Oppenheimer or How I Learned To Keep Worrying And That I Am Never Going To Love The Bomb
This movie both was and was not about a white male savior
Oppenheimer can be judged in two ways: On the one hand, it’s an incredibly well made film, one of Nolan’s best non-Batman movies. On the other hand, a couple of offhand remarks about the actual victims of the only three nuclear explosions in history is not enough, I don’t care how brilliant you are.
I have been to Hiroshima. I felt it was my responsibility to visit on my first trip to Japan, not just as an American, but because I owe my existence to the American military presence in the country. My grandparents met, and married, in Okinawa, an island so startlingly beautiful that my first two thoughts upon landing were:
Well no wonder they fell in love here, who wouldn’t?
God we are such assholes, of course we built a base on yet another of the most beautiful islands in the world.
Hiroshima, like every city in Japan and most of East Asia, is a massive, modern, wonderful city with more technology than any city in America will ever have. There are tall buildings and a fantastic train station with aisles of delicious food and even a quite good Louis Vuitton. There is also, however, a very large and imposing historical presence. I hired a tour guide who took me around all of the nuclear sites in the city on a well planned and heavily trodden trail with one intention: to impress upon people with absolutely no doubt that nuclear war is horrific and that it should never, ever, happen again.
The three most depressing museums I have ever been to are, in no particular order:
The Legacy Museum- Montgomery, AL
Any museum about lynching and mass incarceration would be depressing but the cruel, brilliant minds behind this museum start beating you up at the door and don’t stop until you somehow make your way out of the memorial- physically, but never mentally.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum- Washington, DC
This probably doesn’t need any explanation but the thing about this museum that ensures that you may never sleep again are the little cards with the story of an actual victim of the Holocaust that gives you a little biography and then at the end tells you if they lived or not. No words.
Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall- Hiroshima, Japan
I mean it’s a museum about when the bomb decimated Hiroshima, there is no way that it would not be the worst thing you have ever seen and I also just cannot describe what it is like.
*The British Museum gets an honorable mention but only because you spend the whole time thinking “they should really give this stuff back”.
All of that to say that a movie about a tortured genius who designs a bomb because sure, he kind of has to, because dear God what if the Nazis hadn’t been so wildly anti-semitic that they fucked up their own chances to get the bomb, but who also had really no issue pushing Indigenous Americans off of their land in order to build said bomb, should really focus more on the hundreds of thousands of people who died than his intensely blue eyes.
Christopher Nolan is a frustrating genius himself. He made some of the best Batman movies without Michael Keaton that we’ve ever seen but he also made Inception, which I will never forgive him for. He also made Tenet which was not good but I have a huge crush on John David Washington so I’ll forgive him for that one.
From a movie making perspective, this is absolutely the work of a genius. It’s an incredibly well made film, beautifully handled, with a score that feels as menacing and overwhelming as an atomic bomb but which also makes a story which is basically about a bunch of nerds doing science almost as exciting as watching Tom Hanks watch a guy on a bus do a Bing search on a Nokia.
Cillian Murphy is at his absolute best here and RDJ is RDJ but old and kind of mean which is probably just RDJ from the future. It’s a good movie. It’s a long, long, long movie but it’s a good movie.
BUT
Not one Japanese face. Not one Indigenous face. Two throwaway lines about pushing Natives off of their land and not giving it back but not one mention of the deaths, illnesses, and environmental impact that continue to this day. One throwaway line about how many Japanese citizens actually died of the bomb with absolutely zero reflection.
Was this the story of Oppenheimer? Yes. Is that an excuse to completely and totally ignore the impacts of the entire reason we are watching a movie about Oppenheimer? No. We got more of the worst Albert Einstein impersonator of all time than we did about THE PEOPLE WHO WERE MURDERED BY THREE ATOMIC BOMBS.
There wasn’t even any reflective debate about either should we/shouldn’t we or should we have/shouldn’t we have and I can see both sides. Nolan did do a great job of showing how a singular focus on achieving a goal can lead human beings to over enthusiastically celebrate that goal regardless of what the ends of achieving that goal really mean. I was reminded of when I lived in Washington, D.C. and hordes of frat boys screamed and cheered outside of the White House the night Bin Laden was killed. I had two thoughts:
SASHA AND MALIA HAVE SCHOOL IN THE MORNING LET THEM SLEEP.
Should we really be celebrating anyone’s death this much, even if it is an evil man? (Obviously unless he’s Hitler and whoever invented underwire bras, in which case the answer is yes, with champagne).
This has gone on too long, but not as long as the movie. Unlike Barbie, this is a movie worth seeing. But after you see it, do some deep Googling to learn about everything they didn’t include in the film.