The Oppenheimer Effect

Why a 3-hour historical docudrama has over-performed at the summer box office.

The Short Take: 

Despite a few notable imperfections, Oppenheimer is a masterpiece — perhaps even Christopher Nolan’s magnum opus. I especially love how his use of film form serves a thematic purpose. 

Image Credit: IndieWire

[SPOILER ALERT: To the extent that one can spoil historical events, this review will not be safe if you have not seen Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.]

The Long Take: 

Indulge me in some physics, to begin. 

As I mentioned on our Barbenheimer podcast review, I was a bit of a physics nerd as a kid. In high school, I chose AP Physics over chemistry or biology. I was a member of a physics olympiad club that would compete against other schools on the weekends. To be clear, I wasn’t particular good at physics. I was constantly two steps behind my genius friends, in awe of their ability to apply formulas and crunch numbers with ease. It was still fun for me, even though I knew I wasn’t like them. Thankfully my deficiencies did not lead to a villainous turn, as they did for some characters in this film.

In light of my history, it is unsurprising that Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer induced so much serotonin in my brain as I watched. Not only Albert Einstein, but other heavy hitters like Niels Bohr (He basically discovered the atom as we know it!) and Werner Heisenberg (As in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle! Come on!) incited the Leo pointing at the screen meme for me. Richard Feynman, who, at least when I was school, was touted as one of the most important physicists of the 20th century, has but a bit part in this film. That blew my mind and reinforced how massive the scope and scale of The Manhattan Project really was. 

What drew me to physics over the other sciences was not a who’s who list of physics all-stars, however (despite what my above enthusiasm might indicate). It was a push and pull between the theoretical and the experimental. That, on the one hand, physics was trying to MacGyver a basket that would protect an egg falling from a certain height or a car that would win a race on a given slope. But, on the other hand, it was also contemplating deep, existential, seemingly unknowable questions about the universe and our existence in it. About the very nature of time and space. Trying to quantify the unquantifiable. Nolan’s screenplay, with all its talking in rooms, captures this tension incredibly well, especially through the Ernest Lawrence character, played by Josh Hartnett. But, really, any conversation amongst scientists in this film made me lean in to listen. 

Image Credit: New York Times

I know, that was a long walk to justify the small amount of actual physics I’m about invoke, but I do think it unlocks my admiration for Nolan’s film. The Doppler effect, conceived by physicist Christian Doppler in 1842, describes the continuous shift in frequency of sound, light, or any other wave, relative to an observer. The most common, readily accessible example is when a fire truck or police car drives by at a high speed. To you, the observer, the pitch of the siren changes as the vehicle passes. Like so many things in physics, the nature of something depends on time, distance, and relativity. And, in the case of the Doppler effect specifically, how we define or quantify something is entirely dependent on the experience of the observer. 

I say all this because in telling the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan seems to understand that this is what happens with history too. That the relative time and distance for any given observer alters the pitch and tone at which it is perceived. More bluntly, that history is subjective. And as much as historians try to pin down objective facts to the best of their ability, most of history relies on subjective narratives. It is a matter of varied, ever-changing perspectives. So the way one conceives of a horrendous act like the dropping of two atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 looks and sounds different depending on the observer. 

To the physicists working on The Manhattan Project up until the bombs dropped, the atom bomb was a monumental scientific achievement. For some of them, it may have myopically been more of a puzzle to solve than a weapon to build. The word naïveté, unsurprisingly, gets thrown around in Nolan’s Oppenheimer multiple times. Politicians and military strategists would have been dispassionate about the potential fallout of the project, but for very different reasons. For many families who moved to Los Alamos, the Manhattan Project was more a disruption of their own daily lives than anything else. 

Even Oppenheimer himself, the father of the atomic bomb, would seemingly change his view towards the project and what it accomplished over the course of his life. For characters in the film, even those close to him, his attitudes or philosophy are enigmatic and unfixed.

And, of course, I, as a viewer of this film, might have the historical distance to understand the stomach-turning irony of some of the celebratory scenes. As someone who learned about American history in school, I have the knowledge and context of hindsight, having learned about the destruction, devastation, and cruelty perpetrated by the bombs and all the people behind them. 

To me, the brilliance of Oppenheimer as a film lies in its utilization of film form to represent this idea of history’s subjectivity. When I had the privilege to see the film on a 70mm IMAX screen, as Nolan intended, I had a mesmerizing experience; I felt fully immersed in the fuller (or, more accurately, taller) screen aspect ratio that made it impossible to see anything other than the images of the film. I was able to give myself over completely to the viewing experience. There were stretches where I forgot there was a packed theater full of people sitting around me.

The combination of this specialized theatrical set-up along with Ludwig Goransson’s propulsive yet haunting score and Jennifer Lame’s agile, nimble editing — all under Nolan’s direction — made me feel Oppenheimer’s subjective experience. With quick cuts or an unrelenting refrain, I could become engrossed in abstract thinking along with him or feel the weight of his actions pushing down on him. The close-ups on his face do not merely emphasize his emotional or psychological state at any given moment. The unnatural nature of an extreme close-up gives viewers access to a viewpoint not normally afforded in our everyday lives. When we talk to someone on the street, we don’t normally see them framed as they would appear in a close-up. So there’s something about the framing of a face that creates a new observer position. A new relative time and distance. A new wave of light and sound.

I often talk about the power of montage in my reviews. That’s partly because when I was studying film as both an undergrad and grad student, theories of montage always were the most revelatory. That the splicing of still images together could not only create the illusion of moving pictures but imbue a sequence with so much meaning and subtext via juxtaposition was so simple in concept, yet so potentially complex in execution. 

In Oppenheimer, montages often occur at lightning speed. Some are flashes of memory. Some are abstract images, presumably representing Oppenheimer’s own imagining of quantum physics, or, perhaps, even the vastness of the universe more generally. Others still reflect what could be — an unreality of Oppie’s nightmares. The most jarring is the image of an unidentified woman whose skin is pealing off, presumably from exposure to the explosion. It’s unclear who she is or where or when she’s supposed to be, or even if she’s real. Does she represent Oppenheimer’s fear of what could happen with the proliferation of nuclear weapons? Is he imagining what’s happening in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but placing a white woman in that scenario because that’s what’s more familiar to him? All we know is that in real life, she’s played by Nolan’s eldest daughter.

I’ve heard some critics complain that the montages are too fast, making it hard to see what some of the images actually are. I can see how that would be frustrating purely out of curiosity, but I do think that the rhetorical effect of it going by so quickly is also powerful because it shows that so many thoughts, memories, ideas, etc. can flash in our minds in an instant. And it’s all indeterminably mixed together in a subjectivity soup. 

Nolan’s interview with Total Film indicates that he intentionally uses the formalist tools at his disposal to engage with subjectivity. More specifically, he said that the sequences filmed in color reflect Oppenheimer’s perspective. He even wrote the screenplay in the first person, which he admits he’s never done before. Meanwhile, he says the black and white sequences represent historical events represented neutrally or objectively.

I take issue with this breakdown. I’m generally of the belief that an author’s stated intent doesn’t always matter. That is, Nolan may have intended to make those black and white scenes objective, but that doesn’t mean they come across as objective to me. And one does not supersede the other. For me, the positioning of Oppenheimer and Strauss as antagonists that emerge out of this major historical event skews the black and white scenes more towards Strauss, even if he is not portrayed favorably in many of them. The black and white sequences contain his “side” of the story. He has a climactic monologue in which he not only reveals how bitter and conniving he has been all along, but he puts Oppenheimer on blast for spinning his selfish, ego-driven desire to control the Manhattan Project and prevent another, bigger bomb (said with Bennie Safdie’s Austro-Hungarian accent) from stealing his thunder. He’s in the wrong, but he’s also not wrong. 

So even though the black and white timeline humiliates Strauss by the end, it still serves as the mechanism through which we learn about his point of view. Robert Downey Jr., by the way, is possibly the best he’s ever been here. His turn/reveal of Strauss’ true nature is absolutely chilling. 

Image Credit: LA Times

To be clear, I prefer this characterization of the two film styles to Nolan’s intention because it leans into this idea that history cannot escape subjectivity. Nor is it simply that the “winners” get to tell their version of history, an oversimplified aphorism we hear all the time. Even though Strauss fails his Senate confirmation and, in a way, loses to Oppenheimer, there are no winners by the film’s conclusion. Even when we witness an elderly Oppenheimer receiving some kind of presidential honor, Einstein’s prophetic voiceover says that the fuss, the accolades will not be for him. They will be for “them.” 

And, of course, the final moments of the film reveal that in the mysterious conversation he has with Einstein, Oppenheimer admits to Einstein that he thinks that by introducing the atomic bomb to the world, they have destroyed it. Even if the detonation of the bomb itself did not blow up the world, they have still introduced humanity to an unparalleled means of destruction that will dominate world politics henceforth. It’s direct, and expected, yet, after the near three hours leading up to it, potent and explosive.  

What makes this final reveal one layer more complex is how it circles back to Strauss and a subjective recounting of the past (forgive me if I sound like a broken record by now…once I latch onto a theme, I can’t let go). His entire vendetta and ensuing smear campaign against Oppenheimer stems from his assumption that Oppenheimer said something to Einstein to turn him and the rest of the scientific community against him. Alden Ehrenreich’s White House aide character says, with delicious smugness, “Did you ever think that maybe they weren’t even talking about you?” Subjectivity, as we see through Strauss, can be dangerous because it’s an egocentric reflex. When we tell a history, we can’t help but filter it through out own perspective. That can offer unique insight, of course, but it, as we see here, can also lead to error and misunderstanding. 

There’s yet another theory in physics that parallels this push and pull of what we know vs. what we might assume. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle that I mentioned earlier says that for subatomic particles, the more accurately we are able to measure one aspect of an object, like velocity, the less we can know about other aspects, like its position. Similarly in Nolan’s work, the closer we get to Oppenheimer, the less of a view we get of characters — especially female ones — just out of his orbit. Or, more broadly, less of a view of other stakeholders in the Manhattan Project and the dropping of the A-bomb. We never see anyone living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We meet President Harry S. Truman briefly, but his appearance — as much as I love Gary Oldman — is more of a caricature than anything else. 

We can explain away these lacks, absences, or glossings over with subjectivity, but is that letting Nolan off the hook too much?  

The film’s biggest flaw, for me and many other critics, is in its representation of female characters. Jean Tatlock seems more like a means to an end, to make Oppenheimer’s biography sexier and show that he was a known womanizer. The scenes between the two of them felt forced and awkward. Nolan reduces Tatlock’s character to an emotional burden for Nolan more than a fully-fledged intellectual and activist in her own right. By the end, Florence Pugh’s massive talent had been largely wasted.

Image Credit: Vanity Fair

Emily Blunt’s character, Kitty Oppenheimer, is less of a problem for me than she is for other critics because she gets an Oscar-worthy comeuppance moment. And I did feel as though she was written as a complicated woman who could not and would not fit into the stereotypical mid-century house wife role into which society tried to box her. Yet, I do concede that for most of the film she’s just a miserable drunk. 

Ryan McQuade made a solid point on the Awardswatch Podcast when he said that he doesn’t actually want Nolan to try to represent the perspectives of women or minorities (like the Japanese victimized by the A-bomb) because he inevitably wouldn’t do a very good job, creating problematic representations of them. So not only must we contend with Oppenheimer’s constructed subjectivity in the film; we must consider Nolan’s subjectivity as well. 

To be perfectly honest, I don’t think I would have wanted the version of this film that spent more time on strands of the story that don’t get a lot of screen time. I don’t think I’d actually be interested in more Kitty-Oppie husband-wife scenes at the expense of the scenes with Einstein, for example. But perhaps that speaks to a problem with my own shortsightedness as a viewer who delights in the parade of physicists talking about physics more than the relationship between two married people. 

And that brings me to the central question that prompted me to write this review in the first place. Why is it that a three-hour historical docudrama — featuring dozens of scientists and mostly men speaking to each other in rooms about whether or not they’re about to destroy the world — is a huge hit at the box office? Are there lots of others out there like me?

Barbenheimer, the meme-fueled pop culture phenomenon is at least partially responsible. But I don’t think Oppenheimer does this well if people aren’t into at least the idea of seeing it on its own merits. It certainly doesn’t do this well without the positive critical response after its opening weekend. 

We’ve gotten plenty of historical dramas or biopics before. Any Oscar pundit knows they’re the staple contender in any given year’s Oscar race. The most recent example is Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, which didn’t actually get that much critical praise (certainly not compared to Oppenheimer), but propelled itself on the charisma of Austin Butler and the general public’s love of one of the greatest musical artists of artists of all time.

But if I think back to how Luhrmann represents history and biography and compare it to what Nolan’s doing here, I see a world of difference. Through his bombastic style, Lurhmann was able to capture the magic of Elvis as a stage performer. But in taking stock of his life and trying to say something about the history he was a part of, the film falls flat or at best waffles. Nolan goes into telling the story of his titular character, Oppenheimer, with so much more confidence about what Oppenheimer’s story can tell us about ourselves and the world we precariously find ourselves in. 

Image Credit: The Hollywood Reporter

This film called Oppenheimer — and not The Atomic Bomb or The Manhattan Project — does not in fact go from cradle to grave documenting the events of his life first and foremost. Nor does it really celebrate his genius (though there are certainly individual scenes that do that) as the primary agenda of the film. It places this massive, catastrophic historical event at the center of his film and then tells the story of Oppenheimer’s relationship to that history.

Marx would say that history is a series of modes of production. (And I have to mention this here because when I took one of my oral exams in grad school, a professor asked me “What is history?” and I foolishly didn’t realize that he was fishing for Marx’s definition of it. ) More specifically, Nolan’s Oppenheimer tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer by way of a mode of production: the massive undertaking of building the bomb. We see the same physicists who make calculations and debate theories physically assembling the parts of the bomb.

The bomb was a capitalist war effort before it was a scientific expedition. It was more of a pragmatic, experimental product than it was a theoretical prospect.

Image Credit: LA Times

And that is what haunted Oppenheimer for the rest of his days. That is what destroyed his soul, and the world with it.