I want to argue some of the misrepresentations in Christopher Nolan’s OPPENHEIMER are detrimental to the story it is trying to tell.
Of all possible approaches to the general topic — the Manhattan Project, which was a collective endeavor, and the advent of the nuclear age, a fact of global magnitude — Nolan opted for the individual-centered form of the biopic, and the film doesn’t lie about what it is, being called OPPENHEIMER and being adapted from a biography called AMERICAN PROMETHEUS. The result is a 3-hour immersion in the point of view of Robert Oppenheimer throughout his “triumph and tragedy” (unironic subtitle of the book), from rising star to collateral red scare damage.
“The individual” as the preferred vehicle for telling any story is ideological. I see people defending the lack of other viewpoints and perspectives in the film (for instance from women or Japanese people) as a genius trait of the storytelling that should somehow emphasize the lack of awareness in Oppenheimer’s perspective. I would make the argument that it is, in fact, bad storytelling on the premise’s own terms, because Oppenheimer did actually face other perspectives, and had a richer intellectual life than depicted here.
These are the elements that I find most problematic:
1. The impact of the Manhattan Project on indigenous peoples. The Pueblo people who lived in this so-called deserted land are entirely invisible in the film, despite being widely employed on the base as housekeepers, and being the first victims of fallouts. Not to mention the effects of uranium mining in the Navajo Nation, by Navajo people. Or the impact of later H-bomb testing on the populations of the Pacific Northwest. The development of nuclear weapons is intrinsically related to colonial structures, and it is still a topical trait as it applies to the current energy race too. And environmental activism by indigenous peoples ties in to the next point…
2. Environmental stakes. It is a misrepresentation that e.g. fallout was not a topic discussed in Los Alamos, in addition to outright destruction of the world on which the film focuses. This should at least be problematized. Not doing so is all the more absurd because Oppenheimer’s son Peter became an environmental activist because of the legacy of Trinity, and Edward Teller (villainized in the film) was already in the 50s one of the first scientists trying to raise awareness about carbon-induced climate change. In general, it seems rather obvious that telling this story now, the doomsday panic of the nuclear age needs to be linked and updated to the current climate crisis, as they stem from the same history and have such obvious connections even through the characters of the film.
3. Off-handed treatment of ideology. This comes from the Oppenheimer biography the film is based on, AMERICAN PROMETHEUS by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. The book is contextualizing Oppenheimer’s Left-wing militancy and reminds that he read Marx in German, but doesn’t try in the slightest to understand if this had any impact on his thinking, instead focusing on the American concept of patriotism, and a pinch of political naivety. This is all the more ironic because the title invokes Prometheus for the sake of a metaphor that is never truly explored, although it was heavily used by Marx himself as a revolutionary archetype. The film replicates this trait and worsens it by inventing a scene where literate communists attribute to Marx the phrase ‘Property is theft’ (penned by Proudon, whom Marx contradicted on this precise topic). Oppenheimer’s ideological dilemma and possible interest in publicizing classified findings needs to be given a proper ideological reading, but neither American scholars nor Nolan are interested in putting any effort in even representing correctly the ideology of a milieu that was bathing in Marxist concepts. It’s poor portrayal of both the context and main character.
The book and film are similarly off-handed about all of Oppenheimer’s intellectual influences (outside of physics that are presented as a purely abstract realm). Reference to any literature is treated as anecdote, and we get the usual Bhagavad-Gita quote and John Donne sonnet, without reflecting on how these texts might have shaped Oppenheimer’s approach. For a more in-depth portrait, one might want to turn back to the opera DOCTOR ATOMIC, composed by John Adams to a text that Peter Sellars assembled precisely from all the literary sources that were important to Oppenheimer. One might also add that, while being like the film’s soundtrack grounded in minimalism, the score is of much more substance, and makes for a more rewarding 3-hour experience.
>marginalia* 