It looks great, is well acted and brilliantly edited. But I was surprised to find Oppenheimer a drearily conventional film. Surprised because of the pretentious ambition of its director and the strange, often inscrutable complexity of his subject. But if Christopher Nolan is often pretentious, he is rarely profound, and here his reach proved greater than his grasp.
J. Robert Oppenheimer was born to great wealth in 1904, raised in a home of exquisite and lushly cocooned refinement. The Manhattan apartment of his youth was shared with a younger brother, several servants, and original works of Cezanne and van Gogh. The source of this opulence was his father’s textile business, which proved relatively resilient to the great stock market crash of 1929, an insulation that only ratified young Oppenheimer’s dreamy detachment from the world.
By the time of the Great Depression, Oppenheimer had since left the family home, embarked upon an academic voyage overseas, but still he rarely read newspapers and was blissfully unaware of the Crash. “I was an unctuous, repulsively good little boy,” he later remembered. “My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.”
For a long time, Oppenheimer’s twin passions were theoretical physics and metaphysical poetry – he was especially fond of John Donne, whose holy sonnets Oppenheimer would borrow from when naming the first atomic test “Trinity”. The one in question opens: “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.”
It wasn’t until after Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933, which coincided with Oppenheimer’s residence at several European universities, that earthly matters finally began to claim his attention. “Beginning in late 1936, my interests began to change,” he told his hostile interrogators in 1954, as he was interviewed by his government’s Atomic Energy Commission. He continued:
“I had had a continuing, smouldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany. I had relatives there, and was later to help in extricating them and bringing them to this country. I saw what the Depression was doing to my students. Often they could get no jobs, or jobs that were wholly inadequate. And through them, I began to understand how deeply political and economic events could affect men’s lives. I began to feel the need to participate more fully in the life of the community.”
The “community” he refers to here is several: the Berkley campus at which he taught physics, and for whose radical students he was developing sympathy; and for the American Communist Party, with which he flirted, and of whom both his younger brother and his lover were ardent members. Oppenheimer helped settle refugees of the Spanish civil war, and saw the European communists as heroic resisters of fascism, but like his physics, Oppenheimer’s communism was largely theoretical and he never joined the party.
For me, one of the great mysteries of Oppenheimer is how this otherworldly man, who had once dwelled solely in rarefied abstractions, came to successfully lead an historically large and complicated military/bureaucratic project. Oppenheimer doesn’t seem terribly interested in the question, but suggests that reverence for the brilliant man, coupled with the gruff loyalty and clear-sightedness of his military overseer, General Leslie Groves, was the glue that held the whole thing together. American wealth and resolve didn’t hurt, either.
But, still: this once nervous and cosseted boy who could spend hours pondering the theology of John Donne, and who had once – in some deranged fit of humiliation – attempted to lethally poison his university teacher… this man would become the charismatic and managerially effective chief of the Manhattan Project? No one would have thought it possible. Except, I suppose, J. Robert Oppenheimer.
* * *
In Oppenheimer, we watch as the great physicist meets the US President in the Oval Office, less than two months after the end of the Second World War. The two men – the Bomb’s designer and the Bomb’s deployer – had never met before, and Truman was curious to speak with him. But the meeting quickly soured when Oppenheimer responded ambivalently to the president’s praise, and then confessed his moral sickness. “Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands.”
Truman is visibly appalled by what he considers to be Oppenheimer’s indulgence. The film has him pass Oppenheimer a handkerchief, which may or may not have happened, but Truman’s disgust with him was, nonetheless, very real. “Blood on his hands, dammit,” the president said after Oppenheimer had left his office. “He doesn’t have half as much blood on his hands as I do. You just don’t go around bellyaching about it.”
This brief, sour meeting between the US President and his country’s new icon was also notable for Truman asking Oppenheimer when he thought the Soviets might acquire their own Bomb. Oppenheimer confessed that he didn’t know, before Truman revealed that his question was rhetorical. “I know the answer,” he said. “Never.”
As the war ended, and America’s alliance with the Soviets turned darkly competitive, Oppenheimer’s melancholic ambivalence aggrieved the president. Just as the president’s pious certitude alarmed Oppenheimer. For him, it was only a matter of time before the Soviets had weaponised nuclear fission – the question now was of designing international controls over nuclear arms. For Truman, the imperative was improving upon the destructive capacity of their own arsenal and centralising atomic authority with the military – a goal to which the president thought he could usefully conscript Oppenheimer.
Oppenheimer’s Oval Office scene is dramatic, and shows well the profound difference of temperament and philosophy between the men, but it also crudely flattens Truman into a caricature of an insensitive hick, whose use of the bomb was reprehensibly glib. Which is a gross distortion, but recognising Truman’s complexity would have upset Nolan’s simple morality tale.
In Oppenheimer, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is offered as an unjustified moral catastrophe. But it was – as queasy-making as this is to write – more complicated. Under Emperor Hirohito, who was understood to be literally divine, Japan had transformed itself into a militarily advanced death cult. In the country that produced the kamikaze pilot, death was preferable to surrender.
The conventional fire-bombing of major cities, including Tokyo, wrought more blood than the two atom bombs. Cities made of wood and paper were engulfed in flames. On March 9, 1945 – one month before Truman became president – Operation Meetinghouse was launched. It was history’s bloodiest air-raid, comprised of 334 B-29 bombers which dropped 1,600 tonnes of explosives on the Japanese capital. More than 100,000 people died that night, but the Japanese would not yield. While privately understanding the futility of the war for at least a year, the Japanese fought as zealously as ever – in the first three months of Truman’s presidency, more US troops were killed by the Japanese than in all of the preceding war.
On Truman’s desk were several options, none of them bloodless. They were all variations of slaughter. Slaughter wasn’t an abstraction for Truman – he saw rivers of blood on the Western Front as a US captain – and now as president he had to choose between different projections of them. One of those choices, a land invasion of Japan, was quickly ruled out after General Marshall forecast a loss of life in the many hundreds of thousands. The profound, sacrificial obstinance of the Japanese was a great thorn. It was “our boys” or the Bomb.
I don’t write this to nakedly justify its deployment, but to emphasise the grave and unpleasant context of its use – something conveniently elided in Oppenheimer. To be sure, there were those on the Manhattan Project that felt that a benign demonstration of the weapon’s power to Japan may have compelled their surrender – and many that felt that the second bomb, detonated over Nagasaki, was gratuitous.
Oppenheimer himself would later think their use on Japan unjustified, and his biographer Martin Sherwin – whose book American Prometheus, co-written with Kai Bird, is the basis for this film – was firm in his view: “I believe that it was a mistake and a tragedy that the atomic bombs were used. Those bombings had little to do with the Japanese decision to surrender. The evidence has become overwhelming that it was the entry of the Soviet Union on 8 August into the war against Japan that forced surrender but, understandably, this view is very difficult for Americans to accept.”
My point is that Nolan is earnest in presenting Oppenheimer as a dramatically tortured figure, which is true enough, but he denies anyone or anything else their complications (not least the pitifully underused Emily Blunt, who plays Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty). Even Oppenheimer’s – his vanity, his charm, his betrayals of friends – are flattened or ignored.
* * *
As was predictable, the film conspicuously uses the words from Hindu scripture that Oppenheimer later told us he thought of when he saw the world’s first detonation of an atomic bomb, that night out in the New Mexican desert. “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Oppenheimer was erudite, articulate and a gifted writer – but this has always struck me as a suspiciously eloquent response to that moment. Regardless, it’s become a neat shorthand for a modern parable, a real-life Frankenstein: the destructive hubris of the Scientist.
It’s a worthy theme, revitalised now by rapid advances – and commensurate warnings – of AI, but in the case of Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, the grandiosity of the premise ignores the very basic pressure of developing the bomb in the first place: the Germans seemed advanced in acquiring it, had some of the world’s best physicists with which to do so, and were lead by the demonic Führer. It is inconceivable that this wouldn’t have prompted a race for the weapon, even allowing for German diminishment after ‘42.
Of the bomb’s development, as opposed to its use, there wasn’t really a choice. And Oppenheimer’s Jewishness played some part in his decision to offer his genius to his government. He saw what was happening.
* * *
Like John Donne, Oppenheimer was horny, brilliant, abrasive. He was also impatient, affected, and quick to scorn. An early teacher of Oppenheimer’s once remarked that he was eager to declare his “pre-eminence”.
Early romanticism and self-absorption later gave way, in both men, to larger vocations: Donne joined the priesthood, while Oppenheimer became a thwarted, eventually martyred prophet about nuclear Armageddon. “In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humour, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”
In one of Donne’s holy sonnets, he prays that he might assume the suffering of Christ himself: “Buffet, and scoff, scourge, and crucify me, / For I have sinned, and sinned.”
It’s easy to imagine Oppenheimer privately pleading the same, though after his impulsive confession of sin to the president after the war, he remained largely muted – or at least cryptic – about his own guilt. In the New Yorker, film critic Richard Brody wrote of Oppenheimer: “Although the movie is unusually and even gratifyingly talky, moving most of its action ahead by way of dialogue, we almost never hear Oppenheimer speak about his guilt—not even in intimate discussions with his wife, Kitty.”
The likely reason for this is that Oppenheimer, for all of his eloquence and time as America’s voluble High Priest of Science, didn’t much talk about it. Perhaps he understood that public statements of doubt and remorse in a triumphant culture was self-harming; that as quickly as he’d been publicly sanctified, he could just as quickly be villainised – the emotions with which he was publicly deified were lofty and volatile.
Which is what happened. In 1954, his exile from the government – and effective exile from public life – was declared after the Atomic Energy Commission, to which he was an advisor, stripped his security clearance on the grounds of “substantial defects of character”. It was another way, given that they had no evidence, of declaring him a Soviet spy – or at least a latent one.
Even more so than Oppenheimer, the late Priscilla J. McMillan argued forensically in her 2005 book The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer that he was undone by the fanatical vindictiveness of three enemies: Lewis Strauss, the head of the AEC where he was Oppenheimer’s boss; the physicist Edward Teller, who was obsessed with designing the hydrogen bomb; and William Borden, a zealous anti-Communist and congressional staffer.
For reasons of ambition, hostile grudge-bearing and, in Borden’s case, ideological zealotry, each man artfully and enthusiastically sowed doubts about Oppenheimer’s faithfulness to his country, making it easier for others to interpret his past flirtations with Communism, and his contemporary objections to the development of the H-bomb, as treasonous.
The White House and Pentagon had grown tired of Oppenheimer’s warnings and ambivalence about the hydrogen bomb, when they dwelt in surer things. The language of patriotism and military primacy was blunt, assured – it didn’t want its clarity gummed by the grave hand-wringing of its guilt-stained priest. And here were three men who understood how to manipulate this.
As important as Oppenheimer was for the Manhattan Project, he was ultimately an instrument of the US government’s will: once he was considered an obstacle to it, the force of his achievement remained inferior to the resolution of the State.
Oppenheimer rarely complained about his exile, and it’s possible that he saw the injustice of the government’s censure as a karmic variation on justice – the punishment may not have been symmetrical with his sins, and it may have been spurious, but he was deserving of punishment nonetheless.
And so he took it. And then, in 1967, he died of throat cancer at the age of 62. The final eulogy at his funeral was given by his old friend George Kennan, the veteran diplomat and designer of America’s Cold War policy of containment, who said:
“In the dark days of the early 50s when troubles crowded in upon him from many sides, and when he found himself harassed by his position at the center of controversy, I drew his attention to the fact that he would be welcome in a hundred academic centers abroad and asked him whether he had not thought of taking residence outside this country. His answer, given to me with tears in his eyes: ‘Damn it, I happen to love this country.’”