I watched ‘Oppenheimer’ for the second time with a friend last week. The first time was on 21 July, but owing to work I had to leave halfway through. Now, seated closer to the screen, I came to appreciate the narrative as it unfolded.
The American Screenwriter and Director Paul Schrader calls it possibly the most important film of the century, while Oliver Stone, hardly a fan of mainstream US cinema, has underscored its relevance too.
The Western Left is predictably divided over it: Jacobin accuses Christopher Nolan, the Director, of valorising its protagonist too much, while the World Socialist Website praises it for its relevance and its no holds barred approach to the subject of nuclear war.
A masterly biopic
This is quite unlike any biopic I have seen in recent years. There have been several films of Oppenheimer before, including Roland Joffe’s ‘Fat Man and Little Boy’ (1989).
Joffe’s film, however, focused almost entirely on Oppenheimer’s work at Los Alamos, the Trinity test which gave the world its first glimpse of a nuclear bomb. Nolan’s film does not gloss over the Trinity test like that, and you must watch the sequence at Los Alamos to appreciate how subtly he handles it.
‘Oppenheimer’ is a more multifaceted film, probing into the depths of the man’s mind and soul. It does not absolve him of what he did, but it does show the pangs of conscience that assail intellectuals co-opted into positions of power.
It is this theme that stands out in the film and makes it the masterly biopic it is. There is a point in the second half, after the Trinity test, when the screen fades to black. It then opens to a close-up of Oppenheimer’s face. There is hardly any of the exultation and excitement he felt during the detonation. He seems more wearied, more worried.
When the US Army packs up everything and his superior at Los Alamos, Leslie Groves, tells him that they will handle everything from now, Oppenheimer doesn’t so much smile as wince. It’s the first time he’s displaying doubts. Something is lurking beneath him.
As the film will inform us in the next few scenes and sequences, those doubts keep on growing, until he comes to the conclusion, which he relays to Harry Truman and his officials, that he has blood on his hands.
The role of scientists
‘Oppenheimer’ touches on an important point there, the role of scientists during war and how they can be co-opted into exploring, and extending, the destructive potential of their work.
The scientists at Los Alamos are moved by the need to push the limits of scientific research, and even those displaying leftwing sympathies – at one crucial moment Oppenheimer, who has by now abandoned his leftwing ideals, confronts a group opposing the dropping of the bomb in Japan – are enthralled by the possibilities of their work.
On more than one occasion several characters utter the line: “Theory can only get you so far.” That is the ultimate point of the movie: that praxis will always be more consequential than theory, and that, often, the consequences of theory cannot be predicted, still less prevented.
The film does not ignore or undermine the moral dimension to these issues. But it does not bolster that at the expense of everything else either. Robert Oppenheimer’s conversion to pacifism was swiftly followed by retribution, and he ends up as a martyr, but the story does not portray him as a misunderstood hero.
Role reversal
Though the entire movie unfolds in the US, and hardly anything of the destructive effects of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is shown, except in fragments, Oppenheimer realises on his own what he has wrought. Yet by the time he comes to these conclusions the roles of hero and villain have changed.
Two crucial characters in the film make it to the cover of TIME magazine, including Oppenheimer. Another TIME cover, not shown here, featured Joseph Stalin. At the Potsdam Conference, we are told the US President gloats over the bomb to Stalin. This sets off a chain reaction that ends with the Russians developing the atomic bomb before the Americans. By that point, of course, the Russians had taken the place of the Germans and Japanese.
Very interesting times
Despite their destructive consequences, there is no denying that these were very interesting times. ‘Oppenheimer’ opens a window into an intriguing phase in American political history, when the ‘Free World’ joined the Soviets in a joint effort against the Axis powers.
The Left, despite its anti-war sloganeering, was part and parcel of this effort too: the Communist Party of the US, not unlike the Communist Party in countries like Sri Lanka, lent its support to the war on the basis that Nazism was the greater evil.
‘Oppenheimer’ does not, of course, probe into these issues and themes, because mainstream American cinema has never understood leftwing politics properly. But leftwing politics was a pinnacle, or centrepiece, in the war, and it more or less determined the course of the Manhattan Project as well, especially in relation to the postwar right-wing witch-hunts against leftwing artists and scientists.
Nuclear annihilation
Today, of course, we are constantly confronted with the horrors of nuclear annihilation. Yet the Americans dropped the bombs twice, though they considered dropping the bomb on China not long afterwards.
Robert Oppenheimer himself did not doubt that he had done the right thing by helping in its development: during the Korean War, for instance, he is reported to have supported the use of tactical nuclear attacks. But like George Kennan’s advocacy of containment, his advocacy of nuclear cooperation was undermined and dismissed. By then the US economy had profited so much from the war, so much from the development of such weapons, that the military-industrial complex was here to stay.
Eisenhower’s comments on these developments in his farewell address could not prevent them. ‘Oppenheimer’ reminds us, right until the end, that one man should take responsibility for all that. This is a fine film, a relevant one, and it deserves being seen by everyone.
(The writer is a freelance columnist who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com. He is the Chief International Relations Analyst at Factum, an Asia-Pacific focused foreign policy think tank based in Colombo and accessible via www.factum.lk)