Eadem sed aliter: A Media Review of Oppenheimer
In this review, Roberts reviews Christopher Nolan's newest biopic; and implores us to realize that this newest movie is anything but a biopic
My approach to cinema has always been quite simple; when I settle into a good leather seat at the theater, or one of the comfier lumps in my couch, I think of what W.C. Fields said of actors; '[w]e are not here merely to entertain or illuminate, but to elevate'. When I watch a movie, I keep an eye out for these aspects; does it entertain? Does it illuminate? Does it elevate? The best movies do all three; and thus, the best movies are very, very rare. Most movies, lacking any artistry, can barely do one. In America, we prefer to be entertained.
Of course, this is the state of American cinema; with directors treated as auteurs and actors having almost wholly been replaced by celebrities, the lunatics have been running the asylum. In 1956, H.L. Mencken lamented that American cinema was 'still in its Wild West stage of culture', and such a culture was inhospitable to the genuine artist. I am inclined to think we have never quite left this stage. All we have done is traded out the cowboys for the superheroes; and all of this has not changed how much Americans enjoy being robbed of their money.
Whether the artist could survive in cinema, I have no clue--unlike the philosophers like Zizek or the wistful critics like Richard Brody, I do not think cinema has ever been a high art. I am much closer to Pauline Kael, who noted that to enjoy cinema, one must be willing to love the trash, because that is what cinema usually produces. Shit has its own integrity, you know; trash is not bad, it just is not art. If all things were art, the species would kill itself off one by one--and we would be right to do so.
The reign of the auteur has, to my mind, climaxed with the movie event we have called 'Barbenheimer'; like our ideas and our romances, Americans have shoved two random things together and told us how wonderful a couple it made. For one movie, we had Greta Grewig who directed Barbie; for the other, someone handed Christopher Nolan the script for Oppenheimer. And the hub-hub around these movies has been a spectacle all in itself. Movie goers dressed up, Twitter threads were exhausted, films critics like Eileen Jones became incoherently drunk on the chance to chastise and praise movies--instead of criticizing them. The writer's strike was washed away in the ebullient effulgence of a marketing campaign, a campaign that turned to the American movie goer and said, with peppy solemnity, 'Choose one'.
While some made a decision and others compromised and went to both, I left my choice up to fate; and being someone raised on Lemony Snicket, fate to me is the unpopular restaurant with the weird waiters, where you are brought things you never asked for…and often do not like. Such fate intervened when a friend of mine asked me to go with him to see Oppenheimer. The choice had been made, and fate was kind to me.
After all, I ended up liking Oppenheimer.
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The ultimate deception of Oppenheimer is this: it is not a biopic, marketing and Christopher Nolan be damned. It is a story that tries to come to grips with the chaotic origins of our nuclear age. Like an adopted child, it wishes to know the fools who sired this world. It is fragmentary, it is a little lost, and it never has the whole truth even as the plot comes to an end. And what it ends up realizing is the stunning resemblance our world has to the world the atom bomb was meant to change.
Oppenheimer is not a biopic because it lacks the narcissism of other biopics; one can think of Aaron Sorkin's Steve Jobs or Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind or James Marsh's A Theory of Everything. In these movies, as in most biopics, the story is forced to revolve around one person. All of Steve Jobs is based on the conversations Steve Jobs has, just as A Beautiful Mind mixes schizophrenia and reality, where we never leave John Nash's mind. A Theory of Everything is anchored in its romance, as experienced by Stephen Hawking, with little to no intervention from beyond him.
Oppenheimer does not do this. From the beginning, there are two major perspectives: Oppenheimer and Strauss. These perspectives interact a few times--like the scene where Oppenheimer meets Einstein, as well as the AEC meeting about there being a spy in Oppenheimer's hand picked group and the moment they have to testify about isotopes. And yet, beyond this, they have little to do with each other in the literal sense. Oppenheimer has two perspectives: Oppenheimer, who moves between the world of theory and the real world consequences of such theorizing, and Lewis Strauss, who enacts a near-Shakespearean play all on his own (the fact they picked Robert Downey Jr. was a godsend).
The lack of narcissism in Oppenheimer, planned or (most likely) accidental, makes the movie at least seem like it wishes to illuminate something for the audience: to me, that illumination was done by the glow of bombs bursting in air--and Oppenheimer's mind. The movie was about the bomb, not Oppenheimer. He was merely the person closest to it, subjectively. Strauss, on the other hand, was closest to the politics of the era. Together, these perspectives were used to (try to) illuminate the origins of the bomb and the world it made.
This framing, to the usual American movie-goer, gets lost in the admittedly stunning aesthetics of the movie; the recurrence of rain drops as a motif, the fiery inner world of Oppenheimer's deepest fears which are meshed into the objective reality of the movie, the use of camera angles to both emphasize and disorient the viewer—this is all quite brilliant. The director, in the days when the producer reigned in Hollywood, was once not considered an auteur but a technician--and it still holds that the best directors are skilled technicians. And Christopher Nolan is quite talented in this way--even if his movie's dialogue, sex scene, and horse riding scenes had to suffer.
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What is this non-biopic trying to tell us? While it is the role of the moviegoer to gawk at the brilliant techniques of a movie, it is the role of the critic to ask (among other things) what is being told--or sold--to us. This is a role that has been woefully neglected by our current critics. Too many of them are beholden to the ultimate God of American cinema--did it entertain? This means they miss that the movie is attempting to illuminate the viewer.
What I saw was a movie that looked at the atomic bomb from two perspectives; the scientific and the political. The interesting aspect of Nolan's narrative is that he lets both perspectives build up in their respective ways; Oppenheimer transforms from a scientist to a media star (or 'guru' as he is called by one of his colleagues) to a guilt-ridden martyr. Lewis Strauss goes from a background character to a political mastermind to a villain seeking to destroy Oppenheimer.
And yet, both of these perspectives are subverted; Strauss reveals towards the end that Oppenheimer wanted to be a martyr and in fact this justified Strauss' position, as well as the fact that his suspicions of espionage were right. Oppenheimer's perspective is undermined by the revelation of his conversation with Boris Pash that reveals Oppenheimer as having sold out a person he knew--not because of anything this person did, but because Oppenheimer was attempting to gain the trust of his bosses.
The way each perspective is thrown into suspicion is a way of trying to illuminate the viewer, to force them not to merely accept the story being told by Strauss and Oppenheimer, but to consider that these stories are full of lies just like any other story. It invites the viewer to be more sensitive to things like Henry Stimson crossing off Kyoto as a target for the selfish reason that he honeymoons there, or to Harry S. Truman's absolute disdain for Oppenheimer and the guilt he feels. It even allows Nolan to add in certain theories, like the idea that Jean Tatlock was murdered rather than committed suicide, which gives the world Oppenheimer is operating a slightly sinister hue.
Ultimately, with subverted narratives, conspiracy theories, and revelations of betrayal, Nolan splits the atomic bomb into two parts: the world that built the bomb, and the world that the bomb built. Oppenheimer, up until the bomb being set off in Los Alamos, is full of a certain scientific optimism that defines the world before the atomic bomb. It is an optimism with harsh edges and a willingness to disregard risks of its advancements; that is, it is Promethean. This Promethean spirit is carried throughout the movie by Oppenheimer, and it is the spirit that built the bomb; a spirit that lied to itself to justify what it was doing.
The second part, the world that the bomb built, is seen through Lewis Strauss, who believes in a world where only America can have the bomb--and, when that world proves impossible, that only America should have the best and most terrifying weapons. Strauss embodies the myths that have long undergirded our world now; the MAD doctrine, the double bind state (a government that can destroy our whole world asks us to trust and admire it…), and the frenzied fear, and promotion of the fear, of Russia in America. To name a few, anyway. This is the world that the bomb built--our world. The Promethean spirit of Oppenheimer, whatever its motivations and lies it told itself, gave way to our ability to set the world on fire--and that, as Oppenheimer mentions to Einstein, destroyed the world without any of Teller's 'chain reaction' fears.
The spirit of Prometheus was followed closely by the chaos of Pandora's box; the world the bomb made destroyed the world that produced it.
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As I left the theater, half-listening to my friend's disappointment that there weren't more explosions, I found myself coming to grips with this illumination. Of course, I knew this illumination and Oppenheimer's sad conclusion for a long time; between Jean Paul Sartre's declaration in Notebooks for an Ethics that the Marxist revolution had been put to bed by the invention of the atomic bomb to Will Self's monograph that declared our era the 'Arkhipov era', I have also found myself seeing the world as one crafted by our atomic--and now nuclear--death drive. Like the humans following the opening of Pandora's box, we have all come to learn how to live with the chaos that has followed the invention of the bomb.
Oppenheimer attempts to illuminate this, but it does so accidentally and therefore the illumination is lost to those who went to a Christopher Nolan movie in the name of entertainment. Which is most people. And in a world so full of digital illiterates as ours, the references and the creative use of the plot and even the testing of the atomic bomb will be (and nearly has been) lost on those who want to discuss the sex scenes or how the bomb's explosion was shot, or who want little more than to deride Oppenheimer for political reasons. People came to see the movie for the bombs, only to miss the focus on the bomb and the world it produced.
And this very fact is why, as I made my way to my car, I found myself quoting (and mispronouncing) a phrase of Latin that Arthur Schopenhauer uses in his magnum opus The World as Will and Representation:
Eadem sed aliter
The same, but different.
What an apt way to describe the world the bomb made and the people who now live in it.