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'Popular responses to Christopher Nolanâs latest cinematic offering, Oppenheimer, have generally been positive, with the film generating unexpected commercial success given its length and subject matter. However, audience opinion has been polarized regarding the filmâs political implications, bifurcating in accordance with the lines along which people have interpreted its ideological content. Some have read Oppenheimer as an indictment of its titular character, typically praising the film for not shying away from the physicistâs personal shortcomings (like his arrogance or infidelity) or attempting to justify them.
For them, the film also shows Robertâs complicity in the most devastating war crime ever committed by foregrounding such details as his justification for continuing the Manhattan Project post-Hitlerâs suicide and his refusal to sign Leo Szilardâs petition against dropping the bombs on Japan. Another strand of popular discourse, however, has gone the other way and accused Nolan of whitewashing the image of J. Robert Oppenheimer by de-emphasizing the horrific outcomes of his actions (such as by keeping the harrowing images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki offscreen) and portraying him as skeptical when it comes to atomic weaponry by glossing over his moral culpability in making them possible.
For this latter camp, the filmâs decision to utilize Oppenheimerâs victimization at the hands of the Gray board as a framing device to bookend the narrative meant a shift in perspective from âOppenheimer as perpetratorâ to âOppenheimer as victim.â For still others, the film has seemed to be a balancing act between these two contradictory tendencies, with the criticism and the sympathy canceling each other out to varying effect: for some, a fair representation of a complicated historical figure, while for others, a politically-toothless blockbuster looking to cover all bases.
Despite the differences between these positions, the common axis around which they revolve concerns a moral assessment of Oppenheimer as an individual, both as a man sustaining frayed personal relationships and as the physicist who made nuclear warfare possible. The film gets read merely as an exploration of Oppenheimerâs guilt, with opinions differing as to the success or failure of the depiction. The questions implicitly posed by such discourse tend to be of the following type: How are we to think of Oppenheimer and his legacy more than eight decades after the inception of the Manhattan Project? How should history judge this complicated figure, and what lessons could we draw regarding brilliant (but flawed) individuals occupying positions of power during times of global crisis?
Such considerations, while valuable, nevertheless seem too restricted to the level of the individual and inevitably miss the most crucial point to be derived from Oppenheimer, one underscored by its closing scene involving an ominous exchange between Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) and Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. âWhen I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world,â says Robert, recalling a previous meeting between them.
Einstein confirms that he remembers the meeting well, and then Oppenheimerâs spine-chilling follow-up comes: âI believe we did.â The film ends with a montage of nuclear warheads launched, eventually engulfing the planet and triggering atmospheric ignition, cross-cutting with grief-stricken close-ups of Cillian Murphyâs face. Of course, Oppenheimer doesnât refer here to having started an actual nuclear reaction and set fire to the atmosphere, which was the genuine worry at hand during his prior meeting with Einstein. Instead, he draws a revealing parallel between nuclear weapons and the scientific-military-industrial complex that facilitates them by analogizing the chain reaction that characterizes them bothâforever threatening to spiral out of control with catastrophic consequences.
In these final images of the film, the fear and grief writ large on Oppenheimerâs face thus have little to do with either atmospheric ignition or even the specific dangers posed by nuclear weaponry. They reflect, instead, his confrontation with a final revelation â one that comes perhaps too late in his own life. Itâs an acknowledgment of the tragic course taken by scientific reason in general (âthe culmination of three centuries of physics,â as his colleague Isidor Rabi put it), which seems to lead inevitably to a paradox through its weaponization. The grand institution of science and technology, long heralded as the flagbearer of enlightenment rationality and progress, seems to produce scenarios that violently contradict its own utopian ambitions with the existential threats it generates.
The more pertinent questions raised by the film then become the following: How come âthree centuries of physicsâ ultimately lead to a paradoxical scenario where its progress becomes the foundation for an existential threat, despite peerless geniuses like Oppenheimer and Einstein being fully cognizant of such dangers? And what does this indicate regarding our pursuit of technological progress itself, usually widely accepted as an unquestioned universal good? This essay shall probe such questions through a reading of Oppenheimer, which aims to bring forth and examine these fundamental contradictions (mirrored by the filmâs contradictory characterization of Oppenheimer himself) and thus interpret the film as an alarming representation of the tragedy afflicting the very heart of our project of scientific-technological modernity.
The Tragic Subject of Oppenheimer
As the film opens with Oppenheimer reading his statement to the members of the Gray board security hearing, the first introduction we get to this character is through a flashback to his days spent at Cambridge, where he attempts to poison his tutor Patrick Blackett (James DâArcy) with a cyanide-laced apple after being antagonized for his subpar laboratory work. This early instance of a young Robert responding under duress and lacking control over a situation almost instinctively with the urge to kill seems to foreshadow his eventual historical legacyâas the man fated to spearhead the single most violent act of death and destruction in human memory.
Itâs tempting to read this sign as indicative of the âtragic flawâ within Oppenheimer, which, despite his best intentions, sets him down a dark, winding path and ultimately becomes his undoing. But, as we shall see, such attempts to locate the roots of tragedy within Oppenheimer, arising from his personal attributes, would be to misrecognize how the tragic element manifests across the filmâs narrative.
As per the classic Aristotelian theory of tragedy, hamartia (most commonly translated as âtragic flawâ) is responsible for the series of events affecting a movement from a state of felicity to disaster for the tragic hero, bringing about their downfall. Traditionally, hamartia has been understood to be some inherent character defect that gets in the way of the (otherwise virtuous) heroâs attempts to retain control over their fate and, as such, the possibility of depicting the downfall of a wholly virtuous (or villainous) character, as tragedy, was ruled out.
Later critics like Jules Brody have contested this interpretation of hamartia and insisted that it be understood as a morally neutral term, indicating a chance accident. Itâs deemed an unforced error that leads the hero to âmiss the markâ (literal translation of the verb hamartanein). Like an archer inadvertently missing their mark, not due to lack of trying or inherent moral deficiency, tragedy manifests as a contingency that unalterably sets the course towards downfall. As opposed to the classical notion, this interpretation of hamartia emphasizes its externality and autonomy relative to the character: tragedy, in this vein, is that which strikes not because one is inherently flawed (for then their downfall is merely the comeuppance they already deserved) but due to something that lies radically outside the bounds of oneâs will.
However, neither of these two interpretations of hamartia fits the tragedy of Oppenheimer, for they oscillate between locating it either entirely within the character or entirely without them while positing the characterâs actions as the site where the tragic element takes root. To take the classic example of Oedipus Rex, where Oedipus fails to recognize his father Laius at the crossroads and kills him, the tragic error is attributed either to Oedipusâ hasty behavior because of his hubris (as per the classical notion) or to sheer bad fortune. But in both cases, itâs something that Oedipus (and Oedipus alone) does that actualizes the tragedy.
In both cases, Oedipusâ actions evince regret in him, and if he couldâve gone back in time and done things differently, itâs clear that he wouldâve avoided slaying the man he meets at the crossroads. This isnât true, however, for Oppenheimer. As the character of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) reminds us, Robert never once admitted to having regrets over Hiroshima and that âif he could do it all over, he would do it all the same.â Admittedly, the latter claim isnât a factual observation but something that Strauss rhetorically puts forth to make his case against Robert. Still, it does lead one to wonder: What precisely could Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer have done differently, had he the chance to turn the clock back, so as to effect any different outcome?
He certainly couldnât have stopped the nuclear race from ever starting, for that becomes inevitable the moment the atom is split by scientists in Nazi Germany and, a year later, World War II breaks out. Perhaps he couldâve more strongly opposed the decision to bomb Japan. Yet this argument misses the fact that the hindsight with which we now assert that the Japanese surrender wasnât due to the bombs but rather the USSRâs entry into the war on 9th August 1945, was not something that was prophetically available to Oppenheimer who, like his fellow scientists, could only act based on information fed to him by the US military. Further, it is known that Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur, and even Trumanâs chief of staff Leahy, went on record to condemn the atomic bombs as âeither militarily unnecessary, morally reprehensible, or both,â and yet Truman went ahead anyway.
Itâs fair to say that a âhumble physicistâ like Oppenheimer, especially with his personal âquestionable associations,â could have done little to sway Truman. This isnât to absolve Oppenheimer of all personal responsibility or claim that he always acted ideally. But it is to assert that the question of the violent trajectory taken by scientific rationalityâculminating in nuclear weaponry but certainly not restricted to the bombings in Japanâcannot simply be reduced to the individual decisions taken (or not) by Oppenheimer (and other scientists like him), regardless of whether these decisions were motivated by inherent tragic flaws or brought about by chance circumstances.
We thus note how the existing notions of hamartia are ill-equipped to adequately account for the tragedy of Oppenheimer and preclude the possibility of deriving a politicized critique: the classical notion attributes all responsibility to the individual afflicted by the tragic flaw. In contrast, the latter notion leaves it all to accident. Whatâs necessary here is a way of configuring hamartia that situates it neither entirely within a character nor without them. Instead, it accounts for the dialectical relationship between inner subjectivity (acting upon outer reality) and external structures (determining and constraining the subject from within).
After all, the âtragic flawâ manifests as most tragic precisely when it appears to be located within, leading us to proclaim the character as inherently flawed, even as its ultimate genesis lies elsewhere. Hamartia, in this case, must thus be located as being extimate to the character â deriving from the Lacanian concept of âextimacy,â a portmanteau of the two mutually contradictory words âexternalâ and âintimacy.â Extimacy refers to a dissolution of the usual demarcation between interior and exterior and thus reframes the question of hamartia â no longer understood as some moral deficiency but rather as a mode of subjectivity volitionally adopted by the character as their own, but which nevertheless is founded in the external structure that produces the subject.
To view the âtragic flawâ in the narrative as extimate to Oppenheimer is to insist that it operates through him, even as its origins remain radically outside him. As shall be discussed in the next section, this shows up in the film as Robertâs significant psychical investment in Enlightenment-era rationalityâas embodied in the ideals of scientific progressivism and bureaucratic due diligenceâa structure of which he is a product through and through. As the film unfolds, this structure unravels for Oppenheimer to reveal at its heart a gnawing irrationality, manifesting through his often contradictory behavior as well as the rising sense of a loss of control (which Einstein also brings up in the final scene) and the tragic realization of his own helplessness in the face of it all.
Enlightenment and its Discontents
Regardless of the wide variety of opinions out there regarding Oppenheimer, there seems to be a near-universal agreement in describing him as a deeply contradictory character, something that Nolanâs film also evokes in numerous ways. Edward Tellerâs (Benny Safdie) testimony of Robertâs actions as âconfused and complicatedâ may not have been entirely fictional, and we see how the Gray board leverages the apparent contradictions in Oppenheimerâs behavior (like his shifting position with respect to the H-bomb) to persecute him.
Additionally, Robert often behaves in ways that undermine his personal position, like admitting to prosecutor Roger Robb (Jason Clarke) that the communist Haakon Chevalier (Jefferson Hall) is still his friend. We also see him arguing more than once that the scientistsâ role as creators of the bomb does not give them any greater right to dictate whether itâs used, even as we see him doing precisely the same while convincing his colleagues of the need to unleash the bomb despite Nazism no longer being a threat.
Oppenheimerâs contradictions can only be fathomed if we first recognize that heâs a Kantian liberal subject through and through, implicitly following the rational framework elaborated by Immanuel Kant in his seminal essay âWhat is Enlightenment?â. The path to Enlightenment, Kant wrote, lay in maintaining a clear separation between private and public uses of reason and in having a state form that freely allowed the maximization of both. Put simply, the difference is as follows: private use of reason refers to executing oneâs assigned duties in the specific role (teacher/scientist/lawyer/banker, etc.) one occupies within civil society, whereas public reason refers to performing oneâs greater duty towards society as a whole, i.e., by speaking out and protesting, according to oneâs convictions, against that which threatens the so-called âcommon good.â
With the one hand, you oil the wheel that turns (for that is your job), and with the other, you mend the spokes that are broken âthis seems to be the model of Enlightenment rationality that also governs Oppenheimer. âArgue as much as you like and about whatever you like, but obey!â wrote Kant, his blueprint acting as an injunction to people to speak out against the status quo as and when necessary, but not at the cost of neglecting their duties (for without the latter, society itself would break down).
One clearly sees this tension between âarguingâ and âobeyingâ play out in the film through (among other things) Oppenheimerâs engagement with the communists, neither officially joining them nor entirely giving up on their cause. Oppenheimer is quick to âargueâ alongside his fellow members of the F.A.E.C.T when it comes to showing solidarity with âfarm laborers and dock workersâ and insisting that âacademics have rights too.â
He is also quick to âobeyâ when Lawrence (Josh Hartnett) convinces him of the need to tone down his political activity so that he can do his duty, showing the ability to be âpragmatic.â Itâs fascinating to see how Robert goes out of his way to inform the authorities about Eltenton (Guy Burnet) because itâs his duty as a law-abiding citizen to report espionage attempts. Yet, he also resists the persistent Colonel Pash (Casey Affleck) to keep Chevalierâs name concealed, spinning lies that would return to hurt him later.
In fact, Robertâs lifelong commitment to âarguing,â i.e., not letting the exigencies of private ends trammel over public reason, is precisely what separates him from Lewis Strauss, whose perspective is taken up in the parallelly-running storyline shot in black and white. While Strauss has spent his whole life climbing the social ladder by greasing the right palms and pleasing the right people, Oppenheimer, in contrast, was (in)famous for speaking his mind (almost to the extent of seeming arrogant) and standing up for causes he believed in, regardless of potential political backlash.
Itâs telling that when the senate aide (Alden Ehrenreich) was pushing the question of who targeted Oppenheimer and why, Strauss mentions that âRobert didnât take care not to upset the power brokers in Washingtonâ (which undoubtedly Strauss always took care to), before recounting the tale of his humiliation in the case of exporting isotopes to Norway. Oppenheimerâs real âcrime,â for which Strauss takes it upon himself to punish him, lay in this insistence on always keeping private and public reason separate and for not backing down on his stance against further nuclear armament or paying enough importance to influential individuals to bow to them. His folly, perhaps, lay in thinking that the state structure was rational enough to tolerate the same.
Underlying this two-pronged mode of rationality that Oppenheimer embodied is the assumption that the exercise of reason can act as itâs own corrective, i.e., the threat of rationality leading us into error and excess is countered by rationality itself, in recognizing such dangers and undertaking appropriately rational countermeasures. Yet this would be to presume a state form that also functions rationally, where private and public uses of reason can be kept separate, which is only possible in an age of globalization under the aegis of something akin to âworld governmentâ as Lewis Strauss puts it in the film, which Oppenheimer imagines functioning through âthe United Nations as Roosevelt intended.â
However, nearly two centuries after Kant, the world in which Oppenheimer finds himself is ruled by division and strife, where the imagined separation between private and public usage of reason often collapses â such as when it becomes the very duty of scientists to help fashion weapons of mass destruction, which contradicts their greater responsibility as rational agents to society at large. The Kantian model presupposes a state form that allows for both obedience and argument and thus leads to contradiction in situations where argument itself amounts to disobedience, like when Oppenheimerâs continued opposition to the H-bomb project is framed as a betrayal of his patriotic duties.
Nolanâs film shows us how nation-statesâ fractured and warring imaginaries constantly undermine the promises of Enlightenment rationality â promises of scientific progress and peaceful prosperity â both on micro and macro scales. One of the dominant antagonisms staged throughout the film is between the US militaryâs policy of compartmentalization and the values of transparency and open communication that are key to the institution of science. âAll minds have to see the whole task to contribute efficiently,â as Oppenheimer tells General Groves (Matt Damon), which really applies not just to the scientists working at Los Alamos but also to humankind in general, engaged in the Enlightenment project of reaping the benefits of scientific progress while protecting against its dangers. All humanity, setting aside mutual differences, must together see to dangers that threaten us on a planetary scale, whether nuclear bombs or the worry of climate change.
The essence of compartmentalization, which lies in damming the tendency of knowledge and information to circulate freely, shows itself to be irrational insofar as it seeks only to further private interests (in Oppenheimerâs case, that of the US military) at the cost of public ones. As Oppenheimer discovers, to his great horror, his hopes of international cooperation preventing the nuclear race from spiraling out of control seem utterly fanciful given the utmost hostility between the two world superpowers. The contradiction is made explicit with great force in the scene where Oppenheimer meets President Truman (Gary Oldman). He assures the President that the Soviets, too, have abundant resources to build a nuclear arsenal, hoping his reasoning sufficiently convinces the President to shut down Los Alamos and enter arms talks with the USSR.
In response, Trumanâs Secretary of State James Byrnes (Pat Skipper) takes Robertâs observation to conclude the exact opposite, arguing that the USSRâs nuclear potential means that they have to âbuild up Los Alamos, not shut it down,â which shows how incompatible Oppenheimerâs rationality is within such a fundamentally irrational state. At this moment, Robert realizes the error he has been led to with his investment in Kantian rationality, its inherent contradictions growing steadily apparent, as he remarks to the President, âI feel like I have blood on my hands.â Itâs one thing to imagine this blood to be representative of the deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, massacres which (as previously discussed) Oppenheimer wasnât entirely responsible for and nor could have prevented singlehandedly.
But insofar as the line follows Byrnesâ conclusion, the blood on Oppenheimerâs hands should indicate something far ominous: that is, his involvement within the institution of science and technology â itself a part of the greater Enlightenment project of modernity â leading to a scenario where he has given humankind âthe power to destroy themselves,â as Neils Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) puts it. The idea of Enlightenment, a word referring to the state of being illuminated, of the production of light to cast out darkness, thus attains perversion in the spectacle of the atomic explosionâpopularly held to be âbrighter than a thousand sunsââ which paradoxically for Oppenheimer back then also necessarily represented the zenith of scientific progress that he had helped reach.
Technology as Revelation
That the zenith of scientific progress should appear as an act of bringing to light in Oppenheimer perhaps hints at something of the essence of this act of putting science into use, of âtaking theory and turning it into a practical weapons system,â as Robert tells Groves. For the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the essence of technology lay in revelationâunderstood as the movement from a state of concealment to unconcealment. âTechnology is a mode of revealing,â wrote Heidegger in his essay âThe Question Concerning Technology,â referring to how science apprehends the natural world to bring forth what would have eluded us otherwise.
We need only think of some of the earliest examples of human technology to get the point across: the harnessing of fire, for example, reveals the nutritional value concealed within plants and animals to be used as sustenance, while the plow that turns the earth reveals the fertility of the soil thatâs otherwise inaccessible. It was crucial for Heidegger that we do not fall into the usual trap of imagining technology as something neutral in itself, as merely instrumental means to ends, its purpose defined entirely by how humans use it. To imagine technologies as disparate as the windmill and the atomic bomb as mere instruments at the mercy of humans, while not technically incorrect, reduces them to a false equivalency that obscures their vastly differing essences.
More importantly, it obscures their telos, i.e., their ultimate (intended) purpose, which must also be held responsible for their creation in the first place, for no one imagines that the telos driving the manufacture of windmills and atomic bombs to be anything similar. Thus, for Heidegger, itâs important that we apprehend technologyâs essence as ârevelationâ so that we may better appreciate how the technologies we use constrain (and are constrained by) the realities they bring forth. Revelation in this manner, for Heidegger, thus involves a âbringing-forth,â i.e., something is brought forth from obscurity and into sight. The windmill, for example, can tap into currents of air and bring forth the same as electrical currents, which can then be harnessed as electricity.
The idea of technology as a mode of revealing is acknowledged most directly in Oppenheimer during the scene where Secretary of War Henry Stimson (James Remar) discusses dropping the bomb on Japanese cities, and Robert describes it as âa terrible revelation of divine power.â That the bombâs power is defined as divine (god-like and thus not of the world of humans) is, of course, no mere coincidence, and harks back to the now-infamous line from the Bhagavad Gita quoted by Oppenheimer, âNow I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,â typically misunderstood to imply Robertâs identification with the figure of death, given his role in pioneering the atomic bomb.
In the Gita, however, it is told to Arjuna by Krishna, the latter taking on the form of Vishnuâs multi-armed self and thus refers to a moment of identification between death and divinity. Death appears to Arjuna in the form of Vishnu (and to Oppenheimer in the form of the atomic explosion) as something terribly divine, something so otherworldly that he, a mere mortal, cannot possibly hope to comprehend or control it. Later, following the Hiroshima bombing, we hear Truman on the radio describe the bomb as âa harnessing of the basic powers of the universe.â Read together, the technology of the atomic bomb can thus be described as a harnessing of the basic powers of the universe so as to effect a revelation of divine power.
The paradox becomes apparent: whatâs harnessed is that which belongs to the fundaments of this world, even as whatâs revealed feels like something otherworldly (transcending the limits of the human) â as if to imply the presence of the otherworldly (albeit concealed) within the very building blocks of our reality. Once again, we have here a relation of âextimacy,â in that technology takes the base matter of our world (its natural resources and the physical laws governing them) and contrives it to reveal something that appears external to us insofar as it threatens to exterminate the world.
It is this trait of modern technology, as seen most visibly in atomic bombs but certainly not limited to them, to ultimately objectify its subjects (i.e., human beings), becoming external and even opposed to them concerns Heidegger. He characterizes the logic governing modern tech as a âchallenging-forth,â a âsetting-upon,â that separates it from older technology where the revelation involved was merely a âbringing-forth.â He contrasts the windmill, which simply taps into air currents already flowing, with the modern activity of coal mining: â. . . a tract of land is challenged in the hauling out of coal and ore.
The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral depositâ. The difference between the windmillâs âbringing-forthâ and the coal minerâs âchallenging-forthâ is that the former resembles receiving gifts from Mother Nature doled out generously. At the same time, the latter is active exploitation of nature, motivated by the single capitalist logic of âmaximum yield at minimum expense.â
Revelation as âchallenging-forthâ thus affects a pretty different kind of unconcealment that Heidegger describes: âEverywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing-reserveâ. The phrase derives from the idea of standing armies forming the military reserve forces. It refers to a peculiar ordering of natural elements wherein they stand by, at hand, and ready for use instead of being freely scattered within the world in their natural forms.
Oppenheimer neatly illustrates the idea through the recurring imagery of spherical glass bowls being gradually filled with marbles, representing increasing quantities of refined uranium and plutonium, standing by, ready to be used as fissile material. This process represents how science and technology reveal the contents of our world as mere means, as things to be used to achieve our desired ends, and not as ends in themselves. The logic of technology subjects humans to a view of the natural world as something that exists only for the purpose of being harnessed for profit, overriding the idea of its existence in its own right.
The problem with this logic of turning nature into the âstanding-reserveâ is, of course, that eventually, it extends to humans themselves â humans who, as part of the same natural world, are also made part of the âstanding-reserveâ of science and technology. âThe current talk about human resources, about the supply of patients for a clinic, gives evidence of this,â writes Heidegger. It is to effect a depreciation in the value assigned to humanity itself. It marks that moment wherein technological revelation starts appearing as something external to humanity â external insofar as technology now seems turned against humans themselves and thus out of their control. Indeed, that is how the âterrible revelation of divine powerâ must have appeared to the hundreds of thousands massacred at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who became mere fodder for imperialist war games and who tellingly donât appear in Oppenheimer except in the form of mere statistics.
Modern technology, thus, as a form of revealing that âchallenges-forthâ and turns nature into the âstanding-reserveâ, contains within itself a paradox: As humans keep utilizing scientific knowledge to exploit the natural world for profit and using the profit to further its technologies to better exploit nature (not unlike a chain reaction), eventually the logic of natural exploitation â now magnified manifold â threatens to engulf humankind itself.
Perhaps the most tragic aspect of Oppenheimer is the realization that this existential threat is not well appreciated until it gets displayed in some form, as when Robert justifies continuing the Manhattan Project despite Hitlerâs death, claiming this would encourage deterrence. By insisting that âthey wonât fear it until they understand it, and they wonât understand it until theyâve used it,â Oppenheimer directly invokes the logic of revelationâfor if technology is a mode of revealing, as Heidegger insists, it seems like the culmination of technological progress must consist in the revelation of its own catastrophic potential, so that we may learn to curb the same before itâs too late.
Oppenheimer beyond Oppenheimer
In an interview about the film, Oppenheimerâs co-producer Emma Thomas describes it as a âcautionary tale,â hoping it leaves viewers with more troubling questions than straightforward answers. But itâs hard to see how Oppenheimer can function as a cautionary tale as long as the discourse around it centers on an assessment of Oppenheimer himself and the story of his moral culpability and guilt. Understandably, popular opinion has fixated upon the depiction of the individual more so than anything else, given that Oppenheimer has been marketed as a biopic. Additionally, the buzz around Nolanâs decision to write his screenplay in the first person so as to tell the story from Oppenheimerâs subjective perspective undoubtedly contributed to prejudice regarding the filmâs ambitions, shifting the focus to the man himself rather than the story unfolding around him.
But what this decision does for the film is actually quite the opposite, i.e., by locking the viewer onto Oppenheimerâs perspective, the film eschews a moral judgment of Oppenheimer himself (for that requires us to view him objectively). It encourages a questioning of the structures that made this tragedy possible. In watching the film, the audience is made to feel like âweâre on this ride with Oppenheimerâ (as Nolan put it), and this formal identification with the protagonist dissuades attempts to make it all about him, as has primarily been the case with previous attempts at telling the story of the atomic bomb. The idea isnât dissimilar to the proverbial walking of a mile in someone elseâs shoes, which indicates a movement away from making that person the sole object of oneâs critique.
It is here that popular discourse around the film, centering on a moral judgment of Oppenheimer and his guilt, falls short: the more significant point alluded to by the filmâs closing moments isnât about whether Oppenheimer was the devil for having commandeered the Manhattan Project to success or a saint for advocating arms control. It certainly isnât about the role of individual responsibility in overseeing projects of seismic importance (as if a different set of personnel couldâve ensured a different historical outcome). Itâs easy enough to investigate some tragic event and have the buck stop with some individual figure to arrive at some scapegoat upon whom responsibility is pinned in order to be relieved of the labor necessary to interrogate systemic factors that keep reproducing such tragedies.
To the extent that Oppenheimer portrays its titular character as flawed, itâs also careful to show us that Robert himself was acutely aware of his flaws and felt remorseful. And as his friend Chevalier notes: âSelfish and awful people donât know they are selfish and awful.â But itâs precisely by presenting this sympathetic portrayal of the man Oppenheimer that the film encourages a more careful reading of his position within the scientific-bureaucratic apparatus, one that transcends individual specificities, suggesting a sense of fatality with which the events of the movie are tainted and imploring us to derive a critique of this apparatus itself.
Of course, the film is about Oppenheimerâs life and work and depicts the same in detail, but this focus on the man himself is not an end in itself but merely the means to get beyond the man and explore what made, drove and ultimately tormented him. Paradoxical as it may sound, given the filmâs text, the title of Oppenheimer may be less of a reference to the famous physicist himself and more of an indication of the historical subject position that was once occupied by Robert but now endures despite him.
In numerous interviews, Nolan has mentioned how scientists working in AI often refer to the current AI explosion as their âOppenheimer moment.â In revisiting and rethinking the story of the nuclear bomb, perhaps itâs time that we stopped obsessing over what Oppenheimer could or should have done differently and instead broach the question of how such âOppenheimer momentsâ arise in the first place and how to tackle them. How come new developments in science and technology often strike us with fear and alarm when we should be rejoicing in the potential benefits they could bring us all? How come when news of developments in computerization, automation, and AI technologies hit the stands, the popular reaction is often one of dismay, stemming from fears of losing livelihoods rather than one of celebration?
âPrometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man; for this, he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity,â the movieâs opening frames inform us. Going by the filmâs narrative, itâs easy to imagine that this refers to Oppenheimerâs persecution by the Gray Board under the animus of Lewis Strauss. But Prometheus was punished by the gods from whom he stole fire, not by men. Neither was Prometheus punished for regretting and having hopes of going back on his act, which happens in the case of Oppenheimer and the bomb. So, the âtortureâ referred to in the quote has nothing to do with the tarring and feathering Oppenheimer undergoes throughout the film, culminating in him losing his security clearance for trying to minimize the fallout from his invention.
Instead, the idea of âstealing fire from godsâ in Oppenheimerâs case refers instead to the laws of physics and their harnessing by the institution of science and technology, which gives men such terribly divine powers as the atomic bomb. Being tortured for eternity, then, in this case, means living with the horror and fear that our technological progress can, at any moment, become our undoing. âChances are near zero,â as we are told repeatedly, but that doesnât stop Fermi from taking side bets on atmospheric ignition. It is this element of non-zero chance, this uncertainty that paradoxically (re)appears at the end of a long process of scientific inquiry and development based on values of certitude, that strikes as most tragic â that the hallowed project of gaining control over the natural world for human benefit has led to a real possibility of loss of control and human extinction.
In the film, Einstein astutely notes this to be a trait characterizing the ânew physicsâ when Robert first comes to him with Tellerâs troubling calculations, observing how they are âlost in your (i.e., Oppenheimerâs) quantum world of probabilities, and needing certainty.â But of course, it isnât as if quantum mechanics itself introduces uncertainties into our world so as to destabilize it; rather, quantum mechanics â itself the culmination of âthree centuries of physicsââ only reveals the uncertainties that have long inhered in the world and in the scientific project itself, but which so far have remained concealed. Small wonder then that Bohrâs character insists that what they have is not just a new weapon but a new world.
Thus, rather than deriving a critique of Oppenheimer himself, a man long dead and gone, a far more fascinating and important discussion to be had from Nolanâs Oppenheimer would be regarding the âcriticalityâ of scientific reason itself. The notion of criticality, as used in the film, refers to that stage during which a nuclear chain reaction becomes self-sustaining, beyond which it becomes âsupercriticalâ and proceeds towards explosion. The institution of science in todayâs world is similarly self-sustaining insofar as its narrative of technological progress requires no additional justification, insofar as even our response to scienceâs dangers usually tends to be more science.
Like a chain reaction, scientific progress feeds capital, which in turn feeds science and so on â a juggernaut advancing so autonomously as to almost be insulated against external criticism and the possibility of applying brakes. And carrying with it, all the time, the risk of âsupercriticalityâ â from CO2 emissions causing global warming to developments in AI causing job losses or worse, and so on. Itâs precisely this tragic course of events, from rationality and control to irrationality and loss of control, irreducible to the individual and instead requiring deeper systemic interrogation of the fundamental assumptions underlying technological modernity, that Oppenheimer allegorizes in its tale of the atomic bomb and the man who fathered it.
The film lays bare the irrationality at the heart of the Enlightenment project of scientific progress and the paradoxes it leads to, mirrored by the paradoxes of the quantum world and manifesting in Oppenheimerâs contradictory subjectivity and the final tragic realization that despite his crucial role in the making of the bomb there was perhaps very little he alone could have done to change the course of history, a history that through his participation he also helps actualize.'
#Oppeneimer#AI#Emma Thomas#Albert Einstein#Christopher Nolan#The Manhattan Project#Leo Szilard#Cillian Murphy#Tom Conti#Institute for Advanced Study#Princeton#Isidor Rabi#Gray Board#Patrick Blackett#James D'Arcy#Lewis Strauss#Robert Downey Jr.#Edward Teller#Benny Safdie#Haakon Chevalier#Jefferson Hall#Roger Robb#Jason Clarke#Ernest Lawrence#Josh Hartnett#Boris Pash#Casey Affleck#George Eltenton#Guy Burnet#Alden Ehrenreich
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the computer blade | source
#i do not know enough about pi clusters to write ids for this post. apologies#talos gifs#stim gifs#stim#tech stim#technology#techcore#computers#raspberry pi#circuit boards#wires#cables#blinking lights#glow#plastic#black#gray#purple#pink#blue#green#cyberpunk#robotcore#robot stim
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#â â :*ăïŸïœ„* âżÖ¶â á© *ăïŸïœ„*: â â#moodboard#alternative moodboard#mb alt#kpop messy#kpop layouts#kpop moodboard#messy bios#edgy moodboard#clean moodboard#angelcore moodboard#aesthetic layouts#visual archive#mood board#blue moodboard#green moodboard#gray moodboard#brown moodboard#white moodboard#jennie blackpink#bp jennie#jennie moodboard#jennie icons#jennie#messy layouts#black pink moodboard#black pink#coquette moodboard#gg moodboard#instagram moodboard
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Eastman Johnson (1824-1906) "Gathering Lilies" (1865) Oil on board Located in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, United States
#paintings#art#artwork#genre painting#genre scene#eastman johnson#oil on board#fine art#national gallery of art#museum#art gallery#female portrait#portrait of a woman#gray dress#grey#brown#dresses#clothing#clothes#pond#garden#green#1860s#mid 1800s#mid 19th century#a queue work of art
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stimboard with ice nine kills gifs, slashers, halloween treats, and VHS/analog horror for @dead-dog-dont-eat !
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#you dont ask questions about project mayhem [boards]#đ§Œ#horror#vhs#technology#candy#food#ghostface#scream#ice nine kills#michael myers#halloween#fire#camera#gray#black#orange#brown#green#purple#stim#stim gif#stimboard#analog horror#television
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Í Í Í Í Í Í Í Í Í Í ÍÂ Í Í Í ÍÍ Í Í Í ÍÍ Í Í Í Í " Í Í Í Íi'm not being perfect enough "
#lana del ray aesthetic#lana is god#lana unreleased#lana del ray aka lizzy grant#lizzy grant#girly stuff#girl interrupted#girly#girlhood#girlblogging#just girly posts#just girly thoughts#just girly things#im just a girl#aesthetic moodboard#alternative moodboard#moodboard#archive moodboard#kgirl moodboard#kpop moodboard#carrd moodboard#gray moodboard#mood board#krp moodboard#pink moodboard#vintage moodboard#blue moodboard#japan moodboard#messy moodboard#dollie
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SUPERACHE - CONAN GRAY
#mini's moodboardsáŻâ
#conan#conan gray#superache#conehead#kid krow#found heaven#family line#jigsaw#yours#moodboard#moodboard aesthetic#aesthetic moodboard#aesthetic board#aesthetics#red aesthetic#black aesthetic#conanposting
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#gray#silver#silver tresses#black girl moodboard#goddess energy#moodboards#aesthetic board#luxury aesthetic#my moodboard#black girl aesthetic#black women#black femininity#nsfq#black women in femininity#hair inspo#hair aesthetic#gray hair#rich bitch
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why cant i be a 20th century schoolboy studying shakespeare with his group of morally grey friends
#just a 1900s boarding school boy with his close totally platonic friends#if we were villains#the secret history#dark academia#shakespeare#classics#dead poets society#picture of dorian gray#dorian gray#morally grey
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'In the first of many close-ups of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) in Christopher Nolanâs new film about the physicist, heâs a young student observing raindrops falling in a well. Murphyâs eyes wander tremulously, his perception of the external puddle prompting him to reflect. Heâs a troubled student at Cambridge, isolated and homesick, sinking into depression. Heâs aware of how any talents he has cultivated as a theorist are undermined by a lack of finesse in the laboratory. After his professor, Patrick Blackett (James DâArcy), holds Oppenheimer back from seeing the visiting physicist Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) deliver a lecture, the student injects the professorâs apple with cyanide. Oppenheimer attends the lecture and lies comfortably in bed that night, dreaming of both Bohrâs hidden quantum universe of paradox along with the more immediate bucolic comforts of his family ranch in New Mexico, where we see a horse being fed an apple. The image snaps Oppenheimer out of his reverie. He runs to the classroom, where Blackett and Bohrâwhoâs seized the apple and is about to biteâare in conversation. Oppenheimer grabs the apple from Bohr and throws it in the trash.
The biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin (the basis of Nolanâs screenplay) makes mention of the apple episode, though itâs veiled with much uncertainty and secondhand speculation. Nolan mythologizes the incident, making it the basis of the filmâs exploration of character and self-knowledge. As he steals away the apple, Oppenheimer offers an excuse to Bohr: âWormhole!ââa good-golly physics pun, yes, but also a wink at this cause-and-effect framing, asking where the budding physicist may have ended up if he had not taken back the apple versus where he did end up, and the devastation his invention wrought. The apple, memorably framed in vivid close-up as the cyanide drips down the skin, has an Edenic reverberation after all. Innocence is destined to be lost.
This early section chronicling Oppenheimerâs development could be read as a not-too-subtle augur of how the atomic bombâs creator would be judged for his part in the deaths of hundreds of thousands in Japan and for unleashing a weapon with the power to destroy humankind. In one particular close-up, young Oppenheimerâs eyes beam with electric intensity. As he looks toward the camera, the image is eerily suggestive of a mugshot. This close-up happens at a museum, as he stares at a Cubist portrait by Picasso, the shot-reverse-shot hinting at an echo of Oppenheimerâs own fragmentation in the painting. Art delivers the subject from his crisis to an absolving revelation: the artistâs oblique methods and transmutation of reality reveal how the world of limitless paradox and uncertainty isnât only in the universe âout there,â but also within the mindâs recesses. Around this time we also see Oppenheimer listening to Stravinsky and reading Eliotâs The Waste Land (which, interestingly, was later described by William Carlos Williams as an âatom bombâ dropped on poetry). While not featured in the film, American Prometheus notes how it wasnât a year and a half of psychotherapy that snapped Oppenheimer out of his depression. It was Proust.
Oppenheimer demonstrates that what could have been and what actually happened are similarly problematic; in both the definitive truth is elusive. While physics and modern art embrace the fragmentation and paradoxes of the universe, the obtuseness of the public record will not. In the face of the civilization-shattering âdestroyer of worlds,â how do we justify our lives? This is the question that haunts the film, and is raised explicitly early on, as we meet Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and Oppenheimerâs main foil in the film, who readies himself for his 1959 cabinet confirmation hearing. Strauss speaks to an aide (Alden Ehrenreich) about Oppenheimerâs self-indicting testimony five years earlier. Dredging up incidents from both menâs pasts, the hearings of 1954 and 1959 demand that they âjustify their livesâânot only to âhistory,â to be read in congressional documents (or major Hollywood motion pictures), but privately, to themselves. This is what makes Oppenheimer so unique as a historical biopic: it elevates its subject matter to a meditation on what is knowableâabout history, about our own choicesâand what it means to act responsibly in light of that fact.
Throughout Oppenheimer, weâll see many more images of Oppenheimer gazing in wonderment, most famously at the terrifying fire of his atomic invention at the Trinity test site. As Oppenheimer stares into the explosion, he recalls a line from the Bhagavad Gita about the Eternal swallowing everything: Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds (an alternative translation is âNow I am become Time, swallower of allâ). Language is inadequate to describe something so all-encompassing; narrative breaks down. We first hear this quote when Oppenheimer begins his romance with a young communist named Jean Tatlock, played by Florence Pugh. She has him translate the Sanskrit scriptureâdemanding that he not gloss it but read the words verbatimâin the middle of sex (scholars do have their kinks, after all). The meaning within that passage doesnât need to be contextualized for us, but itâs later manifested in the hellacious light at Trinity. What we see at Trinity will indeed, to quote the John Donne sonnet after which it was named,1 âbreak, blow, burnâ through all the quotidian habits, trophied accomplishments and window dressing distracting us from the looming dread. The bombâs shattering sound catches up with the light, and after the being held so long in astonishment, the onlookers are knocked out of suspended awe and back into space-time.
For an audience, to be hurled back into space and time is to say weâve safely returned to the conventional confines of movie plot. Between moments of chilling contemplation, Nolanâs film moves forward with a feverish briskness, stompingâsometimes clumsilyâthrough the busy history it chronicles. The film has two interlocking narratives: the first, titled âFission,â is shot in richly hued color and shows the perspective of Oppenheimer himself, in a sometimes experimental, stream-of-consciousness style. The second, âFusion,â centers on Strauss and is more narratively straightforward, filmed in noirish monochrome. Nolan cuts between Oppenheimerâs journey toward the Trinity detonation and a pair of hearings: his security clearance hearing presided by the Gray Board in 1954, and the U.S. Senateâs confirmation hearing of Eisenhowerâs Secretary of Commerce nominee, Strauss, who engineered Oppenheimerâs 1954 downfall. Because the film is so engrossing, the structure never comes across as a gimmick, instead playing like a natural reflection on themes of cause and effect, the chain reaction of events set in motion filtered through the problems of motive and memory, pointing to the difficulty of adequately assessing an individual and a historical moment. True, with all the filmâs density of incident and character, one sometimes wishes that Nolan might slow down and let things breathe, giving his characters less rapid-fire, fact-laden talk, and I canât help feeling his penchant for rushed scene transitions sometimes does his actors an injustice. But this splintering rapidity also seems to serve a purpose: underscoring the transience of ego in the longue durĂ©e of history. We see a murdererâs row of âthat guy!â supporting players (Josh Hartnett, Rami Malek, Tom Conti, Josh Peck, Jason Clarke and so on)âall brilliant and distinguished, worthy of their own probing close-ups, but here merely impressionable faces consumed by the filmâs own gravity, like stars sucked up into the darkness of one of Oppenheimerâs hypothesized black holes.
The quickly passing familiar faces ultimately lead us to the problem of historical assessment underlining Robertâs hearing. We can make snap judgments of these figures who will soon be sucked into oblivion, but in the meantime, we get so many faint glimmers of their hidden inner workings, which complicate easy analysis. Think of eccentric Kurt Gödel (James Urbaniak) staring up at Princetonâs trees, his fears of the Nazis as a refugee mentioned in passing; or the scorching visage of Colonel Boris Pash (Casey Affleck), who exudes malevolence as he tries to elicit names of leftist Berkeley faculty from Oppenheimer, though we soon learn his fanatical anti-communism goes back to what happened to his family decades ago in Russia. Or consider President Truman (Gary Oldman), whose rebuke of Oppenheimerâs âcrybabyâ qualms about dropping the bomb might seem cruel, but the solemn darkness in Oldmanâs expression evinces that, in the recesses of private thought, he very much understands his decisionâs moral weight. History books and movies can tell us what an individual did or said, and itâs up to later generations to make conjectures about what they really meant. But those interpretations have their limits: when attempting to grasp the mindâs labyrinth, even the most brilliant subject will get lost.
Instead of killing his teacher at Cambridge, Oppenheimer finds intellectual deliverance at Göttingen University, then at last returns to America as emissary of âthe new physics.â Before long, World War II begins, and heâs chosen by General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) to run the program where the atomic bomb will be created and tested. Oppenheimer sees a noble logic in its creation, as the bomb will lead to the ultimate Pax Americana, wherein godlike nuclear power will be so respected by a newly empowered United Nations that it will end all wars. As with some equations Oppenheimer works on, real-world evidence will reveal the limits of his most elegant theories: civilization will be at perpetual standoff, with billions of lives hanging by a thread. Later in the film, when his colleague and hawkish competitor Edward Teller (Benny Safdie) explains that things are much more complicated than Oppenheimer had supposed, he brings up BlackettâOppenheimerâs would-be victim professor. Blackett, Teller says, had noted that Hiroshima would not be the last act of World War II, but the first act of the new Cold War. In Oppenheimerâs mind we see a snap-cut to Blackett biting into the apple: while our hero found a wormhole out of one grave scenario in the filmâs prologue, heâs nevertheless landed in a much more dire and far-reaching one. The atomic bomb may have been inevitable, but either way Oppenheimer seems predestined to bring death.
The new physics postulates that everything is in flux, and Nolanâs Oppenheimer underscores how this applies not only to physical matter but to the certitude of human psychology and historical events, the very things historical tribunalsâand historical filmsâaspire to define. During the 1954 Gray Board hearing, federal prosecutor Roger Robb (Clarke) tries to paint a definitive picture of Oppenheimer, showing that he has questionable associations and beliefs unfit for someone with a high-security position. Robb brings up damning evidence from twenty years earlier, including the Communist Party affiliations of Robertâs wife Kitty (Emily Blunt), brother Frank (Dylan Arnold) and close friend Haakon Chevalier (Jefferson Hall). Of most personal consequence, the proceedings bring up how Oppenheimer left Los Alamos in June 1943 to spend the night with Jean, who was going through a depressive crisis. As this last incident is detailed through transcripts and testimonies, the scene takes an unexpected turn: Oppenheimer is suddenly naked before the panel, and Jeanâten years removed from her suicideâis writhing on top of him. Oppenheimer is exposed not only to public scrutiny but also to Kitty, framed just over his shoulder. After the meeting is adjourned (and the hallucination has passed), Oppenheimer tries explaining to Kitty that he was under oath and what he said was nothing she didnât already know. But, she fires back, âToday you said it to history.â
Kittyâs remark hits on the filmâs conflict of public and private worlds, the linearity of one and the fragmented contradictions of the other. As Oppenheimer cuts back and forth between all these different scenes and settings, its braided storylines make the audience question whether any continuity can be found: Is who we once were who we are now? How do we act in the heat and influence of one time, and then later, in the measured calm of another? Is the would-be murderer Oppenheimer the same as the more abstract murderer who invented the atomic bomb? How ought we feel about him, considering how condescending he is to his brother Frank, how callous a husband he is to Kitty, how absent a father he is to his two children (in almost every scene with the Oppenheimer children we hear them crying), or how disloyal a friend, whoâhowever much pressure heâs underâeventually gives up Chevalier to the feds? How should heâhow should weâbe judged?
Who then is this multitudinous, paradoxical figure at the filmâs center? Oppenheimer shows a forthright commitment to his actions. Whatâs interesting is how consonant this is with the emphasis on dharma, or sacred duty, in the Bhagavad Gita. In a cosmic vision, the poemâs warrior prince sees Krishnaâs manifestation as âdestroyer of worldsâ and learns he must put aside his moral scruples about the evils of war and instead surrender to the Eternal, committing himself to combat. Oppenheimerâs actions flow with a similar steadfastness, no second-guessing. Despite her rebukes, Oppenheimer will get Jean flowers. He will marry Kitty before her pregnancy begins to showâitâs what one does. He will give up leftist organizing to work on the bomb. He defies clearance because, he feels, he must. He has to visit Jeanâa passionate communistâduring her psychological crisis. He has to report the attempted espionage, which will lead to Chevalierâs downfall. And to fulfill a new World Peace that he believes the bombâs power will ensure, he helps select the live targets it will be used on. Contrary to what Kitty says, his resigned demeanor during the hearing is not that of a martyr. Itâs that of someone fulfilling an inner mandate.
And yet this sense of duty in Oppenheimer is paradoxical in that he is not ruled by any conviction, the way his peers seem to be. Edward Teller calls him âthe sphinx of the atom,â adding, âNobody knows what you believe. Do you?â Heâs also open to being wrong, recognizing the limits of even the most elegant theory in practice. Oppenheimerâs character rhymes with the quantum world heâs unveiled, his movements and decisions like the beams of light in his quantum visions: sharp and brilliant but unruly, uncontainable and infinite.
Compare Oppenheimer to Lewis Strauss. When the film shifts to Straussâs point of view, we see things in black and white, apposite for a hardline ideologue. Strauss, a âself-made manâ who asks that his name be pronounced âStrawsâ (the grandson of Jewish immigrants, he has refashioned himself a Southern gentleman), is a stuffed shirt for whom public opinion takes precedence over poetry. Through the scrim of Oppenheimerâs literary influences, Strauss embodies Proustâs observation how our âsocial personality is a creation of the thoughts of other peopleââor, in the language of the Bhagavad Gita, Strauss is stuck on satisfying his kÄma, the egoâs desires. While Oppenheimer surrenders to his panelâs judgment like a Cold War Socrates drinking his hemlock, Strauss is furiously apoplectic, ferocious in his contempt for his rivals when his nomination is declined. When his post goes away, heâs nothing, and might as well be dead.
More than its structure and spectacle, what elevates Oppenheimer as a historical epic is how Murphy and Downey, Jr. inhabit their respective characters. Oppenheimer and Strauss are both said to have done their duty, though their psychological dispositions lead them to do so for very different reasons. Downey, Jr. is perfect as a jittery man of paper skin, defined by superficial accomplishments and high stature, the aspired ends of his public service. While Nolanâs close-ups of Oppenheimer draw us in, the shots of Strauss point outward: when we see him leave the Senate chamber in defeat, he is looking away from us and offering a phony bullshit smile to the press cameras, after which he will be relegated to a historical dumpster (from which only moviedom can resurrect him, some seventy years later). Murphyâs Oppenheimer, by contrast, is absolutely and wholly himself through every gesture and glance, though he understands how our quiddity resists the stamp of certainty. Some critics have reduced Nolanâs J. Robert Oppenheimer to little more than a conflicted conscience, but I think what makes this characterization memorable is its capaciousness. Oppenheimer is a man reconciled to the mystery of what we are as human beings. With his measured directness in movement and a watchfulness so acute that we feel how perception is itself action, Murphy comes to manifest what Oppenheimer told Edward R. Murrow in his 1955 CBS interview: âThere arenât secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men. Sometimes they are secret because a man doesnât like to know what heâs up to if he can avoid it.â
Since his breakthrough Memento (2000), Christopher Nolan has followed, sometimes with a too-heavy hand, the recurring theme of how we dissociate from the truth of our lives in order to endure (Insomnia, The Prestige, Inception and certainly his three Batman films). With Oppenheimer this idea finds the subject heâs always been reaching for. The settings are dissociated from the outside world, as men in suits draw formulas, experiment, make plans and settle policy in neatly arranged government buildings, some constructed out of thin air like Los Alamosâs Spaghetti Western depot, when thousands of miles away the merciless meat grinder of World War II transpires. We do not see military combat in Europe or the Pacific, nor do we see the Japanese victims at Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
Nolanâs refusal to show the full fury of nuclear devastation has drawn criticism from critics who believe the victimsâ experience must not be overlooked, but by suppressing the images of the carnage, Nolan forces the audience to imagine it, just as Oppenheimer must. During the filmâs most haunting sequence, set in a gymnasium where Oppenheimer gives a speech celebrating Japanâs defeat, we experience an unsettling sense of displacement with him. The gymnasium speech begins conventionally, but both vision and sound bend in accordance with a new reality. The walls around have uncertain spatial dimensions, and the crowdâs cheers are unexpectedly swallowed by silence. Oppenheimerâs imagination projects his gadgetâs power, with intimationsâbut, significantly, not lingering graphic representationsâof molten skin and a body sunk into an ashen heap. Like the Trinity blastâs explosive sound and palpable force catching up with the holy light, the implications of a nuclear age rap on the door of our imagination. The sceneâs discordant formal grammar expresses a jarring fragmentation akin to what Oppenheimer experienced with modern art. But the sequenceâwith overbearing visual and aural stimuliâhurls us out of artâs safe confines; the reliable cause-effect physics of Nolanâs narrative is broken open. (That Nolanâs daughter plays a molten burn victim we see in a fast close-up suggests a fourth wall breaking down, much like the walls behind Oppenheimer at the podium.) For all the time jumps up to this point, there was still a basic coherence to the story. Now time is out of joint, and the veil of space is cracked. After Trinity, we are in a frightening new world, with a new consciousness that we fight to repress. The unfathomable quality of the weaponâits danger and awesome powerâextends to the workings of our own minds, what Proust called the âabyss of uncertainty.â
As both Oppenheimer and Strauss tryâand failâto justify their lives, the bombâs malignant presenceâdespite the intensity of that deafening blastâis almost forgotten. The film gives us the catharsis of ostensible victory, with Strauss defamed in 1959, and Oppenheimer eventually redeemed, celebrated with honors by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1963. But the mind catches up with the dissociations of melodrama. Weâre given one last close-up of Oppenheimer, again staring down at ripples on water that in his mind become expanding circles of fire on a helpless earth. The clamor of civilizations is drowned by fire and fallout. Everythingâour loved ones and our rivals, petty politics and the flux of the discourse, the self-fashioned vanities of a world all too online, and the cultural banquets of a phenomenon like âBarbenheimerââfalls silent. Like Oppenheimer and the Picasso, the audience looks into this last close-up as another mirror, where we are drawn with centripetal force to our own horrific imaginings.'
#Oppenheimer#Cillian Murphy#Lewis Strauss#Lyndon B. Johnson#Barbenheimer#Patrick Blackett#Niels Bohr#James D'Arcy#Kenneth Branagh#American Prometheus#Kai Bird#Martin J. Sherwin#Christopher Nolan#T.S. Eliot#The Waste Land#Stravinsky#Proust#Robert Downey Jr.#Alden Ehrenreich#Gray Board#Trinity test#Bhagavad Gita#Florence Pugh#Jean Tatlock#Kurt Godel#Josh Hartnett#Rami Malek#Tom Conti#Josh Peck#Jason Clarke
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james albin on yt | source
#talos gifs#stim gifs#stim#tech stim#technology#techcore#wires#hands free#circuit boards#robot stim#robotkin#multicolored#black#gray#metallic#blue#green#teal#purple#yellow#gif ids#id in alt#satisfying#EDIT. THE ALT TEXT SAID N GIFS CUZ I FORGOT TO EDIT IT FOR GIF NUMBER. MY APOLOGIES
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Dating MGG aesthetic đ
#spencer reid#mgg#criminal minds#mgg pics#dr reid#matthew gray gubler aesthetic#matthew gray gubler directing#matthewgraygubler#matthew gray gubler#Matthew gray Gubler mood board
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The Ones Who Live | 1x03 - Bye
#THAT FACE IS THE ACTUAL IRON THRONE#Rick Grimes#*#rg#The Ones Who Live#EXCUSE ME BUT THE NOSEâą#rogue neck fuzzies đ#HIS N E C K#bram stoker is rattling my 90s ouija board i've got in the closet#he wants to talk#biting....things#after a particularly hard thrus-#who is talking?#shut up omg#you need jesus#lucky for you he's supposed to be back soon i think or something#it's not even Sinday#that T E N D O N#bless every line on your face#they're all beautiful and sacred#the waves#the flippy little curls at the ends#the grays!!#his ability to grow a gorgeous beard probably makes other men cry#his little scars#wearing entirely too many layer lbr
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the age-old discussion as to whether or not ben barnes was poor casting for dorian gray is incredibly funny to me like yes we know that dorian is supposed to look like an innocent blond cherub instead of a dark luciferian daddy long leg prince of sin because literature but it all comes down nitpicking in the end because iâm just sure that oscar wilde the man himself would have been salivating over ben every waking minute of his damn life if he were here
#oscar wilde told me this himself when i was using an ouija board#he said to me that the sun doesnât rise in the east#it rises in ben barnesâ eyes#and that he liked the movie#itâs true#oscar wilde#the picture of dorian gray#dorian gray#dorian gray 2009#ben barnes#benjamin thomas barnes#dark academia#dark academia books#poc dark academia#english literature#english lit#classic literature#classic lit#english lit memes#classic lit memes#books and literature#book blog#books
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