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denimbex1986 · 1 year ago

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'Director Christopher Nolan assembled an all-star cast for his summer blockbuster “Oppenheimer,” a biopic about physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the creation of the Manhattan Project. The film, based in part off the definitive Oppenheimer biography “American Prometheus,” stars Cillian Murphy as the famed scientist...

J. Robert Oppenheimer

One of the 20th century’s great enigmas, J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) was born into a wealthy New York family. His pick as the head of the Manhattan Project was a risky one: He was a theoretical physicist, not a practical one, and he was well known for his eccentricities. But Oppenheimer transformed into a bureaucratic mastermind, deftly leading scientists and the military together at Los Alamos.

After the war, he was swept up in the nationwide panic over communism, and several key figures within the U.S. government accused him of being a Soviet spy. Some of his former colleagues turned on him in a 1954 hearing that would end in the revocation of his security clearance. After a lifelong habit of smoking up to five packs a day, Oppenheimer died of throat cancer in 1967. He is played by Cillian Murphy (“Peaky Blinders,” “Inception”) in “Oppenheimer.”

Kitty Oppenheimer

Kitty Puening (1910-1972) was born in Germany and immigrated to the United States when she was a toddler. Described by friends and acquaintances as smart, mercurial and vivacious, Oppenheimer was her fourth husband. Her first marriage lasted just a year, and she soon became the common-law partner of Joseph Dallet Jr. a member of the Community Party. Bolstered by his convictions, Dallet left for Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War. He died in combat in October 1937.

When Kitty met Oppenheimer at a party in Pasadena two years later, she was married to her third husband, Stewart Harrison. Kitty became pregnant with Oppenheimer’s child in 1940, and they asked Harrison to grant Kitty a divorce. The Oppenheimers had a son and daughter together. Kitty’s ties to the Communist Party were part of the evidence put forward by Oppenheimer’s detractors.

Kitty Oppenheimer is played by Emily Blunt (“A Quiet Place,” “Jungle Cruise”).

Jean Tatlock

Described by some as the love of Oppenheimer’s life, Jean Tatlock (1914-1944) was a pioneering doctor in the Bay Area. She attended Stanford Medical School and became a clinical psychiatrist in her 20s. Her brilliance attracted Oppenheimer, who met her at a house party in Berkeley. The pair were on and off for years until Tatlock called their engagement off in 1939.

Tatlock was found dead in her San Francisco apartment in 1944. She was just 29...Tatlock is played by Florence Pugh (“Little Women,” “Midsommar”).

Ernest Lawrence

Long before Oppenheimer became a household name, Ernest Lawrence (1901-1958) was one of America’s most famous scientists. He joined the physics faculty at UC Berkeley in 1928 and, the next year, was joined there by Oppenheimer. Both in their 20s, they became close friends — Lawrence later named his son Robert in Oppie’s honor. While at Cal, Lawrence invented the cyclotron, which earned him a 1939 Nobel Prize.

However, their friendship soured, as the men butted heads about the future of nuclear weapons. After the war, Lawrence pushed for more government funding into nuclear research, and founded the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The death knell for their friendship was when Lawrence reportedly discovered Oppenheimer was having an affair with Ruth Tolman, the wife of their friend and Caltech scientist Richard Tolman.

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the chemical element lawrencium are both named for Lawrence. He is played in the movie by Josh Hartnett (“Penny Dreadful,” “Pearl Harbor”).

Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves

The military head of the Manhattan Project, Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves (1896-1970) was tasked with finding a scientist to lead the team in Los Alamos. Groves, who was the son of an Army chaplain, was the consummate military bureaucrat. His skill at building teams landed him in charge of both the construction of the Pentagon and the Manhattan Project during World War II.

On the day the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Groves called Oppenheimer from Washington to congratulate him. “I think one of the wisest things I ever did was when I selected the director of Los Alamos,” Groves said. When Oppenheimer said he wasn’t as sure, Groves replied, “Well, you know I’ve never concurred with those doubts.”

Groves is played by Matt Damon (“The Martian,” “The Last Duel”).

Lewis Strauss

One of the villains of the Oppenheimer story is Lewis Strauss (1896-1974), the chair of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Oppenheimer and Strauss conflicted in just about every way. While Strauss wanted the U.S. to maintain secrecy about their nuclear arsenal and develop ever more powerful hydrogen bombs, Oppenheimer objected to both. Oppenheimer, who was highly regarded and never afraid to embarrass someone he considered foolish, irritated Strauss constantly.

Strauss got his revenge working with FBI director and professional paranoiac J. Edgar Hoover to look for Soviet sympathies in Oppenheimer’s life, which set into motion the security hearing that would revoke Oppenheimer’s top-secret clearance. Strauss is played by Robert Downey Jr. (“Iron Man,” “Dolittle”).

Richard Feynman

Few men involved with the Manhattan Project had lives as colorful as Richard Feynman (1918-1988). Feynman was not yet 25 when he was recruited to work in Los Alamos — he didn’t even have a graduate degree. But the Queens man with a thick New York accent and a devilish grin was an undeniable genius. He also loved pranks. He was known for sneaking into the facility — something that could have easily gotten him shot — and used to crack safe combinations where his colleagues stored top-secret material.

In 1965, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics, and he became a household name thanks to his bestselling memoir “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” He is played by Jack Quaid (“The Boys,” “Logan Lucky”).

Robert Serber

Robert Serber (1909-1997) was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan in 1934 when he attended a guest lecture by Oppenheimer. The professor’s brilliance was so unforgettable, Serber packed his bags and transferred immediately to UC Berkeley to study under him. The two became fast, lifelong friends. When Serber was ready for an associate professorship, Oppenheimer advocated for him. Department chair Raymond Birge, however, wrote that “one Jew in the department is enough.” (Oppenheimer was Jewish, as was Serber.)

Serber accompanied Oppenheimer to Los Alamos and was later one of the first Americans to inspect the bomb sites at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He is played by Michael Angarano (“I’m Dying Up Here,” “The Knick”).

Werner Heisenberg

Oppenheimer’s counterpart in Nazi Germany was Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976). As the Manhattan Project was getting off the ground, American scientists feared they were far behind the Nazis’ nuclear program. Luckily for them, Heisenberg was nowhere near the creation of an atomic bomb. Despite being a Nobel Prize winner, Heisenberg never got close to unlocking nuclear fission; when he learned of Hiroshima while in an English prison camp, he expressed astonishment that the Americans could create such a weapon at all.

Heisenberg is played by Matthias Schweighofer (“Hinterland,” “Army of the Dead”).

Frank Oppenheimer

Frank Oppenheimer, the younger brother of Robert, also had his life torn apart by Cold War paranoia. A brilliant scientist in his own right, Frank Oppenheimer (1912-1985) joined the American Communist Party in the 1930s. Although he left it several years later, after the war he was ordered in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. As a result of the Red Scare fervor, he was forced to resign his teaching job at the University of Minnesota. He moved to a cattle ranch in Colorado. There, he was able to get a job teaching again — at a high school.

In the 1960s, Oppenheimer decided he wanted to open a kid-friendly science museum. He found its home in San Francisco, and there he opened the Exploratorium in 1969. He was a constant presence at the museum until his death in Sausalito in 1985. He is played by Dylan Arnold (“You,” “Halloween”).'

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denimbex1986 · 1 year ago

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“Genius is no guarantee of wisdom,” says government official Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. It could be the blockbuster’s banner statement. Since the release of Nolan’s thrilling, bombastic film, the culture has been caught in the firestorm about how to explain the personality of the eloquent, esoteric J. Robert Oppenheimer and his creation of the first and only people-destroying atomic weapon to be used against civilians. Where Hollywood traffics in Oppenheimer’s ambiguity as a historical character, two small but potent nonfiction forebears ask a more pointed question: what is the responsibility of scientists to their societies?

The Day After Trinity (1981) and The Strangest Dream (2008) evacuate the mythical tropes of the tortured genius biopic that Hollywood loves to rehearse in films like The Imitation Game, Hawking, and A Beautiful Mind. Now enjoying a renaissance, the films are neither unforgiving nor hardline, but offer sharper moral clarity to the Oppenheimer dilemma, presenting a more complex (and condemning) portrait of the father of the atomic bomb: a patriot, philosopher-king, skilled public administrator, scientific collaborator with military and government, emotional naif, egotist, and polyglot.

Nolan’s story arcs towards Oppenheimer losing his naivete upon realizing that he has given humanity the power to destroy itself. Designed to wrap around each filmgoer’s own worldview and politics, the film is as politically open-ended as you might expect from a major blockbuster. In his press tour, Nolan articulated a more explicitly conservative stance that chimes both with the Great Man theory of history (another biopic favorite) and the Cold War military doctrine that justified the development and use of atomic arsenals against civilians.

“Is there a parallel universe in which it wasn’t him, but it was somebody else and that would’ve happened?” Nolan said in the New York Times. “Quite possibly. That’s the argument for diminishing his importance in history. But that’s an assumption that history is made simply by movements of society and not by individuals. It’s a very philosophical debate…. he’s still the most important man because the bomb would’ve stopped war forever. We haven’t had a world war since 1945 based on the threat of mutual assured destruction.”

That’s also the idea behind the official policy of the nuclear superpowers: deterrence. Horror, in other words, was necessary to prevent even greater horror. The very same doublethink led to Harry Truman’s honorary degree, conferred for ending the war.

How reluctant was Oppie? In Jon Else’s The Day After Trinity, a documentary originally made for public television in 1980, Oppenheimer’s collaborators deliver ambivalent, guilty testimony to a static, non-judgmental camera. Screening on the Criterion Channel, Else’s doc points to the great pleasure its subject took in being appointed the leader of the grandiose bomb project, with the cosmic job title of “Coordinator of Rapid Rupture.” The lens pans patiently across grainy, grayscale photographs that have the natural air of science fiction; the film feels more of a piece with Chris Marker’s La Jetee (1962) than a typical historical documentary. After all, Oppenheimer was not just the enabler of the weapons that could annihilate us all, but of the high-stakes hallmarks of modern spectacle itself. The awe-inspiring images of mushroom clouds over Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki are now instantly recognizable in the core visual grammar of contemporary entertainment and media. It’s hard to imagine an idea better suited to Nolan’s exalted, maximalist esthetic and his stories of obsessive male protagonists pressurized within towering patriarchal systems of power.

Oppenheimer positions the atomic bomb as the creation of a brilliant, creative personality. But The Day After Trinity revels in the administrative scale of the Los Alamos project necessary to make a mechanism to trigger, in a millionth of a second, a violent chain reaction with a flare brighter than a hundred suns. A walled city of six thousand staff, at a cost of $56 million. Seven scientific divisions: theoretical physics, experimental physics, ordinance, explosives, bomb physics, chemistry, and metallurgy. All of America’s industrial might and scientific innovation connected in this secret lab with its billions of dollars of military investment.

“Somehow Oppenheimer put this thing together. He was the conductor of this orchestra. Somehow he created this fantastic esprit. It was just the most marvelous time of their lives,” says Freeman Dyson, a rather eccentric theoretical physicist who became Oppie’s colleague at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. “That was the time when the big change in his life occurred. It must have been during that time that the dream somehow got hold of him, of really producing a nuclear weapon.”

In this vision of the A-bomb narrative, Dyson posits that Oppie’s aims switched from finding out “the deep secrets of nature” to producing “a mechanism that works. It was a different problem, and he completely changed to fit the new role.” We begin to see more clearly a portrait of an outsider with a wild desire to be at the center. All the work the whiz kids were doing over the years was always designed to contribute to the war. (All the films remove Oppie’s more demonstrably radical tendencies, his belief in a world government, for instance, which he mentioned offhandedly in the New York Review of Books in 1966.)

The closest we get to Oppenheimer himself is his pale-eyed, doppelganger brother, Frank, who gives the impression of a visionary living in a purely abstract realm. He stammers a little when he speaks of the moment when he and Oppie heard on the radio of their great bomb in action. “Thank God it wasn’t a dud… thank God it worked… Up to then, I don’t think we’d really, I’d really, thought about all those flattened people.” He still seems stunned. If nothing else, Frank gives weight to the storytelling trope of scientists as hyperintelligent but flakey space cadets at a remove from the humanity of it all. “Treating humans as matter,” as Los Alamos collaborator Hans Bethe puts it appallingly. Another contributing scientist says he vomited and lay down in depression. “I remember being just ill,” he says. “Just sick.”

The doc swirls with clips accumulated from Los Alamos Scientific Laboratories, National Atomic Museum, American Institute of Physics, and Fox and NBC newsreels, while Paul Free’s authoritative narration hovers like an omniscient voice from the depths of the Cold War itself. Then, there is Oppie: a figure of stricken elegance in his rakish pork pie hat. Typical of documentaries constructed in a postmodern style, what it all means is never explicated. Ambiguity presides over clarity.

Most directive is Dyson’s testimony. “He made this alliance with the United States Army and the person of General Groves who gave him undreamed-of resources, huge armies of people, and as much money as he could possibly spend in order to do physics on the grand scale,” Dyson says with his flashlight perceptiveness. “We are still living with it. Once you sell your soul to the devil, there’s no going back on it.” Los Alamos, in this counternarrative, was not just an ivory tower but an irresistible paradise for genius-level scientists simply interested in new discoveries and mega-gadgets.

Dyson is a dubious fellow to emerge as the truthteller, given the inconsistency of his own legacy. His unorthodox theories are worthy of their own Nolan-esque treatment. He advocated growing genetically modified trees on comets, so that they might land on other planets and create human-supporting atmospheres, and eventually became a climate change denier based on his distrust of mathematical models. But his intelligence is irrefutable, and his distance from the Manhattan Project gives him a guiltless perspective and authority absent in Oppie’s other colleagues. Dyson, a greater antagonist than can be found in any mere Marvel movie, diagnoses Oppie as the self-induced victim of a “Faustian bargain.”

“Why did the bomb get dropped?” Dyson asks, his tie a little too big, his combover a little too combed over. “It was almost inevitable. Simply because all the bureaucratic apparatus existed at that time to do it. The Air Force was ready and waiting… The whole machinery was ready.”

Dyson also refutes the refrain of Oppenheimer’s responsibility for the catastrophe. “It was no one’s fault that the bomb was dropped. As usual, the reason it was dropped was that nobody had the courage or the foresight to say no.” Dyson pauses to let this sink in, then looks down and wobbles his head tragically. “Certainly not Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer gave his consent in a certain sense. He was on a committee that advised the Secretary of War, and that committee did not take any kind of a stand against dropping the bomb.” This measured oral history is fatal to the view of Oppie as a gentle humanist.

Dorothy McKibben, who ran the Manhattan Project’s office, chimes in with crystal clarity: “I don’t think they would have developed that [bomb] to show at a garden party. I think they were going to do it.” In archival footage, General Leslie Groves plays the role of plainspoken pragmatist: “It would have come out, sooner or later, at a Congressional hearing, if nowhere else, just when we could’ve dropped the bomb if we didn’t use it. And then knowing American politics, you know as well as I do, if there had been an election fought on the basis of every mother whose son was killed after such-and-such a date, the blood is on the hands of the President.”

Through these testimonies, the convention of the conflicted scientist and the myth of an A-bomb created in self-defense give way to a mantra of winning the war, and winning quickly. Valuing American lives over other lives. Avoiding a bloody invasion of the Japanese mainland. Months before Hiroshima, orders had been given to leave several Japanese cities untouched, to provide virgin targets where the impact of the new bomb could be clearly seen. Afterwards, a scientific team from the US was sent to Japan to study the effects. Footage rolls, in The Day After Trinity, of news clips of hospitalized burn victims.

In films on the Manhattan Project, questions of conscience are commonly seen through the assenting viewpoint—that of the scientists who continued to work on the bomb, even after Hitler’s defeat. One essential perspective is obscured, black-holed in subterfuge, even. Physicist and European refugee Joseph Rotblat made crucial discoveries in the fission process, and went on to specialize in nuclear fallout. He moved to Los Alamos in 1944 but defected from the project on grounds of conscience upon learning that the Nazis could not build such a bomb. He was the only scientist to turn his back.

“If my work is going to be applied, I would like myself to decide how it is applied,” Rotblat says in the 2008 Canadian documentary The Strangest Dream. Streaming on the National Film Board of Canada’s platform, the film traces his renunciation of A-bomb development and his role in the Pugwash Conferences, where scientists and statesmen gathered to discuss the reversal of nuclear proliferation. The film renders a fairly straight treatment of its quiet subject, with the visually rich backing of a vertiginous collage of disparate forms, including spooky Cold-War era footage and clips of the Trinity mushroom cloud. Oppie is not in the film, but the narrative takes place in the fissures he helped wrench open; he lurks like an ever-present ghost behind the character of Rotblat, who stands as his angelic nemesis as he tries to transform physics into a humanitarian project. Like Oppenheimer, Rotblat was also accused of espionage, but he was eventually awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his contributions to the disarmament campaign.

Notably, Rotblat is entirely absent from Oppenheimer, despite being described as a brilliantly offbeat individual—a “mad Polish scientist”—by a former student in The Strangest Dream. It’s a curious historical erasure and a missed chance for a dramatic clash. Then again, perhaps Rotblat is too steady and untragic, incorruptible and unmemeable for his own big moment, let alone the blockbuster treatment. Oppie’s genius wasn’t just in his Faustian bargain but in the way that he spoke and the way he held himself, quoting Hindu philosophy and smoking till the end of time. I suppose film culture is more interested in the flawed, tortured luminary than the staunch, principled dissenter or the morally engaged scientist.

Prosecuting the melancholic drama of the ingenuous mastermind requires substantial historical selectivity. Most cinema narratives hew to the oft-cited rationale for the A-bomb’s development: its function as a deterrent to a Nazi explosive. But in his essay “Leaving the Bomb Project,” Rotblat wrote, “Groves said that, of course, the real purpose in making the bomb was to subdue the Soviets… Until then I had thought that our work was to prevent a Nazi victory, and now I was told that the weapon we were preparing was intended for use against the people who were making extreme sacrifices for that very aim.” With more than a dash of elegiac melancholy, the working thesis of The Strangest Dream is that Rotblat’s moral strength insulated him against Oppie-style tragedy.

Insofar as the The Strangest Dream and The Day After Trinity position the Manhattan Project as an unholy alliance of physics and the openly violent arm of the state, they do so via the absent presence of Oppenheimer, who, flush with government cash, personifies the uneasy collision of science and military. Today’s ventures in AI offer the same science-ethics conundrum, and we don’t seem to be any closer to resolving it than at the moment of Oppenheimer’s mythic quandary. Looking at the images of the Los Alamos exertions, you can almost faintly hear the words of today’s STEM bros: disruption, innovation, brilliance. Wondrous and diabolical, the A-bomb is presented in these documentaries as the freakish outcome of public-bureaucratic entrepreneurialism. (They are weaker on the tangled history of superpower competition and atomic technology.) It all depends, of course, on what humans do with the technology we develop.

Given what we know about capitalist society at present, things aren’t exactly looking up. Just a decade after The Day After Trinity, the Cold War victory lap was being run at the box office. A new, end-of-history generation of studio filmmakers was writing a euphoric, Fukuyama-esque version of reality into pop-culture lore: in blockbusters like Independence Day (1996), The Core (2003), and Armageddon (1998), American pluck saves humanity from wholesale destruction; anxiety surrounding US dominance over the international order is undetectable, and the US military is either prominent or necessary. Before them all, The Day After Trinity suggested that technology’s triumph is the very crux of the problem.

Today, Oppenheimer reifies a political crisis—superpower competition for atomic arsenal—as a conundrum of personality, tech, and naive genius, even as it centers the wild fraternity of science, military, and government vital to create the A-bomb. But the political arrangement of power and resources seems like more of an objective, inevitable fact about the world in The Day After Trinity and The Strangest Dream. If there’s such a thing as sober, mournful spectacle, these films manifest it.

Oppenheimer is long gone, but his legacy—the capacity of a self-destroying humanity, and the late-capitalist spectacle of that mushroom cloud’s bright flash of light—lingers. He did not sign the Einstein-Russell Manifesto against nuclear war. He never apologized for his role in bringing the bomb to life. Atomic technology is now standard. The world’s nuclear powers currently possess an estimated 12,512 active warheads. More than enough to wipe out the planet.'

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