#kai bird

[in-love-with-movies]

Oppenheimer (2023)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Alter and Bird both dispute that Carter was weak or lost in the weeds, as he has so often been portrayed. Carter brought more positive change to the Middle East than any president in the decades before or since; signed more legislation than any post–World War II president except LBJ; and warned of the dangers of climate change before the threat even had a name. Carter’s human rights policy played a huge and largely uncredited role in the collapse of the Soviet Union—more so, perhaps, than any policies enacted by his successor Ronald Reagan.

[...]

I came to think of Carter as having lived in three centuries. He was born in 1924, but it might as well [have been] the 19th century because they had no running water or electricity, or mechanized farm equipment. He was president in the 20th century. Conflict resolution, democracy promotion, global health—these are the cutting-edge issues of the 21st century. Carter has been intimately involved in them for the first 20 years of the 21st century. So the scope of this life, I think, is under-appreciated.

I think [you] explain a little bit more to the reader than I do how useful Carter’s [published] diaries are, that he kept religiously when he was president. They’re really good.

[deadpresidents]

Just saw Oppenheimer and I was a bit disappointed with how they portrayed Truman. He came across pretty poorly IMO. It was only one scene but I wondered what you thought.

I understand your disappointment and it certainly wasn't a very in-depth portrayal of Truman, but according to the book that the movie was largely based on -- American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) -- the meeting that Oppenheimer had with President Truman went down pretty much as depicted in the film.

As Bird and Sherwin write in American Prometheus:

(O)n October 25, 1945, Oppenheimer was ushered into the Oval Office. President Truman was naturally curious to meet the celebrated physicist, whom he knew by reputation to be an eloquent and charismatic figure. After being introduced by Secretary [of War Robert P.] Patterson, the only other individual in the room, the three men sat down. By one account, Truman opened the conversation by asking for Oppenheimer's help in getting Congress to pass the May-Johnson bill, giving the Army permanent control over atomic energy. "The first thing is to define the national problem," Truman said, "then the international." Oppenheimer let an uncomfortably long silence pass and then said, haltingly, "Perhaps it would be best first to define the international problem." He meant, of course, that the first imperative was to stop the spread of these weapons by placing international controls over all atomic technology. At one point in their conversation, Truman suddenly asked him to guess when the Russians would develop their own atomic bomb. When Oppie replied that he did not know, Truman confidently said he knew the answer: "Never." For Oppenheimer, such foolishness was proof of Truman's limitations. The "incomprehension it showed just knocked the heart out of him," recalled Willie Higinbotham. As for Truman, a man who compensated for his insecurities with calculated displays of decisiveness, Oppenheimer seemed maddeningly tentative, obscure -- and cheerless. Finally, sensing that the President was not comprehending the deadly urgency of his message, Oppenheimer nervously wrung his hands and uttered another of those regrettable remarks that he characteristically made under pressure. "Mr. President," he said quietly, "I feel I have blood on my hands." The comment angered Truman. He later informed David Lilienthal, "I told him the blood was on my hands -- to let me worry about that." But over the years, Truman embellished the story. By one account, he replied, "Never mind, it'll all come out in the wash." In yet another version, he pulled his handkerchief from his breast pocket and offered it to Oppenheimer, saying, "Well, here, would you like to wipe your hands?" An awkward silence followed this exchange, and then Truman stood up to signal that the meeting was over. The two men shook hands, and Truman reportedly said, "Don't worry, we're going to work something out, and you're going to help us." Afterwards, the President was heard to mutter, "Blood on his hands, dammit, he hasn't half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don't go around bellyaching about it." He later told [Secretary of State] Dean Acheson, "I don't want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again." Even in May 1946, the encounter still vivid in his mind, he wrote Acheson and described Oppenheimer as a "cry-baby scientist" who had come to "my office some five or six months ago and spent most of his time wringing his hands and telling me they had blood on them because of the discovery of atomic energy."

[vintagewarhol]

[denimbex1986]

'It can be said that Christopher Nolan has always known how to end a movie. From Leonard Shelby concluding his journey where it began and asking “now where was I?” in Memento to the topper that wouldn’t stop spinning in Inception, this is a filmmaker who looks for the most potent image that will burrow its way into audiences’ heads.

Yet the final scene of his most ambitious film to date is something more impressive, if altogether disquieting. Oppenheimer definitely implants a grim idea in the viewer’s mind, but it does so by giving the uncanny impression that we are seeing it through J. Robert Oppenheimer’s eyes first. Standing by the duck pond that Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) has been consigned to by posterity, and where Oppie will be joining him in exile sooner than he realizes, the man credited with fathering the atomic bomb asks if Albert recalls Edward Teller’s theory about a nuclear explosion triggering the end of the world.

“I remember it well, what of it?” Einstein asks. “I believe we did,” Oppenheimer says while an IMAX camera plummets so deeply into Cillian Murphy’s blue eyes that the viewer feels like we are being left to drown in his despair—despair at the prospect of nuclear war, despair at self-annihilation, and the lingering, eternal despair that comes with the realization that for the rest of time on this planet, these weapons will be at humanity’s disposal. It’s a chilling signoff for a film that plumbs the ambiguities of Oppenheimer’s life without offering easy answers. While Nolan made a picture accessible to almost any viewer, he refused to provide any degree of comfort, reassurance, or easily memeable sentiment and message.

Which is one of the many reasons I’ve long been skeptical of the common criticism about Oppenheimer being too long or that “the trial” in the last hour dragged on and on. More than once, I’ve been told the movie could have ended after Trinity, the first successful detonation of a nuclear weapon on July 16, 1945 which is shot and edited with all the tension of a thriller in Nolan and Jennifer Lame’s hands. It should be noted that the Trinity test, and the exuberant satisfaction Oppenheimer briefly feels toward his accomplishment as fellow scientists hoist him on their shoulders before the American flag, occurs at exactly the two-hour mark in the film.

The implication, therefore, seems to be that Oppenheimer should have ended on a note of triumph—a disastrous choice, to put it mildly, for the story of engineering a doomsday weapon—or that the movie could have glossed over Oppenheimer’s later years. Why should we care if Oppenheimer’s security clearance with the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was revoked, or that the architect of his downfall, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), suffered his own public humiliation?

The answer, of course, is that it is these turns of events which elevate a riveting piece of biographic storytelling into a cinematic prophecy of doom that on its own will likely be with us for many years to come.

Living with the Bomb

The most crucial thing to understand about why Oppenheimer went on for a full third hour after World War II concluded in the shadow of a mushroom cloud is that there is no credible way to discuss this man without delving into the fact that the government which entrusted him to build the device also pillared and besmirched his name to the point of infamy.

During a panel with Meet the Press’ Chuck Todd on the 78th anniversary of the Trinity test, Nobel Prize Laureate and theoretical physicist Kip Thorne said he knew scientists early in his career who demurred from pursuing a public life in government service or policy-making because of how Oppenheimer was treated.

Said Thorne, “I was as much influenced by my father who dealt with McCarthyism as the chair of a faculty in Utah at the time. We had a governor who was dictating to the board of trustees to fire faculty with left wing tendencies. So I went through this in my own family.”

The implication that Oppenheimer was a traitor, or at least untrustworthy with American secrets due to his political leanings, sent a chill through academia and government institutions that lasted for generations. With a simple letter speciously raising doubts about Oppenheimer’s loyalty to his country, William L. Borden (who was working as a proxy for Strauss) was able to discredit and muzzle the most respected scientific mind of the 20th century in American life; the man who ended World War II and brought our boys home. If the far-right could do that to him because he expressed vocal opinions about the hydrogen bomb, no one was safe.

So any biopic about Oppenheimer legitimately needed to cover a life that eerily matched the arc of Greek tragedy to a tee. After all, historians Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin named their definitive biography on the man American Prometheus, and what is a Promethean tale if you skip the part where the gods condemn him to be chained to a rock so his guts will be pecked out each morning?

Oppenheimer dramatizes these elements, and does so with spectacular detail and specificity. Even biographer Bird remarked with astonishment at the same Trinity anniversary panel that Nolan did something he and Sherwin had not: he went through the transcript of Lewis Strauss’ failed confirmation hearing and discovered a surprise witness named Dr. David Hill (Rami Malek in the movie), who was called on to essentially smear an unprepared Strauss with the same kind of one-sided testimony Strauss used to decimate Oppenheimer in his security clearance hearing five years earlier. The dramatic irony that this was done as revenge by the scientific community against the political class’ most envious party was not lost on Nolan.

In fact, it creates one-half of the climactic crescendo wherein Strauss raves after his Cabinet post begins slipping away that “I gave [Oppenheimer] exactly what he wanted: to be remembered for Trinity! Not Hiroshima! Not Nagasaki! He should be thanking me!” Of course Strauss’ fury also articulates why the film is so much richer and, ultimately, ambiguous. It explores part and parcel the facts of Oppenheimer’s life, and in doing so invites you to descend down into the pits of Hades.

A Trial Without a Jury or a Verdict

The most powerful sequence in Oppenheimer arguably occurs at the top of the third hour. After an exhilarating taste of success and triumph, Oppenheimer is left out of the final, gruesome moments of World War II. Two nuclear bombs fell on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the span of three days in August 1945. Two hundred twenty thousand lives were snuffed out in biblical fire or the lingering, years-long horror of radiation poisoning. And J. Robert learns about it just like every other American—by listening to the radio.

Then comes Nolan’s cinematic flourish. He lets you live in Oppie’s nightmare just as it is beginning to coalesce. While giving a patriotic speech crowing about the success of the nuclear weapons’ use on Japanese cities, Oppenheimer’s unconvincing stabs at jingoism fade away as he can only hear the sound of a woman screaming; then comes a bright light as the face of a young girl melts away. It is a new world for Oppenheimer, America, and the whole the human species. But only after he has let the genie out of the bottle does the film’s interpretation of Oppenheimer begin to seriously grapple with the long term ramifications of that release.

There is an argument to be made that Oppenheimer should have shown the nuclear holocaust inflicted on the Japanese people. I respect this opinion, although Nolan’s choice to trap you in Oppenheimer’s large, yet still limited, vantage point is the dramatically right one. It took this scientist years to come to terms with the horror of what he wrought on Japan, and the movie lets it slowly seep in.

There is also the uncomfortable fact that this story is bigger than just World War II. In the film, Oppenheimer considers the irony that his former tutor opined in the press that the nuclear bomb not so much ended World War II as it began what we now call the Cold War with the Soviet Union (which really happened). But the point of the Oppenheimer film is that what those scientists at Los Alamos did was bigger than just World War II or the Cold War—or even the 20th century itself.

Oppenheimer built, sharpened, and fastened a global Sword of Damocles above our collective heads, and it hangs there still. It will, in fact, hang there forever, unless one nation finally pushes the button and invites the inevitable response.

The last hour is about Oppenheimer, as a character and a film, coming to terms with that legacy. This is not a typical biopic about a great man, but a portrait of a soul damned by unspoken regrets and second-guesses that he never articulated to anyone. The film even posits Oppenheimer went through the humiliation of an unwinnable security clearance hearing as some form of penance for fathering the bomb.

“Did you think if you let them tar and feather you that the world will forgive you?” his wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) asks. “It won’t.”

“We’ll see” is Oppenheimer’s cryptic response. While we suspect Oppenheimer’s fight for political survival was not quite so history book-minded, the reality is he truly did tell the President of the United States “I have blood on my hands,” and spent the rest of his brief public life attempting to steer the United States away from the infinitely more deadly hydrogen bomb and the arms race it inevitably courted. He was then banished to the duck pond next to Einstein for his troubles.

Dramatically seeing that destruction is as cathartic as it is disturbing, with Jason Clarke’s government attorney Roger Robb embodying Zeus’ hungry eagle which is always eager to feast on Prometheus’ liver. It should be noted, this context also is what allows Kitty Oppenheimer, a brilliant woman whose mind is left to curdle by the oppressive expectations of her era, to finally speak candidly in one of the best scenes in the movie.

In the end though, the finale asks the audience to interrogate Oppenheimer the man. Can you forgive him? Should you even bother entertaining the idea? The real man never publicly admitted remorse over what happened in Japan, and whether he felt profound guilt or not, he still ushered in a nuclear age without end. There is no escape from the future Oppenheimer has wrought—not even for J. Robert Oppenheimer, who is professionally and spiritually destroyed by the legacy he pursued with wide open arms.

The last hour of Oppenheimer is not about the father of the atomic bomb; it’s about the father of our tomorrow and each and every one that will come after. Until one day, maybe it won’t.'

[ohmysatan42]

I'm almost certain if Robert oppenhimer was born today he'd be a melodramatic fainting emo girl. This is all I've learnt in the first 100 odd pages of American prometheus.

[cinesludge]

Movie #28 of 2024: Oppenheimer

[kammartinez]

I’ve always been curious about what it feels like for an author to see their work translated into another medium. The question seems particularly interesting with a film like Oppenheimer, the biopic directed by Christopher Nolan that opened in theaters this week. It tells the life story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man known as the “father of the atomic bomb,” and is based on a mammoth, Pulitzer Prize–winning 2005 biography that took 25 years to research and write. American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, is more than 700 pages long; at first glance, it’s difficult to imagine how a book this granular about a subject this complex became a movie. Sadly, Sherwin passed away two years ago, but Bird was able to have the uncanny experience of “meeting” Oppenheimer while visiting the set of Nolan’s film. I talked with him about this encounter and about his book’s path to Hollywood.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

Bird and I spoke over the phone a day before the film’s release. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Gal Beckerman: How are you feeling?

Kai Bird: Well, my head is spinning a little bit. It’s very weird. This book came out 18 years ago. Where was everyone then?

Beckerman: Well, you did win the Pulitzer Prize. So you can’t say that it was ignored.

Bird: That’s true. I can’t complain. But, you know, it got on the paperback-best-seller list last week. It never made it on the best-seller list back then.

Beckerman: It took a long time for it to be picked up and adapted.

Bird: Well, the book was optioned. But, you know, years went by, and nothing happened. So we were very lucky when I suddenly got a phone call in September of 2021, and I was told that Christopher Nolan wants to speak to me. I didn’t realize it then, but looking back at all his other work, he’s really the perfect director for this book. He’s always been interested in time and space and memory, science and science fiction. So it makes perfect sense that he could be attracted to a book about a guy who was a quantum physicist.

Beckerman: So the shift to film felt pretty seamless to you?

Bird: The way Marty [Sherwin] and I both thought about the book—and this would be true of any potential film as well—was that it might be an interesting story to follow the making of the atomic bomb, but that if that’s all there was, we wouldn’t be spending all these years—25 years—on it. What gives the story its arc is both the triumph of [Oppenheimer’s] achievement in Los Alamos but then the tragedy of what happens to him nine years later, when he’s brought down from being America’s most famous scientist to becoming a nonentity, humiliated on the front pages of The New York Times. His loyalty to the country is questioned. That’s what makes the story really interesting. And so, when I first had a meeting with Nolan, he was not sharing the script with me at that point. He said he works confidentially, although he’d done a whole draft already. He works very fast. I told him I thought it was important to focus on the trial. And I think he was relieved to hear me say that, because when he showed me the screenplay a few months later, it really is a lot about the trial.

Beckerman: Were there aspects of the book that you thought would be particularly difficult to communicate in film without the benefit of hundreds and hundreds of pages?

Bird: The quantum physics. This was also a struggle in the book, because it’s so complex. But actually, Nolan really attempts to explain quantum or give you a sense of the music of it. He develops a good analogy in the film. He has Oppenheimer walking through an art gallery in the 1920s, when he’s studying quantum, and he’s looking at Cubist pictures done by Picasso. And he’s staring at them, and he’s seeing the quantum in Picasso’s images. That’s not specifically in the book, but, you know, Oppenheimer’s mother was a painter and an art collector. She bought early van Goghs and several Picassos, so it’s entirely appropriate.

Beckerman: Did you learn anything about filmmaking through this process?

Bird: I saw the film for the fourth time last night. And each time I see it, I see layers that I didn’t see on the first occasion. I hear some of the dialogue that I missed on previous occasions, because it is very fast-paced. Nolan is really quite interesting as a filmmaker, I think, precisely because he’s not trying to bring you along. He’s not trying to make sure you understand everything. He’s leaving little clues throughout the visual experience that he doesn’t explain. So, for example, if you know who the physicist Richard Feynman is, he is portrayed in the film, but he’s never identified. But on several occasions, you see this young man banging furiously on a bongo, and that’s Feynman.

Beckerman: And if you know, you know!

Bird: Exactly. He wants people to leave the theater with questions: Oh, who was that? And questions about, you know, McCarthyism, living with the bomb, and why did that happen to Oppenheimer? Was it just or unjust? He’s not giving you the answers. And he does that with the whole very weighty issue of the decision to actually use the bomb, which is still controversial history.

Beckerman: I know that you went to visit the set while they were filming. I’m curious if you could tell me a little bit more about what that experience was like, just the uncanniness of it. And, you know, meeting Cillian Murphy, who played Oppenheimer.

Bird: It was very bizarre. When I met Cillian, he was being introduced to me after shooting a scene, and I shouted out, “Dr. Oppenheimer, Dr. Oppenheimer. It’s such a pleasure to meet you. I’ve been waiting all these years.” And then we had a five-minute conversation. And I told him I thought it was interesting how well he had captured Oppie’s voice. Oppenheimer’s voice was always very soft-spoken. It’s the kind of voice that makes you want to lean forward to make sure you’ve caught every word. And each word is pronounced very meticulously. And he speaks in whole paragraphs. Cillian’s response was Oh, well, I’m glad you think so—but, you know, we try not to imitate the voice; we try to simply capture the spirit of it.

Beckerman: Well, that seems a pretty apt description of adaptation when it works well, as it sounds like it did in this case.

Bird: I just think I’m a lucky, lucky author.

[khelinski]

And perhaps it was also reassuring, particularly for an intellectual, that Robert could tell himself that it was a book - and not a psychiatrist - which had helped to wrench him from the black hole of his depression

Kai Bird/Martin J. Sherwin

[thatwritererinoriordan]

[watchingalotofmovies]

To End All War: Oppenheimer & the Atomic Bomb

To End All War: Oppenheimer & the Atomic Bomb    [trailer]

Documentary about J. Robert Oppenheimer. Exploring how one man's brilliance, hubris and relentless drive changed the nature of war forever.

An excellent companion piece to Christopher Nolan's film. It obviously covers very similar ground as the movie. But it's nice to see original footage of Oppenheimer and hearing from experts about the historical context.

Oppenheimer is a fascination person. At the end, all the events that had happened clearly seem to haunt him.

Conveniently, the doc is part of the Oppenheimer BluRay.

[darshanan-blog]

Oppenheimer - Movie Review

Epic-maker movie “Oppenheimer”, directed by Christopher Nolan tells the story leading up to atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki towards the end of World War II that changed the course of history forever.  The film is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Deeply heartrending…

[deadpresidents]

Watched “Oppenheimer” last night, and I keep thinking about the scene with Gary Oldman as Truman. While I absolutely believe that Truman would have claimed all the credit & blame of dropping the bombs for himself, and also that Truman would have called Oppenheimer a cry baby and an s.o.b., I am struggling to think of Truman as being so naive that he thought that Russia would “never” develop their own bomb. I checked the reference — Ray Monk’s “Robert Oppenheimer” (2013) is the source for the scene, but I can’t get at his sources to see what he’s drawing from. McCullough’s “Truman” corroborates the cry baby comment and the blood-on-my-hands but not the “never” quote.

Do you have anything to hand about Truman’s belief in the Russian’s ability to build the bomb? How could anyone think that the Russians would “never” create a bomb?

In American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO), which I believe was one of Christopher Nolan's major inspirations for the film, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin go into detail about that meeting between Truman and Oppenheimer and the scene in the film takes almost word-for-word what is written in the book. Truman is actually quoted in the book as saying "Never" after asking Oppenheimer when he thought the Russians would develop their own atomic bomb and not getting a response.

The sources that Bird and Sherwin list for that meeting and the "Never" comment are Nuel Pharr Davis in the 1968 book Lawrence and Oppenheimer, and Murray Kempton, who wrote about the meeting and the comment in the December 1983 issue of Esquire Magazine and his book Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events. I haven't read either of those books, but I did read Kempton's Esquire article and he also directly quotes Truman as saying "Never".

I agree that it seems really naive of President Truman to not think the Soviets would ever develop their own nuclear weapons. The only possible explanation that I can imagine for that mindset was that the meeting between Truman and Oppenheimer that is portrayed in the film took place in real-life on October 25, 1945. (In Kempton's Esquire article, he says it took place in 1946, but he was mistaken because Bird and Sherwin researched Truman's Presidential appointment calendar and were able to pinpoint the correct date.) The U.S. dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and August 9, 1945, respectively. Japan surrendered on August 15 and the war officially ended when Japan signed the instrument of surrender on the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945. So, the meeting between Truman and Oppenheimer took place less than two months after the war finally ended. I can only imagine that Truman had still not fully shifted towards what the next conflict might be and was focused on trying to stabilize what was left of the world and mobilize the government in a different direction than it had been after 15 years of Depression, economic recovery, defense preparations, and fighting the war.

Plus, it's worth remembering that Truman didn't know anything about the existence of the American nuclear program until after President Roosevelt's sudden death thrust him into the White House and the military realized, "Oh shit, we should probably tell the new President that we're very close to building the most powerful weapon in the history of history!"

I don't think it was necessarily naivety on President Truman's part. I think, as Kempton suggests in the Esquire article, that is was just a fundamental lack of understanding by Truman that the Soviet Union didn't need Oppenheimer to build the bomb, especially since the war was now over and they wouldn't be under the time constraints or immediate pressures that made the work of the Manhattan Project so much more difficult. The knowledge was out there and the very fact that it had been proven by the Americans made it clear to the Russians and everyone else that it could be done. Harry S. Truman was a provincial politician from the outskirts of Kansas City who had a healthy dose of American Exceptionalism in him even before becoming a national figure, so the realities of nuclear physics were probably not easy for him to decipher.

[bob-the-movie-man-film-reviews]

Oppenheimer (15): Fission + Fusion = Cinematic Brilliance.

#onemannsmovies review of "Oppenheimer" (2023). #OppenheimerFilm. Nolan's stunning biopic that demands to be seen on the big screen. 5/5.

A One Mann’s Movies review of “Oppenheimer” (2023). The “Barbenheimer” tag for this week’s releases is slightly bonkers since you could hardly imagine two more different films than “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer”! Both have been packing cinema screens this weekend (hooray!). “Barbie” was surprisingly good. But, having had disappointments from Nolan (“Dunkirk“, I’m specifically looking at you here!)…

[denimbex1986]

'The key word in Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” is “compartmentalization.” It’s a security strategy, introduced and repeatedly enforced by Col. Leslie R. Groves (Matt Damon) in his capacity as director of the Manhattan Project, which is racing to build a weapon mighty enough to bring World War II to an end. In Groves’ mind, keeping his various teams walled off from one another will help ensure the strictest secrecy. But J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the brilliant theoretical physicist he’s hired to run the project laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M., knows that compartmentalization has its limits. The success of their mission will hinge not on isolation but on an extraordinary collaborative synthesis — of physics and chemistry, theory and practice, science and the military, the professional and the personal.

In the weeks since “Oppenheimer” opened to much critical acclaim and commercial success, Groves’ key word has taken on an unsettling new meaning. Compartmentalization, after all, is a pretty good synonym for rationalization, the act of setting aside, or even tucking away, whatever we find morally troubling. And for its toughest critics, many of them interviewed for a recent Times piece by Emily Zemler, “Oppenheimer” compartmentalizes to an outrageous degree: In not depicting the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they argue, the movie submits to a historical blindness that it risks passing on to its audience. Nolan, known for crafting fastidiously well-organized narratives in which nothing appears by accident, has been taken to task for what he chooses not to show.

Most of those decisions, of course, flow directly from his source material, “American Prometheus,” Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s authoritative 2005 Oppenheimer biography. With the exception of one key narrative thread, everything onscreen is framed, per biopic convention, through its subject’s eyes. And so you see Oppenheimer as an excitable young physics student, and you behold his eerie, captivating visions of the subatomic world. You see him become one of America’s leading physicists, take a major role in the secret race to the A-bomb and, together with his recruits, devise and build the world’s first nuclear weapons. You see his shock and awe when the Trinity test proves successful, lighting up the desert sky and landscape with a blinding flash of white and a 40,000-foot pillar of fire and smoke.

What you don’t see — because Oppenheimer doesn’t see them either — are the bomb’s first victims: the thousands of New Mexicans, most of them Native American and Hispanic, who dwell within a 50-mile radius of the Trinity test site and whose exposure to radiation will have deadly health consequences for generations. You don’t see the bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; you don’t see the lethal conflagrations and ash-covered rubble, and you don’t see the bodies of Japanese victims burned beyond recognition, or hear the screams and wails of survivors. (Estimates place the eventual death toll at close to 200,000.)

In refusing to visualize these horrors, is Nolan showing admirable dramatic restraint or committing unforgivable sins of omission? Is he merely sticking to his subject’s perspective or conveniently dodging the kind of imagery that would trouble Oppenheimer’s conscience?

As it happens, the scientist does in fact see that imagery, and his conscience is duly troubled. In one key scene, the camera studies Oppenheimer and his colleagues as they watch disturbing footage of the bombings’ aftermath. An offscreen speaker describes how thousands of Japanese civilians were incinerated in an instant, while thousands more died excruciating deaths from radiation poisoning. You see Oppenheimer recoil, even if what he recoils from is left pointedly out of frame.

These are not the only images of WWII that the movie withholds. It’s a measure of the formal and structural rigor of “Oppenheimer” that we see nothing of the Pacific theater conflict, and nothing of the European theater conflict, either — not even when Oppenheimer fears that the Nazis might be building a nuclear weapon of their own. Nolan, who always trusts us to keep up with his elaborately constructed puzzle-box narratives, also trusts us to know a thing or two about history. And crucially, he wants to open up a different perspective on the war, to show how some of its most crucial tactics and maneuvers played out not on battlefields but in classrooms and laboratories — and, finally, in the theater of Oppenheimer’s mind.

We are sometimes told, in matters of art and storytelling, that depiction is not endorsement; we are not reminded nearly as often that omission is not erasure.

It’s a brilliant mind, to say the least. It’s also ill prepared for the terrifying, world-altering reality that it ushers into being. Oppenheimer may see footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but images are a poor substitute for reality; he will never walk among the ruins, witness the despair of the survivors or behold the devastation up close. Nolan knows that we can’t either. What’s more, he clearly believes that we shouldn’t be able to.

Seen in this light, the director’s refusal to thrust his camera onto Japanese soil, far from being an act of historical vagueness or obliviousness, instead represents a carefully thought-out, rigorously executed solution to the problem of how to represent history. And his solution speaks not to his insensitivity but his integrity, his refusal to exploit or trivialize Japanese suffering by re-enacting it for the camera. Nolan lays the groundwork in one of his most revealing scenes, shortly before the decision is made to target Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Oppenheimer looks on, U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson (James Remar) removes Kyoto from the list of potential targets, citing the city’s cultural and historical significance and fondly recalling that he and his wife honeymooned there years earlier.

Before the bombings have even taken place, Nolan, in this one scene, indicts the arbitrary callousness of a U.S. war machine that cloaks its destructive intentions in cultural high-mindedness and rank sentimentality. It’s an appalling moment, and Stimson unambiguously solicits Oppenheimer’s contempt as well as the viewer’s; watch that scene in a packed house and you’ll hear the audience scoff as one. You might also begin to suspect, if you haven’t already, that Nolan isn’t going to dramatize the bombings in straightforward fashion, if he means to dramatize them at all.

Nolan has never been turned on by spectacles of violence. Even “Dunkirk,” a harrowing if ultimately optimistic World War II bookend of sorts to “Oppenheimer’s” apocalyptic despair, is a combat picture far more driven by ideas than by carnage. Violence certainly plays its part in Nolan’s movies, but seldom is it an end in itself. Reviewing “Oppenheimer” in the New York Times, Manohla Dargis noted, “There are no documentary images of the dead or panoramas of cities in ashes, decisions that read as [Nolan’s] ethical absolutes.” And in a recent Decider essay, the critic Glenn Kenny shrewdly examined “Oppenheimer” alongside Alain Resnais’ elliptical 1959 masterpiece, “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” itself a powerful commentary on the futility of trying to represent the unrepresentable. “Had Nolan chosen to somehow ‘recreate’ the bombing of Hiroshima,” Kenny writes, “we, the viewers, would really see nothing.”

Japanese filmmakers, of course, have been powerfully evoking and re-creating the bombings for decades: Kaneto Shindo’s “Children of Hiroshima” (1952) and especially Shohei Imamura’s devastating “Black Rain” (1989) are just two well-known examples. Over the past few weeks, social media users have circulated clips of Mori Masaki’s 1983 anime “Barefoot Gen,” an adaptation of Keiji Nakazawa’s manga series of the same title. It contains what is surely one of the cinema’s most upsetting, unsparingly graphic depictions of the atomic blast and its casualties. It’s one of several animated films, including Renzo and Sayoko Kinoshita’s 1978 short “Pica-don” and Sunao Katabuchi’s “In This Corner of the World” (2016), that have confronted the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with a boldness and artistry that live-action cinema can be hard-pressed to match.

Much of this evidence has been marshaled in Nolan’s defense: Surely this is Japan’s story to tell, not his. I’m reluctant to embrace that particular stay-in-your-lane logic, which is ultimately deadening to the cause of art and empathy. As Clint Eastwood demonstrated in “Letters From Iwo Jima,” it is not beyond a white Hollywood filmmaker’s ability to enter persuasively and movingly into the mindset of a wartime enemy. Even so, that clearly isn’t the story Nolan is telling. And with such a wealth and variety of Japanese fiction and nonfiction filmmaking on the atomic bombings already, why should “Oppenheimer” bear the responsibility of representing events and experiences that fall outside its subject’s perspective?

Some would rebut that “Oppenheimer,” being a Hollywood blockbuster with serious global reach (whether it will play Japanese theaters remains uncertain), will be many audiences’ only exposure to the events in question and thus might “create a limit on public consciousness and concern,” as the poet, writer and professor Brandon Shimoda told The Times. A corollary of this argument: The crimes committed against the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were so unspeakable, so outsized in their impact, that Oppenheimer’s perspective does and should dwindle into insignificance by comparison. For Nolan to focus so exclusively on an American physicist’s story, some insist, ultimately diminishes history and humanity, even as it reinforces the Hollywood hegemony of the great-man biopic and of white men’s narratives in general.

I get those complaints. I also think they betray an inherent disrespect for the audience’s intelligence and curiosity, as well as a fundamental misunderstanding of how movies operate. It’s telling that few of these criticisms of perspective were leveled at “American Prometheus” when it was published in 2005, that no one begrudged Bird and Sherwin for offering a meticulously researched, morally ambivalent portrait of their subject’s life and consigning the destruction of two Japanese cities to a few pages. That’s because books are books, the argument goes, and movies are movies — and this perceived difference, it must be said, reveals a pernicious double standard.

Because they seldom achieve the narrative penetration and richness of detail of, say, a 700-page biography, movies, especially those about history, often are hailed as achievements of breadth over depth, emotion over intellect. They are assumed to be fundamentally shallow experiences, distillations of real life rather than sharply angled explorations of it, propelled by broad brushstrokes and easy expository shortcuts, and beholden to the audience’s presumably voracious appetite for thrilling, traumatizing spectacle. And because movies offer a visual immediacy and narrative immersion that books don’t, they are expected to be sweeping if not omniscient in their narrative scope, to reach for a comprehensive, even definitive vantage.

Movies that attempt something different, that recognize that less can indeed be more, are thus easily taken to task. “It’s so subjective!” and “It omits a crucial P.O.V.!” are assumed to be substantive criticisms rather than essentially value-neutral statements. We are sometimes told, in matters of art and storytelling, that depiction is not endorsement; we are not reminded nearly as often that omission is not erasure. But because viewers of course cannot be trusted to know any history or muster any empathy on their own — and if anything unites those who criticize “Oppenheimer” on representational grounds, it’s their reflexive assumption of the audience’s stupidity — anything that isn’t explicitly shown onscreen is denigrated as a dodge or an oversight, rather than a carefully considered decision.

A film like “Oppenheimer” offers a welcome challenge to these assumptions. Like nearly all Nolan’s movies, from “Memento” to “Dunkirk,” it’s a crafty exercise in radical subjectivity and narrative misdirection, in which the most significant subjects — lost memories, lost time, lost loves — often are invisible and all the more powerful for it. We can certainly imagine a version of “Oppenheimer” that tossed in a few startling but desultory minutes of Japanese destruction footage. Such a version might have flirted with kitsch, but it might well have satisfied the representational completists in the audience. It also would have reduced Hiroshima and Nagasaki to a piddling afterthought; Nolan treats them instead as a profound absence, an indictment by silence.

That’s true even in one of the movie’s most powerful and contested sequences. Not long after news of Hiroshima’s destruction arrives, Oppenheimer gives a would-be-triumphant speech to a euphoric Los Alamos crowd, only for his words to turn to dust in his mouth. For a moment, Nolan abandons realism altogether — but not, crucially, Oppenheimer’s perspective — to embrace a hallucinatory horror-movie expressionism. A piercing scream erupts in the crowd; a woman’s face crumples and flutters, like a paper mask about to disintegrate. The crowd is there and then suddenly, with much sonic rumbling, image blurring and an obliterating flash of white light, it is not.

For “Oppenheimer’s” detractors, this sequence constitutes its most grievous act of erasure: Even in the movie’s one evocation of nuclear disaster, the true victims have been obscured and whitewashed. The absence of Japanese faces and bodies in these visions is indeed striking. It’s also consistent with Nolan’s strict representational parameters, and it produces a tension, even a contradiction, that the movie wants us to recognize and wrestle with. Is Oppenheimer trying (and failing) to imagine the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians murdered by the weapon he devised? Or is he envisioning some hypothetical doomsday scenario still to come?

I think the answer is a blur of both, and also something more: In this moment, one of the movie’s most abstract, Nolan advances a longer view of his protagonist’s history and his future. Oppenheimer’s blindness to Japanese victims and survivors foreshadows his own stubborn inability to confront the consequences of his actions in years to come. He will speak out against nuclear weaponry, but he will never apologize for the atomic bombings of Japan — not even when he visits Tokyo and Osaka in 1960 and is questioned by a reporter about his perspective now. “I do not think coming to Japan changed my sense of anguish about my part in this whole piece of history,” he will respond. “Nor has it fully made me regret my responsibility for the technical success of the enterprise.”

Talk about compartmentalization. That episode, by the way, doesn’t find its way into “Oppenheimer,” which knows better than to offer itself up as the last word on anything. To the end, Nolan trusts us to seek out and think about history for ourselves. If we elect not to, that’s on us.'

[ohmysatan42]

Taking on this absolute behemoth of a book because I love physics and communists and yeah I loved the movie but also this is a really interesting bit of history and I want to know more. (Like the un American committee which went after oppenhimer also went after Lucille ball, like wtf???)