#on whether or not Nolan’s usage of sound/light/hallucinations were indicative of Oppenheimer’s state of mind

[kindlythevoid]

Oppenheimer spoilers below

Christopher Nolan.

You done it again.

I’m sure I could touch on so many things in this movie. I might later, I might not. But leaving the theater I felt so deeply unsettled, and I wanted to touch on that, from my point of view as an amateur writer and someone starting to feel comfortable talking about cinematography (although I have no current plans to do much more than talk about it).

Now I’d like to start by saying that, if you haven’t seen it or it didn’t make that big of an impact on you, this is a long movie. I, myself, am no stranger to long movies and I think it was marvelously done. That being said, my memory tends to leave things to be desired, so while I am writing this rather soon after I watched and digested it, others may have stronger points/counter points/evidence/what-have-you.

With that out of the way, I’d like to talk about one facet of the movie that Christopher Nolan, imo, harnessed in a way that I did not expect. And it wasn’t color, it wasn’t camera perspective, it wasn’t even the timeline.

It was his usage of sound.

From the very beginning, sound has always been a key factor in this movie. In the trailer, the crackling of the radiation detector is ominously present. It is used less frequently in the movie than I had predicted, but when it makes its “appearance” it most certainly put me on the edge of my seat. It brings a sense of gravity to an already serious situation. Engrossed in the movie as I was, I admit the sound mainly made me uneasy because it demonstrated the presence of radiation. Looking back, I can add to that and say it may have also been used as a foreshadowing tool.

Now, I’m sure we’ve all heard sound used a foreshadowing tool. The little girl screaming for help is actually the protagonist with a shadowy past who can’t get the sound of the daughter/random child he couldn’t save out of his head. The words of an interrogation in the beginning of a movie finally get context half-way through when the timelines finally align. It’s been used, it’s been subverted, it’s nothing new.

Except when it is. In my experience, and I am the first to admit that I haven’t seen enough movies of the genre to have a definitive say in the matter, I have never been quite as unsettled or shocked by the background noises than while watching Oppenheimer.

Let me start with the sound that will not leave my mind. Those damned boots. I’d heard it at school pep rallys when everyone would stomp in the bleachers. I had never expected to hear it in a movie about the man who made the atomic bomb. When I first heard it, I thought it was an aesthetic choice, like picking the music to evoke a certain emotion. And while it is that, all of sound is, I never actually expected for it to be from such a central scene.

When the boots were first connected to a scene, a short, split-second, blink-and-you-miss-it shot of shoes-on-bleachers, it was early enough in the movie that I thought it was a flashback of a pep rally at one of his schools, maybe as a boy genius, and I let it go. Later on, when they show the full scene, it’s terrifying.

And then you can’t hear the boots at all.

For hours, all you could hear were those boots in the back of stressful scenes and now that they’re there, now that you can see them, suddenly they’re gone. You know what they’re supposed to sound like, so why would you need to hear them again? And it helps build the suspension, the tension that Oppenheimer is feeling during that scene. And so the next time you hear it in the movie, the next time those boots are stomping on the bleacher in the background when they are in a meeting or an interrogation, it pulls you right back into the stress and horror of the bleacher speech.

And then, of course, you begin to realize that while the timelines had been so well interwoven that it seemed like you couldn’t go two scenes without hearing those boots, it was always a very specific scene, a specific timeline that the boots would make an appearance. Because, of course, in one Oppenheimer hadn’t heard them yet, and in another it’s not Oppenheimer at all.

Another prominent sound that I mentioned earlier is the Geiger Counter (I finally looked up the name!). This is a foreshadowing of a different kind, more physically consequential than mental. This, I believe, foreshadows the heavy losses suffered later in the movie by the radiation poisoning. The blast itself only killed so many people, it was the radiation, as they are so fond of pointing out in the movie, that helped round out the total killed in the bombings.

I’ll admit that it’s a bit of a stretch, but I can see it being a small detail that was added in.

On another note, I’d like to address how Nolan also utilized the absence of sound.

Oppenheimer (movie) doesn’t necessarily have jump scares, per se, but rather I jumped a lot during the movie. More startled with a side of deep-seated dread rather than scared. Any way you put it, Nolan does a very good job of keeping me at the edge of my seat. I’ve mentioned earlier the lack of sound during the bleacher scene (containing about half of the many times I jumped during the movie) so I won’t go into that again.

Another part of the movie where he employs this is the bomb test. This is the culmination of years of hard work, the pinnacle of one of three (four?) timelines. And you can’t hear a thing. You get the countdown (a staple from the trailer), the drop, and then… nothing.

It’s a beautiful flash of light and an explosion but the whole time there’s not a sound to be heard. At first it feels like it’s gone just so you can look at the view and then as you’re lulled into security… the shockwave hits.

I can’t remember the last time I jumped so high in a movie theater.

And it’s used for every time you see the shockwave. Silence, wind, and then a force pushes everything back, rattling the house, whipping up the dust. It’s really iconic imo.

Anyway, I walked out fixated on the noises of that movie. And the cackling of the neon did not help my dazed state.