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Do you remember the concluding lines of Citizen Kane’s screenplay?
Thompson: Well—it’s become a very clear picture. He was the most honest man who ever lived, with a streak of crookedness a yard wide. He was a liberal and a reactionary; he was tolerant—“Live and Let Live”—that was his motto. But he had no use for anybody who disagreed with him on any point, no matter how small it was. He was a loving husband and a good father—and both his wives left him and his son got himself killed about as shabbily as you can do it. He had a gift for friendship such as few men have—he broke his oldest friend’s heart like you’d throw away a cigarette you were through with. Outside of that—
Girl: What about Rosebud? Don’t you think that explains anything?
Thompson: No, I don’t. Not much anyway. Charles Foster Kane was a man who got everything he wanted and then lost it. Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn’t get or lost. No, I don’t think it explains anything. I don’t think any word explains a man’s life. No—I guess Rosebud is just a piece in a jigsaw puzzle—a missing piece.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, like Orson Welles’s and Herman J. Mankiewicz’s Charles Foster Kane, was a mess of contradictions, an enigma and a puzzle: A “perpetually distracted, endearingly eccentric, brainy naif.” An impulsive, amoral womanizer and risk taker. An ambitious egotist and narcissist, aloof and arrogant with an incredible ability to compartmentalize his life into many discrete parts. He’s also a man whose ambitions, snobbish self-regard and moral scruples frequently collide.
Like Kane, Oppenheimer is viewed through contrasting lenses. He’s a crybaby, in President Truman’s words; a narr—a fool—in Einstein’s; a weakling, according to his wife.
The new film Oppenheimer is as much a work of art as it is of biography or history, with its nonlinear, fractured structure and jumbled timeline, featuring flashbacks, abrupt shifts from black-and-white photography and color (to contrast subjective and objective realities), searing close-ups, a shrill and booming soundtrack, and nearly psychedelic, hallucinatory glimpses of Oppenheimer’s inner life. Oppenheimer is, as a friend and a leading historian of the 20th century Maurice Isserman, put it, “One of the greatest historical movies—no, scratch that, one of the greatest movies, period, I’ve ever seen.”
It is also a penetrating psychological study—of the grotesqueries of ambition (whether Oppenheimer’s, Lewis Strauss’s or Edward Teller’s) and of the erratic, unpredictable functioning of the Los Alamos scientists’ moral compass.
Read the reviews and you’ll be struck by some critics’ scoffing, sneering and sniping: about Christopher Nolan’s supposed failure to adequately develop the women characters, or to explicitly depict the effects of the radiation released by the Trinity test on neighboring peoples and the impact the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The most mean-spirited review, by The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, describes Oppenheimer as “Ultimately a History Channel Movie with Fancy Editing.” I wholeheartedly disagree, but to each his own—all critics are entitled to their opinion.
I’d say Rex Reed has it right when he calls the film “an unforgettable rarity in a currently stagnant cultural swamp of movie mediocrity.”
But what strikes me in many of the reviews is the failure to unpack the movie’s larger themes, beginning with the scientists’ Jewishness. Nolan does a great job of getting at the complexities of left-wing, New Deal–era Jewish support for the labor movement, the antifascist mobilization in Spain and, of course, the Communist Party, including divisions about toeing the party line, supporting Stalin or transforming Communism into 20th-century Americanism.
I was especially impressed by the film’s treatment of two conflicting forms of mid-20th-century upper-middle-class Jewishness: Oppenheimer, who finds meaning in the life of the mind, the sensual pleasures of the body and the world of culture and (for a time) radical politics, and Strauss, like Irving R. Kaufman, the judge in the Rosenberg case, resentful, ruthless and determined—but both, in the vernacular of the day, pushy strivers, like Duddy Kravitz and Sammy Glick, craving acceptance by the structures of power.
Then, there’s the reviewers’ failure to address one of the movie’s key themes: the issue of science and power and the Los Alamos scientists’ dawning realization that far from being partners in power, they were the servants of power, not a countervailing power.
As the historian of science Alex Wellerstein observes, Oppenheimer’s scientific contributions are difficult to pin down: “it is not so much about any particular discoveries or scientific insights he had (again, he was considered quite brilliant, but not focused enough), so much as it is about his role in the changing context of how science was done in this country.” Science involved teamwork, which has many intricate effects: it diffuses responsibility and makes science increasingly dependent on outside, generally governmental, funding.
During the 20th century, it became clear that expert knowledge, technical skills and technocratic management were the keys not only to military power, but to other forms of power. As Loren Baritz wrote in his 1960 classic, Servants of Power, groups of social scientists played an instrumental role in the creation of modern advertising, hiring practices, human relations, personnel testing, scientific management and employee training.
Scientists, in particular, face a moral challenge. Their discoveries and inventions can be used for good or ill—a decision that lies largely outside their hands. But that means that scientists mustn’t think of themselves as morally neutral and disinterested pursuers of truth. They cannot simply leave it to others to decision how to use their creations and breakthroughs.
Then, too, there are the ethical issues raised by the deployment of the atomic bomb. The movie clearly lays out the conflicting motives for deploying the new weapon and the reservations of many of the scientists. It also exposes the haughtiness of administrators, bureaucrats and political and military leaders who are annoyed by the presumptuousness of scientists who want to participate in policy decisions. It asks, in effect, what hath man wrought?
As Isserman points out, the movie “doesn’t require you to condemn or approve of the choice to develop and use the bomb. It presents the issue as it seemed to the principal actors at the moment, which was full of tension and ambiguity. And, finally, treats the issue of communism in a grown-up fashion, with its own tensions and ambiguity.” As the historian Michael Sherry pointed out in his history of American air power, “the crucial moral divide about slaughtering civilizations from the air had been crossed years earlier, first by the enemy, then by us.”
In one of the movie’s most arch lines, Edward Teller says, “Nobody knows what you believe. Do you?” Implicitly, the father of the hydrogen bomb is asking the audience for its views about the use of the new weapon.
In addition, the movie asks how we should evaluate a complicated, contradictory life: Oppenheimer is not a saint or a man of marble. He is deeply flawed. He may have regarded himself as a martyr, but he ultimately did name names to those investigating Communist infiltration of the Manhattan Project. In that sense, he resembles Elia Kazan. How, the movie asks, do we make sense of such a man?
Oppenheimer is a rarity these days: a movie for adults, not simply because of its R rating, but because it assumes a level of background knowledge and allusions that few films these days dare ask for. It also approaches its topics with a degree of nuance and complexity absent from so much of today’s popular culture. It includes elements too often missing from today’s films: jealousy, envy, betrayal, loyalty, score settling, self-destruction, idealism and human foibles. It’s at once empathetic and damning.
A biopic, a historical epic, a work of art and a psychology study, Oppenheimer offers faculty in history, political science and sociology a fantastic opportunity to probe some of the biggest issues of our time: the social consequences of scientific progress, the nature and limits of patriotic duty and the Faustian bargain of trading one’s soul in exchange for knowledge, power and status.
It also offers a lesson for anyone who writes. Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin titled the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography on which the movie draws American Prometheus, and the movie begins with an epigraph:
“Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man.
For this he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity.”
By organizing his film around the theme of hubris and torment and making judicious use of symbolism (a poisoned apple), the director is able to create a movie that is truly mythic, yet also surprisingly concise. Oppenheimer the man becomes “a prophet of apocalypse who put the fear of God (or something even bigger) into his countrymen as well as their enemies and a martyr-slash-scapegoat for an international scientific community reckoning with the blood on their hands.”
Oppenheimer was indeed a modern-day Prometheus who tapped the power of the atom not for scientific discovery nor for energy too cheap to meter, but as an instrument of war. A big reason why Western societies, apart from France, don’t rely on nuclear power is, in part, due to its association with mass destruction. Instead, we depended upon coal and other fossil fuels at enormous political, military, moral and environmental expense.
A bit like Citizen Kane, Oppenheimer concludes with dialogue that combines irony and gravity. The audience learns that Lewis Strauss wholly misunderstood an exchange between Einstein and Oppenheimer. No, the bomb’s father did not insult Strauss. Instead, he acknowledges, to Einstein’s distress, the horrors that he had unleashed.
Oppenheimer: Albert, when I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world.
Einstein: I remember it well. What of it?
Oppenheimer: I believe we did.
