Nolan’s Narrative
By [There are probably spoilers in this post. I don’t believe in such things, so I can’t be sure. If you are bothered by them, perhaps best not to read.]
Christopher Nolan has commented that he hopes the movie will spark a discussion of nuclear weapons. Many people, particularly those born since the late 20th century, believe that nuclear weapons are no longer a threat. For others, they are simply a part of our world, not something that can be changed.
But nuclear weapons are very relevant. Vladimir Putin and other Russians have made nuclear threats during Russia’s war against Ukraine. China is expanding its nuclear arsenal so that the nuclear standoff becomes a three-party problem, more difficult to solve than the Cold War two-party problem, which was not a walk in the park. International agreements to limit nuclear weapons are falling. Anticolonialism emphasizes the wrongs done during the development of nuclear weapons to states and communities of color. We need new ways to think about nuclear weapons and war, while a 19th-century war of conquest is in progress. We need new ways to think about the ongoing damages of an arms race, which were previously ignored.
Meanwhile, in the US, the elders in nuclear weapons studies have little new to say, and young people find the field hostile. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation decided it wasn’t meeting its goals on nonproliferation and arms control in 2021 and ended its funding of the field.
We need a way forward – a new way. Can “Oppenheimer” spark the discussions that will find that way? We won’t know for some time. I am interested in the responses to the film. But let’s start from the film itself.
Yes, it is a biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer. It covers a wider slice of his life in more detail than most biographies, film and written, that focus on his participation in the Manhattan Project. From the beginning of the film, the hearing on whether to continue his security clearance and Lewis Strauss’s Senate hearing on his nomination to be President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce frame Oppenheimer’s academic career and participation in the Manhattan Project. This puts a stronger political cast on the Manhattan Project. Congress generously funded a project they knew little about, but that meant that there would be a reckoning.
Another reckoning, of longer timeframe, was the effect of Communist Party membership or interest during the 1930s. At that time, it was a not unreasonable way to express sympathy for labor, which was in the process of organizing. Unions were developing, and they had common interests with the Communist Party. Stalin’s purges at the end of the 1930s ended much of that. But those 1930s associations were resurrected after the war by Senator Joe McCarthy and his sympathizers in response to the civil war in China and the spying that gave the Soviet Union the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer’s enemies used that hysteria to remove his influence. One of them, Strauss, later loses his influence because of his role in taking down Oppenheimer.
Oppenheimer’s personal characterists played into those political currents in ways that proved unfortunate for him. His downfall may have also damaged the ideas he was trying to put into effect for the control of nuclear weapons.
A continuing fascination with Oppenheimer is his mental state: arrogant, naïve, inconsiderate, technically brilliant? What were his relationships with women like? Nolan is fascinated; the color portions of the film supposedly represent Oppenheimer’s viewpoint. We have little information on his thinking. He was conscious of leaving the impression he wanted to leave, so his own words are unreliable. We won’t ever really know, leaving a large space for people to fill with their own expectations. Nolan does a reasonable job of respecting the unknowns.
After the bomb is built, the political and military take it out of Oppenheimer’s hands. The movie portrays this part of the story in the way it’s been portrayed. Drop the bomb or invade Japan? It was Truman’s decision. These decisions are important part of the story for how they set the future, and how they are presented in the movie is at odds with today’s best scholarship. I’ll write about that in a later post.
Oppenheimer’s clearance is revoked. Strauss is about to face the photographers after losing the Senate vote for him to become Commerce Secretary. [I may not have the sequence of the rest of this quite right, but I think it doesn’t matter.] Strauss recalls an interaction we saw early in the film, when he was a trustee at the Institute for Advanced Study. Oppenheimer speaks to Einstein at the pond, out of Strauss’s earshot, and Einstein hurries back to the building, ignoring Strauss. Strauss took this to mean that Oppenheimer was turning scientists against him. Now we see the interaction in color, from Oppenheimer’s viewpoint.
Oppenheimer has come to Einstein for advice, which Einstein gives him, including that events to come will be about others, not him. We go back to Strauss and his aide, who tells Strauss that it’s not about him. And we that long-ago interaction was not about him either. We might also wonder if Einstein broke the fourth wall to tell us that it’s not about us.
I haven’t completely figured that out, but it’s clearly intended to be significant. If I see the film again, I will keep it in mind.
I haven’t tied things up in a neat bow, but I think Nolan doesn’t either.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner