63: Oppenheimer

Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is about a man torn in two, powered by the inexorable pull and push of forces he manages to harness, but cannot control. Nolan attaches title cards with the terms fusion and fission early in the film, each to a different thread in Oppenheimer's life. The first traces his work on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos; the second, his fall from grace during the second Red Scare. Both threads intertwine throughout the film: action and reaction, past and future, the development of the atom bomb and the many fallouts that resulted from the Trinity explosion.

Nolan's movies have always played with time; his approach here is to foreground the dread of the bomb, to treat it as an inevitability. But where his instinct in the past has been to explain himself with expository dialogue, here Nolan relies primarily on the power of images, and with introducing them almost as prophetic flashes before framing them in their entire context. The film starts with fire, and with a promise: Prometheus stole fire from the gods, and was tortured for it for eternity. J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) will also steal fire, and he, too, will suffer for it.

Murphy plays Oppenheimer like a man haunted by both past and future. He's charismatic and distant, sometimes simultaneously. Oppenheimer both attracts and repels his contemporaries; he's a womanizer who's married to his work, a theoretical physicist with a disdain for mathematics. When the film pulls in near Murphy's clear blue eyes, it's as if he's scrutinizing the very atoms in front of him, and, at the same time, he's considering something thousands of miles away. Nolan neither vilifies the man, nor makes excuses for him.

Murphy–and Nolan, directing him–sharpens the character of Oppenheimer into an intense point with a singular goal; crucially, the movie leaves his motivations more opaque. It's unclear whether Oppenheimer joins the Manhattan Project out of a sense of duty or a drive for scientific achievement; he doesn't seem to know his own heart, himself. Nor can he know the outcome of his actions. "Theory will only get you so far," states a scientist when discussing the possibility that the bomb might ignite the Earth's atmosphere upon exploding. The world might burn forever, but there's only one way to be certain.

Except certainty remains elusive, even after the bombs go off. Nolan manages to maintain the tension even after the Trinity test. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema shoots the characters in the crystal clarity of black-and-white imagery that only hindsight could allow; elsewhere, he bathes his images in blues and rusts, the earthy tones of a world on fire, a doubling of the black-and-white sequences now drenched in doubt. The line about theory only getting so far is repeated twice, taking on different meaning in each context. Other lines repeat, too: Oppenheimer tells a student "You'll be all right" twice; another man states, in two different hearings, that each hearing is not a trial.

The repeated lines layer atop each other, accruing irony as they repeat. They also take on the alternating roles of fusion and fission. Oppenheimer's line telling the student he'll be all right is first an act of fusion, a welcoming in to a classroom; the second time the line's repeated, it's an act of fission, of pushing the student out of the nest and into a larger world, one where teacher and student can be colleagues. Both the bonding and the split are true, but the line reading remains the same, a paradoxical push/pull, a verbal–and visual–expression of the contradictory nature of quantum mechanics.

Nolan restrains himself, keeping the explanations of the science to a minimum. He's less interested in the development of the bomb, and more in the emotional toll that being responsible for the bomb's inception would take. It's all a foregone conclusion: the bomb will go off, and history will march on. Nolan tells us why we should care by showing the aftereffects of the action before action is even taken: the fire in the movie's prologue, but also the drumming of a crowd's heels before a speech, and again to devastating effect immediately after the words are spoken. His film manages to capture guilt and consequences as a chain reaction that reverberates backwards and forwards in time. It rattled me; it rattles me still.

Oppenheimer is in theaters now.

What I talked about:

On Seeing and Believing podcast, Kevin and I reviewed Oppenheimer alongside Barbie. (I enjoyed Barbie! It's a movie at war with itself, but it's worth it for Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling's performances in particular.)

I was also delighted to join Joe and Kalid over at Frankenstein's Podcast to talk about xenomorphs and Alien: Covenant.

What I'm listening to:

The Mountain Goats announced a new record this week. It doesn't come out until October, but we do know that it will be a rock opera centering around a character on the run who pops in and out of earlier Mountain Goats songs, especially on All Hail West Texas. This isn't the first record that got me into the band, but it is the one that convinced me that they're great. It sounds like sweat and camaraderie and melancholy, all appropriate for late July.