The white saviour and failed representation in a lauded ‘masterpiece’.
It’s a testament to Christopher Nolan‘s breathless film-making in Oppenheimer, based on ‘American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer’, written by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, that there seems to be only consensus about the supreme technical craft presented to our eyes and ears. However, its selection and handling of its subject, the “father of the atomic bomb“, is worthy of scrutiny.
Indeed, the film craft is sumptuous and exciting. At this point, Nolan is several movies deep into his collaborations with cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema and composer Ludwig Göransson. Jennifer Lame‘s high-wire trapeze editing fluidly bounces us around in space and time, and crucially cleverly flashes us back to faces and details so that we’re never lost where we should expect to be, even if the storytelling stakes aren’t always as clear as they need to be (the final third of the film certainly tells us that it’s dramatic, but it’s not so clear why).
We’re also spoiled by the myriad outstanding performers, led by Cillian Murphy‘s astonishing portrayal of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, even if there simply isn’t time or space to utilise them all to their full potential. And while I’m well in the camp praising Robert Downey Jr’s performance, I can only imagine the storytelling being clearer (and the film’s runtime being leaner) without the subplot of Strauss, the Salieri to Oppenheimer’s Mozart, which could be its own film.
Oppenheimer‘s sense of import is inflated by two dissonant film-making choices. For one: it’s cut like a trailer, a format which delivers information in glimpses, and is designed for hyper-focussed viewing – a vernacular this film maintains for 180 minutes. The other: it’s largely filmed in IMAX, an elite film format which captures images at an unmatched level of detail, ideal for capturing vistas and expanses in ways other formats cannot – and yet this film largely consists of people talking in rooms, some of them claustrophobically small, and literally focuses on faces, rendering some of them now eight stories tall.
Even with its considerable run time, Oppenheimer‘s three hours of propulsive cross-cutting devotes not even seconds, not even to mere cutaways, to the non-white faces most affected by the decisions it portrays.
Despite Nolan’s claim that the film is about consequences, Oppenheimer isn’t interested in showing any, instead focusing not on consequence but conscience. One incredible distillation of the mix of self-absorption, irresponsibility, and lack of self-awareness is that the scene about exactly that which pointedly never cuts away from the protagonist’s inability to look at horrific images which the film itself refuses to show:
This might be a tasteful decision – until it isn’t. If that seems unfairly critical of a film already handling a difficult topic (which, let’s not forget, was not an assignment given to the film-maker, but one which he actively pursued), we already have an example of a film, from the same year, which solved the problem of how to portray atrocities without actually showing them, to inspired and devastating effect: The Zone of Interest (2023).
As with many of his films, most notably Interstellar (2014), Nolan ultimately uses a grim existential turning point for the entirety of humanity (as opposed to, say, a dead wife) as a prop in the story of a visionary genius who feels tortured (it’s worth noting that Nolan wrote the Oppenheimer screenplay in the first person). Perhaps the single most irresponsible and distasteful film-making choice in Oppenheimer and its literal focus on the bad conscience of “the father of the atomic bomb” is when the culmination of his trial invokes the aesthetics of nuclear incineration:
the film’s ultimate statement is that Robert Oppenheimer’s own personal Hiroshima was a man yelling at him.
Hell, he even makes another “sheets” phone call to Kitty afterward.
Further Viewing
“We’re glorifying one white man and ignoring all the victims. Children are still suffering. It’s alive now. It is not in the past.” – Pam Kingfisher (via AJ+).
In response to a movie with the whitest cast to ever white cast…
… many have drawn attention to the lack of representation of other groups and minorities people directly affected by the historical events referenced and portrayed – specifically, Japanese civilians killed by the bombs, Hispanic people displaced by the Los Alamos test site, and Indigenous “downwinders” from the Hanford bomb factory, who still literally feel their effects today. The first two are from longer threads worth reading:
Read the full unrolled thread from Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, M.S., which ends with this:
What do people who were exposed to radiation in the U.S. nuclear program think of the movie Oppenheimer? pic.twitter.com/bJvSRAR6z5
— AJ+ (@ajplus) August 5, 2023
‘Oppenheimer Is a Mind-Blower, but How Is It as History?‘ asks Slate.
“People head to their local IMAX in order to experience what it’s like being inside the flames of bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, however Nolan never puts his audiences in the shoes of those who suffered the most.” Victor Fraga charges Oppenheimer, and Nolan, with whitewashing the miscreant (via DMovies).
“Hot Dog”: Vox‘s rundown of the life of Oppenheimer sounds like a far more interesting plot (and of his brother Frank’s an actual, y’know, sub-plot) about obscene privilege and even more obscene power. One is left to wonder what Scorsese might have done with it…
“When you’ve played a meaningful part in bringing about the death of over 100,000 people… you naturally don’t think of that with ease” – Robert Oppenheimer in 1965 on if the bomb was necessary (via CBS News):
Released the same year as Oppenheimer, another Oscar-winning film solved the problem of portraying atrocity without displaying atrocity, to inventively powerful effect – The Zone of Interest (2023):