Looking for "Oppenheimer" tickets?
Director Christopher Nolan has some tips for how to see his film — including where he'd want to sit. https://t.co/i6b5UHSjRO
— The Associated Press (@AP) July 23, 2023
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Christopher Nolan movie, and this won’t be the one that breaks that string, if only because I have enough paranoia dreams about nuclear war already. But it *is*, no doubt, a worthy & significant film. So here’s a space for y’all to discuss it…
Vanity Fair had a piece on The Cast of Oppenheimer and the Real People They Play” — many useful pictures!
New York Review of Books included an informative, inimitably NYRB review from a critic who lists his biases up front:
If you’re a member of any dynasty prominent in twentieth-century political history—with Roosevelts, Churchills, Windsors, and Kennedys at the forefront—your relatives are certain to be reincarnated in a nondocumentary film sooner or later. The halo effect of those families’ global fame sometimes also encompasses lesser participants on the periphery of momentous events. So when I read that Christopher Nolan, the British-American director best known for his Dark Knight Batman trilogy, would make his next feature about the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, what excited me most was personal. Often called the father of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer was a longstanding intimate and colleague of I. I. Rabi (rhymes with “hobby”), winner of the 1944 Nobel Prize in Physics and a first cousin of my paternal grandfather. To this day members of the Rabi branch of our Stammbaum, whom I call my nuclear family, still refer to the physicist by his nickname, Oppie…
During my youth Oppenheimer was the world’s most famous scientist after Einstein—a stature he achieved by directing the Manhattan Project’s desert laboratory in Los Alamos, where he led an unruly pack of young scientists to build the first nuclear weapon. His death at sixty-two in 1967, of throat cancer from decades of relentless chain-smoking, made the front page of The New York Times. Since then he’s inspired an unusual number of theater pieces for a scientist, including at least three plays, two musicals, and an opera performed at the Met. Having admired Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s magisterial 2005 study American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, I was encouraged to learn that Nolan used it as the basis for his screenplay. The book brought me back to my early familiarity with Oppenheimer’s story, which combines the mythic import of the Ring cycle with humanizing details that exemplify the inextricable links between world-changing occurrences and the minutiae of everyday life…
The perspicacious Helen Newmark Rabi had known the more-sensitive-than-thou Oppenheimer since early childhood—they were classmates at New York’s private, progressive Ethical Culture School, where he enrolled in 1911—and considered him an insufferable poseur. Rabi held a more amused, though hardly uncritical, view of Oppenheimer’s high-flown airs. They first met in 1929, while both were pursuing postgraduate studies in Europe, and these fellow New York Jews took to each other right away despite their very different upbringings, temperaments, and worldviews. Rabi attributed their dissimilarities to class, his colleague having been, in his unsparing words, “a rich spoiled Jewish brat,” the eldest son of highly assimilated German Jews. The Oppenheimers’ full-floor apartment on Riverside Drive was hung with a Blue Period Picasso and three Van Gogh canvases, among other artworks, the opulent opposite of the two-room Lower East Side tenement flat where Rabi grew up in an impoverished Galician-Jewish family. For him, science was the universal equalizer of humankind, rather than the transcendental elevator of the spirit that Oppenheimer deemed it to be.
Far more than I’d imagined possible in a film about a scientist, Nolan conveys the thrill of discovery that gripped the small international confraternity of physicists who between the two world wars advanced into the new conceptual frontiers opened by Albert Einstein (played here, a bit clownishly for my taste, by Tom Conti) with his theory of relativity. Oppenheimer’s director-screenwriter not only clarifies highly arcane scientific information for the lay viewer but makes it exciting, a propellant to the human drama onscreen. If at times there seem to be too many full-screen montages of swirling atoms and distant galaxies, happily we are spared clichéd close-ups of furrowed brows before inspiration strikes…
Not having been inside a movie theater in more than three years because of the pandemic, I found Nolan’s pull-out-all-the-stops IMAX extravaganza an exhilarating reintroduction to cinema, stunningly realized by the sweeping cinematography of the Dutch-Swedish Hoyte van Hoytema. The bass-heavy audio mixing by Willie D. Burton seems more suited to the usual IMAX car chase fare than to a drama with many intimate scenes, in which dialogue is often covered by the thumping soundtrack. Understandably, the tour de force of the special effects team, led by Scott R. Fisher, was preordained to be the first atomic blast. Especially memorable is the delay between the detonation’s visual and sonic impact, the latter happening after a startlingly long interval, as thunder does with lightning. Elementary physics, but very effective…
NYRB also had a (should be paywall-free) repost of Thomas Powers’ original 2005 review of American Prometheus, and three related Oppenheimer bios — “An American Tragedy”:
One of the many complexities of the character of J. Robert Oppenheimer is apparent in his response to the discovery of nuclear fission in January 1939. “The U business is unbelievable,” he wrote to a colleague once he had satisfied himself that uranium atoms really did split when bombarded with neutrons. “It is I think exciting, not in the rare way of positrons and mesotrons, but in a good honest practical way.” He meant that fission didn’t turn physics upside down and inside out like so many other discoveries of the first decades of the twentieth century. Fission was as practical as a hammer…
The speed of Oppenheimer’s mind would not have surprised those who knew him. At thirty-four Oppenheimer was famously brilliant. The surprise was his enthusiasm for the “good honest practical way” fission might be put to work. His whole life had been moving in an entirely different direction since his discovery of physics, and especially theoretical physics, at Harvard in the early 1920s, then at the Cavendish lab in Cambridge, England, and finally in the German university town of Göttingen, where he studied with Max Born, argued with his fellow students, and developed “some taste in physics.”
For a decade theory dominated his life and later his teaching in California until the mid-1930s when Oppenheimer suddenly discovered politics—specifically, the “popular front” politics of the American Communist Party as it tried to rally resistance to fascism. Oppenheimer’s politics were, however—like his physics—mainly theoretical. He always insisted he never joined the Party himself, and the FBI, despite a dozen years of relentless surveillance and phone-tapping, never managed to prove he did.
Oppenheimer early in the war readily agreed with a US Army security officer, charged with weighing his loyalty, and said it seemed he had “belonged to nearly every fellow-traveling organization on the West Coast.” He went to rallies, helped raise funds for refugees of the Spanish civil war, made substantial donations of his own to a representative of the Party, fell in love with one Communist, and was close to many others, including his brother Frank, who joined the Party in 1936 and remained until about 1942. For Oppenheimer in his Red period communism was a noble ideal, a way of conceiving a just world, and very likely—much in the way of his physics, his ambitious reading, his tailoring, his interest in art, food, wine, and martinis made exactly so—another means of distinguishing himself from the ordinary run of mankind…
Vulture (NYMag) has a post on “The Troubling Reverberations at the End of Oppenheimer, Explained” — which includes answers from Christopher Nolan. I found it interesting, but, of course — spoilers! (for the film itself, not for the history behind it).
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And then, of course, there’s the social media response to Oppenheimer…
Amazing that so much twitter discourse over Oppenheimer is based on the mistaken assumption that it's actually The Wind Rises.
— Paul Wang (@Cataphrak) July 21, 2023
The guy's name is the title of the movie. It's like how Titanic was about how great the ship was or how The Godfather was about how wonderful it was to be Vito Corleone. https://t.co/3gJV0M5OgZ
— Starfish Unexpectedly Cancelled For Hating Hitler (@IRHotTakes) July 22, 2023
Ah yes the real victims of WWII: the Japanese https://t.co/JZjWIhS2rw
— Gas Stove Prayer Warrior (@canderaid) July 20, 2023
If you want people to sympathize with the Japanese in WW2, showing everyone their perspective is probably the worst way to go about that. A movie "centering Japanese voices" would be bone-chilling.
— Now on Threads! (@agraybee) July 22, 2023
Every facet of Hot Political Take-dom!
National Review’s movie critic on Oppenheimer: Nolan evokes “the atrocity of the January 6 show trials” pic.twitter.com/4x2LLD4Onr
— Christian Vanderbrouk ?????????? (@UrbanAchievr) July 21, 2023
Oppenheimer was a fine movie but its politics were a bit iffy. wouldve been way better if at the end Oppenheimer turned to the camera & said "i am anti-American now" & then specified hes the exact kind of anti-American i am pic.twitter.com/fbMm8HSSwx
— Nicholas Grossman (@NGrossman81) July 23, 2023
magical, somehow we've invented *another* moronic form of Oppenheimer discourse.
do you think maybe the *several known atomic spies* had something to do with this https://t.co/Z82gPgYQYw
— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) July 22, 2023
They already made this movie it's called "Hidden Figures" I wonder why you don't find it inspiring https://t.co/7wAztfZTu9
— The okayest poster there is (@ok_post_guy) July 22, 2023
It looks different when yours are the boots about to be on the ground, of course…
I remember the WWII vets in my neighborhood talking about The Bomb. The Army and Marine vets were all for it. The Navy and AF guys were convinced that at least Nagasaki wasn't necessary.
— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) July 22, 2023
Gin & Tonic
Providence has one of apparently only 19 IMAX screens in the US. I’ve booked tickets for late next week
SpaceUnit
I am again reminded that social media is like an enormous HOA meeting where literally anyone can attend and speak.
ETA: Also this thread is a bigger bomb than Oppenheimer’s.
Urza
@Gin & Tonic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IMAX_venues
More than 17, but not nearly as many as I would have thought.
Ihop
Nolan is a fine filmmaker. I can reccomend a possibility of someone finding any of his films enjoyable.
But for fuck sake, knowing the totality of the behavior of the empire of Japan towards everyone around them in that period; all told, they got off lightly.
I don’t wish to make light of any tragedy or butchery. But again, they should have no complaints.
Redshift
My father-in-law was a WWII Marine. He was in training for the invasion of Japan, and they were projecting potentially hundreds of thousands of casualties. He never talked about it, but Ms. Redshift was always aware that without the Bomb, she might never have been born.
cain
The only other Nolan movie I’ve seen (and I’m not seeing Oppenheimer cuz I don’t want to be depressed) is the Batman trilogy with Christian Bale which were pretty good.
The guy who played “Scarecrow” in the first one, “Batman Begins” is who is playing Oppenheimer.
Suzanne
This is a dumb fucken take. Around 200,000 civilians died, for fuck’s sake. People aren’t their goddamn government. There’s a rational and convincing historical argument that this was the best outcome available, given the circumstances of the time, but it’s still a tragedy and mocking their victimization is…. a bad look, to say the least.
I haven’t seen the movie, so I’m not going to weigh in on the specific artistic choices Nolan made here. I usually like his movies. But I don’t think it’s “tankie” to make this criticism.
Mike in NC
@Redshift: Paul Fussell wrote an essay entitled, “Thank God for the Atomic Bomb” because he was due to transfer from the ETO to the Pacific even though he had been badly wounded in Europe.
American Prometheus has been on my reading list for a long time.
Ken
Mind you, they said the same thing in their Barbie review.
piratedan
it was a war and from my reading of history, it’s not as if anyone gets to wear white when we’re dealing with nation-states, bigotry, self-serving interests etc…
My understanding is that Hirohito had to intervene to shut down the Military (read, the Army) from dying to the last person and taking every last civilian with them. The military control of information and propaganda was just as effective as the Nazi’s (and our own) in convincing their citizens that submitting to the West would be the end of their way of life (sounds familiar).
Did the US do the right thing with Nagasaki? All I know is it was after that one, Hirohito stepped in and shut them down and surrender followed.
Did the US have their own issues…. yup, their own biases and racism that caused the Japanese internment, the refusal of refugees (i.e. Jews) from Germany (and damn near everywhere else the Nazi’s were entrenched). We’ve hardly got a clean sheet when it comes to what one would consider good behavior these days, but the revisionist history takes from people who apparently didn’t pay very much attention in class or bother to educate themselves is pretty much crap.
I’m sure that there are plenty of people in Thailand, Korea, Phillipines and China who might have some thoughts on how the Japanese dealt with other ethnicities leading up to and during the war.
Jackie
I grew up in Richland WA, which was one of the “secret cities” during the Manhattan Project outside of the Hanford Nuclear Site. We moved to Richland in 1958, when it became an “open city.” Our high school is known as the Richland Bombers with the atomic mushroom cloud part of the logo – along with a painted mural outside of the gymnasium of a B-17.
Even after Richland became an Open City – secrets abounded about what was going on at Hanford.
The majority of streets are named after Manhattan Project “nobility,” along with Leslie Grove and Howard Amon Parks. All streets named after WWII notables related to Hanford and the Manhattan Project have little plaques notating their significance. Many businesses in Richland have “Atomic or Nuclear” in their names to this day. My dad built a bowling alley in Richland in the early ‘60s called the Atomic Lanes.
This movie is bringing back so many memories for me and my family. Plus a lot of explanations for what we didn’t know.
My Dad was in the Army Air Corp in WWII and stationed in Walla Walla for awhile. He recalled while flying there was a huge “No Fly Zone” over a section of the Columbia River and adjacent land. That, of course was the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, just north of the then closed city of Richland.
pat
I’m reading a couple of biographies of Oppenheimer written in the 1980s. I think that’s enough for me.
A complicated man, but aren’t all physicists a bit weird? (//s)
West of the Rockies
@Mike in NC:
I’ve read it twice and highly recommend it! I tried a more recent biography but dropped out after 150 rather tedious, bouncy pages.
Almost Retired
Random thoughts. My wife and I are going to see Oppenheimer in Hollywood next week at one of the few theatres in the world that can display the movie in 70mm. And I don’t even know what that means.
Many years ago my wife’s geographically scattered family settled on Kansas City as a mutually inconvenient place for us all to meet for Christmas – the country’s most underrated city IMHO. My father in law and oldest son visited the Truman Library with me. FIL was on a ship in the Pacific in 1945 when the bomb was dropped. He went to his grave thinking that saved his life and millions of American and Japanese and other lives and he and my son bonded over taking about that, even if they didn’t entirely agree about Truman’s decision.
My best friend from law school is a studio lawyer, although he doesn’t deal with film production (he deals with the studio catalogue). We had dinner last night and he was quite irritated by the casting in Oppenheimer, in the sense that Jewish historical figures – whose Judaism was central to their stories – were played by gentiles. I quote: “Oppenheimer was played by a guy named Murphy? Couldn’t they get the fucking Pope to do a cameo as Old Oppenheimer?”
not sure what my point is other than these are complicated issues (ok maybe not the 70mm thing), and maybe I don’t have to express a definitive opinion on the subjects and the world will still be just fine.
Major Major Major Major
I enjoy Nolan well enough but I do not have a three-hour movie in me, absurd.
Jackie
@piratedan: “Did the US do the right thing with Nagasaki? All I know is it was after that one, Hirohito stepped in and shut them down and surrender followed.”
The bombing was horrific, but so was the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Japan made their choice; the rest is history.
dmsilev
@pat:
Can confirm….
Suzanne
@Almost Retired:
Yeah, I am hearing more and more of this comment from Jews, both people I know personally and reading opinion pieces, social media, interviews, etc. I hadn’t really thought about it up until a couple of years ago….. but I’m white (with a little bit of Ashkenazi ancestry, but not much). I am currently of the belief that my primary job is to listen and learn, not to develop an opinion on the issue.
Kelly
Copied from an earlier thread:
My Uncle Walt was a bombardier on a B29 out of Tinian. He flew the massive firestorm missions before we dropped the bomb. Flew reconnaissance over Nagasaki after the bomb. He did not think the results of the bomb were any worse than the firestorm missions. He had General Sherman’s attitude “War is cruelty and you cannot refine it”
Major Major Major Major
@Ihop:
I think destroying their military, deposing their government, and rebuilding it from the ground up as a liberal democracy with a better constitution than our own was pretty ok! Did the postwar famines not last long enough for you? Needs more children starving to death? We’d already destroyed half their major cities, of course—should we have gone harder after surrender?
Major Major Major Major
@piratedan:
They were actively trying to surrender so long as they could keep their emperor. So we nuked them, twice. Worth it?
dmsilev
With regards to only briefly showing the victims of the bombings, and only indirectly, I guess what I would say is that the film was an adaptation of an Oppenheimer biography, not of a book like The Making of the Atomic Bomb (a very good, albeit lengthy, read) which does try to tell the stories of at least some of the victims. That choice set the focus of the film.
dmsilev
@Suzanne: All I can offer is my own perspective (Jewish, descended from Poles and Russians, don’t have to go back all that far on the family tree to find relatives who died in the Holocaust), and for me it didn’t really feel like a major concern. Again, purely my own view and I fully recognize why others might feel (strongly) otherwise.
dm
The bombs might have also been a message to Stalin, who had agreed to enter the war against Japan after the end of the war in Europe — the Soviet Union declared war on Japan on Aug 1.
As it was, they still got the Kuriles out of their week of war in the Pacific.
NotMax
@Major Major Major Major
Oppenheimer was the #1 box office success in Saudi Arabia and in India.
I suspect three hours of A/C might have played a part.
NotMax
@Almost Retired
Sheesh. How upset was he when nice Jewish boy Michael Landon played a WASP on Bonanza?
Suzanne
@dmsilev: I typically don’t put much stock in the criticisms that boil down to, “Why isn’t this movie/book/whatever about what I want it to be about?”. And that’s because I think the better approach to take is to encourage more storytelling in order to more effectively depict those different viewpoints, rather than to fault individual works for not telling every part of what are usually huuuuuuge stories. Each work can only do so much, you know?
But I also think it’s shitty and facile and the worst kind of utilitarian hot-taking to attempt to sweep those concerns aside altogether. 200,000 civilians — who probably did not have any control or insight or influence in their situation, who were just normal people trying to live their lives and raise their kids, who were kids — were killed. Honestly, most Americans alive today probably don’t know about that, and they should.
DrDaveChemist
Saw the film this evening. Kind of like Titanic, this is a long film because it’s telling more than one story: the story of the making of the bomb and the story of Oppenheimer’s politics and how they played out in the aftermath, including their effect on Lewis Strauss.
Lots of moral ambiguity all the way around, from Oppenheimer’s personal life to his politics to dropping the bomb to pursuing the H bomb, and no easy answers since this is real life and not fiction
I was surprised to hear someone from my scientific lineage (George Kistiakowsky, post-doc mentor to my PhD advisor) name-dropped as an important member of the team at Los Alamos, as I hadn’t known about that before. Physical chemistry is a small world…
HumboldtBlue
@SpaceUnit:
Daaaaaammmmmnnnnn
Elsewhere:
Speaking of geniuses and people who discovered fascinating things about our world, it’s been a year since we lost Diana Kennedy, renowned author of nine cookbooks on Mexican cuisine. Self-described as an ethno-gastronomer and labeled by others as a culinary anthropologist, I’m getting ready to watch Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy once the soccer match is over. It’s gonna be good.
Jackie
@Suzanne: Normal people and their kids trying to live their lives also applied to those living in Pearl Harbor.
America is not the country who declared war.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne:
Was this one tweet an attempt to sweep away these concerns entirely or was a sarcastic response to an attempt to criticize the movie for not being about what the critic wanted it to be about?
Alison Rose
@Ken:
Well, you would obviously be more sensitive to those.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: This has gotten super-meta, so I’m not exactly clear about what is sincere and what is sarcastic at this point. But there has been a lot of discussion on Twitter about Oppenheimer not telling much of the stories of the victims of the bombs in Japan or of the Native and Latino New Mexicans who lived near the test site. It cam up last night on the Barbie thread. Some of the usual commenters who hate leftists more than Republicans mocked those opinions. I hate that, and I think it’s inhumane.
Ken
Interesting; an earlier open thread also turned into a discussion of Oppenheimer, complete with sub-threads on whether use of the atomic bombs was justified, and the casting of non-Jewish actors to play Jews. I’m assuming this is just because the planet’s round and people read Balloon Juice at different times.
dmsilev
@Suzanne: Talking about this film in particular, the victims of the bombs were there, but decidedly in a secondary role. ‘Told about, not shown’, to invert the usual saying, and to the extent that anything was directly shown, it was through the lens of Oppenheimer’s sense of guilt over what he had worked to bring about. I wouldn’t say they were swept under the rug, but yes they more definitely were not front and center.
Suzanne
@Jackie: Yeah no shit. I can hold space in my heart and mind for all civilians who suffer due to events they cannot control, be they American, Japanese, whatever.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
@Almost Retired: Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce portrayed Argentinian Pope Francis in 2019. Geoffrey Rush, who isn’t Jewish, portrayed Einstein in a ten part mini series in 2017. Barbie, a blonde Angeleno is portrayed by an natural brunette Aussie.
No one complained. So what makes the casting of a weirdo bomb maker different.
Omnes Omnibus
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch: Robbie is a brunette? I did not know that. I don’t recall seeing her as anything but blonde.
Jackie
@Suzanne: Totally agree. I wish all disagreements could be settled without war and the innocent deaths because of.
Suzanne
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch:
The argument that many people make is that Jewish people are often portrayed as caricatures by non-Jews. Furthermore, there’s been a growing awareness in recent years that minority groups need to have more control over their storytelling and depiction, because members of the dominant (white) culture usually miss nuance at best and are offensive at worst. This is why we don’t accept blackface or yellowface any longer.
Suzanne
@dmsilev: I would be willing to bet that if you went into the Ohio diner and asked the Real American patrons there about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no one could tell you anything about the victims, the cities, the aftereffects, etc. I can understand why Nolan might not have wanted to go down that road in his movie, but it is a huge gap in knowledge. Telling all of those stories helps us reckon with history and develop compassion. It’s important.
NotMax
Insofar as Hiroshima, highly recommend the Barefoot Gen manga series, also the anime film, which is available for streaming on Retrocrush.
Short interview with the creator (who as a child was an eyewitness).
Major Major Major Major
@Jackie:
What’s the multiplier on permitted callous civilian deaths if you weren’t the one who hit first? Is it really 2,900x?
Ruckus
@Major Major Major Major:
I’m not all that familiar with his work but I agree that a 3 hr movie isn’t something I would want to sit through.
Tehanu
@Almost Retired:
@NotMax:
Sheesh, indeed, and I’m half Jewish. It’s called acting, for Pete’s sake.
NotMax
@Tehanu
No argument. As pointed out in an earlier thread, there was a non-existent outcry when straight Cillian Murphy played the gay lead in Breakfast on Pluto.
Alison Rose
@Tehanu: Sure, and that can stretch pretty far. But in some cases, it’s inappropriate. I presume you wouldn’t be okay with a white actor doing blackface? Or a remake of Breakfast At Tiffany’s that retained the yellowface? There’s also the issue of cis actors of the wrong gender being cast in trans roles (e.g. a cis man playing a trans woman). Now, often in the case of a Jewish character, the portrayal doesn’t involve any offensive elements. But — and this will seem contradictory — we are simultaneously a minority in the country while also not exactly being so in Hollywood. It’s not like there are no Jewish actors, for God’s sake. I get that the filmmakers often want a specific look, and in a case like this where it’s a biopic, someone who can evoke the look of the real person they’re playing. I’m not 100% against the idea, but I don’t think it’s fair or appropriate to dismiss it as ridiculous because “it’s just acting” as though there have never been any cases where that phrase was used to excuse some seriously repugnant shit.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
@Ruckus: At least they could Stand and sing “take me out to the ballgame” during the 7th reel stretch
NotMax
Edward R. Murrow speaks with Oppenheimer. Originally aired January 1955.
HumboldtBlue
Yo, if youse get tired of nattering on about bombs and shit, New Zealand takes on Panama in 15 minutes, so we could discuss that.
Also, #Xitter is trending and that’s funny.
Sister Golden Bear
@Suzanne: The specific argument I’ve seen regarding Oppenheimer is that his Jewishness was a critical part of the story given that the Holocaust was occurring during the development of the atomic bomb — and had it been developed slightly earlier the bomb would’ve been used on Germany. So the argument is that a Jewish actor would bring more depth and nuance to this.
I don’t know whether I entirely agree with this — given that we’re now 70+ years removed, albeit the Holocaust still casts a long shadow on many Jews I know, even if it’s not top of mind.
Anoniminous
Roger Ebert on Grave of the Fireflies
Alison Rose
@Sister Golden Bear: Considering all the nazis flouncing around the internet and the country and one of our two main political parties, it’s definitely top of mind for some of us. I mean, the fuckers wearing 6MWE shirts won’t let us not think about it.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
Given the controversy I wonder if they’ll cast someone different in the sequel
Sister Golden Bear
@NotMax: Not to well actually, but actually at the time there was a fair amount criticism from the queer community towards Breakfast on Pluto precisely for casting a straight actor to play a gay lead character. It was part of an on-going criticism about Hollywood casting cis-het actors to play LGBTQ+ characters. Driven among other reasons that LGBTQ+ actors have had a hard time being considered cis-het roles, which drastically limits their opportunity to work as actors.
Sister Golden Bear
@Alison Rose: No argument there.
FWIW, I was thinking of Jewish friends from a decade or two ago, who were so secular they’d probably eat a ham sandwich on Yom Kipper. But every so often, something in the news would (justifiably) surface Holocaust-related fears that we’d talk about.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
⚽👍
Alison Rose
@Sister Golden Bear: Yeah, that’s the thing. You can be the least Jewish Jew ever, and yet you know that they’d take aim at you, too. That’s part of why it pissed me off so much when that dude in the Israeli government (not Bibi, but I don’t remember the guy’s name) a few years ago said that Reform Jews weren’t real Jews. Like, bro, the nazis don’t give a shit if we keep kosher or not. They hate all of us equally.
FastEdD
Truman was one of my favorite Presidents because he was always able to make a forthright decision when necessary but it sounds like there’s a scene in this film where Oppenheimer confronts him and Truman dismisses him out of hand. I can understand why the physicist would have extreme misgivings. I can also understand exactly why Truman, a WW1 veteran would view the bomb as just a “bigger hammer” to end the war. I hope the film doesn’t trivialize either character.
sab
My sister is a retired art historian, specializing in Asian art.
She told me about going to some conference were one of the speakers specialized in Japanese movies, in particular war movies made during WWII. Showed some movies where all of the extras as Japanese were actual Koreans and in the movie were actually killed in the “battle.” Not CGI killed. Actually killed.
Sister said the audience was stunned.
sab
@sab: My husband’s father was stationed in the south Pacific during WWII and had a visceral hatred of Japanese he passed down to his kids. I have spent my whole married life fighting this hatred, viewed by me as racism.
Sister’s report on this conference made me slightly rethink.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
Telling all of those stories helps us reckon with history and develop compassion. It’s important.
It might just help with keeping those stories from repeating. Humanity can learn. It’s a slow process and takes a lot longer than it should but it might just be possible. One of the things is what we are doing now, communicating with people possibly thousands of miles away, most of us possibly learning something that 75 or more years ago we would likely never actually know about. We might have gotten the big points but the story, the background might be totally missing. Which is what the book burners and conservative shit heads want, for the rest of us to never find out how shitty they are. Humanity is of course made up of all kinds some are people that do far more good than not so good, some do far more harm than any good whatsoever. Actually seeing that can help us grow as humans. Or maybe not…..
sab
@sab: But I have a niece by marriage whose grandmother was an Okinawan war bride. Very unusual for an American GI to marry a Japanese, but her American family adored her.
Ruckus
@sab:
It is possible that my parents were far better than I may have ever imagined. The one thing they didn’t teach me was to hate. I mean I’m human so that’s built in but still, I didn’t get it reenforced at home or especially working with my dad. And my dad was in the Pacific in the USN. The first house I lived in we had a Japanese couple living 2-3 doors down and I went to school for 12 yrs with their daughter in the same grade. Dad moved the family into that brand new just built house while mom was in the hospital having me.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
I remember learning as a young kid growing up in the 50s and early 60s that dropping the A-bombs on Japan was morally indefensible. Then I got to high school and studied WWII in a little more depth and realized that dropping the bombs was inevitable by that stage of the war, and quite defensible by the logic of fighting a total, world war. Everyone in America wanted the freaking war OVER, especially after V-E day. The incredible casualties and brutality of the Pacific war battles (i.e. the “island hopping” strategy) were very sobering, and after the horrible battle of Okinawa, the estimated American casualties for an invasion of the Japanese home islands were huge (and estimated to take at least a year). No way would Truman not have used every weapon he had available to win the war. I remember the girl giving the report in history class saying “We dropped the first bomb to prove it worked, and we dropped the second to prove we had more than one”.
cain
@sab: The Japanese were very cruel during WW2. Ask any Chinese whose ancestors were at Nanking. There was something to be said about the description of the Japanese soldiers as “dead eyed”.
Despite who they were during that time – I think they’ve changed since then. The end of the war was humbling in ways that they’ve never experienced.
Also keep in mind their cruelty wasn’t just outward but inward as well. Japanese period of the “Meiji Restoration” was brutal prior to WW2. But you got to hand it to these folks – they thought they were pretty hot shit until U.S. Admiral Matthew Perry showed up and they thought “we need to be like that” and they pretty much converted their society to a modern society in a 100 years – but they turned their back on all the old rules.
Japanese history is one of the most interesting histories around. Fascinating people. They created twitter before twitter – the gentry would constantly be passing notes around to each other.
NotMax
@Sister Golden Bear
Not to in any way dispute but what pushback there was may have been pretty insular. I certainly did not see nor hear anyone say boo about it within the circles in which I travel online.
Water under the bridge, though. Let the finished product speak for itself. Good acting is good acting regardless.
Murphy in Pluto: good acting
Peter Finch in Network: good acting
Bob Hoskins in Roger Rabbit: good acting
Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln: good acting
George Arliss in Disraeli: good acting
Olivier in Marathon Man: good acting
George Sanders in Man Hunt: good acting
Anthony Quinn in Zorba: good acting
Mickey Rooney in Tiffany’s: bad acting
John Wayne in Conqueror: bad acting
.
piratedan
@Major Major Major Major: I can’t say… but the attempts that they made to negotiate a surrender did indeed try to retain the emperor in place (and supposedly the Military control of the government) in the face of demands of an unconditional surrender.
The fact that the negotiations were made with the Soviet Union and not the US could be the issue here, considering who Stalin is/was, do you believe that he would have shared this with the US government with Truman while at the same time being ready to enter the Pacific theatre of war at the same time?
How omniscient do you believe that the US and British intelligence services were?
The fact that Hirohito had to intervene to demand the surrender and then post that acceptance, survive an attempted coup de’tat before it was even signed doesn’t mean that peace was on the cusp of happening before the bombs were dropped.
I tend to believe it was the confluence of events, both the atomic bombs and the entrance of the Soviets into the war that caused Hirohito to accept the unconditional terms. I could also understand the desire to try and reduce US casualties, considering the nature of the campaigns on Iwo Jima, Tarawa, Saipan and Okinawa
All of the civilian deaths are tragic, and war tends to marginalize them all into statistics that sometimes lose meaning. Unsure how those lost in Nagasaki or Hiroshima should be, could be measured against those lost in Nanking, Manilla, Dresden or Stalingrad. They are all horrific and the scope and scale of loss is pretty much beyond comprehension.
VeniceRiley
Lise Meitner is the hidden figure of fission. She won’t get a movie. But there are biographies you can read!
NotMax
Not bad companion piece to the Nazi effort regarding an A-bomb is the based on a true story The Catcher Was a Spy.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
@VeniceRiley: Maybe Tinseltown can get Margo Robbie to play her in a biopic.
NotMax
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
Or Ryan Gosling in drag.
:)
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
@NotMax: Hmm, I wonder if John Wayne would have been good in Roger Rabbit or Herbie the Love Bug
NotMax
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
Or Mayflower.
“Hit the beach, Pilgrims!”
:)
Viva BrisVegas
Sometimes it seems that the monstrousness of Japanese militarism is downplayed in relation to nazism.
They were effectively the same, only their victims varied. If German citizens bore moral culpability for the actions of their government, then so did the Japanese. If Berlin or Munich was worth nuking, then so was Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
Anyway, the two nuclear bombs dropped on Japan weren’t the deciding factor in the surrender, the Red Army marching through Manchuria was. The militarists had no regard for the loss of their own people at any scale. The March Tokyo incendiary bombings proved that.
Hangö Kex
@Major Major Major Major: Usually I tend to walk out from anything longer than two hours or so feeling cutting half an hour out would have been an improvement, but this time it seemed every minute was there for a reason; leaving out any of the many intertwining stories wouldn’t have resulted in the same whole.
Donatellonerd
i avoid 3-h movies generally (as does my daughter), and we both never felt bored and never wished we were somewhere else. she learned a lot (my husband & i learned some new things. I thought it was an excellent movie, — movies with or about moral ambiguity are hard to love.
no Imax in Paris — we’d have had to go to London.
Gretchen
Charlie Pierce is right. My dad and uncle were in Europe on VE Day and were told that now they were heading to the Pacific to fight the Japanese. They were both army, and mightily relieved to learn when Japan was out and they got to go home.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
Cacti
Haven’t seen Oppenheimer yet.
Barbie was a crap fest for very different reasons than the culture warriors say. 90 minute paean to consumerism of a plastic doll. All of the very legitimate criticism the daughter made of Barbie the product brushed aside because Barbie makes first world people happy, and also you’re a big meanie for making the pretty blonde lady cry, little scowly brown girl.
I doubt every day is a perfect day for the ladies and the men building Barbieland in the sweatshops.
raven
@Redshift: My old man was a tin-can sailor in the Pacific and he was on the “picket line” at Okinawa after 27 landings. He respected the Japanese but he was all in on dropping both and ending the war. I’m reading (listening) to Ian Toll’s Pacific War Trilogy and, in “Twilight of the Gods”, describes how close the Japanese came to not surrendering after the bombs.
raven
@Ruckus: My old man was the same. He was a football coach in Whittier in the early 60’s, He said that he would watch the Japanese kids and when they wobbled he knew it was time to back off because they were so tough. His brother, who never left Navy Pier in Chicago, always ran his mouth about “hating those Japs”.
p.a.
Correct me if I’m wrong but the Japanese military planned to fight to the last man. How many American military, Japanese military, and Japanese civilians would have died in an invasion? Japan being an island nation, there was no “beyond the Urals” for Japanese civilians’ shelter. (Don’t really know the refugee situation in Stalin’s SU, but the potential was there.)
WW1 Germany surrendered when the fighting entered its territory (mutiny, starvation at the same time.). Anyone think a successful invasion of Kyushu would have been enough for the Japanese military to quit?
What I know on Nagasaki (which isn’t enough) I find disturbing. We should have given the shock of Hiroshima more time to reverberate through the Japanese government.
Dmbeaster
@Major Major Major Major:
They were actively trying to surrender so long as they could keep their emperor.
This is a commonly repeated statement of alleged history, but is 100% false. Internally, the only policy in place as of July, 1945, was suicidal resistance. No one advocated for surrender so long as they could keep the Emperor. They never formulated any position as to a possible surrender proposal, and the trial balloons served up internally in order to at least consider the question were absurd.
Externally, they never communicated to anyone any desire to surrender pursuant to any terms whatsoever. The one effort to involve the Soviet Union as a possible mediator for possible talks specifically refused to set forth any proposals of any kind, which was an entirely idiotic way to start a possible mediation about peace.
Cacti
@p.a.: You’re not wrong. Japan forcefully conscripted thousands of civilians as well as slaves from their occupied territories as cannon fodder for the defense of Okinawa.
Now multiply that by an order of magnitude for a defense of the mainland.
Matt McIrvin
@NotMax:
When I first read this I thought you were talking about Eddie Murphy in The Adventures of Pluto Nash.
Matt McIrvin
I saw a Facebook meme pointing out another strange Barbenheimer connection: the stars of Barbie and Oppenheimer both played, not just Batman villains, but Batman villains who were corrupted Arkham Asylum psychiatrists.
Cacti
Much of the tension in modern Asian relations today can also be attributed to the fact that the Allies didn’t force Hirohito from his thrown, or make his government grovel for forgiveness as was done with Germany.
Because in truth, we saw Asians as lesser humans than Europeans, and wanted to go back to being their colonial overlords.
Within a decade of WW2 ending, we were helping France try to subjugate Vietnam.
Dmbeaster
@p.a.:
What I know on Nagasaki (which isn’t enough) I find disturbing. We should have given the shock of Hiroshima more time to reverberate through the Japanese government.
A good deal is known about the Japanese reaction to Hiroshima, and sadly it confirms the thinking by the US advisors, who analyzed the potential use of the bombs beforehand, that it would take at least two dropped within a week of each other.
The dominant scientific advice in Japan was that it was astonishing that the US had refined that much U-235, but that enough for a second bomb would be at least many months away. And that conclusion was actually correct.
The military noted how white fabrics protected those exposed to the worst effects of the flash, and wanted white sheets to protect troops. In other words, waiting more time after Hiroshima was unlikely to have had any effect.
Japanese scientific knowledge did not include any meaningful awareness of using transuranics rather than U-235 as fission fuel, and no awareness of Pu239 and its properties. The second bomb was a much more major shock than the first. This was not a one off thing, and the Japanese had to expect the “rain of ruin” promised by Truman if the Potsdam terms were rejected.
They were supposed to be separated by a week, but anticipated bad weather had the Air Force move up the second bombing rather than delay it. Those folks were not giving much thought to a suitable time period for the effects of the first to hopefully sink in.
Ruckus
@Cacti:
Sorry. As I said elsewhere on BJ, I worked on the high production molds to build Barbie dolls. The original dolls were made in lessor molds that were far cheaper. Once the concept was proven and the quantity of dolls desired grew dramatically new molds were made by our family company. I machined the cavities that formed the body, using a pantograph, a machine that uses a larger epoxy model and reduces the size to what is required for the part. Today that would be done a lot different but that was how a lot of molds to make plastic parts were built in the way back. The shop was in Los Angeles, the dolls were molded in southern CA and the locations were not in any way sweatshops. I did, at a later date meet Ruth and Elliot Handler in our shop, discussing other molds we were making for them.
Just because you see no need for Barbie dolls, a hell of a lot of them were sold because a lot of girls seemed to like them. A toy, made specifically for girls. Sure it may not have made sense to you or many others but is it better to make dolls rather than toy guns? I think it is. And I did many decades ago. And I haven’t changed my mind in all these decades. And I worked on molds for toy guns as well. I believe it was for Mattel. I also made molds for milk bottles, 5 gal water bottles, not just toys. Our shop existed for 33 yrs before an earthquake decimated the place. I owned it for longer than my dad did. I built a lot of tools to make toys, and many other items. And I don’t feel like I wasted my life making tools to make toys for kids, or any of the other hundreds of tools we made for many different segments of the plastics industry.
Ken
Oh, that is nice.
Semi-relatedly, in Spanish orthography of the 16th century, “X” represented a “sh” sound. Learning that made all those weird Aztec and Mayan names — like Uxmal in the morning thread — suddenly much easier to pronounce.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Ruckus: When I look at a 3-hour movie, I start with the same suspicion I feel looking at 700 page books by well-known writers. Often there’s some self-indulgence that a good editor needed to curb. Except for Lord of the Rings, of course. Those movies were the perfect length. :-)
I just can’t sit through a 3-hour movie any more. I don’t have the bladder capacity.
lowtechcyclist
@Sister Golden Bear:
Everyone knows you’re supposed to eat herring on Yom Kipper. ;-)
My father was about as secular a Jew as you can get; while it didn’t help that I grew up in the DC area and his family was in Los Angeles, I think I made it into double digits before I knew that half my relatives were Jewish. If he ever observed Passover or Yom Kippur in the slightest, there were certainly no visible signs of it.
Not that he was interested in that sort of networking, but later on he mentioned that he’d been quite aware that there were country clubs in the DC area that wouldn’t have let him join on account of being Jewish. This was in the 1960s and late 1950s.
MisterDancer
As someone who, in prior threads last couple of days, spent a hell of a lot of time talking about atrocities in WWII and the racism in Hollywood, even in my fave TV series?
Man, you are where fun goes to die.
I’ll also say it this way — I’ve been both that “little scowly brown girl” (well, guy, in my case) AND Ken, at various points in my life. As I matured, listened to people, and tried to become an adult in a world where there’s no real map to, say, manhood? Well, this movie’s themes spoke to me.
The message that one’s Mom might be trying to connect with you thru play? Hits hard as fuck when you lose your Mom way too early, like I did. I never felt that the movie was trying to say that Sasha was 100% wrong. I took away that those are, in fact, somewhat valid, and very much parallel the Matell CEO stuff in the movie. Both are looking at what Ruth wrought and how it got reshaped and torqued in our culture, over time.
What’s ironic is that yes, there are valid criticisms of BARBIE. It is a corpo cash grab, is one, to be certain! But it’s far from a soulless one. It’s one where the creators certainly put a lot of thought and effort and heart into it.
And we, as a culture, need to come to terms with those two seemingly polar opposites being more and more part of our cultural landscape.
Matt McIrvin
@Viva BrisVegas:
While I see the point, I also get really uncomfortable with this type of justification for targeting civilians–it reminds me of Osama bin Laden arguing that since the US is a democracy, American civilians actually bear more responsibility for their government’s actions than in these totalitarian regimes, so they’re legitimate targets.
That said, by the end of World War II, mass bombing of civilians was already an accepted tactic on all sides.
Geminid
Barbie and Oppenheimer have won audiences in Turkiye as well. Ragip Soylu (@ragipsoylu) gave the English translation of a Tweet by Turkish “Digital and Media News” reporter Bosuna Tiklama:
eversor
Meh, on this one the Japanese attacked us it was not the other way around. They attacked us and we bombed the ever living fuck out of them. That’s how war goes. Don’t want to get bombed, don’t bomb someone else. Fuck them.
There is the other matter that Japan was brutal to an extent that we don’t talk about to everyone around them. Ask any of the Pacific Nations they terrorized how they feel about the nuking of Japan. You’ll find they are all very much for it.
Then there is the issue that we did rebuild Japan and have great relations with them now. Japan loves us, and we love Japan, despite that whole sorry period of history. They obviously forgave us, we can forgive ourselves. Despite the nuking Japan is a massive win for the US. Nobody outside of American tankies and Japanese “restore the emperor” right wing imperialists is hung up about that whole sad and sorry tale. Nobody cares anymore. Japan is a massive success as far as these things go and love American stuff. And now Netflix is full of anime and Nintendo and Sony are loved brands, sushi is loved, ramen is everywhere. Let the past go. Shit happened and everyone was an asshole. Oh well.
eversor
@Ruckus:
I’d like to hear more on this as I have a soft spot for plastic little men to play the table top war games.
Rusty
@dmsilev: I came to mention The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, so thank you for putting it early in the discussion. I still think it has the best narrative writing on modern physics that has ever been produced. When I was a high school physics teacher many years ago I would read parts of it to my students. I agree that it also has an excellent description of what happened to both cities and their residents when they were bombed. As for the discussion on the justification for dropping the bombs, I think reading all of the Making of the Atomic Bomb is a good start, it gives the history which is important for understanding the decisions. It talks about the ferocity of the defense of Okinawa, and that civilians committed suicide off cliffs to avoid being occupied. There was a belief that the defense of the Japanese islands would be at least as intense and there would be significant American casualties (although I know there is disagreement over what the estimates were at the time). We also can’t discount that other than one test in a desert, no one had seen the actual effects of the bomb. The country was war weary and wanted it done. Finally for myself and how I view the bombs, I don’t remember if it was in the book or I read it somewhere else, a comment from the time around the decision. Who was going to tell that the family of a soldier killed taking Japan that we had a weapon that could well end the war but we decided not to use it.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: I’ve read that American Army officers surveying Gemanies devastating cities were of the opinion that the bombings were a waste. They did not see any tangible advantages gained by the destruction, and probably wished the Air Force Corps had been sent fewer B-17s and more P-47s.
There was extensive study of the effectiveness of strategic bombing carried out after the war. It was called the Strategic Bombing Survey, or something similar. I read that one conclusion reached regarding Japan was that a concerted attack on the railroad bridges and tunnels carrying coal to Japan’s industrial areas would have brought its economy to its needs.
Instead, the US bombed civilian population centers, as the US and even more so the British did in Germany. That was just pointless vindictivness. We see in the experiences of Ukraine in this century and Great Britain in the last that such a barbaric strategy will not break a country’s will to fight- even less so, I think, when a populace was ruled by totalitarian regimes like Germany’s and Japan’s..
Nettoyeur
@Ihop: Yup. The Second Sino-Japanese war and related stuff in Asia killed ~20M Asians, mostly, Chinese….roughly on a scale with Soviet losses in the war with Nazi Germany. After the Dooittle raid on Tokyo, which inflicted very modest physical damage but had large pschological impact, the Japanese military killed ~250K Chinese civilians in reprisals n the region where Doolittle’s US flyers landed. Japanese fascism had a lot in common with the Nazis.
Nettoyeur
@Redshift: Prediction wa 500K to 1 M US casualties, and far more on Japanese side. Battle of Okinawa killed ~15K US and ~230K Japanese military and civilians.
Nettoyeur
@p.a.: I have lived and wirked in Japan. Much of the land outside the big cities is steeply mountains, connected by winding roads which were dirt paths in the 1940s. In the Pacific island war, the Japanese fought to the last man, with huge death rates. And survivors hid out in jungles and caves for years. The Japanese people are brave, tenacious and self sacrifiicing to this day. US experts expected that resistance to a conventional invasion would last well into the 1950s.
Nettoyeur
@Suzanne: When I lived in Japan in the 1980s, there was a Japanese history professor who published an essay every August 6 about how the atomic bombs saved many million Japanese lives that would have been lost had the Allies invaded instead.
On August 14-15, 1945, after the bombongs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as the Emperor was preparing to announce the surrender (it had been recorded, just in case), some young militarist offucers the Japanese Army attempted a coup to prevent the Emperor from giving the speech of surrender which referred directly to the power of the bombs. The threat was real….the chamberlain hid borh the Emperor and the recording of the speech in secret spaces in the palace. The coup failed, the rebels committed suicide and the surrender went forward. This episode, called Kyujo Incident, illustrates just how committed the Japanese could have been had the war continued.
schrodingers_cat
@Nettoyeur: Can you recommend a good book on the Pacific theater.
schrodingers_cat
@sab: I have heard some horror stories from a Japanese friend of Korean ancestry. She said that her family is still not considered Japanese even though they have lived in Japan for several generations now.
NotMax
@eversor
Overselling the product there, bub. At least when it comes to this household.
;)
Nettoyeur
@dmsilev: I AM a physicist, and I approve this message.
schrodingers_cat
For the record I have nothing against leftists nor I do hate them more than I hate Rs. I hate no one. I just have little to no expectations from Rs so I don’t see any point talking about them. I do have somewhat higher standards for those ostensibly on our side.
Connor
@NotMax:
Or when nice Jewish boys William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy played a gentile space captain and an alien first officer? (Sheesh, couldn’t they get a real Vulcan? I mean, seriously.)
Cacti
@Ruckus: Yes, mass production of plastics has been wonderful for the planet and is definitely, and in no way polluting the fuck out of it because it never biodegrades. 😉
PJ
@Suzanne: Well, it’s taught in high school (at least when I was there, more than 30 years ago), and I’ve never met an American who wasn’t aware of the Japanese casualties of the atomic bombs.
But, as you also know, this was a war. It’s terrible that civilians died in WWII, but they put an end to the war. (Yes, I know there’s still debate about this, but scholarship from the last 25 years is pretty conclusive, in my opinion.) And many, many people died in the war. It’s estimated that 100 – 200,000 civilians died in the firebombing of Tokyo. Over 200,000 people died in the fighting on Okinawa, with estimates around 100,000 for Okinawan civilians. The Pacific War was brutal, whether it was fought with conventional weapons or atomic bombs.
PJ
@Major Major Major Major: You might want to read up on the scholarship.https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2022/05/02/did-the-japanese-offer-to-surrender-before-hiroshima-part-1/
Hob
@Cacti: Impressive how, after being corrected by someone with firsthand knowledge on your claim that Barbies were made in sweatshops, you instantly pretend that your complaint was about plastic being bad.
Paul in KY
@Dmbeaster: They were supposed to hit Kokura on number 2.
Roberto el oso
@NotMax: Just to tie your reference to John Wayne and The Conqueror back to Oppenheimer, one of the film’s principal locations (Snow Canyon) had been used for extensive A-bomb testing only the year before, and there’s speculation that the various cancers which eventually killed Wayne and Susan Hayward and the director Dick Powell and close to half of the cast and crew were the result of lingering radiation.
https://www.wideopencountry.com/how-did-john-wayne-die/ https://www.wideopencountry.com/how-did-john-wayne-die/
JerrytheMacGuy
@schrodingers_cat: For the Pacific War, I would recommend Ian Toll’s trilogy (“Pacific Crucible”, “The Conquering Tide”, and “Twilight of the Gods”). For the last months of the war in Japan, read Richard B. Frank’s “Downfall: The End of the Japanese Imperial Empire”. For a study of the Emperor, read Herbert Bix’s “Hirohito and the Making of Imperial Japan”.
And, as mentioned by many above, the best book on the A-Bomb is Richard Rhodes’ “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”. His follow-up on the H-Bomb, “Dark Sun”, also chronicles Oppenheimer’s problematic post-war political life, his opposition to Teller’s lobbying to develop “The Super” (the Hydrogen Bomb), and the battle with Lewis Strauss and others.
There are a number of good books about Truman published in the last 30 years.
Cacti
@Hob: Barbies are mass produced at four overseas Mattel factories. Two in China, one in Malaysia, and one in Indonesia.
http://www.designlife-cycle.com/barbie-dolls
Are you usually so smug when you’re dead wrong? Must be a Boomer.
JerrytheMacGuy
Some random thoughts:
The Manhattan Project was created in fear that the Germans would develop the bomb first. Had it been completed in time, A-Bombs would have been dropped on Berlin and other cities and strategic targets. Fallout over Europe would have been catastrophic
Oppenheimer was a secular Jew. Does it matter if a gentile actor portrays him?
I have read a number of books about Truman in recent years. He was perhaps the best president of my lifetime – although I was born in the first week of January 1953 and he was only in office for some 15 more days! In any case, Truman had no regrets about using the Bomb on Japan, but I read somewhere that he was angry that the Army Air Force Brass dropped the second bomb on Nagasaki without first informing him. It appears he wanted to wait a bit longer for the Japanese government to assess the damage and threats of further atomic destruction.
The Pentagon was divided on invading Japan The Army was for it, the Navy wasn’t so sure. The Navy was incurring serious damage to fleet from Kamikaze attacks, but felt that Japan could be squeezed into surrender by a naval blockade.
The Air Force was running out of cities to bomb. The focus was turning to rail yards and other vital logistical targets. Japan faced severe famine in the winter of 1945-46 if the war continued.
My Dad was an ambulance driver, serving in New Guinea and the Philippines. He never talked about the things he witnessed in the war. He was among the first U.S. Army soldiers to occupy Japan. He saw firsthand how the Japanese people had suffered through the end of the war. He would have had good reasons to hate the Japanese people, but he never did. I do not recall him ever saying anything racist about them. When my brother was drafted into the Army and assigned as a medic at an American base in Japan, he thought it was great. He even went to a travel agency to see how much it would be for my Mom and me to join him on a trip there. Unfortunately, in 1969, it was cost-prohibited.
I went to school with two Japanese-American kids. We started kindergarten in Fall 1958, only 13 years after the war. We were all good friends and I still follow one on Facebook. I learned later from him that kids in junior high and high school gave him a bad time and he was in a number of fights. That shocked me, but since the high school was in a redneck area, I guess I shouldn’t have been.
Finally, go see “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” on the big screen. It’s much better than the reviews say. It’s great to spend some time with Indy – and for the last time! But best of all, it has Nazis as the bad guys! We live in a perilous era in which too many people don’t know or have forgotten how dangerous Fascism was and is. It’s a nice to see Nazis get their well-deserved justice again.
Major Major Major Major
@Geminid:
But mommmm, they started it, and anyway everybody was doing it so that makes it okay.
Thank god the secretary of war was a weeb or we’d have destroyed Kyoto too, which was on the bombing list specifically because the intended civilian victims would really be able to appreciate the devastation.
raven
@Cacti: Hey asshole, crawl back wherever the fuck you’ve been hiding.
Cacti
@raven: Go rant at some passing clouds about ‘Nam, gramps.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
@lowtechcyclist:
NotMax
@JerrytheMacGuy
Probably played by actors who aren’t really Nazis. How dare they cast a film like that?
//
Another Scott
@JerrytheMacGuy: Thanks for your comments. It’s appreciated.
I don’t have too many stories to relate.
My dad was born in 1935 and one of his first vivid memories was hearing about the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
One of my great uncles on my mom’s side was in on the Normandy landing. He never married and spent the rest of his life on the farm with his mom. He, of course, never talked about his experiences in the war because people didn’t do that back then…
Thanks again.
Cheers,
Scott.
Elie
I love y’all but its obvious to me that many — maybe even MOST of you have not seen the film.
It is a complex and profound movie about where we were — and now where we ARE in the horrible fusion of science, corporatism and politics. It cannot be appreciated — much less understood without seeing the damned thing.
Not sayin at all that we shouldnt have a variety of thought and opinion about nuclear bombs, right wing politics etc, but this was a pretty profound thought piece about the shit we are in now — its actually a pretty effective horror film about that —
But hey, keep arguing about whatever you want. I encourage all of good faith and courage — to go see it and think about our sorry asses and how we are going to survive…
More superficially — fantastic acting, writing, cinematography. The women’s roles were small but very powerful… Oppenheimer’s wife brought it…
Anyway — my two cents. I may need to see it again