TV & Movies

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).

======

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 Wind Rises)

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