As I sat watching the Hollywood blockbuster Oppenheimer all I could think of was Edward Said. In his famous essay “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims,” Said argued that there was no way to understand the ideology of Zionism----the idea of Jewish racial supremacy---without examining the experience of those who suffered from it, namely Palestinians like himself.
A minor criticism is that Nolan has this tendency to write overly serious scripts where he feels the need to say some things instead of telling them when the latter would be more effective. For instance in the ‘Man of Steel’, which he wrote (bad movie imo), we see a young (child) Clark Kent reading Plato’s Republic (which opens with the question: ‘What is justice?’, which is smacks of superficial profundity, as you can just explore that more properly through the narrative and visual language of the film. In Oppenheimer, they make sure you know he was not just a brilliant theoretical physicist, but also read modernist literature (Eliot’s masterpiece, The Waste Land), listened to modern classical music (forget who; Stravinsky), looked at Picassos and read Sanskrit (true and impressive honestly). It was fine but it could have been more naturally incorporated, whereas here is felt a bit forced.
My main, and I think also the most serious, criticism I would have, is that they did not actually show the consequences of nuclear war. They show that Oppenheimer is a hypocrite, and he suffers both from pride (a desire to play God), but also a moral hypocrite: unlike God, he cannot look at his works. If he wants to take credit for creation, he should also take responsibility for destruction. If Nolan had really wanted to make a film about nuclear horror, instead of Oppenheimer’s tragedy, or if he had wanted to expand the tragedy out from the subjective sphere of one man to the socially objective consequences of his actions, then the films honestly shouldn’t have ended with the surreal vision of the world burning, but with 10 minutes of actual footage from the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima. That’s how you provoke the audience. CW obviously, but if anyone wants to see a film that actually does this, check out: Hiroshima Mon Amour.
As for not showing more detail explaining that the reason for dropping the bomb was one of anti-Soviet Cold-War logic, which is ofc correct, I don’t think you can force this into a biography without making it seem forced and clunky. There was not really a way for Oppenheimer to have that kind of paper proof of the internal workings of the state on hand. That obviously raises the question of how you manage to incorportate info which is important like that. Like maybe you have a digression from his story but I’m not sure how to do that well.
By-the-bye, by any technical measure, and in terms of visual craftmanship, the film is a marvel. I honestly can’t remember seeing a film recently at a similar scale. This is one reason why many people, and not only people with casual interest in movies, flock to see Nolan’s films. That might not speak to you, for whatever reason, which is fine, but this is a legitimate thing for someone to talk about when they liked the movie. People liking things because they find them visually beautiful is natural. This doesn’t mean I think it is the most visually beautiful or movie of all time, but it is good to let people know that if they want to go see it just for that then that’s fine. The sound-design was also the most impressive I can remember in a film, although that might be a bias of having seen it in cinema. The narrative structure and cinematography were very, very impressive imo; why would be a more technical and aesthetic discussion. For instance, the visual harmonies between his meditation on internal atomic structure, the deaths of stars as they collapse as based on chain reactions, and the culmination in the construction of the atomic bomb, also based on uncontrollable chain reactions, extending metaphorically into the uncontrolable social and political consequences of nuclear weapons, was beautiful imo. If you watch films for cinematographic, superficial as they may be, then I think the film is worth watching. It’s also worth watching as an exploration of alienation of a scientist in the form of the fact that no matter how deep his scientific knowledge, it does not allow him to control the consequences of his knowledge.
I should add that I’m biased as I’m a sucker for stories about the wonders and horrors of science as well as history.
Also, my brothers and sisters in Christ: you presumably knew, or could have known, that the film is 3 hours long. That’s on you. Some people (myself included) love long films. Sometimes you want a longer run-time in order to flesh out the story, especially if it’s an epic or biopic. If you were bored that’s a shame but the people I went to see it with were pretty gripped from start to finish.
People malding because they discussed his romantic and sex life is really weird. Like, yh, so what? It’s a biography. That aspect of people’s lives is actually very important and tells you a lot about them, and it says a lot about people’s media literacy that they didn’t catch, even as communists, the significance of how the problematic aspects of his relationships to both women and communists interwove there.
On people wanting to see more of the (presumably technical) details manufacture of the bomb: okay how do you actually do that, narrative-wise? You have to jettison pretty much anything else in the plot unless u want a 5 hour movie. And even if you did it, guess what, you will almost certainly just be left with a something that for most people is a snore-fest and which would only be of interest to nerds like you, me and couple others.
It’s a drama. It’s true that there were many dramatic events in its development but it’s not clear how to integrate that in the script. An actual good script in this kind of movie which is tightly-structured in terms of its narrative risks having its tempo, speed and the developments of its themes upset if another distinct storyline is introduced without reason. Not saying it couldn’t be done, or that it isn’t important, but saying that this is, by definition, intrinsically more worthy of screen time that his personal relations with his communist lovers, is pretty weird and comes off as puritanical, or ignorant of romantic love and how it can feature in biographies, to seems to me.
In any case the technical details of atomic weaponry is not the focus of the film, that’s for textbooks. The focus was on his tragedy, the philosophical connections between his scientific thought and his life, and his personal, romantic and political faults and betrayals.
i actually would be an Oppenheimer movie defender if there had been a third-act pivot to reality, even though i share your criticisms but with much more umbrage and lack of respect for nolan.
i don’t care what sort of ‘technical achievement’ the effects department created for their Bomb Graphics in the film, actual nuclear footage is terrifying not least because it’s real
I don’t really know what you mean by ’ Oppenheimer defender’. I don’t like Nolan as a person. It’s not a personality contest. I’m watching a film and honestly while I’m watching I’m not thinking about Nolan’s personality, i’m thinking about the quality of the film I’m watching. I also don’t necessarily care much about technical achievement for the sake of technical achievement in the context of a movie. It’s justified aesthetically by how it is used. In this film is was used expertly (not simply by Nolan, but by the massive team of workers to made this film) with the sound design to try and capture some of the sick thrill that Oppenheimer experiences as he accesses ‘divine power’. If you didn’t feel that that’s fine, but it is there.
i’d be the Oppenheimer defender, the suggestion you made is one i liked so much it’d overcome the intense ill will i feel toward other parts of the film
you don’t have to self-flagellate & justify about why you liked it, i’m not accusing you of anything and if i was, why would it matter if you liked it? it’s freak behavior to act like appreciating a work of art is an automatic endorsement of every bad thing about a creator and every problematic element of the art
Okay I think we just misunderstood each other. i wasnt suggesting you think that.
lmao self-flagellation the last of my fetishes.
I aint saying that appreciating it is an automatic endorsement of their persons. That’s nonsensically reductive. I’m saying the opposite. Miles Davis was one of the greatest American artists of the 20th century and also a massive dick.
I’m not even a big Nolan fan but this film was a fascinating watch.
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I don’t know how you got any of that from what I’ve said. I expect nothing of most Americans. As I’ve said in this thread, I think they might have been ways to to incorporate alot of other important points in the film. The main big issues are (i) the absence of cold war and soviet-competition policy for the dropping of the bomb in particular, and this could have been brought up by Szilard’s reports of his meeting with Stimpson, tho again i’m not sure how you would put that into the framework of the narrative, being a biography, and (ii) the fact that the actual human consequences of the bombs being dropped werent shown.
But it also made clear that the anti-Communists were scum, that Truman was scum, that the choice over whether to commit mass-murder was a political calculation. At a certain point the onus is on the fucking illiterate, cultureness American to not be a fucking idiots. There are few more annoyingly American things than demanding that all the world dumb-down their culture so that Americans can get some light, easily-digestable entertainment. This movie is still very much on the ‘hollywood entertainment’ side of things. I don’t care whether chuds came out of this convinced. It
I have no idea why you would think that I’m suggesting that fascists came out radicalized by this. They wouldn’t have come out like that no matter how communist the movie is. I’m not talking about revolution, let alone being insane enough to suggest that subtle communist sympathy will turn people communist.
I’m also not suggesting that Nolan is subtle. He’s like one of the least subtle guys in existence. No illusions here over his politics. He’s a lib with a penchant for big historical figures.