2023-08-01 14:10:18
Oppenheimer is an American biography par excellence. He may not take into account the biographical origins with regard to his hero, Oppenheimer: he does not care about his childhood, beginnings, and youth, nor about the last stage of his life, but he depicts a chapter in America’s history.
Christopher Nolan’s film about the father of the atomic bomb: “Oppenheimer” America’s naughty consciousness
Contrary to what might come to mind at first glance, Christopher Nolan’s new movie “Oppenheimer”, which is filling halls these days and occupying critics, in the United States, and many Western and Arab capitals, is not a political movie! What concerns the British-American director, author of the famous “Batman” trilogy (“Batman Begins”/ 2005, “The Black Knight”/ 2008, “The Dark Knight Rises”/ 2012) is, as usual, the fates of superheroes or exceptional ones, coming from the collective imagination or from History, those who stand face to face with their fate, engage in a struggle with reality, which is a struggle between good and evil in the final outcome.Of course, “good and evil” in the Hollywood way…
Oppenheimer is an American biography par excellence. He may not take into account the biographical origins with regard to his hero, Oppenheimer: he does not care about his childhood, beginnings, and youth, nor about the last stage of his life, after his exclusion from the advisory committee of the “Atomic Energy Commission” and his destruction by the American establishment. But it depicts a chapter in America’s biography, and gives us an accurate and honest picture of the United States at a crucial moment in its history: the end of World War II, the beginning of the nuclear arms race, the rise of McCarthyism, and the Cold War.
It is America as we know it, obsessed with obsession with world domination, with its colonial capitalist face, looking suspiciously at critical ideas, afraid of the “bogeyman” of communism, and trampling on humanity under the pretext that “if it does not do it, others will!” Against the same background, the left’s aborted biography, the moment of eliminating the communist experiment in America, and the “witch-hunting” policy that pursued, prosecuted, punished, isolated, and destroyed a wide range of American elites, during the time of McCarthyism.
All of the above will remain in the background, as the scenario leaves the viewer with the option to stop at it and come up with political conclusions. But the film is preoccupied with restoring that unique, rich, contradictory, and sometimes ambiguous personality that is skillfully played by actor Cillian Murphy: he is Julius Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967). Brilliant chemist and physicist, pioneer of quantum mechanics, and scientist who has been called the “father of the atomic bomb.”
Despite his leftist leanings and “suspicious” political ties, Oppenheimer was chosen to take over the task of managing the “Manhattan Project” in 1942, and gathered around him dozens of the most important scientists in America and the world, inside an entire city built especially for them in Los Alamos, in the New Mexico desert. Hundreds of scientists, helped by thousands of people, will work together in this desert to get the atomic bomb before Nazi Germany. The race will become later with the Soviets, of course! It will not stop despite the various international agreements to limit nuclear proliferation. And how the film looks today, in a time of “nuclear” dangers threatening the world once again, as a result of the Atlantic war against Russia in Ukraine.
Oppenheimer hoped to suffice with the nuclear tests, provided that the first experimental bomb would be dropped, thus resolving the psychological war with Japan, and pushing it to surrender. But what happened is otherwise. The euphoria of the success of the Los Alamos experiments soon gave way to a painful remorse after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the time, America justified their fear of the need to end the war with Japan, and to put an end to the casualties on the battlefields. What are the two hundred thousand victims of this barbarism? What are the terrible destruction, and the wounds that have not healed to this day in Japan?
A Christopher Nolan film haunted by the moral qualms with which Oppenheimer was raised. The film’s question is the question that will haunt the film’s protagonist for the rest of his life: What is the moral responsibility of scientists when political regimes, states, and dominant parties use their inventions and discoveries to sabotage the world and destroy humanity? Didn’t Einstein himself warn the world about disasters and evil uses of science?
Robert Oppenheimer will live the terrible guilt complex, after the end of the war, and he will consider himself responsible for the atrocity of Hiroshima, and will strongly oppose the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb, which is a hundred times greater than the atomic bomb. This position opposing the hydrogen bomb is the “guilt” he committed in the eyes of his “executors”, and on the basis of which he will be “tried”, in 1954 at the height of the rise of McCarthyism and the “Committee on Anti-American Activities”.
This man who “made the nuclear bomb” and changed the path of humanity, after being a national hero, will find himself in the dock! His leftist past was exhumed, and he was accused of spying for the Soviet Union. Note that Oppenheimer did not adhere to the American Communist Party, unlike his first girlfriend, wife and brother. But he carried left-wing ideas, attended communist circles, and provided aid to the victims of the Spanish Civil War!
It was not a trial of Oppenheimer in the literal sense, but rather a “listening committee” that would eventually strip him of his post and remove him from the atomic body. Despite her conviction that he is a “good citizen”! Of course, the verdict was issued before the start of the hearings, as President Eisenhower (ruled between 1953 and 1961) himself was the one who demanded the exclusion of this world, which is shackled by its moral questions! Thousands of pages of deliberations and testimonies before the “Inquisition Court”, which revealed the man’s life and history, were relied upon, in 1964, by the German writer Heiner Capehart to compose a political documentary play entitled “The Case of Robert Oppenheimer”. In the same year, it was directed by the major international theaters of the twentieth century: Irwin Piscator in Berlin, Jean Villar in Paris, and Giorgio Streller in Milan.
And if Oppenheimer inspired filmmakers, playwrights, and writers from different angles, Nolan was fascinated by the personality, its internal struggles, and its contradictions (utopian and ambitious at the same time, genius and naive…), more than his interest in prosecuting “American democracy.” The film is built on three parallel and intersecting narrative levels:
Oppenheimer’s arrival at the Manhattan Project and the development of the bomb at Los Alamos.
– Accounting sessions for the head of the “Atomic Energy Commission” Admiral Louis Strauss (represented by: Robert Downey Jr). The self-made millionaire who started out as a shoe salesman hired Oppenheimer in 1947, at the height of his fame, as director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. Since then, the former shoe-salesman with the sensitive Igo seems to have developed a terrible inferiority complex towards the snappy scientist. Thus, he incited, slandered, and leaked his file, with motives of personal and ideological revenge.
Finally, of course, Oppenheimer’s trial, during which details of his personal life, career path, and positions are expressed.
Christopher Nolan sometimes exaggerates in portraying characters and depicting situations with some “affectation”, and repeatedly resorts to visual effects that explain to the viewer physical equations, and the processes of nuclear fusion and fission. However, he seems to admire his main character, clinging to her, and her presence does not diminish throughout the three hours that are the duration of the film.
A unique character who requires exceptional treatment on screen, Oppenheimer is a typical American hero in the end, hero and victim. He accepts his fate submissively, when his star fades, and he returns as a professor at Princeton University… until Admiral Strauss’s manipulations are exposed, and he is rehabilitated politically, so the US government awards him in 1963 the “Enrico-Fermi Prize.” The optimistic scientist in the cap and overcoat is before us a weary man, devoid of ambitions and illusions, preoccupied with unanswerable questions. What is the point of reconsideration? Oppenheimer will remain America’s naughty consciousness!
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