This English-language essay is an abridged translation and adaptation, consisting of sections 10 to 16 of a 16 part Japanese-language essay that appeared in the July 2024 edition of literary magazine Shincho. In the omitted first half (sections 1-9), Christopher Nolan’s previous films are analyzed via the concepts of causality and time, and a detailed argument is presented for the significance of Oppenheimer within Nolan’s filmography.
essay by Keiichiro Hirano
translated by Eli K.P. William
10) Peculiar Causality: The Case of Oppenheimer
The theatrical release of Oppenheimer in Japan at the end of March 2024 was much later than elsewhere in the world—more than eight months, for example, after its premieres in Paris, London, and New York. Now that Japanese audiences are finally able to watch the film, many have been left feeling vaguely uneasy regarding its moral and political stance.
If we are to consider the ethical character of this work, two distinctions are crucial. First, we must distinguish between the film Oppenheimer and the biography from which it was adapted, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Second, we need to distinguish between Robert J. Oppenheimer the historical figure and the person of Christopher Nolan the auteur filmmaker.
The film Oppenheimer centers around a project—a recurring plot motif found in Nolan’s other works, including Inception, Interstellar, and Tenet. The project is in this case, of course, the Manhattan Project. The story is composed of two alternating narratives that both progress chronologically from some time in the past toward their respective fictional presents.
The first titled “1. Fission”is in color and depicts the wartime development of the atomic bomb. The fictional present is the scene of the infamous Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) security clearing hearing that took place in the America of 1954, where Oppenheimer is being questioned due to the machinations of Lewis Strauss. The story takes the form of Oppenheimer reflecting on his life in order to defend himself at the hearing. It is told from the third person omniscient point of view (this is sometimes misunderstood, so it is worth emphasizing that it is not third person limited).
The second narrative, titled “2. Fusion”,is in black and white and surrounds the postwar development of the hydrogen bomb. It primarily concerns Strauss, and the present is the confirmation hearing required for his appointment as Secretary of Commerce in the Eisenhower administration. Here Strauss describes his relationship with Oppenheimer, again in the form of a reminiscence.
Together, the twin narratives depict both the triumph and tragedy of Oppenheimer, in keeping with the subtitle of the biography that was Nolan’s inspiration for the film. Oppenheimer’s triumph was the Manhattan Project, while his tragedy was the AEC hearing.
In the first half of the essay, I discussed Nolan’s technique of thematizing the peculiar origin of events through reversals in time. The peculiar origin of Oppenheimer’s tragedy, as spelled out in the original biography, is the charge trumped-up by Strauss that he was a Soviet agent. Since the accusation was spurious, Oppenheimer’s resulting banishment from public office ought not to have occurred under any normal chain of cause and effect.
Historically speaking, the conflict between Strauss and Oppenheimer stemmed from a disagreement over whether it was right to develop the hydrogen bomb. The film, however, emphasizes Strauss’ grudge over Oppenheimer’s mockery of his opinion at a hearing on banning the export of radioisotopes. This narrative choice made by Nolan ensures that Oppenheimer’s climactic expulsion from public office accentuates the ludicrous origin of the dispute between the two men.
Strauss was a government administrator who had worked his way up the bureaucratic ladder. The biography describes him, in concordance with his presentation in the film, as a detestable figure. He is “pathologically ambitious,” and “self-righteous to a fault, he remembered every slight.” Quoting a pair of columnists, the biography also attributes to Strauss a “desperate need to condescend.” The character of Strauss bears comparison to Joker in The Dark Knight, insofar as both are memorably performed villains who contrast well with their respective protagonists.
Oppenheimer’s triumph such as it is, the Manhattan Project, resulted in the creation of the atomic bomb and its use on Japan. According to his biographers, “Oppenheimer understood that one couldn’t uninvent the weapon.” This is exactly what Nolan meant with the line in Tenet, “What’s happened, happened.”
So, what was the origin of the Manhattan Project? Intelligence to the effect that the Nazis were developing nuclear weapons. Learning of this threat was, in other words, the Inception of the project for the American government. Scientists successfully lobbied the government to begin developing nuclear weapons for the purpose of winning the war with Nazi Germany. The end result was the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan. The relationship between the point of departure—the desire to beat the Nazis to the nuclear punch—and the destination—the nuking of Japan—is almost as peculiar as the climactic murder born of delusion in Memento. What is important here for our purposes is the historical origin of the Manhattan Project in Nazi fears and the sincere attempt and ultimate failure of atomic bomb survivors to understand the reason America chose—as if acting out a Nolan style narrative curveball—to target Japan instead,
Although this would not become clear until after the war, it turns out that there was no solid basis for anticipating Nazi success in developing the atomic bomb during WWII. Werner Heisenberg claimed that he had implied to Niels Bohr as early as 1941 that the Nazis were bound to fail (while Bohr, for his part, thought Heisenberg had meant the opposite). Moreover, the scientists at Los Alamos were able to infer from an atomic bomb diagram sketched by Heisenberg and delivered by Bohr that the Nazi nuclear program was floundering. All of this is depicted in the film. By the end of the year, America would learn from intelligence sources that the Nazi program had hit a dead end.
American scientists were nevertheless driven out of paranoia to persist in development of the bomb. But by the end of 1944, six months after the Normandy landings, an even more definitive turn of events had become manifest: the war in Europe was almost over. Now some of the scientists at Los Alamos, who had only signed up for the purpose of defeating the Nazis, began to express doubts about the rightness of using “the gadget” on humans. If the Nazis were to surrender, the project and the immense funding poured into it would lose their raison d’être. The debate between scientists over this issue is powerfully dramatized in the film. A few of them, including David Hill, gathered signatures to explicitly oppose deployment of the bomb.
It was at this crucial juncture that Oppenheimer, the project leader, eloquently and persuasively insisted that the atomic bomb should be used in the war. He did everything in his power to advance a narrative that, through a peculiar non sequitur, linked the origin of the project in defeating the Nazis to the plan to bomb Japan.
Regarding this twisted logic, the ethical viewpoints of Nolan and Oppenheimer appear to be at odds. The result is that, even as the film appears superficially to depict the triumph and tragedy of the so-called American Prometheus and to thereby satisfy the expectations of the audience, it simultaneously begins, from the perspective of the director, to present Oppenheimer as a problematic rather than sympathetic figure and to introduce criticism in numerous places that is notably harsher than that found in the biography.
11) Why Drop the Bomb on Japan?
The political and ethical debate between Oppenheimer and the other Manhattan Project scientists was shaped by certain arguments advanced by Bohr, who all of them, including Oppenheimer, revered.
Until Bohr arrived at Los Alamos, the scientists participating in development of the bomb had been narrowly focused on the specific objective of victory over the Nazis; it had not yet fully occurred to them that without any consensus on limits to the use of nuclear weaponry, the advent of such weapons could create “a perpetual menace to human security,” as Bohr wrote in a 1944 memorandum that he shared with Oppenheimer. That is, as unbelievable as it may seem, little thought had been put into the consequences of the bomb appearing on the world stage while prospects of successful development remained uncertain.
The core of Bohr’s thinking on this topic was the notion of an open world. If America maintained a secretive monopoly on nuclear weaponry, it would provoke suspicion and a hostile arm’s race, leading to the recurrence of war. To prevent this, Bohr believed that international management of atomic power through information sharing was essential and that a postwar atomic energy plan had to be established during the war in partnership with the Soviet Union, which was then among the Allies opposed to fascism. His conclusion was that America ought to inform Stalin of the Manhattan Project. Moreover, Bohr thought that nuclear technology should only be used to produce a bomb this one time in history and that, considering the potential for cataclysmic destruction, it should be limited thereafter to constructive purposes such as the generation of atomic energy. Oppenheimer was among those who agreed with and was strongly influenced by this viewpoint even after the war. It was also the thinking behind Soviet spy Theodore Hall’s decision to leak information from Los Alamos to the Soviet Union.
Oppenheimer was concerned that a volatile situation like that Bohr warned of could arise if the war ended while the bomb remained unused and cloaked in military secrecy. For this reason, he initially argued for a bomb test, then shifted to the position that America should deploy the bomb in the war while urging, at a May 31, 1945 meeting, that America must engage in a “free exchange of information” with the Allies concerning peaceful uses of atomic power beforehand so that “our moral position would be greatly strengthened.” Why did Oppenheimer’s opinion change? As he wrote on June 16, 1945, in a short memorandum that summarized the views of a scientific panel, using the bomb during the war would “improve the international prospects, in that they are more concerned with the prevention of war than with the elimination of this specific weapon.”
History has demonstrated this naïve and depressingly optimistic argument to have been, moreover, entirely false. There were those at Los Alamos who continued to adopt Oppenheimer’s earlier stance that a demonstration of the bomb’s power would suffice to induce Japan’s surrender. But Oppenheimer maintained that the profound psychological impact of a nuclear explosion in an urban area would be paramount to achieve this end. Here he arrives at the grotesque extreme of what one might call his idealistic realpolitik pacifism. In a word, Oppenheimer held that to realize perpetual world peace, America ought to act while the opportunity presented itself and demonstrate the efficacy of the bomb on multiple Japanese cities, mass-murdering the residents.
This is likely the stage in Oppenheimer’s thinking at which Nolan took issue. The scenes in the film where Oppenheimer refuses to sign a petition opposing the A-bombing of Japan, persuades the opponents of deployment that the world would never understand until it had witnessed the horror, and reassures government and military officials that this approach was bound to succeed all mark an about face from his depiction as a Superman-like hero to a foolish and arrogant figure. One can imagine a more sympathetic take on the man’s internal struggle, but the director’s intentions appear to have been more critical.
It is worth considering the reason behind this directorial decision.
12) The Cold War and The War on Terror in The Dark Knight Trilogy
Batman Begins, the first film in Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, features a secret society called the League of Shadows, led by Ra’s al Ghul, that argues for saving the world from corruption by purging the corrupt from society. Nolan presents the group as a force of definite evil and as the enemy of Batman, who is on the side of justice.
On its face, this scenario offers nothing more than a frivolous comic book story of good triumphing over evil. In fact, however, it represented a contemporary reality that had been pervaded by a superhero-style rhetoric of good versus evil at least since America launched the Afghanistan and Iraq wars in the early aughts. The Iraq War, in particular, was a truly Nolan-esque phenomenon that exemplifies the peculiarity of origins, beginning as it did with the Inception of false information about the existence of weapons of mass destruction.
Nolan is one of a handful of sincere directors who was willing to confront the era politically and ethically. He did so by adroitly reflecting contemporary reality back at itself via a superhero narrative.
In The Dark Knight Rises, the final installment in the trilogy, the philosophy of Ra’s al Ghul reaches its logical conclusion with a scheme to nuke Gotham City. In his attempt to carry out this urban annihilation, Bane calls himself a “necessary evil”, a phrase that affirms the value of nuclear weaponry, albeit reluctantly. As a matter of course, Batman is the device Nolan employs to resist this catastrophic notion.
However, it was likely not the idea of the destruction of the world that led Nolan to feature nuclear weapons in the film; rather, it was his prior fear of nuclear weapons that lead him to contemplate global destruction. In an interview about Oppenheimer for the NHK TV show Close-up Gendai, Nolan says, “Growing up in the United Kingdom in the 1980s, the fear around nuclear weapons and the proliferation of nuclear weapons was very much part of the culture, something I grew up with . I understand this sentiment well, as I grew up in the 1980s myself. That nuclear weaponry is a symbol of annihilation of a city along with its inhabitants and by extension of the Earth as a whole goes without saying. The model for Ra’s al Ghul appears to be an application of this image to the age of the War on Terror. Thus, the embodiment of The League of Shadow’s theory and praxis in nuclear weapons at the end of the trilogy is inevitable insofar as it reflects the terror of Nolan’s formative experiences.
Oppenheimer’s argument for the necessity of making the world understand terror is a theme interrogated critically in Batman Begins:
Alfred: Why bats, Master Wayne?
Wayne: Bats frightened me. It’s time my enemies shared my dread.
In other words, Bruce Wayne chose to become Batman because bats had given him a formative experience of fear (dread). He overcame this fear and now strikes it into the hearts of his foes. Meanwhile, Ra’s al Ghul wants to ruin Gotham City by transforming reality into a nightmare hallucination and sending the citizenry into a deranged frenzy.
Seeking to achieve peace through fear may be somewhat effective in the real world. However, forcing citizens to endure hellish suffering for the sake of peace is wrong. Nolan depicts the effect of fear as something that we cannot control. In this way he widens the target of his criticism from Ra’s al Ghul to include Batman, who supposedly stands on the side of justice.
If the Dark Knight Trilogy is read as story that fuses the War on Terror characteristic of the aughts with the risk of nuclear annihilation characteristic of the Cold War, Nolan can be seen to problematize Batman more than anything. Nolan is here engaging in genuine reflection on how we ought to situate in our world the extrajudicial violence that Batman employs for the sake of justice, a violence that is, moreover, enabled by weapons developed by private corporations for military purposes.
In the final scene of Batman Begins, Gordon notes the vicious cycle of escalation that Batman’s quest implies: “We start carrying semi-automatics, they buy automatics.” This presents us with a counter-thesis, suggesting that the existence of Batman is what produces criminals like the Joker. The historical Oppenheimer is quoted as likening the American and the Soviet Union to “two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life,” not realizing that the enemy is, in fact, an opposing idea essential for recognition of the self and one’s allies.
The conclusion of The Dark Knight, the second film in the trilogy, is that civil society should not permit extrajudicial violence like that employed by Batman, with Batman bitterly accepting his tarnished reputation and vanishing, leaving behind the mendacious narrative that peace was better protected by his former comrade Harvey Dent who lost his soul to evil. This appears to be a critique of both nuclear weaponry and the violence deployed in the War on Terror. However, Dark Knight Rises depicts Batman’s reluctant return, illustrating the dilemma Nolan faces in his contradictory disillusionment with and hope for vigilante justice. This ambivalence may be part and parcel of the director’s trust in military power and police authority. Nevertheless, Nolan chooses in the climax to once again rid Gotham city of Batman, along with nuclear weapons, through Batman’s own heroic self-sacrifice.
13) Moral Qualms
The historical Oppenheimer’s sense of responsibility was directed always toward the future of the world, never confronting honestly the survivors and the dead of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. This is what prevents us from giving our moral assent to Oppenheimer while allowing us to give it to Nolan, who percieves these failings of his subject.
When the Los Alamos scientists view the footage of the atomic bomb devastation, Nolan has Oppenheimer avert his eyes. Although the biography includes no such detail, it does contain Robert Serber’s description of part of the Nagasaki footage: “I saw a horse grazing. On one side all of its hair was burnt off, the other side was perfectly normal.” Serber went on to remark, in a tone that the biographers describe as “flippant,” that the horse was nonetheless “happily grazing.” Oppenheimer’s response was to scold him for, “giving the impression that the bomb was a benevolent weapon.” If Nolan’s intention had been to depict Oppenheimer’s grappling with a guilty conscience, he might have adapted this exchange into a scene where Oppenheimer rises in annoyance to chew out Serber for his remark. The director, however, consciously chose to leave the exchange out of the film, thereby neglecting to emphasize this psychological struggle within Oppenheimer’s character development. Instead, he has the man turn his eyes in silence from the reality of nuclear destruction, an act that can be taken as a symbol of Oppenheimer’s decision to refrain from visiting either Hiroshima or Nagasaki on his eventual visit to Japan.
There is obviously no way for anyone to know Oppenheimer’s heart of hearts. He sometimes hinted at his complicated feelings and refused to allow them to be simplified as if that would compromise his self-respect. However, to borrow a line from Batman Begins: “It’s not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me.” Is̉ this not, perhaps, what Nolan himself believes?
In exploring Oppenheimer’s sense of responsibility toward those who died in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Nolan effectively contrasts it with the scientist’s reaction to the suicide of his former lover, Jean Tatlock. Guilt over loved ones whose death is the fault of the protagonist is a familiar theme in Nolan’s filmography, appearing in Memento, Insomnia, The Prestige, The Dark Knight Trilogy, and Inception. When Nolan’s Oppenheimer receives news of Tatlock’s death, he breaks down and weeps in the forest, displaying more emotion than anywhere else in the film. While the biography does not have Oppenheimer’s wife Katherine present for this incident, in the movie she tells him:
You don’t get to commit the sin and then have us all feel sorry for you that it had consequences. You pull yourself together. You know, people here depend on you.
This line is Nolan’s contribution. It functions to foreshadow questions about Oppenheimer’s responsibility for the development and use of the bomb that emerge later in the film.
Interestingly, the biography does not present Katherine Oppenheimer—or Kitty as she was known—as a likable person. Although the couple were said to have been in a relationship of deep mutual dependence, with Kitty always standing by her husband as his understanding ally, she is described as an alcoholic who possessed a strong desire for fame, an irritable temperament, more cunning than intelligence, and an acid tongue that caused frequent disputes with friends, on top of having serious problems in her relationships to their children. (Oppenheimer was a similarly inadequate father).
While there is one scene suggesting mental instability akin to postpartum depression, her depiction in the film overall is nearly the opposite of that in the biography, transforming her into the sort of strong-willed, attractive, and unyielding female character that is common to Nolan’s films. There are a number of scenes where she demonstrates these qualities. When Oppenheimer has been backed into a corner by Strauss and is behaving with inscrutable passivity, she attempts to rouse her husband with the line “Why won’t you fight?” When she is summoned for questioning at the AEC hearing, her responses are bold, smart, and defiant. Finally, when Edward Teller, a former colleague of Oppenheimer’s who had betrayed him, holds out his hand to her, she refuses to shake it. This last move is important to the story because it provides the audience with catharsis at the end, where the protagonist Oppenheimer— who actually did lose the will to stand up for himself at the “kanagaroo court” AEC hearing—is unable to rise to a dramatically satisfying final action of his own.
However, although Kitty defends Oppenheimer and expresses her indignation at his unfair loss of social position, there is not a single beat in the film in which she appears worried about the ethical problems surrounding development of the atomic bomb. Viewed in this light, her line to Oppenheimer about “sin” after Tatlock’s death can only be intended by her to help him with a personal problem, even if Nolan is using the line simultaneously to evoke the broader moral issues at the core of Oppenheimer’s life.
There is one character, however, who more directly takes on these issues: Roger Robbs. As the de facto prosecutor at the AEC hearing, who the biography describes as “an aggressive trial lawyer”, Robbs was the natural choice for this function. He is portrayed in the film, much like Straus, as a detestable person.
In the final stage of the hearing, the most heated scene in the film, Robbs presses Oppenheimer to explain why he would go and develop the atomic bomb but oppose the hydrogen bomb due to “moral qualms.” Oppenheimer’s defense is as I described it in the first half of this essay; he believed that the H-bomb could not be morally justified because it was too powerful to isolate appropriate military targets and would inevitably take numerous civilian lives, nor could it be justified in terms of America’s security because it would be bound to spur a thermonuclear arms race. Robbs does not find this convincing. After having Oppenheimer confirm that at least 220,000 innocent lives were lost in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, Robbs asks him whether he has any “moral scruples” about this and insists that Oppenheimer explain what he meant when he testified that the “bombing of Hiroshima was very successful.” Oppenheimer says that he meant “technically successful” and that “it is also alleged to have helped end the war.” Disgusted, Robbs forces Oppenheimer to consider whether he would have supported the dropping of a hydrogen bomb on Hiroshima assuming it had been available during the war.
Oppenheimer: That was not a problem with which I was confronted.
Robbs: I’m confronting you with it now, sir.
In his final round of interrogation, Robbs challenges Oppenheimer to explain why, if he would have opposed the dropping of the H-bomb on Japan over moral scruples, he didn’t oppose dropping the A-bomb for the same reason. Oppenheimer begins his reply with “we”, but Robbs interrupts, “No, you, you, you, you, you. I’m asking you. You!” insisting that he answer on his own behalf. After all, it was Oppenheimer who supported use of the A-bomb on his own initiative and who was personally involved in the selection of its targets.
None of the above exchange is found in the biography (except for the phrase “moral qualm”, which Robbs actually used when questioning Oppenheimer at the hearing.) It is something that Nolan felt it necessary to add into the story.
Strauss’ monologue on Oppenheimer, interleaved with this dialogue, accentuates the power of the scene. Like old Antonio Salieri in the film Amadeus, Strauss openly reveals his hatred for Oppenheimer and offers what he thinks is the true ambition underlying Oppenheimer’s opposition to the H-bomb.
Strauss: Oppenheimer wanted to own the atomic bomb. He wanted to be the man who moved the Earth.
Moreover, drunk on his success in realizing this ambition, Oppenheimer “never once said that he regrets Hiroshima.”
Robbs and Strauss are similar in that both question Oppenheimer’s lack of moral qualms about the atomic bombing of Japan, never evincing concern for the innocent lives lost, many of whom were children. Given that the pair are depicted as unlikeable, the audience might take their shared point as a trivial quibble that hardly touches the mythic figure of their Prometheus and might instead empathize with Oppenheimer’s plight.
However, the questions that Robbs and Strauss ask are at the same time the urgent questions of the atomic bomb survivors. It is as though the director himself has travelled back in time to interrogate the historical Oppenheimer who was the basis for his cinematic creation.
Even at Oppenheimer’s climactic speech after the bombing of Japan, when he has a vision of an audience member’s face peeling as though affected by radiation poisoning, it is not the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—who deserve more than at any other moment to be on Oppenheimer’s mind—that fill his thoughts but his own imagined rendition of Jean Tatlock’s suicide. Ultimately, the death he mourns is that of an individual from his personal life; Oppenheimer refuses to confront those who perished in the bombings to the last. This is Nolan’s bitter irony.
14) American Prometheus
Nolan is not completely repudiating the life of Oppenheimer. He appears to admire Oppenheimer’s postwar lobbying to prevent a nuclear arms race and to recognize that he faced choices that were superlatively difficult for any one person to make. Indeed, many of us today might have found the threat of Nazis developing the bomb first that motivated the Manhattan Project just as persuasive. Oppenheimer comes off much like that paragon of so-called justice, Batman of the Dark Knight trilogy, who is ready to sacrifice himself to save the world, suffers public disgrace for his efforts, and refuses to be the primary agent of exceptional violence.
However, Nolan comes off as ultimately critical of Oppenheimer’s obstinate striving to link the Nazi danger that began the project to the A-bombing of Japan that concluded it and of the scientist’s peculiar refusal to accept responsibility for the outcome. The film might have been, admittedly, more balanced if it had included scenes of the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but this would have made it easier to overlook the ethically problematic nature of Oppenheimer himself that their omission puts in sharp relief. The movie’s composition as a progression of two contrasting narratives, Fission and Fusion, can also be seen as an interrogation of the difference in terms of moral qualms between the atomic and hydrogen bombs.
There were some physicists who declined to participate in the Manhattan Project. One was Isidore Rabi, Oppenheimer’s loyal, lifelong friend. The reason he gives in the film, quoted in part from the biography, is that he doesn’t “wish the culmination of three centuries of physics to be a weapon of mass destruction.” Nolan portrays him, in stark contrast to Strauss, as perhaps the most charming and nuanced character.
Other at Los Alamos, like physicist David L. Hill, were opposed to the A-bombing of Japan and gathered signatures to petition against it. Hill appears in the public hearing held to consider the appointment of Strauss as Secretary of Commerce in the Eisenhower administration. His role is to ultimately flout Strauss’ ambition, successfully ousting him from the appointment. This incident of Strauss’ fall from grace due to the hearing is apparently factual, although the biography does not describe it in detail. Nolan likely placed the scene in the climax to shape the impression viewers would walk away with. Although Hill’s presence in the film is sparse, he comes off as particularly likeable here.
Another character who contrasts with Oppenheimer is Albert Einstein. The Fusion narrative begins, after Strauss has picked up Oppenheimer, with Oppenheimer and Einstein’s conversation by the edge of the pond at Princeton University. The content of the conversation is omitted in the beginning only to finally be revealed at the end. This interaction is another contrivance of Nolan’s not found in the biography.
“Now it’s your turn to deal with the consequences of your achievement. And one day, when they’ve punished you enough, they’ll serve you salmon and potato salad,” Einstein prophesizes. “Just remember, it won’t be for you… it would be for them.”
One cannot help wondering, if the act of manufacturing a weapon that killed 220,000 people is to be rectified, what sort of punishment could possibly be sufficient?
This conversation is reminiscent of an earlier scene where Oppenheimer consults with Einstein about the fear that an atomic bomb might ignite the nitrogen in the atmosphere and destroy the Earth. The biography indicates that it was Edward Teller who raised this concern at the outset of the project but that by the summer of 1942 it was determined to have a “near-zero possibility” and promptly discounted. Although the biography offers no indications that Oppenheimer worried about this problem thereafter, he continues to fret over it in the film until the conclusion of the Trinity test. The apocalypse predicted by Teller obviously never occurred in reality. Nevertheless, the film ends with Oppenheimer recognizing that they may have initiated a “chain reaction” that would lead to destruction of the world and imagining the planet being engulfed by flame.
While studying at Cambridge University, Oppenheimer went through a dark period in his life where he experienced depression. In the film, there is a scene where Oppenheimer’s differences with his academic supervisor Patrick Blackett spur him to impulsively poison his apple with potassium cyanide. Ultimately, he has a change of heart after a night’s sleep and intervenes at the last moment by tossing the apple away (though it is Bohr not Blackett who almost eats it). This disturbing incident is apparently based in historical fact and became a major issue when university officials learned about it. However, since Oppenheimer ought to have been arrested for attempted murder if it had really been cyanide, his biographers suppose that it was a more benign substance that merely made Blackett ill and that Blackett may have noticed after actually ingesting some.
The film explicitly presents the spherical apple that might have taken a person’s life as analogous to the spherical A-bomb that took hundreds of thousands of lives. Thus while Oppenheimer succeeded in disposing of a murderous “gadget” before it could kill an individual, this was not the case with the bomb.
The phrase “American Prometheus” when appearing as the title of the biography summons up an image of tragic heroism in keeping with its meaning, while the same phrase appearing in the opening of the film evokes a certain irony.
15) The Self-referentiality of Nolan’s Work
I expect that Nolan’s decision to develop the biography into a film was due in part to his directorial fascination with physics—a scientific discipline whose scope extends from the level of fusion/fission at the infinitesimal scale of the atomic nucleus to the mystery of blackholes in endless space—and its most troubling practical result in the form of the atomic bomb. My analysis of Nolan’s work has heretofore focused primarily on its philosophical implications, but the primary entertainment value of his blockbusters derives from the audiovisual thrill they provide, especially in the flashy action sequences. In this and in other ways, there is remarkable continuity between Oppenheimer and both Tenet and Interstellar, and the Terrence Malick-esque images of the cosmos during the early sequence where Oppenheimer encounters and then becomes obsessed with quantum physics enhance the film to beautiful effect.
Working out how to dramatize the Trinity test likely further stirred up Nolan’s directorial ambition. In an interview that was quoted in the magazine Screen, Nolan says that it was a challenge “To find what you might call analog methods to produce effects to evoke the requisite threat, awe, and horrible beauty of the Trinity test. ” *1
Assisted by sound effects, the moment of the explosion is one of the highlights of the film. But the sound that receives emphasis is Oppenheimer’s breathing, the smallest and most personal element of the scene. This must be contrasted to the sound of the breathing of the myriad citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who are to be obliterated by their respective explosions. Similarly, the construction of the single city of Los Alamos produces a brutal symmetry with the total annihilation of two already existing cities. The breathing of Oppenheimer resonates with the breathing of the audience and with the breathing of Nolan himself.
In Nolan’s work, there is invariably meta-level self-referentiality engaged with the production of film itself. For example, in the first half of this essay, I described how the editing style warps our conception of time. In the case of the Dark Knight trilogy, the calling forth of the “evil violence” of the Joker by the presence of the “just violence” of Batman is at once a political critique and a problem of superhero movie production. For Batman to be created the story requires as a matter of necessity a villain and evil. This is a peculiar origin that puts the cart before the horse when viewed from the perspective of the standard causal relationship in which justice is sought because evil takes root. Indeed, the opening to Dark Knight Rises has peace prevail upon Gotham for the eight years that Batman is gone, demonstrating that there is no way to produce a Batman film set during that period.
The central conceit of Inception—intervention into the unconscious through an artificially generated dream—appears likewise as a self-critique of cinema itself. The question it presents is whether film and reality are truly separate. The better films can entrance and beguile us into mistaking them for reality, the more the distinction between film and reality is blurred at the level of the unconscious. Is this not precisely the effect that directors hope to bring about in the audience? Any director producing films about good overcoming evil through violence in the era of the War on Terror was liable to engage in such self-questioning. Audiences always expect a reality where the bad guys are vanquished like in the movies. They may refuse to accept the difference between reality and fiction like Mal in Inception, however hard you try to convince them that it matters, and head to the voting booth to evaluate national security policies in line with ideas implanted by fiction.
When viewing the lengthy list of names in the credits for Oppenheimer, it is hard not to imagine Nolan, who oversaw the creation of such a monumental film, merging with the figure of Oppenheimer, who brought the Manhattan Project to success through superhuman leadership at Los Alamos. Perhaps this similitude is the reason that Nolan thought carefully about the effect of the images in the bomb test scene being incepted into the audience and felt obligated to treat Oppenheimer’s moral defects with a critical eye.
16) The Works of Kyoko Hayashi
While watching the film, I couldn’t stop thinking about Kyoko Hayashi, an important voice among those who Oppenheimer averted his eyes from to the end—the hibakusha. At the age of 14, Hayashi was caught up in the Aug 9, 1945 bombing of Nagasaki and spent her entire authorial career writing about that day. There are several works of hers I would like to quote here as aids in thinking about Oppenheimer.
The first is a conversation in her novel “Ritual of Death” that evokes the tragic state of Nagasaki immediately after the bomb fell: *2
What kind of bomb was it that could cause this kind of disaster in a second, we wondered.
“I hear they dropped a lot of big cans of kerosene and then scattered incendiary shells over them,” said a man who seemed to be a factory worker.
“They must have, because there is fire everywhere. There’s no other way to explain it. I’ll bet this burn came from touching kerosene without knowing it.”
The woman looked at the burn on her arm.
“So that clanging was from the oil cans,” said a woman holding the hand of a five- or six-year-old boy.
Another passage is as follows:
An interesting rumor had it that this bomb worked only in dazzling midday sun. The sun’s heat made the heat of the bomb that much more terrible, people said. We believed the rumor, too, for the flash from the explosion was so hot.
This exchange between the atomic bomb survivors is nonsensical from a scientific perspective. Even so, it is hard to find a more scathing indictment of the Manhattan Project.
The cream of American elites, behind the veil of total secrecy, utilized minds whose brilliance was recognized by all and sundry to conduct cutting edge research and engage in rigorous discussion that resulted in the massacre of innocent civilians far-removed from their supposed knowledge. What needs to be interrogated here is the violence that was based on radical asymmetry in knowledge, as those lost in Hiroshima and Nagasaki died without knowing what had happened to them while those who survived lived on without understanding what the radiation had done to them.
Once when Hayashi was giving a talk in America about her experience, a scientist asked her, “I see that you’re fretting over genetic issues but there is no connection between being affected by an atomic bomb and being afflicted with genetic mutation. Are you aware of this fact? If so, what do you think?” About this interaction, Hayashi writes, “If that woman’s statement was correct, what had I done been doing with my life all these years? Was I leading the life of a jester? That was the first time that I seriously considered, if what she said was true, demanding compensation from the USA for my life. *3
Modern technology can bring no more hideous shame than that of genetic mutation. This is the “culmination of three centuries of physics” that Rabi abhorred. The specific outcome at Hayashi’s high school was as follows:
The second term started a month late in October. There was a redistribution of classes, and one class less in each grade. Each class had fifty-two or fifty-three students, making four grades in the regular section, and three in the special section. In other words, nearly four hundred were dead.
The next work of Hayashi’s I’d like to consider is her essay, “From Trinity to Trinity.”*4
It contains a first-person account of her visit in 1999 to Los Alamos, the primary setting of Oppenheimer, detailing everything from the souvenirs in the museum shop to the scenery. I found the essay heart-rending to read again after watching the film. There is a powerful moment during Hayashi’s visit to the Trinity site when she is surprised to find a sign warning visitors to beware of rattlesnakes.
I listened for sounds in the hushed wilderness. I wished to hear the sounds of the small but powerful grass seeds that split open in the warm sun. Even the scratchy noise an insect makes on sand while sliding down a doodlebug pit would have been fine. I wanted to hear the sounds of a living creature.
But standing at ground zero, she ultimately never heard such sounds.
In July over fifty years ago, an atomic flash had streaked from this point in all four directions. I have heard that on the test day, there had been a torrential rain from early in the morning, which is rare in New Mexico. The test was carried out despite the storm. The flash singed the rain to white foam, ran across the wilderness, burnt the sides of the unarmed mountains, and danced up to the sky. A hush followed. Living creatures on the wild land were silenced before they could even assume an attack posture.
From the bottom of the earth, from the distant mountain range exposing its red surface, and from the brown wilderness, soundless waves pressed toward me. I squeezed myself. How hot it must have been.
Until I stood on Trinity Site, I had thought that the first victims of nuclear damage on earth were us humans. I was wrong. There were others before us. They were here, without being able to weep or cry out.
Tears came to my eye.
For an interview Hayashi gave near the end of her life, she describes this moment as follows:
There is no sound at the Trinity site. This absence is the big thing you just mentioned, something truly huge and incomprehensible, admonishing humankind. I don’t think admonishment is even the right word, but it bespeaks the terrible thing humanity has done. Rather than having been humbled it is emptiness. It was a withering experience. *5
Neither the historical Oppenheimer, in spite of his love for the natural world of New Mexico, nor the film Oppenheimer even considered the fact that humans had A-bombed non-human organisms and the land they inhabited before inflicting the same destruction on other humans. Certainly they could never have expected that one of the survivors would after many years stand in the place where those harms originated and accept responsibility for the sin of bringing them about.
Hayashi barely escaped the bombing and its aftermath with her life. If she had perished on August 14th at the age of 14, the words quoted here, like so much else, would never have arisen from the silence.
*
Postscript: After the Japan theatrical release of Oppenheimer and the publication of this essay, a historical anecdote that occurred in 1964 during a closed-door meeting between Oppenheimer and the physicist and atomic bomb survivor Naomi Shono, who was visiting America as part of a World Peace Study Mission comprised of survivors from both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, garnered much media attention in Japan. According to testimony found in archival footage kept by the NPO World Friendship Center of the interpreter who served at the meeting, Yoko Teichler, Oppenheimer was in tears when he entered the room in the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies where Shono was waiting and broke into repeated apology, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” This display of emotion seems to have made a strong impression on Teichler, in striking contrast to the attitude of former president Harry Truman who maintained to the end that the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan was just. Reporting of the disclosure coincided with a visit to Japan of Charles Oppenheimer, grandson of Robert Oppenheimer, who spoke out against the inhumanity of nuclear weapons, and the media put a blatantly positive spin on the historical anecdote involving the elder Oppenheimer, painting it as “pangs of conscience” from the “father of the atomic bomb”.
Although Robert Oppenheimer was opposed to the hydrogen bomb, he agreed consistently after WWII with the deployment of small tactical nuclear weapons for battlefield use, claiming that there was an “obvious need” for them. The biography quotes him writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in February 1951 that, “only when the atomic bomb is recognized as useful in so far as it is an integral part of military operations will it really be of much help in fighting of a war.” Moreover, he repeatedly denied regretting his role in developing the atomic bomb and is quoted as saying to reporters who greeted him at the airport in Tokyo during his 1960 visit, “It isn’t that I don’t feel bad; it is that I don’t feel worse tonight than I did last night.” This sort of statement has only further ruffled the hibakusha.
The interaction with Shono took place at a closed-door meeting and we should not overinflate the significance of Oppenheimer’s tearful apology to what he bears responsibility for; rather, we should give him an overall assessment, lining up any such private remarks beside his public statements and actions since WWII.
References
1 This is the English original of the Japanese quote that appeared in press materials provided by Bitters End, Inc. It can be found in Oppenheimer Production Notes. Accessed Sep 6, 2024.
2 Quoted in English translation from Ritual of Death, trans. Kyoko Selden, Japan Interpreter 12 Winter（1978, pp. 54–93). Anthologized in Nuke Rebuke: Writers and Artists against Nuclear Energy and Weapons, ed. Marty Sklar, Iowa City: The Spirit That Moves Us Press, 1984. pp. 21–57.
3 Nagai jikan wo kaketa ningenn no keikenn (Experiences of People Who Took a Long Time)
4 Quoted in English translation with some revision, from From Trinity to Trinity. Kyōko, H., Selden, K., Selden, Y., & Mizuta, M. E. (2007, 149–174). Review of Japanese Culture and Society, 19.
5 Gendai sakka aakaibu 3: jishin no sousaku katsudou wo kataru (Contemporary Authors’ Archive, 3: Recalling her Fiction Writing Career)