For all of Christopher Nolan’s notorious attention to detail, Oppenheimer is a superficial biopic. During the course of the three-hour drama, we learn remarkably little about the life of its eponymous subject. There is no real mention of his childhood; his on-screen relationship with his brother is abbreviated to the point of acquaintanceship, and nearly a third of the movie is occupied with his benefactor-turned-nemesis, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.). The film’s inquiry of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the person, rests primarily on the ability of Cillian Murphy’s haunted eyes and sharp cheekbones to sell moments of quiet torture.
Nolan’s stated ambition is to tell the story of, as he boasts, “the most important man who ever lived.” What he seems to want, however, is to retell the mythic story of Prometheus with Oppenheimer the demigod who brought nuclear fire to mortals, and for his sin, suffered. During the infamous security hearing, Murphy’s gaunt Oppenheimer is stripped down (at one point, quite literally) and the legal eagles of the government peck away at his liver.
At this mythic remove, Oppenheimer the movie uses the man as a synecdoche for how the Atomic Age came to be: the empyrean physics in his head; the strictures of military governance; and the rivers of politics, ideology, and intrigue he swam through. I’m sympathetic to Nolan’s mythopoeic ambition. For most subjects, it would be far too much, but the destructive alchemy unleashed by the first fission bombs is about as consequential as an event in human history can be.
The trouble is that mythologizing Oppenheimer leads to myopia about a question that should be central to a biopic about a scientist, a bureaucrat, and a persecuted government employee: What, exactly, was his work?
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Hollywood tends to vacillate between treating scientists as helpless nerds or as helpful wizards. These negative or positive caricatures leave little room for life outside of the lab. In Oppenheimer, an ensemble of scientists with their own storied histories (Bohr, Heisenberg, Fermi etc.) dart in and out of the picture, essentially as celebrity cameos. The reveal of Einstein (Tom Conti) via a gust of wind to blow off his hat, uncovering the iconic shock of white hair is almost charming; I laughed. To his credit, Nolan’s scientists act much as civilian (i.e. non-scientist) characters do in his other films. They speak in vernacular and not just jargon-filled babble, have personal and political dramas, and emote, like, well, humans. And yet, although Nolan does not treat the scientists like inhuman wizards, the science—the work—remains wizardry out of frame.
As a premonition of his later agony over the bomb, a younger Oppenheimer is tormented by hallucinations of quantum mechanics as he carves a bright career through Europe. The visions are prophetic and abstract: incandescent particles erupt onto the dark screen; braids of light spin dizzyingly; there are vortices of fire, both cosmic creation and earthly destruction—all set to Ludwig Goransson’s plangent score. It’s a deft visual, and Nolan is clearly conscious to at least make the sciency stuff look sleek.
In his review for Scientific American, Charles Seife laments the state of science in Oppenheimer:
…the science is minimal and appears mostly in passing—with no hint of process—and is only mentioned when necessary for a future plot point … There is simply not enough setup to explain the distinction between the atomic fission weapons developed during the Manhattan Project and the thermonuclear fusion weapons … The film doesn’t make clear at all why they’re different scientifically, technically or morally.
The cost of eliding the science at the heart of the Manhattan Project is not just one of context, Seife argues, but of character:
it’s a tired old trope … they give up a piece of themselves—their relationships, their sanity, even their humanity—for their transcendent understanding. “I was tortured by visions of a hidden universe,” Oppenheimer tells the audience, as stars and abstract flashes of light representing the quantum realm flit across the screen, moments before, as a young man, he briefly functionally loses his sanity … Nolan sacrifices the hope of truly helping the audience understand a scientist as a person by instead making him otherworldly.
I think these critiques are, by-and-large, true. Even as it is reverently accurate about the silence between the light and the blast wave of the Trinity Test, the film does not concern itself with the particulars of the science Oppenheimer grappled with.
Your mileage may vary on the extent to which the portrayal of Oppenheimer as a genius tormented by the ethereal world of quantum mechanics obscures his character (I think Murphy does a fine job humanizing him), but the choice to gloss over the substance of his life’s work—including work at Los Alamos—certainly presents an obstacle to a full picture of the man.
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Oppenheimer’s work as a scientist-bureaucrat does feature in several scenes during the second act of the movie: trips with Gen. Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) on cross-country trains recruiting physicists, managing the ego of his then-employee Edward Teller (Benny Safdie), and laboratory discussions (complete with the audience-friendly visual aid of marbles) about the plutonium and U-235 the Manhattan project has piled up.
And yet, as Seife points out, the film does not explore the process of the science Oppenheimer worked on. The crisis that a gun-based mechanism would not work for a plutonium bomb is omitted entirely, though it is perhaps the quintessential example of science in the Manhattan Project.
By way of illustration:
Berkeley, 1943. Physicists, including a bespectacled Emilio Segrè, crowd around a detector in a private home also used by the Music Department, measuring decays from plutonium produced by Lawrence’s cyclotron. But noise, noise, noise in the detector. Is daily cello practice next door the problem? No, the detector doesn’t work during the night either. Trial and error. A revelation! The detector needs light to work; they leave a flashlight on overnight. Finally, in late June, data suggest cyclotron-produced plutonium is stable enough.
But then, a creeping doubt: What about plutonium produced by radioactive pile? Oppenheimer summons Segrè to Los Alamos. A moving van full of electronics rumbles into the desert. At the same time, a telegram from occupied France arrives: Joliot has seen spontaneous emission of neutrons in polonium. The implication: pile-produced plutonium might not just emit alpha particles, but also neutrons, making it unstable.
Oppenheimer orders Segrè to investigate. In a cabin, deep into the remote Pajarito Canyon, Segrè and his young assistants set up shop to re-measure cyclotron-produced plutonium. The experiment is sensitive, so sensitive that they attempt to record just six events over six months. A few more blips in the detector and plutonium would be too unstable. Again, though, the cyclotron-produced plutonium appears stable.
Finally, in April 1944, pile-produced plutonium arrives. Within days, it is clearly at least five times more fissionable than the cyclotron-produced plutonium. Fermi later takes measurements on re-irradiated plutonium and confirms it: The bomb will fizzle prematurely. Information about the results is beyond classified, but it spreads like wildfire through Los Alamos. Groves fights to withhold it from the other labs. When Compton, in Chicago, finally learns of the news, he turns white as a sheet.
July 4, 1944. Oppenheimer officially delivers the news about plutonium to Los Alamos. In desperation, they consider other options: faster guns, electromagnetic removal of the highly radioactive isotope Pu-240. Neither are feasible. They will either have to find a way to detonate the plutonium quickly or all of Hanford’s work will have been for naught.
An older idea, discounted initially, soon captures everyone’s attention: rapid detonation via implosion. On July 20th, Oppenheimer gives the order to discontinue plutonium gun operations: “All possible priority should be given to the implosion program.”
Now consider the weight the implosion design would have acquired for the audience with this context: the desperation of scientists working against time, the monumental choice to reverse course, and the understanding of the scientific labor involved to make these crucial decisions. Seen in this light, when the first atomic bomb is detonated—a second, successive sunrise on the white desert sands of New Mexico—it is not just spectacular scientific wizardry, but the result of a laborious process.
Following the discovery of spontaneous fission in plutonium might seem like a technical rabbit hole for a filmmaker to go down, one that has little precedent in films about scientists, which are mostly concerned with dazzling the audience with their subject’s genius. It needn’t be that way. There are films whose very story is the process. In Spotlight, we follow journalists tracking down sources, combing through old records, and even planning how they want to frame the story (not one of individual priests, but systematic rot in the diocese). When the story finally hits print, as we watch the pre-dawn newspaper trucks begin to distribute the paper, the payoff is real. The connection between all that labor and the finished product is clear.
Unfortunately, the closest we get to process in Oppenheimer is an inquiry into a borderline-pseudoscientific yarn about the possibility that a nuclear explosion would set off a chain reaction in the atmosphere, which, of course, involves an apocryphal trip to see a wizened Einstein. The scientific work which was Oppenheimer’s life at Los Alamos and could have been a throughline for the movie is sacrificed for superficial celebrity scientist cameos.
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Oppenheimer is a tantalizing film because it suggests the possibility to tell serious stories about the work of science for mainstream audiences. There is a curious scene, in the early part of the film, which functions as a part of the thread of Oppenheimer’s flirtation with communism (politically and physically, in the form of a vampish Pugh), in which the scientists—workers—in Ernest Lawrence’s (Josh Hartnett) lab are organizing under a banner that reads F.A.E.C.T. (Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians—I confess I don’t remember if the acronym is explained in the film). Lawrence, a conservative, curses: “They won’t let me bring you on the project because of this,” and Nolan smoothly segues away to Oppenheimer’s induction into the Manhattan Project.
But there’s something more here, more than just the (surprisingly charitable) depiction of Oppenheimer’s leftist bonafides. This is not Murphy flirtatiously quipping to Pugh that he’s read Marx; it’s a work event and there are dozens of other scientists in that room—why?
At the height of the Great Depression, one in four research chemists in New York City was unemployed. Even physicists, insulated more by academia than other scientific professions, felt enough strain to set up working groups to deal with homelessness and unemployment. During the 1930s, with fascism and communism on the rise, scientists too were radicalized. Some, like Oppenheimer, joined radical organizations. Not just political parties, but groups like the American Association of Scientific Workers. Partway between a trade union and a professional organization, the AASW was designed to “promote an understanding of the relationship between science and social problems”—the ills of poverty, racism, war. It—even in just its title—was a nod to something crucial: the idea of the scientist as a worker.
The AASW was a short-lived effort. Like many leftist organizations, it splintered when Stalin made alliance with Hitler. Within a year, many who had called for science as a means of peace and diplomacy were off using cutting-edge science to make weapons of war. Its brief existence was a barometer for the degree of radical thought, and a demonstration of scientists’ ability to organize, and a demonstration that their politics were not separate from their science; the two were entwined. If scientific work was labor, was even a well-heeled professor a worker too? And if one was a worker, to whom did one’s allegiances lie—a capitalist democracy?
In a 2002 oral history, G. Rossi Lomanitz (played by Josh Zuckerman in the film) was asked how Lawrence saw the unionization effort of FAECT:
“After the war, I went to his office, and he had a talk with me in which he seemed to be rather fatherly in his attitude. He said, ‘Look, it’s really important. Don’t consider yourself a scientific worker. Consider yourself a scientist.’ I said, ‘Thank you for the advice.’”
The corollary to the conceit that science is a process is that science is work, the scientist a worker, not a wizard. In Nolan’s cosmology, there is no connection between work, science, and ideology. Oppenheimer the employee exists separately from Oppenheimer the scientist, and Oppenheimer the red. He is merely political because of a quirk in his personality, an idiosyncrasy more related to his taste in women than his work. He is a scientist not because of the work he does but because that is simply who his character is.
Compartmentalized like this, the film loses its ability to say something important. It cannot explain why Oppenheimer had the dalliances he did with leftist thought; they are inexplicable vices of an otherwise devoted public servant. Likewise, it cannot mount a convincing explanation for why a government would so mistreat its Prometheus, and must rely on Strauss as the villain. Finally, it must distort the historical record. Only Oppenheimer can have lonely hallucinations of ashen corpses and future nuclear horrors to come; his colleagues must remain largely oblivious and insensate because in Nolan’s portrayal, they did not share in the scientific work to create the weapons.
There is an argument that Murphy’s Oppenheimer implicitly realizes what Nolan has missed. As Fran Hoepfner puts it in her review for Bright Room/Dark Wall:
It is not through these endless hearings that Oppenheimer gains perspective on himself; he rather gains perspective on the people for whom he worked. He was not a genius wunderkind acting alone. He was an employee.
This reading suggests not a Promethean tragedy, but a quotidian one. Oppenheimer wasn’t punished by the gods for stealing their nuclear fire; he was punished because he was a worker at the mercy of his employer.
Dan Garisto 