Why Oppenheimer belongs in the nuclear waste dump
Quin Hillyer
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Unless you want to spend the rest of your life wanting the return of three wasted hours, stay away from the movie Oppenheimer. It’s a ponderous, turgid mess.
The film also is ethically confused at its very best, and it adopts Hollywood’s tiresome and obsessive pessimism. Trendy leftist entertainment insists that we live in the worst of possible worlds, that the United States is little better than the rest of that bad world, and that benighted humanity is hurtling toward human-caused doom.
WHO WAS THE REAL J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER?
Let’s temporarily set aside the thematic and philosophical problems, though, and first assess Oppenheimer as entertainment, or rather as lack thereof. It seems nobody in Hollywood can tell a straightforward story anymore, and director Christopher Nolan is particularly prone to the conceit that jumping back and forth in time and between narratives somehow keeps his movies interesting.
In this case, the needlessly dizzying “story,” such as it is, jump-cuts back and forth among five distinct phases of the scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life: his rise as a young physics scholar and libidinous leftist, his management of the Manhattan Project that built the first atomic bombs, and three post-war hearings — one in which he advocates the international sharing of nuclear knowledge while arrogantly belittling those who disagree, one in which his security clearance is at risk of being revoked because of suspected communist sympathies, and one in which, years later, the nomination of an enemy of his for secretary of commerce is in jeopardy because the nominee had rigged the security-clearance hearing against Oppenheimer.
If that prior sentence seems overstuffed, it mirrors the movie. The plot’s turgidity would have been bothersome even if told chronologically. All the jumps back and forth in time make the plot, or what passes for a plot, not just confusing but an affront. The affront is worsened by the unnecessary and not-always-consistent use of color video for most of the story but black-and-white video for other parts. Director Nolan seems to be trying to show off filmmaking artistry, but all he accomplishes with the black-and-white interludes is to show self-indulgence.
Then there’s the matter of why the last two hearings — the security-clearance one and the confirmation hearing for Commerce nominee Lewis Strauss — are afforded such prominence. Not only in the first two hours do they keep interrupting the more important narrative about the Manhattan Project, but then together, they take up almost the entire last hour of a three-hour slog.
Yet never is it clear why it’s a big deal whether or not Oppenheimer’s clearance is revoked. He isn’t actively working on the nuclear program by then, anyway. He is treated as a public hero regardless, one who will continue for the rest of his life to earn plaudits and major public awards. And there were no other major ramifications — no fines at stake, no potential jail time, no significant financial losses for a man already fabulously wealthy. Likewise, why should the audience care much whether Strauss got comeuppance for his opposition to Oppenheimer? What difference did it really make whether he served in a second-tier Cabinet post for the last 18 months of the Eisenhower presidency?
Narratively, it’s also perplexing when a scientist named David Hill, played by actor Rami Malek, becomes the key witness against Strauss. Hill, until then, was a minor character. And Nolan makes not the slightest attempt to explain how Hill, of all people, had become so knowledgeable about Strauss’s earlier orchestration of the security-clearance hearing. Finally, it isn’t remotely clear why the Senate should have cared whether Strauss had pulled strings against Oppenheimer. Why in tarnation should that have affected Strauss’s fitness to run the Commerce Department?
Meanwhile, as if Oppenheimer weren’t already outrageously self-important, Nolan keeps the background music, or rather the insistent noise, at a fever pitch throughout. Imagine if Steven Spielberg had played the shark theme notes in Jaws — DUH-duh-DUH-duh — incessantly throughout that whole movie, rather than merely when the beast was approaching, and you get the feel of this assault on the senses. Alas, though, unlike the shark theme, the “musical” notes in Oppenheimer wouldn’t even be interesting if played more sparingly. They are just jarring, and loud, loud, loud.
All of which is backdrop to the movie’s predictably blinkered left-wing sensibilities. Nolan obviously wants the audience to think it’s an awful thing that Oppenheimer had his security clearance challenged. Never mind that Oppenheimer had decades of admittedly intimate interactions with and sympathy for Communist Party members, or that he was notoriously and perhaps blackmail-ably adulterous (mostly with communists), or that the Soviets actually did benefit from a major spy in the Manhattan Project itself. Despite the movie portraying as villains all those who questioned Oppenheimer’s judgment and discretion, the objectively prudent position was the one taken by physicist Edward Teller.
In his testimony to the security committee, Teller said he saw no reason to distrust Oppenheimer’s loyalty to the U.S., but he said this: “In a great number of cases, I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer act — I understood Dr. Oppenheimer acted — in a way which for me was exceedingly hard to understand … and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated …. If it is a question of wisdom and judgment, as demonstrated by actions since 1945, then I would say one would be wiser not to grant clearance.”
Sometimes even brilliant and well-motivated people lack the discretion needed for a security clearance. This is especially true when much of their social milieu is of questionable loyalty to the United States. How, pray tell, was it discreditable for Strauss, Teller, and others to say that Oppenheimer shouldn’t enjoy special access even if he otherwise should be presumed loyal and left alone? For Hollywood, communist sympathies and extravagantly complicated sex lives almost always are at least semi-acceptable, while anyone who questions them is forever a fiend.
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In addition to all those flaws, director Nolan ponderously, predictably, and annoyingly sets up one final line, fictionally uttered by Oppenheimer to Albert Einstein, to pound home for the audience the intended, downbeat message. It reeks of self-flagellating, doomsaying fatalism.
I won’t give away the final sentence itself (if you don’t mind the spoiler, go here or here), other than to say that for many of us, 78 years of post-Hiroshima human flourishing makes the sentence, the sentiment, and the entire message of the movie a damnable lie.