226 Days Late Review of Oppenheimer
For reasons best explained by the ebb and flow time within the context of a well lived life, I didn’t watch the movie Oppenheimer until yesterday. Having valued that gap as well as my desire to have my own mind about the film substantially, I’ve read or watched or listened to nothing about the film. It wasn’t easy to do. Now that I’ve made my way through it, I have some fresh thoughts.
I’ll start with a quick disclaimer. I’ve found Christopher Nolan movies to be a great source of inspiration over the last 15 years or so. I’ve enjoyed them. I’ve written about them. I’ve used them to stimulate my thoughts as a technologist and a writer and even a special needs father. Moreover, as a military historian, there are few topics I’ve spent more time on than the end of World War II. And as a technologist, the men and women that brought the dawn of the atomic age to both deadly application and life giving power is a domain that I’ve also paid a great deal of attention to. So the convergence of these forces in my life represent a significant experience. So I run some risk of overthinking it. But I’ll give it a go anyway.
First, the movie wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. From the types of work Nolan has produced in the past and the sort of story that could come from the creation of nuclear weapons, one could believe that the driver of the story should be something other than a security investigation. Like all Nolan movies, the driver is not necessarily the meaning. And when one thinks about the meaning of a Nolan film, one has to think of it in Nolan structure.
His films tend to orbit around some consistent point in time or space. And when I say orbit I mean near literally. In that something remains fixed while the realities we see shapeshift in real time around it. Inception is the most obvious version as the film itself is mostly an exercise to watch Nolan try to hold layers of realities, dreams in this case, in the front of your mind while a story progresses throughout flexible time all held fixed around one item. In Inception it’s guilt. Time is not linear. As it isn’t in Interstellar or Dunkirk. Nolan views time as Einstein proved it to be. As a dimension. Not dramatically so though. Instead time is simply something to be maneuvered. Stretched or compressed as it was in Interstellar while the themes of progress and consumption and political self deception all orbit around the fixed point of a father’s love and commitment to his daughter. In Dunkirk the fixed point is, well, Dunkirk. It’s a fixed point while the film plays out of sequence from the perspectives of those in relation to the last hold out of the evacuating troops. Attacking there. Leaving there. Rushing towards rescue there. Dying there.
Oppenheimer doesn’t really let you understand what Nolan is holding fixed until the end. And so when I say it wasn’t what I expected I mean that I was fooled at the beginning, in the middle and again in the end. To evaluate the film in the normal critical context is pretty easy. The performances were great. The writing and directing were tremendous. Hans Zimmer was his Zimmer’est with the high pitch clanging accelerating to climax of the test detonation. But in Nolan terms you don’t really know what is the point. Not until Einstein tells you in the end. (Spoiler) The fixed Straussian point that Nolan manipulates the film Oppenheimer about is, well, Oppenheimer. At the center of the most awe inspiring technological story in the history of humankind, the most compelling story could only be one thing. At the center of the war and the science and the politics and the utilitarian moral dilemmas of a race to hold the capability to end the world was the conflict between a man, his conscience and his ego.
So, there’s my 700 words eight months too late. Happy now to find out from others just how wrong I am.