OPPENHEIMER: A Divine Allegory on the Terrors of Neutrality.

There is a point in “Oppenheimer” Christopher Nolan’s treatise on not just the creator of the atom bomb but the confluence of events that led him to his fate as the “Father of the atom bomb”, where you realize Nolan is most definitely not doing a movie about white guilt, or a three hour bit of revisionist history with the hope that we all think kinder of the man. It comes about midway through the movie when one of the great loves of Oppenheimer’s life dies, and Oppenheimer (or “Oppy” as his friends call him) seeks solace to drown himself in guilt. His wife ( a rattlingly fantastic Emily Blunt) finds him off in the woods folded up like a baby in the cold ground of a the land he is in the midst of destroying and immediately runs over to grab him. What one would expect here, what usually follows- a pep talk from the wife who understands his genius, a loving confidence boost from the woman that acts as a kickstand in the mans moments of weakness - is not what's said, instead we get a viscerally livid Emily Blunt all but slapping him before she utters the magic words “You do not get to commit sin and make us feel sorry for you”. It is arguably the thesis of the film, and it was at this exact moment that what had only been hinted at, what felt like it could go either way, became definitive in a movie about a man that was anything but.

Nolan's film jumps from one location to another, from one room to another, from one conversation to another, sometimes in the same conversation. The imagery shifts perspective, shifts time, and is not as aesthetically pleasing as his previous works. Its rough work and craft, not rough as in rough draft, rough as in the sound and feel is abrasive and disruptive. The cuts and edits are part and parcel of the movies anxiety, its frustration. The sound on occasion impedes upon one's ability to hear what it is people are saying, furthering it's appeals to a sense of neglect. Nolan, who famously placed the quote “You should feel it rather than understand it” takes that maxim and uses it to it's most successful effect to date, because it not only lives in service of story but in service of perspective. This is not fully or only from Oppenheimer’s perspective , this is also for the benefit of ours. The imagery, the editing, the sound, the amount of characters in the movie all work in concert to provide this feeling of anxiety, of scattered-ness, inexactitude, and chaos, the fragments of which eventually become angrier and angrier until they explode. There is anger at the lack of concern for what seemed obvious, anger at the lack of focus and the clear blind spots that extend out from it. Anger at the glee of the American military industrial complex to dive in and take advantage of a power they had no business wielding with no conscious about the suffering it may inflict. Several times throughout this film I could feel that anger being transformed into those famous words that flung forth from Dr. Ian Malcolm’s mouth in “Jurassic Park”; “You were so concerned with whether you could, you never stopped to think whether you should”. Nolan, a director largely thought to be something akin to apolitical for the first time feels like somebody who is properly taking a stand on his subject matter, and that stand is one that is searingly frustrated with a man who wouldn't take one.

Nolan's depiction of Oppenheimer is as a man with a mind that could never seem to be in one place at one time, going from singular focus, (Preoccupation with getting the bomb done before the Nazis in order to stop them from possibly annihilating the world ) to one of almost no focus at all, (Most of what happens at Los Alamos) constantly adding more and more to his plate when focus was needed, or singularly focused on one task when he needed to be multi tasking. Several times we see or hear some version of the line “You're spreading yourself too thin”, and Murphy makes sure it shows in his body, in his speech, and in his movement. As the film goes on this turns into something more frightening, more terrifying, as we start to see Oppenheimer as a man who mistakes integrity for righteousness to a callous and cruel degree, and then to a destructive one. Moments when he should take a stand for one woman or the other in his life, he takes a stand for neither. Oppenheimer won't take his eye off the ball, except to save those who in the end wished him the worst. He'll fight for Teller (Benny Safdie) and stomp to get Bohr (Kenneth Branaugh) but can barely be bothered to do the least with the family he made, or the woman who asked only that when she need him every once in awhile, he be there. Moments where he should take a clear stand on his communist-ish principles he teeters back and forth between that and soft jingoism. On one occasion earlier in the movie his friend Isaac Isidor Rabbi (David Krumholtz) finds him in the office in Los Alamos and notices that he has on a military uniform. Isidor is quick to remind Oppenheimer that he is a scientist and that that is his community, so he should take the uniform off and be that, but this reminder only serves to reinforce the movies suggestion that Oppenheimer is a man who too many times can be moved from one position to the next, flopping around like some dead fish on searing ground hoping to be saved. He is a man apart, apart from social allegiances to his friends and lovers, apart from political allegiance to his country’s definitive social system (capitalism) and apart from his birthrights ethno-religion. When Einstein tells Oppenheimer “If your country doesn't love you, then you should tell them to go to hell”. Oppenheimer refuses, replying “I love my country”, but loving someone or something in no way means that you should tolerate such abuse as he has already received by the time this scene arrives, and as many true patriots like W.E.B. Dubois have remarked, loving your country is critically and sometimes harshly reprimanding it, it's just another example of Oppenheimer taking a principled stand when he should be taking an ethical one.

In Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy he notes a specific kind of hell for those whom he was told “Were not rebels, nor faithful to their God”. He asks “What is it master that oppresses these souls compelling them to wail so loud” His guide answers: “I shall tell you in a few words. Those who are here can place no hope in death and their blind life is so abject that they are envious of every other fate. The world will let no fame of theirs endure, both justice and compassion must disdain them, let us not talk of them but look and pass”. “The world will let no fame of theirs endure, justice and compassion must disdain them”. This is Oppenheimer's hell, and in the end, Oppenheimer is a tragedy of the distracted man who in his obsessions and passions of principle, and inability to stand tall when it mattered most became egregiously short sighted, when he needed foresight. The “tragedy” not of the man himself - which might breed sympathy or martyrdom - but a tragedy of what extended out from that folly. What he created and the events that rumbled and shook his quiet confidence in who he was and in what he was doing to pieces, and from there the world that sprung up out of the ashes of it. Oppenheimer's neglect ended up causing two massacres if not a third, killing hundreds of thousands of people in one fell swoop, causing another mass of people to suffer with varying illnesses for generations. Through the rumbling stomping sounds of Ludwig Göransson’s score, the cold aesthetic grotesque beauty in Hoyte Van Hoytema’s photography, the imagined bodies he steps in, the kangaroo trial he endures, the non stop boiling vexation created by those who saw it coming a mile away, and the claustrophobic guilt of Oppenheimer once he finally came to see what was so obvious to those around him, there can be no other conclusion, but that this film is viscerally angry at Oppenheimer, while in recognition, that not only was he not alone, but was not fairly treated, even as he got what he karmically earned. In this sense “Now I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds” is not an opportunity to whip up a sense of mourning, nor a finger wag, but a stern clear eyed warning of the terrors of any form of neutrality when the time calls for a definitive stand… In essence, If you stand for nothing, you fall for anything, and anything in this case was a fall into the catastrophic devastation of man and world.