While we were down in Phoenix last month, Meghan and I made it to the movie theater, and for only the second time in three years together. Of course, it was to see Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.
One of the most important (and obvious) metrics for measuring the success of a film is the engrossing factor. If a movie is able to pull you into itself for the duration (three hours, in this case), then no matter what else, the movie is, perhaps in the most significant way, successful. By this measure, Oppenheimer was absolutely successful. I was completely engrossed. And I’m sure it was successful for all the reasons that knowledgeable movie critics would give. As far as I can tell, for instance, this may be one of the most historically accurate movies ever made. That achievement is quite interesting in itself. (Although, I’m less certain of how accurately it portrays Oppenheimer’s by-all-accounts complicated personality. The Oppenheimer of Oppenheimer is something of an enigma, but not a particularly complicated one.)
But I am not a movie critic and, outside of conversations over beer, I have no desire to be one. Neither am I a(n) historian. While I’m sure I was engrossed for all the same reasons that over 90% of critics and audience members were, I was also very caught by the film for more personal reasons.
The big moment, the apex of the movie, was not particularly enjoyable for me. I have no problem admitting (and neither does Meghan) that when it comes to movies, I am the crier in the relationship. Those moments are probably quite predictable most of the time. But who gets choked up over Trinity, over a remake of the first successful nuclear bomb explosion? Me, that’s who.
Oh, I’m sure the combination of music and silence and all the artistic buildup to that moment in the film did its work on me. But I also know what I was feeling, and that I have felt it before. I put up an essay from a history class that is about as much as I have ever said about that feeling. Here’s how it starts:
When I was eighteen years old, I remember feeling the chills of inspiration as my Air Force commander stood before us — in a church on Sunday no less — to remind my fellow airmen and me of the glory of our profession. “Make no mistake about it,” he said, “we are here to break things and kill people.” Energized by his words, we were young, motivated, and stupid. In recent months, I have reflected often on that moment, on what I thought and felt then. I spent most of my summer this year [2017] working at a field hospital in Mosul, Iraq, where the familiar sound of bombs is not relinquished to a bitter past or confined to foreign soil, where violence in its most aggressive forms and destructive consequences is an ever-present reality. After seeing the other side of that “glory” — the broken homes and dead victims — I have felt increasingly restless with the thought of war.
… with the thought of war or any instrument whose chief purpose is war or with anything that reminds me of it.
I used to love fireworks, deeply, especially the sound and the boom you feel in your chest. Fun, excitement, awe, inspiration, brilliance — I felt only good and empowering things. Now, I’d rather be buried in the ground with a straw to breath through until the celebration is over. I grew up shooting guns about as regularly as anything else, and I loved those, too. But when my friend took a few of us to the shooting range for his birthday in late 2017, it was all I could do to avoid a panic attack. As I write that, it sounds even to me like a bit of an exaggeration, but if it is, it is only a slight one. The fact is, I did not enjoy any of it for one second and couldn’t wait to get out of there. And that was just such a complete and sudden one-eighty for me. I just don’t like any of it anymore, and I think it’s absurd that I ever did.
(There’s a scene in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead where John Ames’s father digs up a gun he had buried, smashes it to pieces on a stump with a borrowed maul, and throws the separate pieces of it in a river. “I got the impression,” Ames says, “he wished they didn’t exist at all, that he wouldn’t really have been content to drop them in the ocean, that he’d have set about to retrieve them again from any depth at all if he’d thought of a way to make them vanish entirely.” I feel exactly the same way.)
And yet, a very large number of us can’t seem to get over how cool it all is. And most of the time I can’t really blame anyone. The fact is, that change in me didn’t happen because I pulled my heart up by its bootstraps. There is an inherent separation between the makers of the instruments of modern warfare and the lives they leave buried and bleeding in the rubble. And it plays on another inherent separation in humankind altogether, one that can only be bridged by experience and by empathy.
“Who could convey this understanding across the barriers of his own human experience?” asked Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. “Who could impress upon a sluggish and obstinate human being someone else’s far off sorrows or joys, who could give him an insight into magnitudes of events and into delusions which he has never himself experienced?”
One of the things that has struck me the hardest is that, even as a member of the military, I didn’t experience this, had no thought about the hundreds of sorties I supported, where they went or what happened when they got there. But that’s normal, isn’t it? It’s sad and it’s horrifying, but isn’t it normal? It’s certainly been normal with the history of nuclear bombs.
Why is it, for instance, that every single adult that I can remember while I was growing up had the same exact write-off response to the history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? How could we justify it? No debate. No difficulty. No deep regret over vaporizing and crushing and radiating civilians. In my experience, having this conversation with the previous generation is impossible. The narrative is too deeply embedded for any reexamination: It had to be done. The Japanese would never have surrendered. The Bomb saved lives. And so on. Bottom line, it was un-American — and, somehow, un-Christian — to think or say otherwise.
Perfectly normal.
I’ve lost track now of where I was going with this, or maybe I’ve already said what I wanted to say. When the bomb went off on the screen in that theater, I felt the same way I feel when they go off in real life. I didn’t see scientific achievement; I saw mass murder and violence. I saw children on stretchers, in ICUs, and in graves.
Here’s what Rand Richards Copper wrote in Commonweal after seeing the film:
After watching Oppenheimer, I streamed The Day After Trinity. (“Trinity” refers to Oppenheimer’s name for the bomb test site, inspired by a Donne poem, and the “day after” refers to yet another hearing, in 1965, at which Oppenheimer was asked about talks on halting the spread of nukes, and responded, “It’s twenty years too late. It should have been done the day after Trinity.”) It may seem paradoxical to suggest that a documentary more acutely conveys the tragedy of Los Alamos than a feature film does. Yet for me at least, it did. In the decades since the Manhattan Project, many commentators seeking to capture the dreadful awe that accompanied the advent of the atomic bomb have invoked Oppenheimer’s quotation from the Bhagavad Gita—“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”—and Nolan leans heavily on it, using it not once but twice. The documentary pursues the horror more subtly, in a banality-of-evil way. It contains a small but terrible moment, when the Manhattan Project physicist Robert Serber displays a section of a wall removed from a classroom in Nagasaki, bearing the outline of a window sash imprinted on it photographically by the blast. “You see the angle here?” Serber says, holding it up. “That shows you that the bomb went off at exactly the height it was supposed to.” And Serber can’t quite suppress a smile—quickly followed by a look of sickly confusion. All these years later, he still feels pride.
That look does more to evoke the scientists’ moral disarray than does the pose of abject contrition in which the last third of Nolan’s film freezes Robert Oppenheimer. Serber’s smile reveals candor about the thrills of scientific discovery, even as his sickened look betrays an awareness of what resulted when those thrills were channeled into the priorities of what Eisenhower himself would call the military-industrial complex. What does it mean—for science and its practitioners, for civilization itself—when mass death becomes, well, a project?
Neil Postman made a similar point in 1985:
[T]o the modern mind … the truth in economics is believed to be best discovered and expressed in numbers. Perhaps it is. I will not argue the point. I mean only to call attention to the fact that there is a certain measure of arbitrariness in the forms that truth-telling may take. We must remember that Galileo merely said that the language of nature is written in mathematics. He did not say everything is. And even the truth about nature need not be expressed in mathematics. For most of human history, the language of nature has been the language of myth and ritual. These forms, one might add, had the virtues of leaving nature unthreatened and of encouraging the belief that human beings are part of it.
Postman’s next line echoes in my head on a regular basis.
It hardly befits a people who stand ready to blow up the planet to praise themselves too vigorously for having found the true way to talk about nature.
And yet we do praise ourselves regularly for just how so-damn-smart we’ve gotten, don’t we? One of the things that struck me the most watching Oppenheimer was how surprisingly boyish the whole enterprise seemed. I’ve had the tendency my whole life to think of many of these historical scientists as men of greatness. But what I saw in that theater — and maybe this is the most historically accurate thing of all — were only boys playing with chemistry sets.
Maybe this is simply one of the tragedies of growing up, realizing that there are no adults in the room. Or very few, anyway. In this case, just big kids and their chemistry sets. “You see,” the little boy said with a proud smile, “it went off at exactly the height it was supposed to.”