Notes on Oppenheimer
my brother has a ranch in new mexico
Cillian Murphy looks just enough like Bill Nye the Science Guy for either “Robert Oppenheimer The Science Guy” or “I Am Become Bill Nye, Destroyer Of Worlds” to be decent bits.
Oppenheimer lost me when I realized the narrative structure of the movie relied on a proto-McCarthy hearing about Oppy’s leftist past.
World War 2 was the last time America generally agreed on anything, as the overarching doctrine of “fuck that guy”. I was expecting Oppenheimer to at least start there, to go from scientific breakthrough to debatable military necessity to the Einstein “tell Germany” scene, then pivot to Hiroshima and the Soviet arms race. Leave all the activism, organizing, Chevalier, in exactly where it is, just pay it off in the second act. Let us see all these brilliant scientists become statesmen out of necessity, as they realize they are the only people on earth with both the understanding and the leverage to head off mutually assured destruction. Instead, we see the entire story told out of sequence, retroactively, through testimony and Robert Downey Jr.’s weird combover. It didn’t have to be a movie about the cold war, but it was.
My surprisingly thorough public school US History classes taught me the toll anti-Communist fervor took on both our country and the world at large. I know about the Red Scare, Hollywood blacklists, McCarthy etc. I know an entire generation of Central and South Americans died in civil wars against or at the hands of brutal dictators we supported over popular lefty politicians. I know about similar situations in Africa too, although I think that was more of a European post-colonial thing? Not the point. I know a pithy Anthony Bourdain quote about Kissinger too. I also know enough world history that I know about Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin.
The movie version of Graham Greene’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy made me understand the stupidity of the cold war. I came away from the theater with a real sense of “that escalated quickly”, where what seemed like some minor questions about who had documents snowballed into a cat and mouse game that ended careers, relationships and lives. It’s a great movie that juxtaposes the life and death stakes of the spy drama with their inconsequential beginnings, and it leaves you with an understanding of the conflict as extremely serious for the people wrapped up in it, as well as the frivolity of the larger situation.
I cannot tell all these dudes apart! It was very hard to figure out who was who if they weren’t famous, mustachioed or uniformed. Half the cast had accents. This coulda been Guess Who: The Movie.
Chasing all the lefties out of STEM is how we got Peter Thiel. Don’t at me.
I have a theory that Oppenheimer started as a more straightforward movie but got inverted so as to either fit more women into the cast, or (more cynically) to make a sufficiently substantial part for Florence Pugh. Which is totally fine. Los Alamos was a sausage party, and I loved both Midsommar and her episode of Hot Ones. (Didn’t see Don’t Worry Darling.) By retelling Oppy’s affair with Jean through testimony, the movie gets to show his wife reacting to the news in real time.
They really had dude reading the “I am Become Death” quote off Jean’s tits.
The Bechdel test, but for Communism.