Julius Robert Oppenheimer’s ambitious dream is to bring physics to the stretch of the desert in New Mexico known as Los Alamos. He achieves this when the United States government approves this “empty” land as the site of nuclear bomb tests. The film erases one of Oppenheimer’s first victims—the Hispanic community living around the area.
This landscape is the setting for much of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer that hit theatres Friday to much fanfare around the world. There is not even a passing mention of the horrors faced by the indigenous community. Instead, the auteur lionises the father of the atomic bomb, played by Cillian Murphy. While the audience is effectively made to question his actions and their terrible consequences, Nolan makes sure — with the same effectiveness — that the man himself is never questioned. He is martyred.
Biopics are finicky things. Oppenheimer revolves around one personality, their triumphs, and their downfalls. But out of it all must emerge a hero—whose story must be told.
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When directors work their ‘magic’
Biopics of anti-heroes have been taking up space on the screen for the past few years. I, Tonya (2017), The Greatest Showman (2017), and Sanju (2018) were all either critically or commercially acclaimed.
But Robert Oppenheimer doesn’t fit the mould of an anti-hero. As described by NPR in 2005, he is a “mystical genius who defies easy labels”.
A somewhat imperfect parallel to this biopic genre is Martin Scorsese’s 2013 film, The Wolf of Wall Street. A rich character study of American stockbroker Jordan Belfort, and his ups and downs, Wolf… falls short of pointing fingers at the man for his transgressions. The movie has even been accused of glorifying Belfort’s excesses and creating sympathy for a man who ruined many lives.
Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis (2022) also falls into this category.
Oppenheimer, Belfort, and Elvis are all ‘troubled geniuses’—the latter half of their personalities towers over all their shortcomings.
To Nolan’s credit, he shows more warts in Oppenheimer’s personality than Scorsese and Luhrmann do with their protagonists. But Oppenheimer’s flaws — from his adulterous nature to alleged interactions with Soviet spies and his role in building an atomic bomb — are explained away, if not justified. He is shown to be wracked by enough guilt and this is supposed to make up for all his flaws. What doesn’t make it to the screen are the scientist’s transgressions — ones that further complicate the man and edge him toward a much darker grey.
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The scientist with a late ‘conscience’
In Nolan’s gaze, Oppenheimer does not have blood on his hands simply because he acknowledges that he does. The film weaves this sentiment into the narrative when American writer Haakon Chevalier tells Oppenheimer that admitting your selfishness means you aren’t selfish.
The movie follows the eponymous scientist chasing his theory to build the “gadget”. He believes he has no control over what the men up in Washington will do with his inventions. He sees it as a necessary measure for America to win the war against the Nazis and later the Japanese. There’s no rumination about what Japan will do, or how many lives will be lost. He oscillates between the reasons, but his conscience is clear.
Until the bomb is dropped. Then he is wracked with guilt — and Nolan gives it a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder-like visual treatment. Oppenheimer’s position changes, he wants to scale back weapons development, and introduce deterrence treaties. He is against the building of the hydrogen bomb too.
Nolan shows Oppenheimer as a man of principle, and the movie’s third act, while depicting glimmers of self-reflection, is set up to drive the point home. It pits him against the aspiring politician Lewis Strauss, the ‘villain’ who won’t hold back. He is the crooked and cunning to the scientist’s integrity and intelligence.
Stepping out of the theatre, one gets the sense that this complicated man was ultimately good. Nolan gave the audience enough grey in the mammoth three-hour runtime to reach that conclusion.
Pitting him against the American political apparatus that wants to silence this complicated but honest man was also a stroke of genius.
Grand biopics often forego the nitty gritty for the big picture. And this IMAX-worthy film falls into that category.
Invisibilising victims for the white ‘genius’
Oppenheimer briefly touches upon the devastation caused by the bombs in Japan, just enough to skirt any allegations of ignoring the victims. But what Nolan forgets are the victims in America. The film erases the experiences of Hispanic residents of New Mexico, where the bomb was tested.
New Mexico is depicted as an empty wasteland, the “perfect spot” for nuclear tests. Even when the giant mushroom cloud fills the screen, the movie portrays only the scientists and military men as the witnesses.
But the nuclear fallout from these tests and subsequent ones was so great that there was a term created for those affected by it—downwinders.
Native Americans who mined the radioactive uranium for the nuclear bomb were also absent from the screen.
While the blame may not solely rest on Oppenheimer’s shoulders, it is interesting to note that he pushed for New Mexico to be the test site. His guilt, as depicted in the film, only arises after the bomb is dropped. It’s framed as the moment when he becomes viscerally aware of the consequences to his world.
Nolan frames this as a narrative device a way to go “from the highest triumphalism, the highest high, to the lowest low in the shortest amount of screen time possible”.
The victims of his actions, the current generation who remember the impact their families suffered after the tests in Los Alamos and the descendents of the Navajo miners, have to settle for Twitter threads and Instagram infographics to express what they wish the film would do, piggybacking on trending hashtags in the hopes of being noticed and taken seriously.
It’s an inconvenient truth that these invisibilised victims are not white and that their histories are brushed aside for the glorification of the “white man’s burden”.
Nolan also obfuscates specific facts in favour of his hero. While the film highlights the scientist’s opposition to the H-bomb as pivotal to his morality, in reality, Oppenheimer’s position was not as rigid or moral. He was not entirely against nuclear bombs, but only against wasting resources on ideas that were theoretical. Once it was clear that the H-bomb would work, he was “almost thrilled”.
But telling this tale would not make Oppenheimer a hero. As much as we crave complicated stories filled with conflict and ambiguities, we root for the good guy. And when the ‘guy’ is scandalous and not good enough, auteurs like Nolan, Luhrmann, and Scorsese work their magic.
Like Oppenheimer says in the film, “Brilliance makes up for a lot”. And Nolan’s brilliance almost shadows his film’s shortcomings.
Of the many grand soundscapes in the film, one stands out — glass marbles dropping into a fish bowl and a wine glass. It’s meant to indicate the uranium that’s been refined by the US, a critical component for this American Prometheus’ fire.
Each marble and each clang, as glass hits glass, weighs heavy — it’s one step closer to changing the world as we know it. Or, as initially framed in the film, success for all the scientists who worked on the project.
But if Nolan had listened closely, he might have heard one of the many things Oppenheimer missed or chose to ignore. The radioactive ‘marbles’ left Native American communities suffering devastating consequences to this day.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)