Midway through Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, Kitty Oppenheimer (Emily Blunt) leaves her Los Alamos home to search for her husband: something is wrong. It’s the middle of World War II, and the Manhattan Project is well underway. But personal rather than professional drama is about to ensue. When Kitty finds Robert (Cillian Murphy), he is in tears over the suicide of his former fiancée Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) — tears that register a stark degree of guilt. He had continued sleeping with Tatlock despite his marriage to Kitty, breaking off the affair only when it threatened to impact his career. Tatlock had been a Communist. Oppenheimer, keenly aware of the suspicions surrounding him for his many associations with radical politics and people, had sacrificed the relationship as a way to demonstrate his loyalty to the United States in terms that security officials at Los Alamos could understand. Now Tatlock — vulnerable, depressive — is dead.
Kitty, herself a former Party member, has little sympathy for her husband. She admonishes him: “You don’t get to commit sin and then have us all feel sorry for you when it has consequences.”
It is one of the first moments in the film when Oppenheimer fails in his attempt to be all things to all people — though it is not, of course, the last. Oppenheimer tells the story of its main character’s attempt to inhabit a number of roles simultaneously: scientist, scholar, soldier, and ultimately world-maker. Nolan portrays this as a noble — if doomed — quest, and the drama of the film stems in large measure from Oppenheimer’s attempt to juggle his various identities for as long as he can.
As a historian of science who has spent years writing and thinking about the cultural images that have gathered around Oppenheimer, I’m drawn to Kitty’s admonition. In a film where Nolan hews closely to the “tragic hero” mythology that has defined how our culture remembers the famous physicist, this feels like the director acknowledging a different Oppenheimer. However briefly, he pulls back the veil to show a subject who is less tragic than he is arrogant and self-serving.
The film unfolds across three nested time periods, with ample cross-cutting among them. At the outer edge is a 1959 confirmation hearing for Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), President Eisenhower’s nominee to be Secretary of the Commerce. As his aides prepare him for the hearing, Strauss is forced to recall — and defend — his role in Oppenheimer’s ouster from government five years earlier. These recollections open the second layer, as we learn about the 1954 security hearing that Strauss orchestrated to remove his adversary from a position of policy influence. We see Oppenheimer in a small administrative office recalling and defending his actions from the past. This opens the third layer, the core of what makes Oppenheimer’s career and person matter: the Manhattan Project and the successful exploitation of the energy within the atom.
Throughout these multiple layers, Nolan portrays Oppenheimer sympathetically — and mythically. He opens the film with an epigraph about Prometheus, who in Greek mythology stole fire from the heavens and gave it to humanity — but suffered divinely decreed torment for his actions. This is also a nod to his source material, the Pulitzer Prize winning biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Like Prometheus, Faust, and Frankenstein, the epigraph suggests, Oppenheimer has sought to master dangerous knowledge and paid the price.
In this view of things, Oppenheimer plays as resolutely noble. Ever the good soldier, he answers his country’s call to use his talents to win the war and defeat the Nazis. Ever humane, he cannot remain blind to the consequences — warning his colleagues at Los Alamos of the apocalyptic potential of their creation and later working to curb the arms race. Nolan never shows us images of the bomb’s victims, choosing instead to focus on the reactions of people at Los Alamos; during one speech Oppenheimer, physically and emotionally chastened by the implications of what he has done, has a kind of vision in which he imagines his audience members suffering the disfiguring effects of an atomic explosion. His anguish is palpable. And within a cinematic context that presents both the Manhattan Project and the use of the bomb as obvious (if unfortunate) necessities, that anguish is redemptive.
But perhaps not completely. Kitty Oppenheimer’s invocation of sin was clearly not just about adultery; it also prompts the audience to reflect on the atomic bomb. It is important to note that Kitty does not chastise him for the affair with Jean — or, for that matter, a yet other affair, with Ruth Tolman (Louise Lombard). She is angry that he wants things both ways: to have his wife tolerate infidelity and to provide comfort when things go wrong. This wish to have it both ways was not just evident in his personal life. In one famous quote, published in Time in 1948, Oppenheimer said that “in some crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge they cannot lose.” The phrase “known sin” is eye-catching, and perhaps was Nolan’s inspiration to have Kitty use similar words in the movie. But it implies more than it actually says, because nowhere in the quote nor the interview from which it came does Oppenheimer say that he regretted the Manhattan Project. He wants to get credit for worrying about the bomb without disavowing either it or the work he did at Los Alamos. There is something subtly evasive and self-flattering in this attitude, a false note within the mythologizing, but Kitty’s comment is one of the few moments in which the movie asks viewers to confront it.
More typical of how Nolan handles key episodes is the so-called “Chevalier incident.” Oppenheimer’s friend Haakon Chevalier (Jefferson Hall) — another person with deep left-wing connections — informs him that a mutual acquaintance is eager to pass on technical information to the Soviet Union. Oppenheimer tries to alert security officers about this acquaintance without revealing Chevalier as his source. To do so, he fabricates a story that makes the transgression seem like a wider conspiracy — a story that backfires, ultimately damaging the professional lives of both men. He never provided a good explanation for this, saying simply at his 1954 security hearing that, “I was an idiot.” The movie, as well as most historians, treats the incident as naïve but not sinister; it sides with General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), who attributed Oppenheimer’s lies to his “typical American schoolboy attitude that there is something wicked about telling on a friend.” This may be true, but it also elides some more complex realities. Oppenheimer was trying to thread a rather difficult needle. He occupied a critical and highly sensitive wartime post and was under constant suspicion for his radical past. He needed to prove his loyalty to the country, while at the same time protecting his friends and leading his scientific colleagues. Oppenheimer may well have been trying to protect Chevalier, but he was also looking out for himself.
Such incidents show that Oppenheimer’s security troubles did not emerge suddenly during the McCarthy era; they were deeply interwoven with all of his work on nuclear weapons both during and after the war. But Nolan assigns the physicist very little responsibility for his own downfall. He presents the revocation of Oppenheimer’s security clearance as a clear injustice, the result mainly of Strauss’ personal vendetta against him. Moreover, it excuses his pre-war Communist sympathies less by recognizing how common such notions were among American intellectuals in the 1930s than by scapegoating others. When Oppenheimer meets Jean Tatlock, for example, their flirtation is immediately intertwined with her attempts to draw him into the Party. Later, there is an uncomfortable moment in which she briefly returns in a fantastical replay of one of their earlier sex scenes, this time in the middle of his security hearing. The scene does not advance the story; its only function seems to be reiterating Tatlock’s role in luring him to Communism. From the sirens of Greek mythology to the Biblical Eve, the temptress is a well-established cultural myth. Its presence here deflects agency from Oppenheimer and actually undercuts the Promethean; it suggests that his foray into radical politics was something that happened to him rather than a deliberate choice.
Nolan gives us keener insight into the nature of Oppenheimer’s choices, a second glimpse behind the veil of the tragic hero myth, in a scene toward the end of the film. Strauss — becoming unhinged at the imminent vote against him in the Senate — drops his pretense of even-handedness and starts to rail against his former adversary. Oppenheimer, he charges, wanted credit for Trinity (the successful bomb test) but not responsibility for Hiroshima and Nagasaki (the loss of life). He also reveled in being a martyr after the revocation of his security clearance in 1954. In this manner, Strauss claims, that hearing may actually have helped Oppenheimer play a role he relished — precisely that of tragic hero.
The rant is self-serving, but as we’ve seen, not completely false. The security hearing was an injustice, but it did not come out of nowhere; it was deeply embedded in a long history with the national security apparatus in which Oppenheimer’s decisions were sometimes sounder than others. Nolan clearly finds nobility in Oppenheimer’s attempts to have it both ways about the bomb, playing the ultimately incommensurable roles of weaponeer and moralist, and the bulk of his film tells the story of a tragic hero who inevitably falls short. But he’s also a sharp enough filmmaker to find the complexity in his subject and appears to agree with Kitty Oppenheimer and Lewis Strauss just enough to give us these peeks behind the veil.
Image: Universal Pictures, licensed under Fair Use Laws.
- Oppenheimer and the Hero Myth - August 7, 2023