There is now a ‘mushroom cloud’ of opinions about Christopher Nolan’s latest movie Oppenheimer. While the overall opinions are positive, some do pick Nolan for certain historical omissions. The most glaring miss was his soft pedalling of the devastation Japan faced after the dropping of nuclear bombs, and the US administration’s heavy-handedness in evicting the Hispanic residents at the nuclear bomb test site at Los Alamos.
Before the promos were out, I had vaguely heard of Robert J Oppenheimer as the nuclear scientist who led Project Manhattan – the United States' plan to build a nuclear bomb during the Second World War. In India, he was also remembered for quoting a line from Bhagavad Gita, “Now I become death, the destroyer of worlds,” after the bomb was successfully tested.
Thanks to a friend’s prodding, I landed at a city multiplex on the first day of the movie’s screening. The hall was packed and we managed to get tickets only in one of the front rows - third from the screen. The hall was milling with young college-going and 20-something crowd, probably Nolan fans mesmerized by his Dark Knight and Inception.
It made me wonder how they are going to take their favourite director’s attempt at a three-hour-long biopic about a scientist - which totally eliminates any scope for high-voltage action or special effects. Moreover, I wondered how many of these students and young professionals, with their brains hardwired to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), will feel excited about a period drama steeped in politics and history.
I had come for the movie with a near-clean slate. I didn’t closely read any newspaper reviews. The news item of lead actor Cillian Murphy’s interest in Bhagavad Gita had evoked some social media buzz, especially among the bhakt crowd.
But their euphoria of an Indian scripture being validated by a Hollywood star soon turned into anger after the movie was released. To their chagrin, the famous scientist is shown reading the holy book during a sex scene. This is now snowballing into a major controversy with the latest reports of Information and Broadcasting Minister Anurag Thakur wading into it. He has censured the censor board for letting this objectionable scene past their scissors.
There are even calls that Nolan should drop this scene worldwide. This controversy is likely to linger on for some time as the hyper-nationalist Indian diaspora is expected to keep it on the boil. I recall how Time magazine columnist Joel Stein was forced to apologise in 2010 after he wrote a humour piece on how the town of Edison in New Jersey state changed after being swamped by Indian immigrants.
As I said earlier, my knowledge of Oppenheimer was sketchy. So I had no idea that this ‘father of the nuclear bomb’ too was caught up in the maelstrom of McCarthy's witch hunt for communists and socialists in the 1950s. So far, I had thought that only politicians, film artistes and writers were hauled up. One of the most notable ones was Charlie Chaplin.
During the early days of the cold war, the US policymakers thought that socialism was more dangerous than fascism. They made all-out efforts to weed out or blacklist people they thought were sympathetic to these causes from the federal administration, universities, and the film industry.
Unlike the stereotype of ‘apolitical’ scientists steeped in lab research, Oppenheimer was active politically, though in a prudent manner - he baulked from becoming a card-carrying Communist. But he made contributions to socialists and Communists fighting General Franco during the Spanish civil war, wanted scientists and academics to form unions, and was in love with a card-carrying Communist woman academic.
All this did not affect him when he got down to setting up a nuclear testing facility in a remote desert land in Los Alamos and wooing top scientists in the country to work on the project. Once the weapon got successfully tested he became a national hero.
But his ties with the Communists came back to bite after the world came to be divided into two camps – the US-led Western bloc (comprising capitalist countries) and the then USSR-led Eastern bloc (communist countries) after World War II. His opposition to the hydrogen bomb and fear of an arms race also landed him in the bad books of the US administration.
As for characterization, Murphy with his probing eyes gets into the skin of Oppenheimer, who graduates from being a precocious science student fiddling at a lab in Cambridge, to a more confident theoretical physicist. During Project Manhattan, he acquires the swagger of a confident entrepreneur trying to sell the idea of the atomic bomb to fellow scientists. After the devastation caused by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the unravelling begins. He is shattered and vulnerable for the rest of his life.
I just could not make out Matt Damon and Robert Downey Jr. Nolan showed them in an entirely different light. Damon has traded his boyish looks to be a Lieutenant General who was the military face of Project Manhattan. Downey Jr, famous for his Iron Man roles, plays a more complex role as a government official who tries to pin down Oppenheimer with his previous links with socialism and communism after World War II when McCarthyism took over.
It is to the credit of Nolan that he keeps viewers engaged for three long hours. It is no mean feat to keep the Instagram Reels generation, with low attention spans, engaged for such a long time.
Tailpiece: Almost throughout the movie Oppenheimer has a cigarette dangling on his lips, or someone else is smoking. Hence we had the ‘smoking kills’ sign as a permanent fixture on the right corner of the screen. Sounded a bit rich as the movie itself is about the atomic bomb and killing people in thousands!
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