Film Club: Oppenheimer

Audio version

** PLEASE NOTE: this essay includes an image of a victim of the Hiroshima atomic bomb that will be upsetting **

Ladies and gentlemen, this week I am delighted to lift the curtain on the first instalment of the Fragments of Light Film Club.

Cinema references already pepper this project, partly as mementos from my previous life, but more importantly because I still believe cinema is the pre-eminent art form of our time, both in its beauty and its degradation.

So every now and then, we’ll lean back, dim the lights and stop to take a long look at a key cinematic work, from ancient classics to modern blockbusters, to ask what light it might shed on this project’s focus: the presence of a sacred dimension in our lives – or lack of it.

I want to begin with Oppenheimer, not just because it’s an intriguing work in itself but because it has so much bearing on what I believe to be one of the most important issues of our time: the world’s stumble towards nuclear war.

Stop for a second and think how extraordinary that is. Director Christopher Nolan had wanted to make a film on this subject for decades. The project was green lit before the world had any intimations that Russia was planning to invade Ukraine. Yet it arrives at exactly the moment when that war has made it more relevant than ever, as we all face renewed threats from what Oppenheimer calls the “divine force” of nuclear weapons. For these timings to work out is like firing an arrow up into space only for it to fall back to earth years later and hit a bullseye.

This often happens with works of art; projects that have gestated unseen sometimes for decades appear just when we most need them. It’s my proposition that such moments are not an accident or coincidence. That’s the Mystery at work. It is trying to communicate something. But what?

Before we get stuck in, I should say that I know from hard experience how easy it is for people to throw tomatoes from the stands rather than face the bull in the ring. I have a lot of sympathy with the view that you shouldn’t judge another’s creative endeavours; instead support any artist doing their best to make something of meaning. In that light, the only appropriate response is surely just to salute Nolan for bringing such a difficult subject to the screen and engaging such a huge audience. Bravo.

But wait. Given that Nolan is so greatly fêted and that he is one of a tiny handful of filmmakers who would be trusted with the millions necessary to tell this story, it is surely also fair for us to expect a certain minimum standard in his work: that he will see the story’s real essence, understand what it means for his audience, and impart that truth in a way that they will carry it beyond the theatre and into their lives.

Would it be too much to suggest, given the potential significance of this story for us at this moment, that such expectations are more than just an idealistic wish but reflect a profound and solemn duty? For the story is not Nolan’s personal plaything; it belongs to humanity as a whole. At a deep level, we entrust it to him on the basis that he will tell it right.

You can probably tell already I believe he failed in that duty.

The quick response is, well that’s just your opinion. We live in a time where everyone has an opinion, which we are all free to dismiss if it runs counter to our own. There is no absolute truth; it is all relative. I disagree: only a culture as broken, as lost, as uprooted as our own could believe that. 

Because like it or not, quality exists. Beauty, truth, they do exist in a way that can transcend our individualistic tastes or culture. Of course, you cannot define them. Like a rainbow, you cannot touch them, cannot take hold of them in your hands through strict definitions or categorisation. Yet that does not mean they are not real. You feel them when they’re there. And I would argue those are the qualities that inspire our love of certain works of art or the deep connections we make with our favourite books or films. For me, I encounter it in films as far apart as Pan’s Labyrinth and La Grande Bellezza, in The Virgin Suicides and Seven Samurai. That’s why we say they touch our hearts. As many ancient cultures attest, the heart is the organ of perception for things that the intellect cannot reach.

Our fact-based culture struggles with such qualities because they defy quantification. We prefer to point to things that can be measured. In film terms, that means things like number of screens on which a film opens, how long it stays in the cinemas or, best of all, box office takings. Money has become our supreme value, overriding more pesky intangibles like integrity, beauty or soul. So the papers celebrate when Oppenheimer hits almost a billion dollars in revenue, nine times more than it cost to make, as that means it must be good when in fact the film and indeed such reporting itself only provides further evidence of our degeneracy.

I should say that previous drafts of this essay included sections on Nolan’s ridiculously white male take on a story that involved the lives of so many men and women of different colours and cultures around the world. Some have excused this failing by claiming it is technically brilliant; it’s not. Previous drafts also went into a long breakdown of the technical reasons why Nolan’s work fails, from the pacing to the music to the way it assumes knowledge in its audience. It’s something I feel qualified to discuss, as I spent most of my filmmaking life trying to turn real life stories into compelling documentary films. In that light, Nolan makes a whole series of rookie errors, the kind documentary makers learn to avoid right at the start of their careers. Here’s a sample:

Any film clocking in at three hours better be sure every minute of that marathon is necessary. Here it is clearly not. Nolan blunders by doing what an old boss of mine called “covering the waterfront”, trying to cram in all the history of Oppenheimer’s biography rather than select what really matters. We’re 43 minutes in before the real story of the Manhattan project actually gets going.

That means there are almost no scenes in this first three quarters of an hour. There are just clips of speech, stapled together with breathless cuts. The clips are almost all of the same curt duration so that the pace is both relentless and monotonous; there is no shifting rhythm, which is the way a skilful filmmaker communicates to an audience what is significant and what is less so. As a result, confusion reigns.

A dead giveaway is the music. Again, a basic trick taught at the start of any filmmaking career is that if you have a lot of material that is fundamentally boring, full of facts not feeling, if you lack any real scenes or ways to engage an audience’s emotions, the last resort is to paper music across the cracks, hoping to create the illusion of emotion and coherence. Oppenheimer ‘s music is incessant throughout for precisely this reason.

And more: the film is constantly telling us things, not showing them, another basic violation of cinematic storytelling. I lost count of the significant events that were reported through dialogue, with images used as wallpaper to cover them. This approach is unavoidable in documentary filmmaking, where interviews are so often the only way to tell key parts of a story. But we always try to keep it to a minimum and use “actuality” or real unfolding scenes where possible. The joy of scripted filmmaking it that it allows you to go beyond such limitations, and actually show not tell the audience what has happened. The kindest interpretation is that Nolan has forgotten this basic tenet.

Honestly, I could go on and on. This is barely the half of it. Yet trying to include all the failings and mistakes made this essay thousands of words long! So I decided to do what Nolan himself failed to do: focus on the heart of the tale.

Not for nothing is the Director of a film called the guardian of the story. It is her or his job to hold its essence in mind amid the countless competing perspectives of all the people involved in making a film, so that the core qualities at stake are conveyed to the audience through the screen.

In the case of Oppenheimer, the essence of this story is surely easy to see. A man driven by both egotistical ambition and the noble desire to defeat the evil of Nazism ushers into the world a force powerful enough to bring about mankind’s own destruction. He spends the rest of his life trying to come to terms and atone for what he has done. It is the story of a human claiming the power of the Gods and the consequences of that transgression. The film is based on a book called American Prometheus, suggesting the original authors at least understood the mythic architecture that lies beneath this human life.

I think it is obvious that Nolan misses the point from the epigraph right at the start of his film. For though he mentions Prometheus’s theft of fire, he goes on to emphasise the eternal torture decreed as punishment for this transgression. This illustrates Nolan’s focal point in this story is on Oppenheimer the man, and the ill-treatment he suffered, not the original theft of divine power itself. Through Nolan’s lens, the consequences for humanity will play second if not third fiddle to the personal troubles of one individual. Brilliant that individual may be but in that simple choice of focus, Nolan hollows out his project.

The choice means a vast amount of screen time is devoted to Oppenheimer’s supposed “persecution” for his tangential communist links and the veracity of the accusations. Even more time is devoted to the architect of this character assassination, an unknown historical personage called Admiral Strauss. But there’s a problem here: what actually is at stake? Nothing more than Oppenheimer’s security clearance. Nolan does his best to invest this administrative detail with huge symbolic significance, portraying its revocation as akin to the annihilation of Oppenheimer’s reputation. It’s a stretch to put it politely.

Because honestly how can we care, why should we care, what does any of that really matter when we are talking about the annihilation of two Japanese cities, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the unleashing of the force that could lead to the deaths of tens of millions more, including in a terrible irony all the people watching at the cinema?

Many have pointed out that Nolan deliberately excludes any real images of the impact of Oppenheimer’s “work” on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Seen in the light of Nolan’s focus this becomes something greater than the sin of omission; rather, it becomes the crime of manipulation.

For if the audience were confronted with the images of the victims, their sympathy with Nolan’s hero and his various bureaucratic challenges would evaporate as fast as the innocent people caught in the bomb’s hypocentre. Oh, Oppenheimer had a rough few days at the office did he? Poor guy. Contrast that with the fate of this schoolgirl burned in the Hiroshima blast:

I am sorry to confront you with such a devastating image. However I have long believed that withholding such images is an act of condescension, infantilising the audience. No, this is too much for you, the filmmaker says, I know what’s best for you. Yet without that crucial visual evidence presented, how can an audience reach a fair conclusion on the decisions a character has made in a story?

This was the principal that underpinned Waad al-Kateab’s and my decision to show the devastating scenes of destruction that she had captured in Aleppo to the audience of For Sama, including images of children who had been killed by the Assad regime and their Russian allies. For how could audiences understand the agony of her own dilemma – whether to stay in the city or not – unless they could share in the visceral nature of the threat to her daughter that she had to face every day?

Every time Nolan has an opportunity to present the broader human context, he prioritises Oppenheimer’s suffering. So when a slideshow of the destruction is presented off camera, it’s Oppenheimer’s face we focus on, his anguish we’re invited to sympathise with. Even in the actual last minute, when Nolan makes his first reference to the present tense danger of a global nuclear war, it’s in the context of a nightmarish vision inside his hero’s head, one that shuts off as soon as Oppenheimer closes his eyes. Throughout, Nolan’s storytelling is interested in a single man, not mankind.

I believe Oppenheimer himself would have baulked at this portrayal. He had a strong sense of the cosmic scale of the transgression at Los Alamos. This awareness is best seen at his famous citing of Hindu scripture in an interview about the Trinity test. In a single minute it says more than Nolan does in three hours:

Contrast the weight, the power of that statement with the way Nolan first uses it in his film: as a bizarre overlay to a gratuitous sex scene, severed from the actual Trinity test by well over an hour of screen time. Doing so not only deprives the words of their real resonance; it betrays a colonial attitude to the holiest of holy Hindu scriptures, the Bhagavad Gita, which Nolan is happy to debase, stripping it of any significance other than as evidence of Oppenheimer’s scholarly learning.

Adrift from its appropriate context, Nolan fails to honour the insight and understanding of the man who this whole film is designed to laud, a failing that is not rectified by hearing the disembodied words repeated again over the test itself.

Contrast also Oppenheimer’s description of what actually happened at the Trinity test with Nolan’s portrayal. In the film, we see no-one cry and hardly anyone silent; they swiftly all break into conventional cheering and whooping. Oppenheimer is then born aloft on the shoulders of his co-workers carried before the American flag, as a glorious hero. I watched this shot in amazement: there was no irony there at all.

A storyteller with heart would know that the Trinity bomb test should be the turning point for Oppenheimer as a character, the point at which his life undergoes a total shift in direction. Usually a revelation of this magnitude occurs halfway through a film, the midpoint in screenwriting shorthand. It is often the fulcrum around which the whole film pivots, where the protagonist’s priorities decisively change. Often the change is from personal ambition, the desires of the ego, to acts of wider service to the community as a whole - or what you might dare to call values of the soul.

Oppenheimer’s real life perfectly lends itself to this structure. Yet Nolan makes a mess of it. Rather than using the Trinity bomb test as the hinge around which his story turns, the test occurs two thirds of the way through. And though we do see scenes of a chastened and doubtful Oppenheimer afterwards, these scenes are lost amid a deluge of further dull, distracting and befuddled sequences around the security clearance hearing and Strauss’s vendetta.

We are told that Oppenheimer tried to campaign for a safer world but we hardly see this on screen, other than the mild objections we see him raise to the development of the hydrogen bomb. If we do not see it, in cinema terms, it effectively did not happen. So Oppenheimer’s real life arc of repentance is muddied and lost in this portrayal.

Thus, when granted the chance to tell a story of great meaning, Nolan failed. He created a piece of work that is unenduring. For why would you ever return to this? What human truth or beauty is revealed here? Nothing. It is heartless.

But the sad truth is that doesn’t matter to anyone in power in the biz; the box office does. In defying the marketing logic and making so much money with a supposedly intelligent film, Nolan is unassailable. We will undoubtedly be forced to watch him triumph at all the awards, just another Emperor with new clothes. Our culture is full of them.

Yet this metric and the film’s success depends on people Nolan gives little thought to: his audience. For I think there is another reason why audiences have still flocked to a film that is so manifestly poor, other than the blind adulation of the critics.

I believe people across the world find themselves called to watch this film without quite knowing why. Subconsciously we sense danger, like rats detecting the stirrings of a leak on board ship. That danger is close, closer than we are being told, like an asteroid about to skim the Earth that our scientists either have not seen yet or deny exists. In our depths, a part of us knows nuclear weapons are a force that is present in our lives again – and the threat is different now from the past, in ways we cannot quite understand.

So we go to Oppenheimer to try to make sense of these intuitions, perhaps to understand a little better the mysterious fear that screams silently at our senses. Sadly little insight is on offer. As noted already, Nolan throws in a nod to the implications for us all at the very last minute, but it is little more than an afterthought. Perhaps he has a suspicion that if the worst comes to pass, he’ll be fine, tucked up in a bunker with some of his multimillionaire friends. It is us, the audience, who will have to face the final settling of accounts with his hero’s transgression.

I cannot help but feel that this film is more than just an artistic failure. It is a betrayal of trust, of duty. A betrayal of us. No-one before and likely for long after will have the opportunity Nolan did to make us face the reality of the horror of nuclear weapons anew in our times. Perhaps if had done his job, we might then have been led to ask why we need them at all, whether they belong to a time in the past, not our own. Who knows where such questions might have led.

All Nolan had to do was follow his own character’s lead, to show not conceal what these weapons mean, what they do, what they are. And at a deeper level, I believe he was being asked to make the change always demanded by a midpoint revelation: to shift the orientation of his priorities from selfish ego concerns to an acceptance of his wider responsibility to the human community as a whole. To make his work an act of service. Ironically, his failure in this will deprive him of any chance to be truly great. The opportunity squandered, we his audience leave the theatre unenlightened, with nothing to take home but our foreboding.

Well, that’s it for this first cheery instalment of Film Club! You’ll probably be delighted to hear that I’ll stop talking about nuclear weapons soon. Next time, we’ll close out the Rising of the Storm series by looking at where we stand today. Then I’m delighted to say we may move on to some brighter fragments.

But one last thing, if you don’t mind me asking. Many of you have been kind enough to respond to my essays directly via email or text, sharing your thoughts or criticisms. It would be wonderful if you felt comfortable enough to leave your comments and reactions below, on the essay itself, so others can join in the conversation and I can convince people – maybe even myself – that I’m not shouting into a void.

So I’ll look forward to hearing your reactions to this one. Until next time.