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Book to film: On Oppenheimer and American Prometheus

Aug 09, 2023 09:01 PM IST

A look at how Christopher Nolan’s film builds on Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s scholarly biography of the famed physicist

A mysterious rumble grows insistently rhythmic every now and again in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Mysterious because we can hear the sound, but we don’t know where it is coming from. Is it a steam locomotive starting up and shaking the earth violently beneath? Or soldiers marching off to war perhaps? Neither, as it turns out. The source of the auditory motif is revealed two hours into the three-hour film about the eponymous theoretical physicist who was given the undesirable but not undeserving moniker, “the father of the atomic bomb.”

Cillian Murphy in and as Oppenheimer. (Universal Pictures) PREMIUM
Cillian Murphy in and as Oppenheimer. (Universal Pictures)

721pp, Rs899; Atlantic Books
721pp, Rs899; Atlantic Books

What was previously nondiegetic becomes diegetic in the film’s most chilling scene. President Harry Truman has just announced the US has dropped its first A-bomb on Hiroshima. The wholesale murder of thousands is proof the Manhattan Project was a categorical success. Now it is up to the project’s director J Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) to give the victory speech. The assembled crowd stomp their feet in unison and cheer him on — as if it were a homecoming rally for a football game, not a massacre. “I’ll bet the Japanese didn’t like it,” he jokes. The rumbling crescendos, its echo more cataclysmic than the preceding Trinity test. Where the test explosion on a desolate expanse is depicted with blinding light, palpable silence and dumbstruck faces before the thunderous boom, the explosion on a populated city is abstracted via Oppenheimer’s fractured POV.

If we don’t see the carnage in Hiroshima, it’s because obviously Oppenheimer wasn’t there. All he can do is imagine the aftermath based on what he knows and what he has seen. Guilt distorts his perception as he recasts the Trinity experience with the crowd, picturing them being blinded by the light and stunned into silence. Cheers turn into screams. A young woman’s face peels off. A charred body is crushed underfoot. The entire crowd vaporises, leaving behind a cloud of radioactive dust. As Oppenheimer is overcome with these visions of horror, the oppressive rumble starts to prick his conscience. Smiling on the surface while dreading inwardly, he is a man at war with himself. Positioning him in the centre of the frame gives the scene a heightened sense of urgency, as the catastrophic capacity of his creation becomes forbiddingly clear for the first time. The nightmare sequence is heavy with regret of a man opening his eyes to what his triumph means for mankind.

Film poster (Universal Pictures)
Film poster (Universal Pictures)

As hinted by the subtitle of American Prometheus, the biography on which the film is based, Oppenheimer’s triumph was a prelude to his tragedy. Building on Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s scholarship on the famed physicist and his infamous invention, Nolan destabilises the illusion of objectivity on a narrative and formal level. The film is split into two perspectives. One, in colour and labelled “Fission”, submerges us in the private anxieties of Oppenheimer, taking us from his forays into quantum mechanics as a student, through his years of flirting with socialist politics, his intense relationship with first love Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) and subsequent marriage to Kitty (Emily Blunt), his breakthroughs at Los Alamos, to his character assassination at the hands of a government commission. The other, in black and white and labelled “Fusion”, presents the univocal world view of Atomic Energy Commission head Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr), the vindictive, conservative, bureaucratic thug Bird and Sherwin identified as the mastermind behind the witch hunt against Oppenheimer.

“Atomic Energy Commission head Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr), the vindictive, conservative, bureaucratic thug Bird and Sherwin identified as the mastermind behind the witch hunt against Oppenheimer.” (Universal Pictures)
“Atomic Energy Commission head Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr), the vindictive, conservative, bureaucratic thug Bird and Sherwin identified as the mastermind behind the witch hunt against Oppenheimer.” (Universal Pictures)

In between the two, visions of the hidden quantum world — depicted via hallucinatory inserts of water ripples, exploding stars, and subatomic collisions — continue to plague Oppenheimer. Murphy’s translucent blue eyes provide a centre of gravity to Nolan’s close-up on one of history’s most consequential men. When a Los Alamos worker in the book says “something about (Oppenheimer’s) eyes gave him a certain aura”, she could very well be talking about the Irish actor. Nolan combines psychological and historical logic to get closer to the essence of a complicated figure who went from shaping history to being reduced to a shadow. Causality is embodied by the constant back-and-forth between the dual ontologies. Though so many characters, timelines and closed-door conversations are thrown into this particle accelerator of a film, the dramatic flow sustains right through to the end as in a suspenseful thriller.

Quantum mechanics suggests matter can behave like a wave at one moment, and like a particle at another. In the same schizophrenic spirit, Oppenheimer emerges with all his paradoxes intact: A scientist who developed a weapon of mass destruction to save lives and then campaigned against using it; a patriot heralded as an American hero and a traitor accused of being a Soviet spy; a physicist well-versed in theories but practically inept in the lab; a man whose politics too were chiefly theoretical yet found himself investigated for strong Communist sympathies; a student of science at Harvard, Cambridge and Göttingen who enjoyed reading the Bhagavad Gita, The Brothers Karamazov and The Waste Land.

In American Prometheus, Bird and Sherwin recount an instance of fellow theoretical physicist Paul Dirac being amazed by Oppenheimer’s ability to write poetry as well as study physics. “In physics, we try to tell people in such a way that they understand something that nobody knew before. In the case of poetry, it’s the exact opposite,” Dirac said. “How can you do both?” Nolan attempts to do no less. Oppenheimer, like Interstellar, is a work of intellectual curiosity aspiring for poetic transcendence. Throughout his career, the British director has been fascinated by temporal shifts and quantum mechanics while remaining a firm believer in the transportive power of old-fashioned film stock.

“Bird and Sherwin do offer further insight into how an understanding of Hindu scripture informed the physicist’s dharmic sense of morality and duty. As they put it, “The Gita seemed to provide precisely the right philosophy for an intellectual keenly attuned to the affairs of men and the pleasures of the senses.” (Westock Productions/Shutterstock)
“Bird and Sherwin do offer further insight into how an understanding of Hindu scripture informed the physicist’s dharmic sense of morality and duty. As they put it, “The Gita seemed to provide precisely the right philosophy for an intellectual keenly attuned to the affairs of men and the pleasures of the senses.” (Westock Productions/Shutterstock)

Of all the books in Oppenheimer’s library, the Bhagavad Gita, as well-established, was one he particularly loved to quote-drop from, whenever a grand enough occasion presented itself. While watching the explosion of bright light during the Trinity test, he spoke of being reminded of what Lord Krishna said as he revealed his divine form to Arjuna: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once in the sky, that would be the splendour of the mighty One.” In its place, the film uses another verse Oppenheimer quoted — “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” — to show how he came to see himself on having provided the world the means to destroy itself. The same verse is translated by Oppenheimer on the request of his lover Jean Tatlock in a sex scene — which has caused a stir in some circles in India. To be sure, there’s no such scene in the book. But Bird and Sherwin do offer further insight into how an understanding of Hindu scripture informed the physicist’s dharmic sense of morality and duty. As they put it, “The Gita seemed to provide precisely the right philosophy for an intellectual keenly attuned to the affairs of men and the pleasures of the senses.”

Robert Oppenheimer’s portrait on a stamp of Togo (spatuletail / Shutterstock)
Robert Oppenheimer’s portrait on a stamp of Togo (spatuletail / Shutterstock)

History tells us when a group of 70 scientists petitioned Truman not to drop the A-bomb on Japan until the country had been offered peace terms, Oppenheimer stifled it. Edward Teller, who was once Oppenheimer’s peer and later his adversary, responded: “The accident that we worked out this dreadful thing should not give us the responsibility of having a voice in how it is to be used.” But by placing Strauss on the offensive and Oppenheimer on the defensive for a large part of the film, Nolan makes the mistake of antagonising one in an appeal to sympathy for the other. Writing for Reverse Shot, Michael Koresky remarks how the choice “allows Oppenheimer to be effectively re-cast as a victim, a little man persecuted by a big system”, adding, “By centring the Strauss drama in his narrative, Nolan engineers a conniving villain that puts Oppenheimer into even more sympathetic relief, however conflicted or compromised. This creates an odd emotional incongruity in a film that clearly signals it’s more about humanity’s existential threat than one man’s journey towards social disenfranchisement.”

The threat of Nazi Germany developing the A-bomb first was sufficient moral justification for Oppenheimer to spearhead the Manhattan project. The threat of Japan, which was “essentially defeated”, did not warrant the use of an A-bomb, much less two. The book reveals the bomb was dropped on Japan to force unconditional surrender and not share the victory with the Soviet Union, thereby establishing American supremacy. Gen. Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) says something to the same effect in the film, “We intend to demonstrate it in the most unambiguous terms. Twice. Once to show the weapon’s power, and a second to show that we can keep doing this until they surrender.” In a subsequent discussion on which Japanese city the US should drop the bomb, the Secretary of War Henry Stimson (James Remar) orders Kyoto be stricken off the list due to its cultural importance. Then, he makes an off-hand comment about spending his honeymoon there. This scene doesn’t appear in the book, but Nolan builds on a historical detail (Kyoto was in fact Stimson’s honeymoon destination even if that may not have been a reason for crossing the city off the list) to illustrate the arbitrary nature of the reasons and decisions that ushered in the nuclear age.

Where the book fares better than the film is in showing how subatomic physics evolved from theoretical conjecture to practical application, from a weapon to save the world to a weapon of apocalyptic one-upmanship. At the same time, it also traces the evolution of communism from an idea associated with the labour movement to America’s mortal enemy crystallising dogmatic hatred and nothing less. As the Red Scare created a climate of fear and panic across the US, the loyalty of scientists were called into question, oaths were imposed, and the sharing of scientific information blocked.

Oppenheimer, however, wished to share atomic knowledge with the world to neutralise the threat it posed. At the same time, he opposed the development of the much more lethal hydrogen bomb in response to the Soviet Union’s first A-bomb test in 1949. This put him in the crosshairs of Strauss, a businessman appointed by Truman to chair the AEC, and Teller, an unwavering nuclear apologist in favour of developing the H-bomb. Not to mention Truman, who had no desire to allow the Soviet Union to catch up in the arms race. When Oppenheimer called for nuclear non-proliferation because he felt he had blood on his hands, the then-US president dismissed him as “a cry-baby scientist.”

Trinity, the first nuclear bomb being prepared at the test site in the Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico, USA on July 16th, 1945. (agilard/Shutterstock)
Trinity, the first nuclear bomb being prepared at the test site in the Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico, USA on July 16th, 1945. (agilard/Shutterstock)

As the USA got caught in the grip of anti-Communist hysteria in the 1950s, past associations with progressive causes, communist friends and love affairs were deployed in a public humiliation campaign against Oppenheimer. “Strauss and his allies were determined to silence the one man who they feared could credibly challenge their policies,” Bird and Sherwin wrote in their book. “In assaulting his politics and his professional judgments — his life and his values really — Oppenheimer’s critics in 1954 exposed many aspects of his character: His ambitions and insecurities, his brilliance and naiveté, his determination and fearfulness, his stoicism and his bewilderment.” If Oppenheimer’s triumph revealed the inventive and destructive power of genius, his tragedy revealed how the State can mobilise its authority to vilify dissidents and activists. Therein lies the reason why his story resonates at a time when the Internet is full of Strausses setting up online tribunals to sully the credibility of those with whom they disagree.

Oppenheimer opens with a bite-sized summary of the Greek myth of Prometheus before it dives into the life of his atomic-age analogue. Prometheus stole fire from the Olympian gods to empower mankind. Zeus, furious, chained him to a rock and sent an eagle to feast on his liver. Since Prometheus was immortal, his flesh would grow back every night, only for the eagle to tear at it again the next day in an endless cycle. Oppenheimer endured a not too different fate: His fiery gift to mankind brought him endless suffering. As a character in the film tells the physicist, “You see beyond the world we live in. There is a price to be paid for that.”

Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.

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