It is no surprise that Oppenheimer has dominated the awards circuit this year. This is foremost a reflection of Hollywood’s obsession with itself: Oppenheimer—a film about an auteur-mastermind who orchestrates a gigantic, multi-million dollar production involving hundreds of people and countless, intricate moving parts, ultimately generating an impact that far exceeds the grasp even of its own creator—might well be seen as a subconscious expression of Christopher Nolan’s concept of himself as a film director.
Nonetheless, Oppenheimer deserves to be considered for more than its self-referential quality; the film’s greatest value derives from how it deals with questions of science, war, and civilization.
At the center of these questions is the titular character, J. Robert Oppenheimer. Gaunt and intense in Cillian Murphy’s rendition, Oppenheimer remains, throughout the movie, a black box whose real motivations are difficult to ascertain. This performance of ambiguity then triggers, for the audience, a feeling of ambivalence. We are not sure how to feel about Oppenheimer. This is the film’s strength and its weakness.
Ambiguity can confront the viewer with a stronger sense of responsibility to consciously decide what they think about the questions that a film or piece of art raises. And Oppenheimer tries to articulate the gravity of its narrative in visceral terms: the ending sequence, where Oppenheimer pictures a planet engulfed in flame as a consequence of his creation, is stark, terrifying, and effective. Yet where the movie falters, in the build-up to this moment, is in its over-indulgence of uncertainty as a defining theme—taking a concept from particle physics and imposing it as a philosophic principle onto a real chapter of our history.
By making Oppenheimer’s choices hazier and more abstract, by blurring its own ambiguity into mere grayness, the film obscures and ultimately cheapens the stakes of the questions it approaches. When everything is uncertain, it becomes easier to evade responsibility for wars conducted in our name. When everything is uncertain, a people can remain paralyzed forever, even as the vaunted structures of our civilization collapse and burn in wreckage around us.
Science, revolution, and the idea of uncertainty
Oppenheimer’s early scenes are thrilling, insofar as they deal with the scientific process as a titanic, electrifying endeavor toward the conception of new ideas. The film understands that science is not only propelled by its own internal revolutions; science is part and parcel of larger revolutionary leaps and ideological contests in the history of humanity. All of this means something for us, who live in the aftermath of a world dreamed of, built up, and destroyed by men such as Oppenheimer; we, in the seat of the world’s ailing hegemon, have inherited their assumptions, their institutions, and their science.
We travel with a young Oppenheimer as he encounters Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and “the new physics” in Europe. In what became known as the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, Bohr championed a new view that subatomic particles are not physically real objects, but can only be understood as probabilities until they are subjected to measurement. From this emerged Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: the more we know about a particle’s position, the less we can know about its velocity, and vice versa.
This sparked a fierce debate with Albert Einstein, who strenuously opposed the idea that the foundation of the universe is probabilistic, rather than determined by dynamic interactions in physical reality. It was a clash not just between two scientific interpretations, but between two systems of philosophy: Einstein’s more materialist philosophy—i.e. physical reality does exist, independent of our observation, and we are part of it, versus Bohr’s positivist approach—i.e. physical reality cannot be assumed to exist, and only what we observe can be verified.
Even as Einstein called for further experimentation to test different interpretations of quantum mechanics, Bohr enlisted a crop of rising physicists, including Oppenheimer, to proceed as if the debate had been decisively won. The Copenhagen Interpretation became hegemonic in physics and remains so today.
Hence a paradox arose in the “new physics”: its greatest adherents championed a principle of uncertainty, with a dogmatic conviction of absolute certainty. Beyond the physicists themselves, the philosophy underpinning this interpretation proved exceptionally useful to the American ruling elite, who today believe they can arbitrarily invent reality while trapping their citizens in various states of incoherence relative to each other.
The film reflects these attitudes without interrogation; while the character of Einstein functions at best as a voice of warning to Oppenheimer, his serious views on physics—and politics for that matter—are cast as outdated by the 1940s-50s or otherwise excised altogether.
This unexamined problem is all the more regrettable, given that Oppenheimer captures a genuine sense of wonder and excitement in its depiction of scientific discovery. The film argues convincingly that science is at its best when in open dialogue with the vast world of social ferment and change surrounding it. Scenes of young Oppenheimer transfixed by a Picasso painting, or reading T.S. Eliot by lamplight as he delves into the subatomic frontier are resonant in that regard. When he arrives back in America, Oppenheimer tells a more conservative colleague, “You embrace the revolution in physics. Can’t you see it everywhere else? Picasso, Stravinsky, Freud, Marx?”
War and the refusal of responsibility
Oppenheimer’s commitments are put to the test as he moves through two historical events: the immediate impact of World War II, and the postwar formation of the U.S. national security state. Here, in the crucible of war and McCarthyism, the film applies its concept of uncertainty like a fog to make Oppenheimer’s intentions and choices more palpable yet more opaque.
The Trinity test acts as a focal point of the narrative, but it is the scenes that follow which are the most compelling. After the bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, Oppenheimer gives a speech to a roaring auditorium, draped in American flags; his confident smile becomes garish, the air shimmers like heat around him, and the jeering applause crescendos into a shrill scream as Oppenheimer glimpses, for an arresting second, an ashen body petrified by atomic flash. The hallucinatory scene works well in sucking the air out of Oppenheimer’s triumphant, egotistical self-image. And, arguably, it justifies the film’s refusal to deal directly with the nuclear fallout in Japan. When Oppenheimer is later shown photos of the victims, he quickly shields his eyes. This aversion to facing the real consequences of the bomb thereby becomes a subject in itself.
What Oppenheimer taps into, without fully exploring it, is precisely the question of how much Americans are responsible for the acts committed by their own government around the world. During a meeting with Harry S. Truman, Oppenheimer is told, point blank, that his feeling of guilt is irrelevant; as president, Truman claims full responsibility for dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and does so gloatingly. But this does not assuage the anxiety; instead, it throws into relief the grotesquely inhuman qualities of those whom we entrust to lead the nation in war—in our time just as much as in Oppenheimer’s time.
Having reached this point, however, the film pulls back from taking a harsher, more unforgiving view of its main character. From his refusal to sign a petition before Hiroshima opposing the bomb’s deployment, to his meek silence in response to Truman, Oppenheimer is repeatedly placed in situations where he could take a stronger stand but chooses the path of least resistance. What explains his cowardice? How much is the father of the atomic bomb responsible for its impact on humankind? The film is afraid to even suggest that its own questions can be answered.
After the war, Einstein publicly called for an immediate, far-reaching democratic discussion in the United States concerning the implications and usage of nuclear power. He believed that such questions must be wrenched out of the grasp of a small knot of generals, scientists, and politicians, and placed directly into the hands of the people.
To its detriment, the film avoids such a point of view, failing to provide a sharper foil to its protagonist. Even after his security clearance is revoked, Oppenheimer floats in orbit around the nation’s circles of power, entreating the same generals, scientists, and politicians to exercise restraint in developing a much larger hydrogen bomb, by which the U.S. ultimately provokes an accelerating arms race with the Soviet Union.
The end of the Second World War thus released two beasts upon the world: the threat of nuclear war and the full force of the American imperial state. If today we are closer to the former than ever before, it is because of the latter. Oppenheimer cannot be expected to do complete justice to this reality: as a commercial product, the film emanates from the vital center of Hollywood, which itself forms a part of the American state apparatus.
The bomb and civilization
The final question which the film takes up, though more obliquely, is the question of civilization. It is best glimpsed in the moment when Oppenheimer’s friend Isidor Isaac Rabi tells him plainly, “I don’t wish the culmination of three centuries of physics to be a weapon of mass destruction.”
Here, in making an involuntary reference to the thrust of Western civilization, Nolan—a consummate Englishman steeped in American pop culture—is at the mercy of forces entirely beyond his apprehension. It would take a different director, a different movie, and a radically different set of assumptions to make sense of the creation of the atomic bomb as, in fact, a logical culmination of the cataclysmic crisis of the West.
Western science, having attempted to straddle the best of the Enlightenment together with the imperial enslavement of humanity, erupted into chaos and uncertainty as Europe descended into the World Wars. The bomb was the concrete manifestation of an entire civilization bursting apart while simultaneously attempting to reassert itself.
A day may come when a new kind of artist will find it possible to approach these questions in a clearer light. The arrival of that day will depend on whether we as a people can realize, in the words of W.E.B. Du Bois, that “Science is a great and worthy mistress, but there is one greater and that is Humanity which science serves.” To lie, to forsake this principle is to bind ourselves helplessly to the fate of a dying civilization.
Contrary to what Nolan has claimed, J. Robert Oppenheimer is not the most important figure of the 20th century. If one follows the film’s premise that the natural sciences are propelled by wider social revolutions, then the great revolutionaries of the 20th century—V.I. Lenin, Mahatma Gandhi, or Martin Luther King Jr.—come to mind as far more significant to the general arc of human history. In the final analysis, the positive discovery of nonviolence may prove more decisive for mankind’s future than the negative threats of nuclear power.
Oppenheimer is nonetheless interesting as a representative figure of the choices and contradictions confronting the “civilized” man of the West. His story is worth excavating, if only to add more weight to the choices that we must make in the looming trials of our own lives.
Facing ourselves in the crisis
At best, Oppenheimer forces Americans to confront the period of McCarthyism as a precursor to our own. Such a national conversation and reappraisal of our history is direly needed. At worst, the film projects a mutated, highly anxious ideology of our current ruling establishment onto a supposedly anti-establishment narrative.
In a New York Times column, Kai Bird, co-author of American Prometheus, upon which Oppenheimer is based, writes: “Sadly, Oppenheimer’s life story is relevant to our current political predicaments. Oppenheimer was destroyed by a political movement characterized by rank know-nothing, anti-intellectual, xenophobic demagogues. … Too many of our citizens still distrust scientists and fail to understand the scientific quest, the trial and error inherent in testing any theory against facts by experimenting. Just look at what happened to our public health civil servants during the recent pandemic.”
It is fantastically ironic for Bird to conflate the scourge of McCarthyism with the Trump movement and the American people’s distrust of scientists like Anthony Fauci—not in the least because Donald Trump has objectively been targeted by one of the most flagrant witch hunts against a presidential candidate in U.S. history. The rhetoric used on either side today matters far less than the actual machinery of the state’s present efforts to contain and subvert a movement of people whose main stated purpose is to destroy the Deep State.
Nolan adopts these double-faced politics in his own way. During Lewis Strauss’s Senate hearing to become U.S. Secretary of Commerce, a fellow scientist denounces Strauss for orchestrating the denial of Oppenheimer’s security clearance. Oppenheimer receives his vindication, and Strauss his comeuppance. It is a classic Nolan scene: a swift, thrilling reveal played for maximum satisfaction. It reads like a rousing defense of scientists the world over.
The only problem is that Oppenheimer’s life does not lend itself to a great trust of scientists. The film thus tries to flatten its own message. Oppenheimer’s progeny are not adversaries of the establishment; today’s scientists are willing servants of an establishment that most Americans have rejected.
To the extent that Oppenheimer contains a cautionary tale, it is the protagonist’s careening vacillation between blind hubris and crippling uncertainty that spells his undoing. But the film isn’t content to be a “mere” cautionary tale; it wants to be vaguer, more deliberately uncertain. Even as Oppenheimer insists that we must reassess our history, it also implies that a verdict is unreachable. Such an attitude evinces a disingenuous relationship between one’s past and one’s present.
Engaging with the subjective realm of a person’s experience need not muddy our view of the basic facts of history (in this case, the creation of the U.S. security state and the push toward nuclear war). In other words, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is not an apt metaphor for human action. People are not particles. In the real world, where American-made bombs are falling upon the starving and innocent of Gaza, the presence of complexity does not mean the absence of responsibility. People who believe otherwise are, as James Baldwin wrote, “impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves or the world.”
That the American situation is so complex, so wracked with contradiction, is actually our opportunity; for it is out of such dense and heavy fire that a new vision can be born. The point, then, is not to disregard uncertainty as a part of the human experience; but rather to acknowledge uncertainty as the terrain through which we move closer to truth and reality.
No matter how closely Nolan’s camera studies Oppenheimer’s face, the film maintains a curious distance from its protagonist’s emotional inner world beneath a veil of ambiguity, obscuring the depth to which the real Oppenheimer may have been conscious of the choices he made. To the extent that the film cannot completely pierce through Oppenheimer as a character, so too does the behemoth of Hollywood view its primary subject, the American people, from the outside, rather than from within: the machine may dimly recognize, but can never fully comprehend that when we stare at Oppenheimer’s face, we see our own.
For a generation of Americans, Christopher Nolan’s body of work has shaped our cultural psyche with images of the mainstream auteur, of the superhero genre, of manhood, and of war. Many of these films already feel like relics of a bygone era—when “grittiness” and the semblance of intricacy served as a replacement for genuine complexity, nuance, and maturity. The crisis of our age calls for no less than a complete revolution in how Americans perceive, demand, and create art that does justice to who we are as a people and who we might become.
With Oppenheimer, a flawed film that nevertheless ventures into compelling, even urgent territory, Nolan has given his audience a greater gift than he could realize: the chance for us to grow beyond him.
Avant-Garde: A Journal of Peace, Democracy, and Science 
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