It's Barbenheimer Week!
Aug. 14th, 2023 11:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cjlasky7Yes, I'm giving into the hype and seeing both Oppenheimer and Barbie, hoping to gain some insight into the collective mind of the movie-going public and maybe the zeitgeist in general. (I caught Oppenheimer with shadowkat on Saturday in Manhattan; I plan to watch Barbie in Brooklyn on Wednesday. So call it a time-delayed Barbenheimer.)
Anyway, on to serious matters:
I. Oppenheimer: In Theory
I can't be objective about this movie, not entirely. The events presented are not some abstract discussion of world history 75 years past; these events directly shaped my family, and continue to shape me and my family today. So with that in mind, let's dive in. To mirror Nolan's methodology, I'm going to view the same movie from two different perspectives:
a. Wave
The central event of the movie is a conversation between Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) and Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) on the grounds of Princeton just after World War Two. Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) is hanging back, just out of earshot. We don't hear what they're talking about until the very end of the film, but it doesn't matter: all three players assembled here are the basis for the entire time line of the film. Einstein is both the ghost from the past and a warning about the future; and Strauss will embody Oppenheimer's future (and ours) in all his petty grievances and apocalyptic designs.
I call Einstein a ghost from the past because even though he does not participate in the Manhattan Project, his theories start the chain reaction of events in the movie. The untold energy lying in the heart of the atom (the "e" in "e=mc2") is the hidden treasure hunted by theoretical physicists and warmongers alike. (Once that genie is out of the bottle, no amount of regret or handwringing will put it back in.) The film cascades from one brilliant discovery or catastrophe to another, the energy from one nucleus splitting the next, raindrops creating ripples on a pond--until the U.S. military decides to split the atom to make the Bomb, and have Oppenheimer make it a reality.
[This is where my personal feelings come in.
Should Oppenheimer (or any of his team) have refused the assignment (no matter what the consequences)? Because on some level, anyone involved with the Manhattan Project knew the devastating potential of atomic weapons. Looking back, the A-bomb is nothing short of a crime against humanity--the deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the thousands who died from nuclear testing, not to mention the big honking nuclear sword of Damocles that's been hanging over our heads since Trinity.
But the threat of Nazi Germany was the apocalypse staring us in the face in 1940. If Hitler got his hands on the Bomb, it would have been the end of civilization as we know it. (Yes, as it turns out, the German heavy water experiments were going nowhere--but we only found out about that much, much later.) As Jews, Oppenheimer and men like Rabi knew the true scope of the horror, the possibility of Kristallnacht magnified by untold thousands, millions. Faced with what they saw as an existential threat, they agreed to the unthinkable. Given my own history, I could never judge them.]
Einstein was also a warning for the future, on both a personal level for Oppenheimer and a global level. Because Einstein knew that once political backlash died down, there would be reassessments and honors as you transition from Man of the Moment to Historical Figure. He'd done all that decades before. He also knew that once those accolades had been passed out and then stored away, all that's left for Oppenheimer is to ponder his place in the chain reaction Einstein started decades earlier--a chain reaction that continues to this day.
b. Particle
Early in the movie, Oppenheimer describes one of the peculiarities of quantum theory: that light, under certain conditions, can be both a wave and a particle. Nolan embodies this seeming contradiction in Oppenheimer himself.
Was Oppenheimer a loyal American or a communist sympathizer? Egomaniac or ultimate team player? Faithful husband or philanderer? Conscientious scientist or horseman of the apocalypse? Depends on whom you ask. For men like Strauss and Harry Truman (played with a truly nasty streak by Gary Oldman), Oppenheimer was an obstacle to both United States hegemony and personal ambitions, to be swatted aside while they pursued greater things. To David L. Hill (Rami Malek), he was a representative of all the voices cautioning against the Bomb after the war. But no matter how good Hill's speech makes you feel, neither (in my opinion) was exactly true.
[OT: Tom Stoppard covered a lot of the same territory--quantum theory as a reflection of human behavior--in "Hapgood," but I think Oppenheimer works better as a subject than Stoppard's double agents.]
The problem with a man like Oppenheimer is that he was totally comfortable in the theoretical, but he never figured how to reconcile theory with the real world. He would dabble in the Spanish Civil War, in unionizing, but he never really committed himself to the cause. He was straddling both worlds, caught in the liminal space between them. Unfortunately, the real world doesn't deal with the Uncertainty Principle very well; one of the most fascinating scenes in the movie was when a government prosecutor (a gleefully hostile Jason Clarke) forces Oppenheimer to consider his contradictory impulses simultaneously--turning the normally eloquent scientist into a babbling, incoherent wreck.
We never do get a Unified Theory of Oppenheimer.
******************************
This was one atomic explosion of a movie: beautifully shot, superbly acted, guaranteed to provoke debate--about historical inaccuracies, forgotten voices and the morality of the Atomic Age. (I have to single out the sound design and Ludwig Goranssen's score as key components in the overall aesthetic.)
If I have one complaint, it's in the final act.
We switch back and forth between Oppenheimer's post-war security clearance review (a kangaroo court) and Strauss' confirmation hearing a few years later (should be a slam dunk). Downey absolutely kills it as Strauss--his egomania, his sly manipulations, and his sheer pettiness have to remind you of politicians polluting the landscape today. But while Downey is razzle dazzling us, Cillian Murphy is scrunched into the corner of a conference room, passively listening as witnesses tear Oppenheimer's reputation to shreds. I was totally with his wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt): speak up! Fight back! DO something! Not because I cared about Oppy's security clearance all that much, but because I hate when a formerly active protagonist suddenly goes limp for a long stretch of the movie.
[I hated the last episode of Seinfeld, when the greatest TV comedy team of the 1990s literally rode the bench while the B squad testified. I hated when Henry Cavill's Superman stayed silent and struck Alex Ross poses while HIS reputation was knocked around in BvS. It just gets on my nerves....]
That one complaint aside, a fantastic movie. Go see it, preferably on the biggest screen possible.
Bonus review: The Meg 2 - The Trench
What? My wife loves Jason Statham. I had no choice.
My recommendation: pay for something else, then sneak in after the first hour. It's more fun that way. Trust me.
Anyway, on to serious matters:
I. Oppenheimer: In Theory
I can't be objective about this movie, not entirely. The events presented are not some abstract discussion of world history 75 years past; these events directly shaped my family, and continue to shape me and my family today. So with that in mind, let's dive in. To mirror Nolan's methodology, I'm going to view the same movie from two different perspectives:
a. Wave
The central event of the movie is a conversation between Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) and Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) on the grounds of Princeton just after World War Two. Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) is hanging back, just out of earshot. We don't hear what they're talking about until the very end of the film, but it doesn't matter: all three players assembled here are the basis for the entire time line of the film. Einstein is both the ghost from the past and a warning about the future; and Strauss will embody Oppenheimer's future (and ours) in all his petty grievances and apocalyptic designs.
I call Einstein a ghost from the past because even though he does not participate in the Manhattan Project, his theories start the chain reaction of events in the movie. The untold energy lying in the heart of the atom (the "e" in "e=mc2") is the hidden treasure hunted by theoretical physicists and warmongers alike. (Once that genie is out of the bottle, no amount of regret or handwringing will put it back in.) The film cascades from one brilliant discovery or catastrophe to another, the energy from one nucleus splitting the next, raindrops creating ripples on a pond--until the U.S. military decides to split the atom to make the Bomb, and have Oppenheimer make it a reality.
[This is where my personal feelings come in.
Should Oppenheimer (or any of his team) have refused the assignment (no matter what the consequences)? Because on some level, anyone involved with the Manhattan Project knew the devastating potential of atomic weapons. Looking back, the A-bomb is nothing short of a crime against humanity--the deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the thousands who died from nuclear testing, not to mention the big honking nuclear sword of Damocles that's been hanging over our heads since Trinity.
But the threat of Nazi Germany was the apocalypse staring us in the face in 1940. If Hitler got his hands on the Bomb, it would have been the end of civilization as we know it. (Yes, as it turns out, the German heavy water experiments were going nowhere--but we only found out about that much, much later.) As Jews, Oppenheimer and men like Rabi knew the true scope of the horror, the possibility of Kristallnacht magnified by untold thousands, millions. Faced with what they saw as an existential threat, they agreed to the unthinkable. Given my own history, I could never judge them.]
Einstein was also a warning for the future, on both a personal level for Oppenheimer and a global level. Because Einstein knew that once political backlash died down, there would be reassessments and honors as you transition from Man of the Moment to Historical Figure. He'd done all that decades before. He also knew that once those accolades had been passed out and then stored away, all that's left for Oppenheimer is to ponder his place in the chain reaction Einstein started decades earlier--a chain reaction that continues to this day.
b. Particle
Early in the movie, Oppenheimer describes one of the peculiarities of quantum theory: that light, under certain conditions, can be both a wave and a particle. Nolan embodies this seeming contradiction in Oppenheimer himself.
Was Oppenheimer a loyal American or a communist sympathizer? Egomaniac or ultimate team player? Faithful husband or philanderer? Conscientious scientist or horseman of the apocalypse? Depends on whom you ask. For men like Strauss and Harry Truman (played with a truly nasty streak by Gary Oldman), Oppenheimer was an obstacle to both United States hegemony and personal ambitions, to be swatted aside while they pursued greater things. To David L. Hill (Rami Malek), he was a representative of all the voices cautioning against the Bomb after the war. But no matter how good Hill's speech makes you feel, neither (in my opinion) was exactly true.
[OT: Tom Stoppard covered a lot of the same territory--quantum theory as a reflection of human behavior--in "Hapgood," but I think Oppenheimer works better as a subject than Stoppard's double agents.]
The problem with a man like Oppenheimer is that he was totally comfortable in the theoretical, but he never figured how to reconcile theory with the real world. He would dabble in the Spanish Civil War, in unionizing, but he never really committed himself to the cause. He was straddling both worlds, caught in the liminal space between them. Unfortunately, the real world doesn't deal with the Uncertainty Principle very well; one of the most fascinating scenes in the movie was when a government prosecutor (a gleefully hostile Jason Clarke) forces Oppenheimer to consider his contradictory impulses simultaneously--turning the normally eloquent scientist into a babbling, incoherent wreck.
We never do get a Unified Theory of Oppenheimer.
******************************
This was one atomic explosion of a movie: beautifully shot, superbly acted, guaranteed to provoke debate--about historical inaccuracies, forgotten voices and the morality of the Atomic Age. (I have to single out the sound design and Ludwig Goranssen's score as key components in the overall aesthetic.)
If I have one complaint, it's in the final act.
We switch back and forth between Oppenheimer's post-war security clearance review (a kangaroo court) and Strauss' confirmation hearing a few years later (should be a slam dunk). Downey absolutely kills it as Strauss--his egomania, his sly manipulations, and his sheer pettiness have to remind you of politicians polluting the landscape today. But while Downey is razzle dazzling us, Cillian Murphy is scrunched into the corner of a conference room, passively listening as witnesses tear Oppenheimer's reputation to shreds. I was totally with his wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt): speak up! Fight back! DO something! Not because I cared about Oppy's security clearance all that much, but because I hate when a formerly active protagonist suddenly goes limp for a long stretch of the movie.
[I hated the last episode of Seinfeld, when the greatest TV comedy team of the 1990s literally rode the bench while the B squad testified. I hated when Henry Cavill's Superman stayed silent and struck Alex Ross poses while HIS reputation was knocked around in BvS. It just gets on my nerves....]
That one complaint aside, a fantastic movie. Go see it, preferably on the biggest screen possible.
Bonus review: The Meg 2 - The Trench
What? My wife loves Jason Statham. I had no choice.
My recommendation: pay for something else, then sneak in after the first hour. It's more fun that way. Trust me.
