“Oppenheimer” film directed by Christopher Nolan, 2023
This is the story of the tortured ambivalence of J. Robert
Oppenheimer, the ‘father’ of the Atom Bomb.
They said he couldn’t run a popsicle stand, as he was a theorist. But he ran the Manhattan Project in Los
Alamos, Chicago and Oak Ridge, Tennessee to a ‘successful’ conclusion,
providing the U.S. government with a bomb that was first to be used against
Germany, but then was later used against Japan at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Oppenheimer was a committed anti-fascist and his first rationale was the war in Europe. But he eventually endorsed the nuking of Japan.
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| The Trinity Test in the New Mexico desert |
This film hides many things. There is no mention of radiation poisoning at
the test sites in the U.S. and the Pacific.
There is only one mention that the Japanese were negotiating for peace,
with only one demand – to keep the emperor.
Afterwards, they were allowed to keep their emperor by the U.S.
occupation forces, so the U.S. objection to this clause was a stall. The actual devastation in Hiroshima and
Nagasaki is only hinted at. There is no
mention of the role of the USSR, which had entered the war against Japan and
was threatening to seize their small northern islands, then Korea and then move
south. There is no mention of Truman’s
actual speech after Hiroshima, which claimed the city was a ‘military base’ and
cited the bombing as revenge for Pearl Harbor. There was nothing about ‘saving GIs lives.” There is no mention that both Curtis LeMay
and McNamara both agreed that if they lost the war, they would be tried as war
criminals for dropping it. There is no mention that Eisenhower
and Leahy of the Joint Chiefs both opposed using the bomb. There is no mention
of the bombs being used as ‘demonstrations’ to the Soviets, as well as
forestalling any Soviet movement into Japanese territory. In the end, the Japanese would have surrendered without dropping it.
So it’s not a full-blooded history, but a sanitized version
centering on the personal struggles of one man, Oppenheimer. In that sense, this is Hollywood's typical style. There is an enormous amount of time spent
on the McCarthyite witch-hunt against Oppenheimer, who finally lost his
clearance and ability to work on further projects. He, like Niels Bohr, Leo Szilard and Albert
Einstein, along with others on the Manhattan project, later became opponents of
nuclear proliferation and argued for treaties with the Soviets. In that sense, the film is a study of the contradictions within a person.
Oppenheimer is investigated by far-right
types backed by Hoover’s FBI for having friends and lovers in the Communist Party, for opposing
the H-Bomb being developed by Edward Teller and for supporting the idea that
the technology should be shared with the Soviets as a gesture of friendship. His donations to the International Brigades
during the Spanish Civil War were also problematic for the FBI. One of his supposed allies in the program was actually undermining him. As it was, it was not Oppenheimer
that shared nuclear secrets with the USSR, but others in the program. Many project scientists opposed the bomb, though that
opposition is only shown once in the film.
The most startling point that many will miss is that, in a U.S.
war council discussion, the question of how many the A-bomb would kill came
up. They figured that due to
conventional leveling and bombing of so many other Japanese cities, the death toll
would be roughly equivalent. So it was a go. This reveals that mass bombing – in Europe, in
Japan, later in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Iraq – are the actual base
tactics. Mass ‘conventional’ bombing of
cities full of civilians is a war crime, so this was nothing new to them… just
a technical twist.
Oppenheimer is played as an assertive but troubled person,
acted by Cillian Murphy, who played Tommy Shelby in the great Peaky Blinders streaming series. He’ll
probably get an Oscar nomination. In the film Truman calls Oppenheimer a ‘cry
baby’ for regretting the nuclear holocaust unleashed on Japan… showing Truman
to be the vicious hick from Missouri that he was. An indicative scene is the Trinity test itself, sort of like a 'duck and cover' ad about avoiding radiation. Los Alamos scientists and families wearing dark glasses are shown, hunched behind wooden barriers or lying prone not that far from the blast site.
So if you want a real history of this event, it will only
provide tangential evidence. The biggest
focus is on the personal story of one man, as is typical of U.S cinema. A large part of this is the red scare, which Hollywood has addressed in the past about themselves. Famous people hover around the edges, while
many facts are ignored. Christopher Nolan
makes blockbuster crowd-pleasers like many Batman movies and Dunkirk – though he did start his career
with Memento. So the limitations of this movie are no surprise.
Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box,
upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “Black
Rain,” “Hiroshima and Nagasaki – Obvious War Crimes,” “The Peaky Blinders” or
the words ‘Hiroshima,’ ‘McCarthyism,’ ‘McCarthyite,”
‘red scare,’ ‘bombing.’
And: Barbie Review: "Mass market girl-boss feminism."
The Kultur Kommissar
August 12, 2023
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