Yesterday morning I met up with one of my aunts in a café near the family's apartment. I'd never been there before. It has I think a fin-de-siècle/1920s aesthetic, its half-moon windows and its branched lamps certainly looking like a later design influence, but its use of heavy carved wood and its opulent air feeling older.
As for the service... Altogether I had the impression that there are regular customers whom the staff are happy to see, and it didn't appear to matter whether they arrived in t-shirts or in business attire. But otherwise it's been a long while since I've felt so snubbed. While I fought with feelings of humiliation, my aunt was a little irate — for example when the two of us were belatedly presented with a single tattered menu, when a second, nicer-looking menu also lay nearby.
Two elderly ladies came into the shop, one quite brisk in pastel pant-suit but the other looking as if a breath of wind would sway her, and we were both shocked that she was left clutching the post at the end of a staircase for support, while the staff ignored her.
We agreed that there might be a reason for the service being the way it was and wanted to give the benefit of the doubt. But as we did not know that reason, the effect wasn't great.
At least it was very nice to spend time with my aunt!
Also, the food was nicely presented. Medium-hardness cheese, fresh cheese and soft cheese like Brie, golden-brown fig jam, were served with bread rolls. Arugula leaves, sprigs of red currants, a wedge each of honeydew melon and watermelon, an apricot, and a lettuce leaf, lent vitamins, freshness and colour.
And I liked the perfectly brewed tea with fresh diced ginger, a small half lemon slice, orange slices, and mint leaves.
***
In the afternoon I had another engagement, this time with a former colleague and her husband, T. and Gi. We met in front of the Kino International near Alexanderplatz, on the Allee that the Soviets had built in an incredibly short span of time after World War II. And there we watched Oppenheimer, as rain sprinkled gently outdoors.
I had reservations going in, as I think that generally Hollywood does a terrible job in portraying intellectual labour or growth, and I felt a bit proprietorial about early-to-mid 20th century physics because I've read a few books about it.
The first scenes were also a little bizarre: it's not giving anything away to say that as a student the physicist had poisoned an apple to avenge himself on a tutor. In the film the aftermath is skated over and I was wondering how the man became a scientist instead of a serial killer. So it was a relief to read afterward in Wikipedia that Oppenheimer had indeed been sent to see a psychiatrist after that episode.
Anyway, after roaming around European universities (we'll still count Cambridge as Europe) during Oppenheimer's student years, and establishing that Oppenheimer revered Kenneth Branagh Niels Bohr, we land back in the United States. He imported quantum physics to CalTech and Berkeley, and attracted a circle of fascinated students and colleagues, like Ernest O. Lawrence. He also had pro-union views, supported Spanish Republicans in the Civil War, and let the Communist Party hold events at his house — his brother Frank and sister-in-law Jackie, and his girlfriend Jean, were however more committed to Communism than he was.
At the same time Oppenheimer was famously fond of having affairs with women. The women in the film, I'll entirely agree with the critics, are not very well drawn. Jean Tatlock introduced Oppenheimer to John Donne, worked as a journalist for the Communist Party, trained as a psychiatrist at Stanford Medical School, and was also fighting her own mental illnesses. She also had a family who presumably cared about her — including the father who found her after she died by suicide.
Firstly, Christopher Nolan wasted all of that material by not mentioning much of it. Secondly, showing her climbing all over the physicist nude in bed and asking him to read one line of Sanskrit to her from a book she found in his shelf — surprise! that random line of Sanskrit was highly apposite to the film's themes — seemed like a weak way to express the intellectual exchanges in their relationship. (I also found the age gap amongst the actors a disconcerting casting choice, unintimidated and egalitarian though Florence Pugh's portrayal of her character may have been.)
His wife Kitty... I found it refreshing that she was portrayed as a reluctant mother — refreshing both because it's true, and also because it feels slightly more empowering to see that she was morally ambivalent in her own private ways while Oppenheimer was making hay of their marriage in more public ways. But I was annoyed that by the end of the film she was used as a mere dramatic device, as a stand-in for the audience, to sympathize with or question the actions of Oppenheimer; and I think that it became clearer from mentions of events in her life, than from the plot of the film, how complex she was.
After returning home from the film, I came across a 1980s docudrama with Sam Waterston (very good) as Oppenheimer. In that script, Kitty tells Oppenheimer cheerfully that he can really profit from the war. Of course it was an abhorrent thing to say, but I felt that the actress was given more to work with in that one revealing line (pragmatism, a reverse side to her ideals, brutal frankness, and a strong streak of misanthropy) than Emily Blunt got from the entire Nolan script. And I think in general she also had far more substance than the film divulges.
Anyway, during the war, Oppenheimer was gradually cleared of suspected Communist sympathies, and put at the head of a mission to develop a bomb based on chain reactions amongst the splitting of atoms. In an interesting choice, he decides that his favourite rural retreat in New Mexico would be a great place to develop weaponry, and a town is quickly purpose-built at Los Alamos under the aegis of the army engineer Major General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon).
As for the scientists Oppenheimer meets, Einstein and Bohr are both rendered as bland cut-outs, maybe as a conscious choice to portray how revered they were. Revered to the point that I was relieved that Einstein didn't wear a red bobbled hat and say 'Ho, ho, ho.'
It was tremendously difficult to keep track of who was who amongst the other scientists. Hans Bethe and Enrico Fermi were familiar names, others not so much. But in the end it all came together, especially during the new scenes at Los Alamos, and they also had their distinct personalities. The angst felt amongst some of the scientists at being displaced from their home countries, and the trauma they must have felt, did not really come out in the film. I think that there were hints of diverse casting, and Lilli Hornig was spotlighted as a female team member; but eminent physicists like Chien-Shiung Wu didn't appear at all. But the film also does a good job of presenting a sense of community, not just within the scientific groups despite their arguments and disagreements, but also with the families, soldiers, and visiting dignitaries in New Mexico.
Edward Teller was of course a controversial figure, to the general public and to his fellow scientists. Here he is presented as sulky, single-minded, and obsessed with his own ideas (especially the H-bomb). I think in the interests of fairness but also because he's been heinously instrumentalized in anti-Semitic tropes that no conscientious filmmaker would want to support, his portrayal is still balanced out by the film. He was not unaware of ethical problems with weaponry, as exemplified by conversations he has with Oppenheimer; and he was motivated more by his scientific aims to which he tried to stay truthful, not by personal hatred. (Which, of course, Kitty Oppenheimer and — by extension — Nolan do not consider an excuse for Teller's Cold-War-era testimony ... even if Robert Oppenheimer did.)
As the efforts at Los Alamos led to the 'successful' Trinity test — the overall success of Los Alamos being tempered by a strange mixture of conscientious secret-keeping and egregious security breaches — the film juxtaposes the stirring consciences of the scientists, their determination to 'bring our boys home' and see World War II end through the emergence of an 'unanswerable' weapon, and their gung-ho satisfaction at their professional achievements.
— Quite apart from this particular film, reading about preparations during World War I and World War II by politicians, civil servants, resistance organizers, and scientists, it is creepy to see how their huge intelligence and acute insights are honed into superpowers by the pressures of war — and then generally weaponized to kill. What if we bent as much mental and physical energy for good? I suppose that was the aim of the League of Nations and later the United Nations, but of course that energy usually peters out. —
On the surface, Oppenheimer is as gung-ho as anyone. In conversations with politicians he falters when it comes to representing his fellow scientists' views and ruling out the use of nuclear weapons on Japanese civilians. (He was only consistent in openly wanting the US to be honest with allied governments, even Stalin's, about its nuclear weapons stock.)
It's also clear that being the leader of a horde of colleagues on a project of this importance is a severe strain — while other decisions are entirely out of his hands, but still have a bearing on his work.
Nolan satirizes the decision-making process of the military heads by presenting a conversation where Kyoto is ruled out as a nuclear target 'because it's culturally important to the Japanese' and a military head had gone there on his honeymoon. It's based on historical fact, although apparently the Secretary of War went to Kyoto not on his honeymoon but on a separate trip.
After the bombs are dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer is haunted by visions of the explosions and their aftermath amongst the victims, and seeks out any information he can find even if he ends up looking away from graphic film footage. Nolan made the choice not to intersperse real-life footage or to show Japanese civilians dying, instead superimposing hallucinogenic scenes of incineration, radiation poisoning, and grief on the civilians and military personnel in the United States. I think this is ultimately a respectful choice.
(But I don't think it is the best course of action to commemorate the perpetrator; it's better to commemorate the victims. When I was maybe 10 years old and a Canadian schoolchild, I found a book in my school that told the story of a girl who suffered from radiation poisoning after the bombs dropped on Japan, and I seemly to vaguely remember her eating miso soup and folding paper cranes. Focusing on stories like this is I think is the best way to prevent reducing the victims of the bomb to a vast statistic of grisly deaths.)
Aside from wrestling with these ethical implications, Oppenheimer's work at Los Alamos had reached a fork in the road in general. Even before the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, scientists were questioning whether the defeat of Nazi Germany hadn't made their work redundant. In the film, Oppenheimer seems both eager to still be involved in the debate around nuclear weapons and 'in the know' about how they will be applied, and also eager to close a chapter — using the terminology of the time, he suggests as if it were a foregone conclusion that now the terrain around Los Alamos be 'returned to the Indians.' But it quickly becomes clear that his government has no intention of abandoning atomic bomb projects, and the pivot to the Cold War twists the immediate aftermath of the previous War.
And as the 1950s creep nearer, the choice not to pursue Edward Teller's plans for a hydrogen bomb full throttle begins to be interpreted as pusillanimous neglect of America's military interests. It also turns out that the Soviet Union has developed a bomb and it's strongly suspected that Los Alamos contributed to it. Klaus Fuchs, whose eventful Wikipedia bio bristles with (literal?) red flags although his lack of sympathy for the Nazi government was beyond doubt, had leaked secrets to the Soviets, although reading up on it after the film it appears to be unclear how much influence he really had on the Soviet nuclear programme in the end.
But just as Oppenheimer observed that politicans' attitudes toward the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb were hardly as respectful as he'd assumed they would be and that these bombs were considered as handy diplomatic tools even after 'victory,' the same 'if you have a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail' phenomenon appeared in America's domestic security as well. Under J. Edgar Hoover and through his mouthpiece Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the hyperactive eyes, ears and imaginations of the agents within the Federal Bureau of Investigation, practically everything and everyone seemed to be 'subversive.' This included Oppenheimer.
Lent an impulse by a vendetta that Lewis Strauss, the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission (Robert Downey Jr., who I agree was every bit as good in the role as people say), harboured against Oppenheimer, a humiliating closed-door hearing aims to strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance just before it was due to expire anyway.
Nolan softens the suspense by not exposing the audience to anything other than the overarching logical and moral truth of the McCarthy era, for example through the lens of a disillusioned young staffer. At the same time, Nolan does depict the maddening irrationality of the Red Scare era and also tries to do justice to the victims of McCarthyism while showing how it drove incredibly bright and talented Americans like the French literature professor Haakon Chevalier into exile and out of their chosen professions, for years or decades. But I think there's a plot hole (for lack of a better word): it is hard to believe that Oppenheimer and others would really be as emotionally well-adjusted and nonchalant in their everyday interactions as they appear to be in the film, e.g. picking up telephone receivers without a second thought, if they know they're being tailed and spied on.
But Nolan also spells out that — while the emotional blow of being accused of treachery after exhausting one's self in a vital military project would have dented anyone — Oppenheimer made himself more vulnerable than he had to be in the hearing because he wanted to face some sort of accountability for his role in the development of the atom bombs. Of course this paranoid anti-Communist kangaroo court was hardly the appropriate forum for an examination of nuclear ethics. But Oppenheimer seemed to feel he had few other venues — for example, his earlier attempt to claim 'blood on his hands' in a meeting with President Truman fell on unsympathetic ears.
Another book-end to the film's plot, as the chronologically disparate plot threads finally coalesce into a sensible guiding binding, is the congressional confirmation hearing of Lewis Strauss. While Strauss's persecution of Oppenheimer was certainly a reason why people might not want to confirm him, I've read some of the other testimony in Google Books. And I practically flipped a table in vicarious rage when I read that when Strauss was Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission:
It was known then that when Mr. Strauss adopted a viewpoint and was subsequently voted down by the other members of the Commission he would nevertheless refuse to accept the majority opinion of the Commission. In fact, I have been told that on certain matters regarding which he felt very strongly and which pertained to the military applications of atomic energy he would, after such an adverse decision had been made by the Commission, actually proceed with discussions in the Pentagon giving the impression that the Commission had reached a decision consistent with his own views and so leading to considerable confusion and embarrassment when a short while later the official communication of the Commission policy would reach the appropriate people in the Defense Department.
I've experienced that kind of scenario once or twice myself, and it is truly enraging. But at the same time, I rushed to Wikipedia after the film to check if Strauss was really out-and-out villainous. As expected, he had good sides and bad sides; for example, when the US had a strict quota on accepting refugees from Germany, he still did what he could to rescue more Jewish civilians.
Oppenheimer's betrayals of others get short shrift in the film. It is clearer that Oppenheimer's friend Chevalier eventually falls victim to McCarthyism' due also to their friendship (it was a bittersweet relief to find, in a later documentary film, that Chevalier still felt a sense of friendship for Oppenheimer). It is especially painful as the film points out how deep the friendship had gone, for example that Chevalier and his wife had babysitted Oppenheimer's son when Kitty was unwilling or unable to do so. What is less clear is that Oppenheimer pointed out former students who were in the Communist party. For example, per Wikipedia, he called Bernard Peters "'a crazy person' and 'quite a red'" to the House Un-American Activities Committee.
As I wrote with regard to Jean Tatlock and others, the truth is often so much more fascinating and stimulating and unexpected than any fiction. I'm sure that many other viewers have scurried down the same rabbit holes in Wikipedia and elsewhere that I have scurried down. But I'd also highly recommend reading books from the Japanese perspective and books about fellow scientists, as much as watching Nolan's Oppenheimer.
*
As for the message for the movie theatre audience, I'd say the film confirms that we should probably pause and think every now and then about how lucky we are that the surface of the Earth wasn't annihilated decades ago.
But rather than artificial intelligence, I think that the most salient historical parallel for us going forward is global warming:
If crops are parching in heat waves and 1/3 of the world's population must move away from the Equator, the humanitarian toll of overproduction and overconsumption may be equally large.
Weirdly enough, and again according to a certain online encyclopaedia, Edward Teller already spoke about and shared other scientists' concerns about greenhouse gases and global heating in the 1950s.
*
In the meantime, Gi. and T. and I went off to Potsdamer Platz, feasted on doughnuts there, and then went our separate ways...
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