Oh good lord. Let's talk Oppenheimer.
But let us first talk about the experience of Oppenheimer.
You see the thing is, I was not aware of the existence of this movie up until a few weeks ago. Honestly I hadn't given Oppenheimer much thought prior to that. I knew of the existence of a named entity "Oppenheimer" commonly associated vaguely with the Manhattan project and the atomic bomb. But honestly, not much else.
And there it was: suddenly all over my YouTube subscriptions. Veritasium did a thing, and then Curious Droid did a thing, and then everyone did a thing. And suddenly when you type in "Oppenheimer" in Google you get these weirdly recent articles portraying his life and contributions.
And sure enough: the guy is pretty interesting. He did interesting things in an interesting time with interesting consequences. And therefore is subject to our historical interests.
And I thought to myself "well that's interesting". And being addicted to a constant stream of new data I started to look into it. And sure enough: the guy is pretty interesting so that's why Christopher Nolan wanted to make a movie about him.
Fine.
Christopher Nolan is an interesting person. He is known for movies such as: Tenet, Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk and The Prestige. And Batman. He is what I would call someone with "high production value". If you get cast in his movies you become famous because you were in that movie. Although that kinda self reinforces itself at one point. They have a particular style to them. Lots of sound effects usually. And weirdly obsessed with outrageous practical effects.
Anyway, his stories are usually all over the place. Whacky "oooh look at me I'm so smart I outsmarted the smart out of you!". I mean, it's fine. With the exception of Interstellar his movies always seemed kinda "meh" to me. Which is not what they were intended to be. Clearly. Transcendence is a movie I absolutely despise for example. But my opinions about Hollywood are not of importance right now. It is sufficient to state "there exists a Hollywood producer that produces whacky fictional stories that wants to do history again for a change". And that by itself is interesting, regardless of the outcome.
So at this point I had consumed a fair bit of data about the whole unfolding affair before me. So the basic narrative is as follows.
There was born an Oppenheimer somewhere in the not so distant past. Oppenheimer came from wealth. He wanted to do physics, and he wanted to do so in a very interesting time for physics. Likely the most interesting time ever in physics. And so not so young Oppenheimer went on to study physics at some prestigious university. And there he was severely depressed. Often in "emotional agony". And then he tried to poison his teacher. Nobody died or got injured. Still a majorly weird and criminal thing to do. He got sent to a shrink. But that's a 1920's shrink and things were really different back then. And then he did the verb for to physic a whole bunch of physics. His parents intervened so he didn't get kicked out school for trying to poison his teacher. But he was unhappy because reasons of personal capabilities or preference. And so he became a theorists. That way you can theorize about doing, instead of actually doing it. Oppenheimer was greatly successful in this and was one of the first to conceptualize a black hole. Although he never won a Nobel prize for any of it. When I say interesting times for physics I mean it. This is the time when Oppenheimer, Einstein, Heisenberg and Gödel and all the other famous people could meet. And did meet.
So Oppenheimer does a Eurotrip and he leaves Cambridge for the University of Göttingen to study. Oppenheimer made friends who went on to great success, including Werner Heisenberg, Pascual Jordan, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac, Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller. That's like "all the names from quantum physics most people will ever know".
After that he goes to the US and does teaching of the lessons learned and the new ones he had just made up and were proven "interesting".
Now from here on the telling of Oppenheimer can go in a number of directions. And the way you tell that story determines a lot about the image of Oppenheimer.
The common telling is something along the lines of "well then World War II happened and then by sheer coincidence it was also discovered that you can do bomb making with atoms because some dudes said so and then Manhattan project and therefore nuclear weapons". The effects of which are not describable in words.
The other telling is: "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds"
And so now arises an interesting juxtaposition in character and motivation. A story worth telling. And therefore I get what all the fuzz is about. I don't need to write an Oppenheimer biography. That has been done for me already. I'm merely a consumer of data at this point. I listen. More than one theatrical play has been written about it! And now a movie by Christopher Nolan!
Now if you want to know how modern advertisement is supposed to work: this is how it is supposed to work. And clearly it worked. Very clever.
But I do want to simply put side by side some fragments of the idea-that-has-become-Oppenheimer entails.
Oppenheimer was overeducated in those fields which lie outside the scientific tradition, such as his interest in religion, in the Hindu religion in particular, which resulted in a feeling for the mystery of the universe that surrounded him almost like a fog. He saw physics clearly, looking toward what had already been done, but at the border he tended to feel there was much more of the mysterious and novel than there actually was ... [he turned] away from the hard, crude methods of theoretical physics into a mystical realm of broad intuition.... In Oppenheimer the element of earthiness was feeble. Yet it was essentially this spiritual quality, this refinement as expressed in speech and manner, that was the basis of his charisma. He never expressed himself completely. He always left a feeling that there were depths of sensibility and insight not yet revealed. These may be the qualities of the born leader who seems to have reserves of uncommitted strength.
As a scientist, Oppenheimer got bored easily and liked to jump around to different fields. But he didn't simply go wherever his fancy led him. He always jumped into trendy fields---he liked being at the center of things.
And when he jumped into a trendy new field, his quick mind often provided some important insight. But because he'd raced through his basic physics classes at Harvard, he lacked the fundamental knowledge to make anything more than initial, and sometimes superficial, contributions. This deficit would haunt him the rest of his life.
Oppenheimer worked very hard [in the spring of 1929] but had a gift of concealing his assiduous application with an air of easy nonchalance. Actually, he was engaged in a very difficult calculation of the opacity of surfaces of stars to their internal radiation, an important constant in the theoretical construction of stellar models. He spoke little of these problems and seemed to be much more interested in literature, especially the Hindu classics and the more esoteric Western writers. Pauli once remarked to me that Oppenheimer seemed to treat physics as an avocation and psychoanalysis as a vocation.
They knew about Oppenheimer's frustrating brilliance---an incandescent mind that simply couldn't focus and see things through. To them, the tragedy of Oppenheimer's life was that he never became the Einstein he could have been.
And the saddest part was, Oppenheimer knew this. Given all the cigarettes he smoked, no one was surprised when Oppenheimer developed cancer in 1965. He sank quickly, and was bedridden by 1967.
Oppenheimer's wife Kitty was reduced to begging his friend Freeman Dyson to visit him on his deathbed. She asked Dyson to engage Robert in some scientific work. She said that he realized he'd squandered his potential, and wanted to give science one last go. She hoped Dyson could spur him on.
But Dyson declined. As he later said, "I agreed with Kitty's diagnosis" about the roots of his despair. "But I had to tell her that it was too late. I told her that I would like to sit quietly with Robert and hold his hand. His days as a scientist were over. It was too late to cure his anguish with equations."
So that's a story. That's character building in your head.
The story of the Manhattan project is usually something like. Omg we can build bombs by splitting atoms because some dudes in a lab coat and/or in front of a blackboard says we can do so for realz this time. And then suddenly everyone asks "how big is that bomb?". And the answer is "much much much bigger". And then everyone is like "that's all fine and good physics, however this is not peacetime. This wartime. And therefore because more weapons equals more better war we must now actually build the thing for obvious reasons".
And then I cannot stress how ridiculous this whole thing is: it actually worked. The amount of brainpower that you must have to not only conceive of such a device when none had existed before but actually build it is, well, mind boggling. You must imagine: nobody had ever done this before. In the 1940's. It was all just maths and people that are very confident in reading instruments. And building those instruments. This was before computers. This was when communication happened not rarely by written letter. But anyways it worked. And then the United States bombed Japan twice for war reasons. Whatever number of deaths I would put here would pale in comparison to the true horrors of nuclear warfare.
So then we-being-humanity did 2121 nuclear tests to one-up each other and then Cold War was history. That's too much history for now.
So in a way it can be said that Oppenheimer was at least in part responsible for the existence of the world where the dangers of mutually assured destruction are forever cemented in our reality. Nuclear holocaust is a concept in our collective minds. And it did happen with great involvement from his part. He is the main character in that story. That's the story.
And being the kind of person that I am I thought "well I should go see that movie because the internet Gods said that I should or something like that".
So I did.
Ah the movie theater! My favorite topic to rant about. Now I want to be clear here: I was happily going. This was an event to look forward to. I didn't actually really care much about the outcome or some hypothetical "4/5 stars" this night mental rating. No I just wanted to go. I was curious. So I get to freely nitpick the badies and not speak about the overwhelmingly amount of goodies. For reasons I just made up.
I don't get modern bioscopen (movie theaters) for the dominant player of Hollywood movies. The experience has been made dreadful to the point of absurdity. It's entirely devoid of human interaction. You have to pick the snacks yourself then do the self-checkout dance and then a little gate and then etc. It's just dreadful. It's the same way a bus can be dreadful. It's just transit, not experience. It's the self-checkout thing, it's dreadful. It's one those "why humanity?" things that unfolded rapidly and seemingly without resistance. The food is bad. Like really bad. Why does it need to be this way. Why can't it just be better. Anyway.
Now Christopher Nolan chose to base his story on some play. He didn't actually write it really totally by himself. I cannot phantom a person that hasn't heard of the phrase "the movie was better" or "the book was better" in reference to a pop culture symbol. So you know, artistic freedom.
I find the movie difficult to describe. It's incredibly long for starters.
Now Nolan puts any author of a review of his movie in an interesting position. It is impossible to tear apart his work without referencing the original play I didn't read. But that's a false trick of the mind: Nolan made that choice. He could have also not done so. And the fact that he did it in the way he did is on him, not the author of the play.
I think it's badly written. Sorry.
The movie revolves around the main protagonist of the story: Oppenheimer. And there are side characters but they are truly side characters. His wife and mistresses seemingly have no motivation of their own. Except for communism for some reason. The motivation of his coworkers is either "unexplained physics verbing" or "anger and frustration". Now I think this is somewhat of a tragedy.
Nolan had special film made for this movie because 70mm imax and black and white reversal film. That doesn't exist, so you need to make that. If you're Nolan. Clearly the man is dedicated to something. Just not character building.
The story focuses around 3 main eras of his life: the building of the bomb, the political fallout from that and his career as a failed political influencer, and the shady McCarthy-esque side characters instrumental in that story. However Oppenheimer is just Oppenheimer. He just does thing. Seemingly for no reason.
However I know what to-physics really means. And clearly Nolan doesn't. And that irks me because his portrayal of the process is superficial and often dishonest. But don't take it for me. Take it from people who knew Oppenheimer intimately. From The Disappearing Spoon podcast Topsy-Turvy Tales from Our Scientific Past and quotes from the wiki page.
Feeling unloved, Oppenheimer withdrew into a world of poetry and physics. As he once told his brother, "I need physics more than I need friends."
Worst of all, he was lonely, far removed from the family that spoiled him. Given his frustrations, and his high-strung personality, he fell into a trough of depression.
He also grew mentally unstable. One of his few friends in England was Francis Fergusson. Fergusson's family owned a ranch in New Mexico where Oppenheimer stayed once while recovering from illness.
Göttingen was the center of the new science of quantum mechanics, and had frequent visitors like Niels Bohr. In Göttingen, Oppenheimer's quick mind impressed Bohr and many others, and his old intellectual swagger returned.
This tendency to leap from topic to topic frustrated Oppenheimer's colleagues. Especially when he'd jump to areas outside of physics. He'd simply drop physics for months to read Proust or learn Sanskrit. He also threw himself into trendy leftwing politics, like throwing fundraisers for the communists in the Spanish Civil War.
Probably the most important ingredient he brought to his teaching was his exquisite taste. He always knew what were the important problems, as shown by his choice of subjects. He truly lived with those problems, struggling for a solution, and he communicated his concern to the group. In its heyday, there were about eight or ten graduate students in his group and about six Post-doctoral Fellows. He met this group once a day in his office and discussed with one after another the status of the student's research problem. He was interested in everything, and in one afternoon they might discuss quantum electrodynamics, cosmic rays, electron pair production and nuclear physics.
Oppenheimer's papers were considered difficult to understand even by the standards of the abstract topics he was expert in. He was fond of using elegant, if extremely complex, mathematical techniques to demonstrate physical principles, though he was sometimes criticized for making mathematical mistakes, presumably out of haste. "His physics was good", said his student Snyder, "but his arithmetic awful".
He didn't have Sitzfleisch, "sitting flesh," when you sit on a chair. As far as I know, he never wrote a long paper or did a long calculation, anything of that kind. He didn't have patience for that; his own work consisted of little aperçus, but quite brilliant ones. But he inspired other people to do things, and his influence was fantastic.
As a leader, his quick mind proved a huge asset; he immediately penetrated to the heart of every matter. And if he didn't have the gumption to stick things through, well, that's what underlings were for. For better or worse, atomic bombs probably never would have been built without Robert Oppenheimer.
And that's a person with a clear motivation and backstory. Emotional turmoil, frustration, and a consciousness that flickers brightly even at the dimmest of times. Does Nolan portray this: no. In Nolan's view the man is a composed well mannered and almost sterile in appearance. His only depiction of brilliance are some abstract visual sound effects and him throwing glasses at a wall. And injecting poison into an apple and then never speaking of it again. Yet it yields an interesting question: what exactly did Oppenheimer learn from the shrink?
There's a sex scene that seems otherworldly. It's devoid of emotion. As if Oppenheimer was too busy doing physics in Sanskrit in his mind to get his dick out. But I don't believe that for a second. If you're a chain smoker because you can't be left alone with your own thoughts: he was probably an animal in bed. Unless he was depressed. Which he wasn't: he was building nuclear weapons.
When you do physics it's very hard to describe. It's not like equations are swirling in your head. Sometimes a graph or some abstract thing, but never the stuff that appears in papers. When you do physics it's like any complex mental task. It's not mystical, and yet it is. Anyone who has ever experienced an intense moment of focus (be it cooking, sporting, playing an instrument, drawing, painting, arting, and so to the verb for all of science) you know this feeling. It's subjective and yet it isn't. Akin to asking "what does it feel to be in love?" or what is "feeling frustrated by your annoying coworkers while you're hungry" is "what does it feel like to do complex abstract thinking?". And Nolan botches it and I have no idea why. And worse people now may think that that's the way you think to build a nuclear bomb. With abstract sound effects. But it isn't, the world falls silent to the music of your own thoughts. A thought he tries to approach but never quite manages to reach.
Oppenheimer loved to share. He was an avid teacher. "More than any other man", Bethe wrote, "he was responsible for raising American theoretical physics from a provincial adjunct of Europe to world leadership".
And yet none of this is actually portrayed. Only the word communism is used more than a hundred times in the script without ever alluding to its meaning to the people involved. Communism equals bad therefore communists are bad therefore we need to build a bomb that can destroy the planet.
Nolan is a master in what I call "superficial depth". It leaves the audience with a feeling of "I watched a smart thing" where the net effect is really "you were just made a bit dumber".
A person that quotes Sanskrit after the destruction of a bomb splitting an atom by brute brain force is not a character without depth.
'He eventually read literary works such as the Bhagavad Gita and Meghaduta in the original Sanskrit, and deeply pondered them. He later cited the Gita as one of the books that most shaped his philosophy of life. He wrote to his brother that the Gita was "very easy and quite marvelous", and called it "the most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue." He later gave copies of it as presents to his friends and kept a personal, worn-out copy on the bookshelf by his desk. He even nicknamed his car Garuda, the mount bird of the Hindu god Vishnu.
Nonetheless, Oppenheimer never became a Hindu in the traditional sense; he did not join any temple nor pray to any god. He "was really taken by the charm and the general wisdom of the Bhagavad-Gita", said his brother. Oppenheimer's interest in Hindu thought is speculated to have started from his earlier association with Niels Bohr. Both Bohr and Oppenheimer had been very analytical and critical about the ancient Hindu mythological stories and the metaphysics embedded in them. In one conversation with David Hawkins before the war, while talking about the literature of ancient Greece, Oppenheimer remarked "I have read the Greeks; I find the Hindus deeper."'
"We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed... A few people cried... Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form, and says, "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that, one way or another. " -- J. Robert Oppenheimer