~ essay on Oppenheimer (2023).
~ Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man.
For this he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity. ~
1. Fission
J. Robert Oppenheimer, first and foremost, can see into other worlds. This is the meaning of genius, in part ~ to be able to transcend yourself and your surroundings and see, in a creative fashion, what is not clearly visible. Or what is not yet there.
In Christopher Nolan’s 2023 film, this soft-spoken, rather ethereal, soul-piercingly handsome American physicist is portrayed (bloody brilliantly so by future Oscar winner Cillian Murphy) as being able to peel back the layers of reality. He can do so not only on the chalkboard ~ but in his mind’s eye.
Even from a young age, Oppenheimer is haunted by what he seems capable of unlocking; the wayward and chaotic and destructive possibilities of physics lay within him. There is a great force of meaning behind light and mass, waves and their elemental reactions {and each of those raindrops}. Such divinely powerful revelations are already occurring as a matter of course, all the time and all around us ~ far out in space and here on planet Earth too.
The math tells him that stars can die. In doing so, they take everything with them. A supernova devours even light itself. In a recursive, explosive chain reaction of gravity and density, stars perish and birth into black holes.
Thus, the theory eventually implies the creation of a bomb.
As a student, legendary physicist Neils Bohr tells him: “You can’t lift the stone without being ready for the snake that’s revealed.” On the cutting edge of physics research during war time, it is all just a matter of time before such a serpent is unveiled. And this is Oppenheimer’s fate: to move the rock. Only the atomic bomb is not a simple serpent ready to strike a hand ~ but a leviathan, still growing and able to devour worlds. Such “divine” power can be controlled by no singular person or nation, least of all him.
Who could hope to control a supernova?
Nuclear weaponry undoubtedly creates a new world; Oppy hopes it is one where war becomes unthinkable. Whether that proves to be true is irrelevant to the fact that the knowledge of this leviathan’s existence is utterly cursed. And it is cursed not just because nukes are pure Death, a weapon of mass destruction on a level that Mankind can scarcely comprehend, their usage – once made – becoming inevitable. The knowledge is cursed because it must be acted upon.
A proverbial “deal with the devil” is devastating because it must be entered into. For whatever reason, the devil has something that you cannot do without (or at least, you don’t think you can). In the case of nuclear weaponry, the leviathan, once known, must be acted upon. He must be dealt with, explored to the fullest extent, understood and collated and harnessed utterly ~ if he can be.
Because if you do not confront the accursed leviathan, others undoubtedly will.
This is Oppenheimer’s first problem: once the curtain is reared back even one ream, can you forget what you saw? Can you doubt the vision of your “enemies” in the audience? Can you stop yourself from stepping on stage, embracing the horror, securing the power yourself? Can you vainly hope Mankind will not take that which is in his eventual control to take?
2. Fusion
“Theory can only take you so far.”
Matter, mass, physical reality ~ they go beyond belief, ideals, ideology. They, like the snake under the rock, are there whether we want to acknowledge them or not. However, such scientific systems of thought as physics and calculus and the complex series of events culminating in the production of the atomic bomb via The Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico in 1945…are just our descriptions of the reality around us. Theory and practice and experimentation, names and numbers and instructions.
They are our methods to meld math and matter to make something real; the resulting explosion at the end of such man-made processes is even realer. The fire is realest of all; the blinking on or off of life by the combinations of elements and atmospheres upon our little rock in space is real too.
Fire does not care if you do not believe in burning; oxygen does not care if you do not believe you need to breathe it. Fire and oxygen {and radiation} do not “care” at all, just as those words we use to describe them are not their true name.
Humans once borne, however, are fully naturalized describers ~ we are ideology. We become it, with every bit of knowledge (or lack thereof) gained over time. Past our own meager physical form, we are nothing but consciousness, choice, ideology. We are names and words and identities as much as breathing beasts and fire-weavers. We use things like math and words to make our way, our ever-ready tools to discover and inspire with. We are the constant results of knowledge and its consequences, ever-filtered through our own singular (or more likely, commonly held) ideology. In this way, we are both real and unreal. Persons are walking x talking parts of reality itself and yet caught up in our own made-up descriptions of reality too, simultaneously so.
Victims of cognitive dissonance, among many other psychic maladies, us human beings are not so different from the baffling quantum world that Einstein delivered to us and Oppenheimer takes forth.
The nuclear bomb, once discovered by a grand coalescence of scientists’ efforts from across the globe, fast becomes mired within the ideologies of its creators ~ and its controllers. And they are not the same people. Where scientists see only the terrifying possibilities, the soldier sees enemies awaiting dispatch {and politicians see power.}
Thus, every nuke’s creation, and inevitable launch, is instantly ideologically bound up in the machine {nation} that demanded its production. Much of Nolan’s film vividly unveils such sub-realities, to a painstakingly satisfying degree.
~
History has named Oppenheimer as “father of the atomic bomb” and in spirit that is true. But like all great and aweful scientific discoveries, the a-bomb was the result of a scientific culmination. We see this in the film with a newspaper revealing that the atom had been split elsewhere in Europe during Oppenheimer’s time at Berkeley as a professor. Those results, as good science is conveyed, are soon recreated in the lab next door. This showcases how the work of science is done – with every discovery being steadily built upon, every scientist climbing from shoulder to shoulder to stare off from the perspective of a giant, far past their own mind or lifetime alone.
Right after their own recreation of the experiment depicted in the newspaper, Dr. Oppenheimer’s self-spoken revelation comes that he and every other physics department across the world is gathering up the implications of the discovery the same way: To split an atom is to make something akin to a small supernova, a physical recursion of anti-matter and fire that goes far beyond its seeming energy limitations (i.e. small device, large reaction). Thus, the proper setting off of a chain reaction of enough uranium, plutonium, hydrogen is to produce an explosive of such terrifying magnitude as to be nigh unthinkable in its destructive effect.
This physical discovery ~ this latest act of science in a long tapestry of “violent, penetrative acts” ~ only has one immediate use to us: a bomb. A super bomb.
For 1940s human society, the cursed knowledge of this super bomb comes caught betwixt two world wars, in a mature, yet ever-bloodthirsty, globalized civilization of nations and prejudice and war. Ideology and disparity are already suffused within the discovery as it comes, as all things come. In this world, alongside such destructive potential comes power. “Defense.” Deterrence. Dominion.
Nolan’s film, in part, purposefully depicts how Oppenheimer and co.’s discovery of a usable nuclear weapon births this new world. It is one where every scientist involved with its creation and every leader charged with its deployment and every person that stands to lose their life in the event of a global nuclear war must become principally concerned with their own ideology and that of its opposition. In a world where wars are far from over, everyone must soon confront the existence of such a final weapon of war. Not a new weapon, but THE weapon. Such confrontation can only be filtered with such meager, ambiguous, paradoxically frustrating ideologies as we have within us and around us, in capitalism and communism, in the life of allies and in the death of “enemies.” The seeds of the Cold War come through as the freshly nuclear world divides into capitalist and communist, ally or “enemy.”
This is Oppenheimer’s second problem: weighing simultaneously in his mind the complexities of scientific reality and the coming complications of an international arms race and the ongoing Nazi genocide against his people and the longer-range Soviet-led ‘threat of communism’ against his home country and the annihilative possibility of something like “atmospheric ignition” and the world-shaking responsibility that such a bomb must bring to every geopolitical maneuver hereafter and the bloody work of war wielded with such a sword and the hope of every future wars’ end with many such swords in many such hands, keeping all swords forever sheathed and bloodless.
This is no state to stay sane within.
While the organization of the effort to make the bomb, to perform the “miracle” as Oppy says, is tailormade for a man of his talents ~ Oppenheimer is certainly not built for dealing with the implications of the bomb’s long-term existence.
No one is.
~
There is regret and sorrow and necessity upon Cillian’s long-haunted face by the end of the film, among other hidden, contradictory, ambivalent emotions we can only guess at.
He’s been a genius, he’s been a coward; he’s directed a miracle for his country, he’s been hounded as a threat to his country; he’s been naïve and brilliant, foolish and prudent. He’s fathered children and committed adultery; he’s made friends and enemies galore, cavorted with communists and capitalists alike. He has been used, but not yet used up.
At the time of that fateful conversation with Einstein, he’d made the bomb and he’d tried his best to caution its usage and he’s not yet had Strauss destroy his career by orchestrating his security clearance’s denial; he is midway through his journey, both glories and horrors carried upon his brow.
Before the lake at Princeton, Oppy looks at the raindrops and uses that incredible imagination of his to see the doom of nuclear holocaust, to dread it ~ to be the one doomed to know Mankind’s dreaded fate.
He imagines the World on fire, the missiles launching and the sky setting ablaze ~ just as he cannot look upon real photos of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He triumphs at Los Alamos with “Trinity” and mere days later is made to bear witness to the tragedy of the United States’ war crime against Japan to end WWII over the public radio. He feels blood on his hands and agonizes upon his face gracing TIME. He constantly manages expectations and yet speaks as a prophet mayest; he acts as a makeshift politician and public speaker on science, ever vectoring policy discussions toward international cooperation into the nuclear age; he cannot help but conceive his own murderously rapturous audience of countrymen immolated in nuclear hellfire. He revels in the magnificence of discovery, every intention shown to us since a young age ~ as genius scientist, loyal American, communist sympathizer and unionizer of his students and peers ~ to try to do good work in the world and help people learn and his art advance; he despairs in the necessities of fate x history x cursed knowledge, whatever you want to name it, as the World calls upon him to “steal fire from the gods” and give it to Man.
{Or rather, give it first to the United States of America, the unequivocal winner of the 20th century and hegemon over the World to this day ~ due in no small part to his efforts. Oppenheimer, most ironically of all given his fate by the end of the film, must be named as one of the greatest Americans to ever live.}
Nolan’s final shot of Oppenheimer’s gaunt countenance, following his graven words to Einstein, is sublime. That is the American Prometheus, the tortured ghost of a Man who has come to know our End, well-weighted by his accursed responsibility as the one that flicked down the last domino.
“I believe we did.”
He speaks for himself and his colleagues; he laments unto the World.
That is cinema; that is reality.
Oppenheimer is a masterpiece; Oppenheimer is hyper-horror. ~
Thresholds of Transformation 