Spoilers.
Much can be said — has been said — about Oppenheimer.
Of course, there are the tired, moralizing critiques that have become the impression-snagging, dopamine-bursting staples of our social-media-fuelled outrage machine. Yes, it is true: even in 2023, Christopher Nolan would certainly be shocked to learn that women are independent agents with their own thoughts and motivations. Similarly, there are those who variously lambast the film’s perceived glorification or vilification of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy). (Though, make no mistake: to miss the profound ambivalence of the film, or its subject, is to admit one’s attention span sits at the Planck scale.) And, there are those who correctly point out the issues which Nolan’s movie omits or gives inadequate attention — in its three hours of content.
That-all notwithstanding, I cannot recall a more powerful moment in contemporary cinema than the buildup to the detonation of Trinity. That utter silence — save for the clattering of the 70mm film reel — in which the sold-out audience witnessed physicists’ intellectual fantasy manifest in flames before their eyes, made real in the realm of the material. The universal forces of creation, and structure, and beauty — the spiritual monuments of a young theoretician — being harnessed, in the context of inescapable war, to rend the very fabric of matter asunder, engulfed in a power our Earth had never seen in its four-billion-year existence prior. In that silence, my body could yield only one response:
I wept.
When I walked out of an IMAX showing at the Metreon downtown — surrounded by jubilant dude-bros torn between fawning at Robert Downey, Jr. and explaining how the movie wasn’t as good as Interstellar — I walked to the curb, a dissociated husk, and collapsed in unmitigated horror.
In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna is confronted with the inexorability and numinousness of his role as the carrier of the cosmic force of time, destroyer of the world — perhaps a better translation than “death”, as Oppenheimer famously took from Isherwood’s poetic license in translating from Sanskrit. Every physicist knew what splitting the uranium nucleus meant: “a bomb”. If Oppenheimer had refused to lead the project, a hundred others could have stood in his place — after all, it only took one to fill the post. And if, in the face of changing tides during the war, that leader decided to try and halt the enterprise? “We’ll have him killed,” we hear from Gen. Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), the personification of the bureaucratic government war machine — not so much a joke as a threat.
And if that leader had succeeded in halting the U.S. development of nuclear arms after the fall of the Nazi regime? What would the world have looked like with the knowledge of fission and fusion devices, leaked by Klaus Fuchs, in the hands of an unopposed Stalin?
Though Oppenheimer tells us the particularities of this man’s life, the story was not truly about him. He, too, was the vehicle of an inexorable and numinous cosmic force. If the film’s ending is to be believed, then the true blame lies in the tension between two fundamental facets of what it is to be human: on the one hand, our pursuit of structure, meaning, and beauty in the humbling vastness of the cosmos, as the younger Einstein and Oppenheimer sought in uncovering and developing quantum theory, respectively; and, on the other, our taste for wanton destruction in war. The former, in the presence of the latter, has an inevitable — and horrifying — conclusion.
The world stands on the precipice. Perhaps the catalyst will be a spark catching the tinderbox in Niger, or Lukashenko making good on his threats to have the now-headless Wagner forces stray from their training of Belarusian troops to march on Warsaw. Perhaps it will be Putin’s bombers making an incursion into UK airspace, or Xi’s carriers venturing into Taiwan’s air defense zone to launch hundreds of simulated direct strikes on the island. But to sit in comfort is now an act of willful ignorance — not realism. World events have slid so far, bit by bit, just at the corner of our vision. My conversations about the news with friends no longer feel like me shouting warnings out into the void; instead, they feel like echoes, reflecting those worries back at me from each pair of eyes. This new feeling frightens me, far more than my own fantasies of destruction ever could.
I fear that I am not prepared to make the choices that will be demanded of me in the coming years. I have not had to face that impossible decision, of whether to confront an enemy so vast — an enemy with the power to bring about genocide without bound, in the holocaust of the strong force — with a remedy that I know may summon global annihilation. I have not had to face a world where we count the stamps for this month’s eggs. A world where our numbers are seared into our memories. A world in which we struggle for a human right that is different in kind from those we have become accustomed to fighting for: the right for human flesh not to be ripped from bone in the fire of a nuclear sun. A world for which we must serve as caretakers. A world where we must wholly will history away from cataclysm — so that our children may live to carry on our pursuit of justice.
I learned in the pandemic the incredible measure of our collective resilience. We will adapt; we will, as we always do, use crisis to build something truly new and spectacular. But when I walk across campus to get a coffee or a sandwich — when I see friends gathering for lunch, or for Frisbee on the quad — I can’t help but mourn the loss that I know we will all feel when the world soon falls off that precipice and into darkness.
The autumnal equinox approaches, when the lengthening nights accelerate. Though I cling to the hope of the day’s return, I also know that there is a brutal winter ahead. For now, I turn inward — and pray for the strength to make impossible choices. \(\,\blacksquare\)