OPPENHEIMER: Prometheus And His Children

 I distinctly remember leaving Christopher Nolan’s INCEPTION in 2010, the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school, with a sense of an ending that would stick with me for the rest of my life. It was the first time I ever went to the theatre and left mulling a film’s ending over and over, wondering what it all was really for. More than thirteen years later and into my late 20’s, I’ve never quite gotten over that feeling of leaving a piece of art transfixed with the questions it might pose and ultimately come out more enthused than something that acts like it has every answer and diminutively resolves it. Nolan’s three-hour biopic OPPENHEIMER based on the Pulitzer Prize winning biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin is a look into the psyche of a man who, by the end, is utterly convinced that he has led a chain reaction of the destruction of humanity.

Because of the film’s very clear inspiration and adaptation of the 2005 novel, it begins with a quote about Prometheus being chained to a rock and tortured for eternity by the gods, damned Zeus, for stealing fire from them and sharing it with humanity. This, of course, is meant to be a representation of the genius who overreaches with hubris, much like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus. Much of the film’s strength lies in its post-Trinity sections where Oppenheimer the man is racked with guilt and trauma over building the bomb. Not only do the acting performances by Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, and Robert Downey Jr. intensify, but Jennifer Lame’s incredible editing, also seen in TENET (2020), shines most in these moments. Many will credit Lame for the brisk pace set in the first two hours of the film as we flash through Oppie’s life from academia to the security clearance hearings, but Lame really impresses with how deftly the many narrative threads get weaved together in its last act. Nolan’s very clear direction and strong script, Hoyte Van Hoytema’s beautiful cinematography, along with Ludwig Goransson’s best score yet and Lame’s expert editing make this a cinematic marvel to experience in full blown IMAX 70MM.

This is a film that looks straight into the heart of obliteration through the eyes of the man that may have helped to kick start the means to bring it about. I got up from my first viewing of OPPENHEIMER and as I walked toward the exit I saw before me a crowd of silent and disbelieving audience members that had just watched someone come to terms with what he left behind. We’re fucked. And what about who he left behind? What am I supposed to do with that? Unlike INCEPTION’s dream/reality conflict, I was not satisfied in mulling it over. I needed, I need, an answer. I think we all look for such an answer. After all, this is a question our society is at the forefront of, having been left in the mush of the sludge of the past generation’s sewage drain.

And so, I read American Prometheus because I need the full context as much as I can get it. Bird and Sherwin’s novel ultimately ends with his children dealing with the wreckage of the world that he helped to build. Oppenheimer’s son, Peter, runs his ranch in New Mexico, while his daughter, Toni, was refused her chosen vocation as a United Nations translator due to Oppenheimer’s security clearance issues in the past and ultimately hanged herself. In some ways, this is Oppenheimer’s real ending, because there is no ending for the next generation. Oppenheimer’s realization with Einstein at the end of the film, though a fictitious encounter, is the ending of his great epoch and the first embarkment for Peter and Toni.

There’s a weird connection between the actual events as depicted in the film Oppenheimer, the novel American Prometheus, and a duology of novels recently published by the late Cormac McCarthy (The Passenger and Stella Maris) that I’m a little reluctant to make but will do so only for their thematic resonance and closeness. I would highly encourage you to go read these two harrowing novels yourself before I continue as I’ll freely get into the damned thing. To get to the gist of it; they center around an older brother and a younger sister, both genius children of a theoretical physicist who worked with Oppenheimer to develop the Atom Bomb and the themes of guilt that surround their lives. The first of the novels begins with the younger sister, Alicia Western, hanging herself. I know that McCarthy did comprehensive research on physics, mathematics, philosophy, and music for these two sister books and that The Manhattan Project is a rather important point in the background of these characters’ lives, but I cannot know if McCarthy explicitly went out of his way to set the parallel between the real-world Peter and Toni with Bobby and Alicia. The book Stella Maris is a series of conversations between Alicia and her Psychiatrist Dr. Cohen. It’s written in almost pure dialogue and Alicia starts the book knowing that she is waiting for her self-inflicted demise, partially because her brother Bobby is in a coma, most likely never to recover, partially because it’s what she’s always wanted because of the world she’s grown to know post-bomb. The Passenger meanwhile features Bobby Western after his sister’s death, long recovered, running from beings unknown, his belongings never really his own, friendships never allowed to stick, all most likely due to his father’s involvement in the bomb. He not only feels guilt over his sister’s death, just as she did his, but he must forever run from the world set forth by his forefathers. Never able to have a life. Not truly.

Oppenheimer’s journey is done, Peter and Toni had to live with the detritus of that world left to them, much like we’re living through our own. Bobby and Alicia’s journeys in The Passenger and Stella Maris are guilt ridden, harrowing, and yet are filled to the brim with everyday conversations that keep us going. Conversations about books, food, hobbies, philosophy, mathematics, music, physics, etc. We hold these conversations, and we hold hands and love and hate and dance because, as the late great Cormac McCarthy leaves us with; “that’s what we do when we’re waiting for the end.”