Review of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer (2023)
*’smi loka-kṣhaya-kṛit pravṛiddho*
*Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds* (Oppenheimer's own translation)
—*Bhagavad Gita* 11:32
In James Hillman’s article *Wars, Arms, Rams, Mars* (first published in 1983), one of the things he explores are the differences between war as imagined through the Greek God Mars with whom Hillman says for a number of reasons American consciousness has extreme difficulty, and nuclear war imagining. And he emphasizes how important it is for us to imagine war, especially with nuclear weapons. He wrote "War is not unthinkable, and not to think it, not to imagine it, only favors the mystical appeal of apocalyptic nuclearism."
Furthermore, as horrific as the atomic bomb is, it is important that we imagine into it. The task of "nuclear psychology," as Hillman calls it, is "a ritual-like devotion to the bomb as image, never letting it slip from the pillar of cloud from the heaven of imagination to rain ruin on the cities of the plain." The reason the atomic bomb must persist as an image is that our imaginations are "the only safe place to keep the bomb." And one way to support this approach is through film.
The words at the top of this review are often thought to have been uttered by J. Robert Oppenheimer at the Trinity test which successfully tested the first nuclear weapon in world history - a plutonium implosion-based atomic bomb whose explosive yield was thought at the time to have been 18.6 kilotons (the explosive energy of 18,600 tons of TNT), but a far more recent assessment (2021) indicated the yield was 24.8 ± 2 kilotons. These words of the Bhagavad Gita take on an even greater urgency when you consider that in 1942, there was legitimate concern that an atomic weapon would ignite the Earth's atmosphere [physicists Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller, and C. Marvin calculated that the atmosphere would not be ignited, their report on this entitled *Ignition of the Atmosphere with Nuclear Bombs*
- Los Alamos National Laboratory, LA-602, April 1946]. Now, Oppenheimer did say these words, not at the Trinity test (or at least, there is little evidence that he did), but twenty years later in a 1965 NBC News documentary entitled *The Decision to drop the Bomb*. That the image of the Brahmanic God Krishna revealing himself in this most dreadful form [to his charioteer Arjuna to whom he had temporarily given the divine eye, for this form could not be be seen with Arjuna's physical eye] came to Oppenheimer expresses a great deal, both about the immensity of the impact seeing this atomic explosion had on him and his deep sensitivity to that event. And, it expresses the fact that humans were working with powers far beyond their understanding and control.
Christopher Nolan’s *Oppenheimer* is a movie deeply informed by the Pulitzer Prize winning book *American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer* by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Its vision is grander than just the single event of the atomic bomb. Instead, the canvas it uses is bordered at each end by time - from the beginning of Oppenheimer's studies in physics to the later part of his service as Director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. The film then freely, but purposefully, goes back and forth in time, more faithful to providing a view to the audience of the immensity of the many powers being dealt with, powers far beyond man, than of being faithful to temporal orderedness and contiguity. Unlike Arjuna, we were woefully unprepared to behold "the destroyer of worlds." And like the steadily expanding high-pressure wave of an atomic explosion, the movie shows Oppenheimer and others being consumed in differing ways by the new era which had opened up - the nuclear age.
The powers unfold in this movie in multiple parallel arenas including but not limited to personal relationships, hard science and engineering, and politics (especially, Cold War politics). As a result, Christopher Nolan had to make some difficult choices in terms of emphasis.
One choice he made is that this is a dialog-heavy movie, which I think is an excellent decision given the extraordinary complexity of the events being covered. There is in my estimation enough focus on the science, but I am aware that there are some reviewers (like author Walter Isaacson) who felt the film would have benefited from including more of the science. I very much sympathize with this view, especially as I was spoiled by the excellent 7-episode mini-series *Oppenheimer* which came out in 1980 starring the great Sam Waterston in the title role. Seven hours, as opposed to Nolan’s three hours, allowed for more of the science (and engineering) to be explored. In addition to the good choices Nolan has made, the acting in this movie was superlative. This is one of the strongest casts I have ever seen in a single movie.
I have written before on this group page about Hillman’s excellent paper *The Measure of Events: Proclus’ Proposition 117 in the View of an Archetypal Psychology*. There, he critiques the narrowness that scientific measure has become and recommends that we discover other gods which measure things existent which allow nature to answer out of the fullness of its possibilities. This view was on my mind as I was watching the film and there a few non-spoiler details in the film which I thought were great.
Very early on when Oppenheimer was a student in Europe, he meets with physics Nobel laureate Niels Bohr. Bohr understands from Oppenheimer's professor that he is not very talented in experimental physics, so Bohr tells him "You don't enjoy the lab? So, get out of Cambridge with its *beakers and potions*. Go somewhere where they'll let you think." Here, we see the importance thinking and imagination are to Oppenheimer, both being essential to the theoretical physicist.
But, this anticipates certain dangers with imagination-only approaches. What came to my mind was one of Jung’s reasons why early modern Latin alchemy declined in the later 17th century. It wasn't because of the emergence of hard science, but because "many alchemists deserted their alembics and melting-pots and devoted themselves entirely to (Hermetic) philosophy. It was then that the chemist and the Hermetic philosopher parted company."
Latin alchemy worked best when it was informed by both the outer alchemical operations and the inner experience. The theoretical physicist can imagine and prove by mathematics much, but needs to be grounded in empirical verification. Furthermore, being grounded in both the inner world and the outer world also has a better chance of keeping the moral question of what one is doing and how it is to be used at the forefront.
As I mentioned, imagination is very important to the theoretical physicist. And Oppenheimer later on in the movie says to his team "We're theorists. We imagine a future and our imaginings horrify us." Imagination and precision in one's knowledge of physical processes are an exceedingly powerful combination! And it is sometimes not enough, for Oppenheimer horrifyingly says "They won't fear it until they understand it. And they won't understand it until they've used it" [note: this is in one of the earlier trailers for the movie].
Overall, I think this is a movie worth seeing, especially at an IMAX Theater. And, I would recommend the book *American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer*, and especially Richard Rhodes's two books - his Pulitzer Prize winning *The Making of the Atomic Bomb* and his *The Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb*.