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Oppenheimer The Movie
The “Oppenheimer” movie is OK, entertaining. Hollywood usually disappoints on any subject you know well. The movie does a pretty good job of showing the brilliance and quirks of Oppenheimer, but as a story on science and technology, at a time when it's more important than ever for the world to understand both, it’s woefully lacking. “Oppenheimer” is most hampered by tying issues of science and technology to personalities, which always muddies the water more than providing clarity. J. Robert Oppenheimer's story might be the atomic bomb, but the story of the atomic bomb is much, much more than Oppenheimer, any other individual, or any group of individuals.
In recent years it's become a trope people learn solely through stories, narratives. Narrative, we are instructed, is tied to character, mostly flawed character. Among others, including Hollywood, I place most of the blame for this on university literature departments, which by the way have provided little good since their inception. Narrative is the literature department equivalent of the economics department spouting various truisms that don't really explain anything.
The development of science and technology are their own stories, representations where personalities and human character flaws add no understanding. Scientific theorems are proved or disproved regardless of any good or bad character traits of its developers, same with the technology that follows and its relation to inventors. For example, key to the development of the quantum technological era is Einstein's E=MC2 — energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. This equation is a representation of the universe with nothing to with the character or personality of Albert Einstein, regardless of his story being a very fine one. The key understanding of this equation is the equivalence of mass and energy. The tiniest bit of mass can be converted to enormous amounts of energy. A basketball size mass of uranium leveled Hiroshima, instantly killing 70,000 people.
“Oppenheimer” deals superficially with the stories of physics and technology. They are without a doubt difficult topics to broach in a couple hours, yet they are the story. There's a couple of good lines on the subject. One is by physicist Isidor Rabi, who says he doesn't want several centuries of physics to culminate in “weapons of mass destruction,” though unfortunately, a lazy use of anachronistic term.
A good scene is after the bomb is dropped. Oppenheimer sits in the office of Harry Truman, America's greatest knucklehead president, that's saying something. Truman calls Oppenheimer the “inventor” of the bomb. Oppenheimer quite rightly demurs. But then Oppenheimer states, “I have blood on my hands,” which is an extremely interesting thought in regards to any individual's responsibility developing any technology. In opposition, “Give ‘em hell Harry!” gleefully accepts the blood on his hands, after all, for the infinitely ignorant Missourian, who through happenstance was thrust into one of human history’s greatest events, nuclear weapons are just the latest, greatest way to kill.
After the war, Oppenheimer gave this issue a great deal of thought, speaking on it until his death. He became one of the few to contemplate, quite insightfully, the politics of technology. In 1958, with a wonderful speech at Princeton, he explores the impact of science and technology on culture, rejecting the long held notion of their ethical neutrality. “The phrase, the ethical neutrality of science, must be a fairly empty one, as an occupation it is based on a very clear belief that is good to know.”
In the speech, Oppenheimer correctly and importantly notes the random nature of much, if not all, technological development. He says,
“It is a very accidental thing too, what effects, if any, developments in science have on human life. Now I mean that not primarily in the mechanical differences, though here too it seems to me there have been some mighty odd accidents. Things could have been done with scientific knowledge which lay fallow for a long time because they didn't have any sex appeal for the economy or industry of the time, and things get done in a great hurry, like making atomic bombs almost before you knew how, because they do have a great sex appeal. A good deal could be written about the randomness and lack of logic in relation between what we learn how to do and in fact what we do do.”
“Making atomic bombs almost before you knew how,” in many ways, it is dumbfounding how quickly they pulled it off. It was less than three years from when Oppenheimer was chosen to run the project till the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bomb was developed in the heat of the most recent, little doubt not the last, world war. In regards to forces that have long shaped technological development, the bomb was no outlier. From the beginning, to better kill each other has been a major instigator of technological development. In a much better film on these issues, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” director Stanley Kubrick concisely presents the idea with an ancestral hominid picking up the femur of a dead antelope, then applying it repeatedly and forcefully to the skull of a waterhole rival. After the blood is spilled, the inventor throws the bone into the air, dissolving into a spaceship orbiting the earth to the strains of Strauss. Representing Homo's million year technological journey, it is one of film's greatest scenes, a technology, it should be noted, not much more than a century old.
The movie's greatest weakness is its third act. The film becomes far too enmeshed in Oppenheimer losing his security clearance in a kangaroo court. Oppenheimer was unquestionably extremely foolish in this whole affair. It's done with little background to the detrimental Cold War politics of the era, politics which unfortunately remain far too similar to today's. The film loses depth focusing on this, becoming a character duel, offering little of the needed, especially to younger generations, greater political context. Call it tried and true Hollywood formulism – that's entertainment.
Sitting through this overdrawn final act, I thought, “Well, unfortunately, they've blown it.” But, the whole picture is saved by the final scene, a bit of well conceived fiction. At the beginning of the movie, after the war, Oppenheimer is being offered to head Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. He greets Einstein, long a resident, strolling by a pond at the Institute. They have a short talk, but you can't hear what's said. The final scene returns to this meeting and we hear the conversation. Oppenheimer reminds Einstein that during bomb's development he had asked him about the madman Teller's wrong calculations that the bomb's chain reaction might spread and ignite the whole atmosphere, destroying life on earth as we know it.
Einstein asks, “What of it?”
Oppenheimer answers, “I believe we did.”
If the movie was deconstructed from the traditional Hollywood narrative track, then reconstructed, that line would be the plot, providing a better history of the science that led to the bomb's development, its creation, and most importantly its release into a world completely incapable of controlling it. That across the planet we still possess thousands of nuclear warheads is a damning indictment against humanity ever having gained the knowledge to make them.
The bomb represents our complete inability to understand, going back millions of years to our Homo ancestors, the defining role technology has played in our social, cultural, economic, and political development. In the last century, as Oppenheimer finally understood, technology is of such unprecedented power it can completely reshape life on earth. Yet, we still have little to no ability to politically talk about it and less ability to politically shape technological development. Unintentionally, “Oppenheimer” demonstrates this explicitly.
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