Self-Sustaining Oppenheimer Reaction
Chain, chain, chain... Chain of #discourse...
As noted last week, I went out and saw Oppenheimer on its opening day, so my post about the movie came before most reactions to the film hit the Internet. It’s been a great source of #discourse, which is mostly to the good because this is a really slow time of year, and people who are now slinging very dumb Takes about the Manhattan Project would otherwise be offering galactically stupid Takes about the deeper meaning of some Instagram post from a D-level celebrity.
Anyway, since there’s so much about the movie, it’s probably worth collecting some brief responses to some of the reactions:
— There was a much-dunked-upon tweet from Sam Altman lamenting that this wasn’t likely to inspire anyone to become a physicist:
A lot of the responses were pretty funny, but at the same time, he’s also not wrong about either part of this. The Social Network absolutely did convince a lot of people that founding a tech company was super cool, and Oppenheimer is not exactly selling the glamour of physics.
But, of course, that’s largely because it’s not about being a physicist in any meaningful sense. There’s a brief sequence toward the beginning dealing with actual science, where Oppenheimer is building up the theory program at Berkeley, and that’s as close as the movie comes to being inspirational in any way. The rest of it is about being a manager and inadvertent politician, and the personal and moral compromises that involves. And while you could say something similar about The Social Network— it’s not long on sequences showing the joys of writing code— that film is written and shot in a way that makes everybody look cooler than they are, while Oppenheimer is just punishingly grim.
So, yeah, this isn’t a movie that’s going to inspire anybody to pursue physics. You could probably make one out of Feynman’s life that would feel more cool, since he was generally a more happy-go-lucky guy than Oppenheimer. I’m not sure how well that would play, though, since his important scientific contributions are much more abstract and his public roles were much lower-stakes than Oppenheimer’s. There would also be a moderate amount of blowback around gender politics, as a number of his attitudes have… not aged well. (Though that’s probably not an obstacle, if we’re being honest to the point of cynicism, in a “No bad publicity as long as they spell your name right” kind of sense.)
I might be interested to see someone take a shot at a biopic of someone like Vera Rubin, who’s got both a good science story and some great “I don’t have time for your sexist nonsense” moments that would play well in the current environment. I’m not sure you’re going to be able to wring epic drama out of that, though, but then again, I’m Not That Kind of Writer.
— In a sort of similar vein, there are two other big threads I’ve seen that I find a little weird given the actual film and its subject. One is talking about this as a story about the burden of scientific genius (possibly connected to Christopher Nolan’s ideas about genius in art), the other is the inevitable disclaimer about hos the reviewer “couldn’t follow all of the science in this…”
That’s funny to me because, from the standpoint of a physicist, there’s next to no science in the movie. There are maybe a handful of lines of dialogue alluding to actual technical problems that the real Manhattan Project dealt with, but there’s no need to follow any of the details, because they’re just name-checks, a bit like the (probably anachronistic) shots of Feynman playing bongos. There isn’t a scientific thread that you could follow even if you wanted to.
And that’s entirely appropriate, because Oppenheimer’s contributions to the Manhattan Project had little to do with scientific genius. In terms of actual physics, his most important contribution is probably his pre-war work on black holes (which he basically never picked back up after the war). He didn’t contribute any particularly unique insights about the idea of making a bomb, or make any bold strokes that solved technical problems along the way. His genius wasn’t in the area of physics, but in administration.
To be sure, this did require a kind of scientific brilliance— from all reports, his success managing the Manhattan Project owed a lot to his ability to follow the details of any and all of the problems that came up. He could make all the different groups of scientists feel that they were understood, communicate issues between groups, and help make reasonable decisions about where to direct effort and resources. But the bulk of the actual scientific work was done by other people— they put Bethe at the head of the theory group because he was much better at computational work than Oppenheimer, and folks like Fermi and Lawrence on the experimental aspects of the project, etc.. Oppenheimer’s role was to oversee the whole thing, and keep the project as a whole on course, which he did masterfully, but that’s not a story of scientific genius.
— Another big line of #discourse around the movie concerns what it doesn’t show, including a whole big laundry list of evils and abuses. This is generally not a line of criticism I have a lot of time for— “Why is this piece of art about this thing instead of that one?” is just not that interesting a question, to me. Choosing what story to tell is the central prerogative of any author, and that’s not always going to be the story any other individual would’ve chosen. I’m more interested in what happens after the decision about what the story will be— does the work succeed or fail at being the thing it’s intended to be?
In this case, what it’s trying to be is a narrowly focused biopic about Robert Oppenheimer, and as a result a lot of stuff is excluded. Including a lot of stuff that’s pretty directly relevant to events on screen— there are a ton of well-known stories about the Manhattan Project that don’t make it in because they don’t directly involve Oppenheimer.
In the specific case of the effects of the bomb, I think this is a lose-lose situation for Nolan. This is already a three-hour movie, and it would be all but impossible to break out of the narrow frame around Oppenheimer the man to show the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a way that did justice to those events within the already long run time. And it is not at all hard to imagine Nolan taking an equal amount of flak for putting in a superficial flash cut to the annihilation of one of those cities. What he’s done feels (to me, anyway) appropriate to the story he’s telling— the hallucinatory bits when he’s giving the speech after the bombing convey the impact on the central character in a way that’s true to the film this is trying to be.
You absolutely could make a movie about the Manhattan Project that gave a more central role to the Japanese civilians killed in the bombings, say by intercutting between domestic scenes in Los Alamos and analogous scenes in Hiroshima. I can easily imagine that being a powerful, important, and celebrated movie. It’s also a completely different movie, not a minor tweak to this one.
— The choice that I’m a little less certain about is the inclusion of the Lewis Strauss stuff in the last hour of the movie. That really does shift the focus away from Oppenheimer a bit, and seemed odd on my initial watch. On thinking about it a bit more, it does make a kind of thematic sense as the most concrete price that Oppenheimer paid for the compromises he made. I might need to re-watch it sometime with that in mind, though.
(I’m not running back to the theater any time soon I’d be more than a little surprised if we don’t end up with a screening and discussion on campus at some point this academic year…)
— The final big piece of the online discussion has been the inevitable re-(re-re-re-)litigation of the decision to drop the bombs in the first place, which is a conversation that never entirely goes away. And it never will go away, because it’s fundamentally a question of counterfactuals and those can never be settled in a definitive way.
I don’t think the movie adds anything particularly new to that particular debate, other than providing a news hook for people to raise it a few weeks earlier than usual this summer. It’s not like Nolan uncovered a new trove of documents about the decision-making on either side, and everybody involved has been dead for a good long while now.
Personally, my main feeling about the whole issue is a vague sense of gratitude that I was born a half-century too late to be involved in making that call. There were a lot of factors going into that, and none of the information they had was all that good. And I don’t really buy that Japan was about to completely surrender even after the Soviets got into the war. Especially given the whole thing where a faction of the army tried to mount a coup even after the bombings so they could keep the war going.
So it’s a choice between dropping the bomb or at least starting to invade the home islands, and neither of those is attractive on either a practical or a moral level. Given that they were already doing things like the firebombing of Tokyo, I don’t think it’s that hard to understand how Truman would end up approving Hiroshima. The latter has taken on greater weight through the decades of the Cold War, but in 1945, I don’t think it would loom quite as large compared to the potential toll of an invasion.
(A few years back, possibly around one of the anniversaries of the end of WWII, my grandmother told me that at the time when Japan surrendered, my grandfather was on a transport ship headed for the Suez Canal. He did something involving photo reconnaissance, mostly in Italy, but they were moving from the Mediterranean to the Pacific in preparation for the invasion of Japan. In her telling, they more or less immediately turned around and sailed to New York instead, where she married him as soon as they could manage it. I can’t swear to the accuracy of that, but it’s a good story and tells you a lot about the way that generation experienced the whole business…)
— Finally, the “I can’t believe this needs to be said” aspect of the whole thing: I basically agree with this Noah Smith post. Everybody involved in a war is morally compromised to one degree or another, but the Japanese empire up through the end of WWII is on a completely different level. The only thing that might deny them a spot atop the Most Evil Combatant podium is that they were head-to-head with their notional allies, the actual fucking Nazis.
I mean, what are we even doing, here?
This may or may not be the last I have to say about Oppenheimer. If you’d like to know for sure, here’s a button:
If you want to take issue with or expand on any of this, the comments will at least start out as open:
As always with potentially contentious topics, though, I reserve the right to intervene if this starts to go off the rails, up to and including closing comments entirely.
I'd go see the Feynman movie. I bet the "is he fundamentally a good guy or a bad guy" angle would be catnip for a lot of filmmakers.
There was a 1996 movie starring Matthew Broderick as Feynman ("Infinity"), but my recollection is that it only covered his life up to the point where his wife tragically passed away from tuberculosis, which was during the Manhattan Project, so he was still fairly young at that point. It's been years since I saw it, though. Looks like it's streaming (...with ads) in several places, maybe I'll watch it again.