Much has been made, in many mainstream circles of online film discussion, of the decision made by writer, director and producer Christopher Nolan to not depict the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Oppenheimer, a biopic about the man responsible for cursing the world with the Atom Bomb. In fact, there is not actually a single Japanese character in the film. These decisions, to effectively omit the portrayal of those who became the human cost of Oppenheimer’s work, have been seen by some as ignorance. As representative of a gun-shyness in condemning the morals and actions of the man. As a tacit agreement with the military figures in both the film and in history who insisted that the use of the Atom Bomb was the only way to guarantee the end of the war and as such, all Japanese life could soundly become collateral because by God, this was gonna bring their boys back!

In Oppenheimer’s third act, when the first images of the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have made their way at last to the community hall-cum-theatre of Los Alamos, they are shown to the staff and employees of the part-workers town, part-military base, but not to us. In the dark hall, the projected slides of charred bodies and permanent shadows cast soft white light over the few dozen people in attendance. They gasp, they tut, they clasp their hands to their mouths beneath two shocked and curious eyes. Not Robert J. Oppenheimer, however. He refuses to look up at the violence inflicted by his magnum opus, his head held in one hand and an unkissed cigarette in the other, unwilling to face the destruction that Oppenheimer never chooses to show us, but that we are all of us familiar with. We know what he did. We know what he wrought. Despite all the regrets, and fears, and doubts, and nightmares that Nolan supposes that this man held in his heart after the Trinity test, we see in this moment exactly what this film thinks of its subject.

Oppenheimer knew that he had changed the world for the worse, the world we live in, the world of everyone who will ever see Oppenheimer- and he won’t even look at it.

“To try to become happy is to try to build a

machine with no other specifications

than it shall run noiselessly.”

J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1929

Oppenheimer is a film consisting of two storylines- Fusion, a secondary story told from the perspective of Admiral Lewis Strauss during a hearing where he is unexpectedly questioned about his role in the 1954 security hearing of Oppenheimer, and Fission, the primary story told from the perspective of Oppenheimer himself. Fission displays a remarkable and self-confident discipline in almost never abandoning the immediate experiences and perspective of Oppenheimer, and deals very heavily in visions, imaginings, nightmares and non-linearity. It is also a story that, through the prism of Oppenheimer’s cares, thoughts and opinions, is incredibly selective in what aspects of the Second World War are even granted lip service, let alone depiction, as he begins to lose himself in the creation of the atomic bomb. It is in these glaring narrative omissions and their subsequent vacuums of meaning, as an audience likely familiar with the broad strokes of this war, that we begin to understand the way Oppenheimer thinks and to realise what exactly he considers superfluous. Oppenheimer depicts him as a man who alleges often, before and during the early days of his involvement with the Manhattan project, that he feels obligated because of his Judaism to become a part of any meaningful scientific effort to fight back against the encroachment of Nazism in Europe. It also depicts him as someone who didn’t find the news of Adolf Hitler’s suicide of any significance beyond its use as a hand-waving dismissal while trying to convince a room full of concerned scientists that they were still justified in continuing preparations for the use of the atomic bomb against it’s new target, Japan. Oppenheimer never finds the strength- or perhaps the dignity- to engage meaningfully with the images of destruction that came out of Japan, but when he is rocked by a vivid vision of Los Alamos falling victim to the atomic bomb during a victory speech given in the wake of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the violence in his mind’s eye is being inflicted against American bodies, towards people like him.

Oppenheimer’s judgement and bleak assessment of its subject is explicit in this way. What we see in Fission are all the assumed thoughts, interests and questions both through Oppenheimer’s eyes and behind them. We are made to empathise visually and technically, if not at all morally, in how we are made to see only what he sees and to explore only that which he found valuable, and to be exposed to the abstractions in his mind manifested by the guilts, doubts and regrets from which Oppenheimer is now inseparable in the annals of history, but that Oppenheimer sincerely doubts the validity of.

More blunt, aggressive and contemporary criticisms of Oppenheimer, removed from the objectivity and adamance in not leaving Oppenheimer’s own perspective that Fission concerns itself with, can be found in the secondary story of Fusion. Admiral Lewis Strauss hates Oppenheimer, not for the controversy and bloodshed and world-altering ramifications of the Manhattan Project, but because years prior he humiliated him by publicly mocking one of Strauss’ decisions as part of the Atomic Energy Commission. Strauss believes he is being heard in Congress regarding his potential nomination as Secretary of Commerce, but is suddenly faced with an aggressive line of questioning regarding his involvement and eventually discovered organisation of the 1954 security hearing that tarnished Oppenheimer’s character, exposed much of his personal life and led to the removal of his security clearance. In a back room, removed from the public eye of the hearing, Strauss claims Oppenheimer to be a coward, a fool, a narcissist and a genius he could not help but admire as much as he disliked. Fusion does not allow us to peek inside Strauss’ mind, we are not allowed to be spectators to any of his visions or nightmares, but his disdain towards Oppenheimer begins to align with and contextualise the slow-creeping judgements cast by the story of Fission as claimed, albeit with more outright vitriol, by his contemporary. Strauss makes many claims about Oppenheimer out of frustration and anger that many of us today will agree with, that Nolan himself most likely agrees with, but he does not make them as an explicitly anointed seer who speaks from beyond his century with the historical knowledge and hindsight to condemn the man in a way that many now have, but as his peer and colleague who just found the guy to be one smug fucking prick.

The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as the cancer and generational birth defects that came with it is a dark and unspeakably violent moment in our history, the kind of thing that most people won’t remember being taught about, but feel they have always known. Oppenheimer is a subject uniquely suited, then, to being a vessel into which contemporary opinion and feeling regarding the existential horror and violence he enabled to be inflicted, especially as his alleged guilt and sense of dire responsibility for the Atom Bomb has now become as intrinsically a part of his historical significance as his involvement in its conception. To enter Oppenheimer very familiar with this moment in history, as well as its repercussions, yet not see it depicted should not be seen as erasure or forgiveness, but as the most damning indictment of Oppenheimer as a man, as a figure and as ‘The Father Of The Atom’. We were allowed inside his mind, in fact, we were not allowed to leave it, and yet we do not see in any capacity the central event not only of his life, but of the entire 20th century- because Oppenheimer didn’t want to face it.

Oppenheimer expects you to come burdened by knowledge, history and lived experience beneath the guillotine of Mutually Assured Destruction. When Oppenheimer, in 1954, recounts to a group of unamused Atomic Comittee members the details of the suicide of his lover and Communist Party member, Jean Tatlock, we see his imagining of the circumstances of her death. An empty bottle of pills, cushions at the foot of her bathtub, her head beneath water. For a moment, a flash of a black-gloved hand forcing her head under. Just a flash. Jean was a known Communist and associate of a valuable American asset during the McCarthy era, you can hardly blame Oppenheimer for allowing this notion to cross his mind. It is never mentioned and it is never indulged, it is merely shown to us. But that brief image in his head that we were privy to sews in us a seed of discomfort and uncertainty that will probably not leave your mind, and that most likely, did not ever leave Oppenheimer’s either. This moment, and its way of presenting itself, is the nature of Fission in microcosm. What we are shown must be believed as his authentic experience and feeling, that which we are not must be believed as his authentic disregard and ignorance, and what we see once then see again differently must then be taken as authentic doubt and unreliability. For Nolan to remain so faithful to this perspective through which we perceive Oppenheimer’s experience as Director of the Los Alamos laboratory, and to not ever truly see the destruction and human cost of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, does not at all betray any dismissal, empathy or impartiality regarding the ramifications of the greatest ‘success’ of Oppenheimer’s life, tacit or overt. It is a decision that states exactly what Christopher Nolan thinks of the man he went to great lengths to suppose the inner machinations and hardships of- that the very act of transitioning so suddenly from ambition to horror in the wake of the Trinity test betrays a naivety, cowardice and blindness that cannot ever be forgiven and should never allow us to be willing to accept his famed regret as sincere.

“I do not think coming to Japan changed

my sense of anguish about my part in this

whole piece of history. Nor has it

fully made me regret my responsibility for

the technical success of the enterprise…

It isn’t that I don’t feel bad, it is that

I don’t feel worse tonight than last night.”

J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1960

In Oppenheimer’s third act, when Oppenheimer is aggressively questioned during his much-publicised security hearing in 1954 about why he is so vocally against the development of the Hydrogen Bomb despite his enthusiastic involvement with the Atom Bomb nine years prior, he becomes flustered. The walls around him shake, blinding white light spills through the windows, piercing through the walls themselves. He is not once more imagining the horrors of the Atom Bomb engulfing the world around him, but having his first real reckoning with the true insincerity of his very public guilt. Someone is finally seeing through him, someone is finally making him say it, to the world and to himself- Oppenhimer would have built the Hydrogen bomb if he were asked and he would never have apologised for that one either, just as he never apologised for his involvement with the Atom Bomb.

Oppenheimer knew what the Atom Bomb would do to a human body. He knew how it would psychologically scar anyone who heard or saw its blast for miles around Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He also knew exactly what a Hydrogen bomb would do, too. He claims that this understanding of the even greater destructive potential of the Hydrogen bomb is why he opposes it’s creation and stockpiling, but in that room, under pressurised scrutiny, in the blinding white light of his mind, we watch him realise that that is also exactly the reason why he would have created it had it been requested. History will forever link Oppenheimer’s name with the destruction he enabled, the cold war he ushered in and the proclamations of responsibility and bloodied hands he claimed to feel. This is not undeserved, this will never be unfair.

When Oppenheimer refused to look at the images that came out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in that dark, silent hall in Los Alamos, he knew that he had changed the world for the worse, the world we live in, the world of everyone who will ever see Oppenheimer- and he won’t even look at it.

We have to.

“We will carpet bomb them into oblivion.

I don’t know if sand can glow in the

dark, but we’re going to find out!”

Ted Cruz, 2015