I care little about the British royal family yet I watched some of The Crown TV series with interest. Those episodes embraced an era I lived through and during which my fledgling awareness of the links between national events in the UK started to develop.
Even more so with Oppenheimer. I was too young for Hiroshima although I’ve subsequently absorbed just enough physics to appreciate the scientific and argumentative roots which brought about the bomb. But the plotline and I (historically) became more political simultaneously as McCarthyism raised its ugly head, covered in the final hour of the movie.
Oppenheimer is long (181 minutes) and it needs to be. Every twist and turn of the dilemma RO faced is both detailed and animated in trenchant dialogue and a persuasively realised cast of characters. It was fashionable to demonise RO’s latter-day tormenters at the time but the movie reminds us that the bomb – as a principle – threatened all of us and the very world itself, then as now.
A true dilemma in that no one was a hundred percent right.
For a time I loathed the USA. I think I was vaguely aware of the injustices (And the ingratitude!) heaped upon RO but he was just one of many victims. Think of the black-listed writers. On the other side: think of the celebrities who flipped.
Decades later it took a few months living in an unremarkable Pittsburgh suburb to achieve a more balanced view of a country I’ve tended to regard as a multi-faceted continent.
The movie won’t be to everyone’s taste. It’s not obscure, the story is well told, but its aims are serious. Someone once said the Brits can’t stand too much reality. No reason why Americans should be any different. See it anyway.
Yes, RO is probably the only movie we saw this Fall season and it was excellent. Cillian Murphy disappeared into the character despite our fondness for Peaky Blinders, which we are waiting for the next season. Having also lived through the early 50's and the aftermath of McCarthyism, as well as the stories of the 'bomb' being berthed under the bleachers at Soldier Field here in Chicago we found the story familiar but still horrifying. My son did a short stint at Fermi Lab here in the outskirts, and was a 'also NUKE' in the Navy. For those who haven't had any experience with actual nuclear history, the movie definitely gives you a truer look rather than just reading a few lines in a history book. Maybe we should all have to crawl under a desk again, to be reminded of how futile protecting oneself from a nuclear bomb is. And how close we are everyday to annihilation.
ReplyDeleteSandi: Watching the latter part of Oppenheimer was like re-living the earlier part of my life in parallel but with one big difference: it allowed a panoramic view rather than experiencing events in breathless day-to-day snapshots. The McCarthy hearings were heavily covered and shocking in the UK but the movie put everything into a historical context stretching back a further decade. These days every thinking person and their dog scratches their head over quantum theory whereas in the thirties it was just a few scientists who were doing the scratching, many of them - including Einstein - saying it was all nonsense. And gradually the nonsense became the new reality.
ReplyDeleteA bad movie might have ended with the news from Hiroshima. But this one responded to the challenge of animating what followed and making it just as vivid - and perhaps even more salutary - than the exciting work at Los Alamos. Yet somehow it never looked like a mere documentary. And now Putin raises the awful possibility of "tactical" nuclear weapons which will simply destroy what he considers to be smaller, handier groups of the enemy. He imagines...
I have seen it 5 times, all at the cinema. It takes more than one viewing to take it all in, especially Strauss. (I have an Odeon Limitless pass in case you were wondering).
ReplyDeleteRP: The movie took me down previously explored literary channels that helped expand the movie's plot. The play (later filmed) by Michael Frayn - Copenhagen - which centred on key conversations between Bohr and Heisenberg; best-selling thin volumes by Carlo Rovelli (Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Helgoland, and Reality Isn't What It Was) and - fascinatingly way, way back, published in the fifties, Witness by Whittaker Chambers, which covered the McCarthy era.
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