Living with Becoming Death
How Nolan Structured A Biopic Like No Other
“If you are the dealer, I'm out of the game
If you are the healer, it means I’m broken and lame
If thine is the glory, then mine must be the shame
You want it darker. We kill the flame”
—“You Want It Darker” by Leonard Cohen,
a timely song for shuffle to land on upon my exiting the theater.
If there’s one thing we know about Christopher Nolan, it’s that he loves puzzles. Oppenheimer’s, for me, didn’t come in the form of a dream maze or an amnesiac’s tattoos. Rather, it was why a director renowned for dense narrative focus took such a sprawling, snapshot approach to a life whose most storied experiences took place within the span of a few acres and even fewer years. The answer (or, at least, my answer) didn’t come into focus until near the end of the film, when I could step back and see the bigger picture stretching beyond the largest IMAX screen in North America.
In his early flirtations with the woman who would become his wife, Oppenheimer explains that quantum mechanics maintain that what we perceive as solid matter is really empty space, populated proportionally sparsely with just enough electrons swirling around atom cores to prevent the world from passing through itself. Heck, the atomic structure as the medium of storytelling begins in the first frame, with raindrops rippling outward from nuclei into electron orbits.
Across the rest of the beginning, we see Oppenheimer’s imagination ablaze with atoms swirling around, larger than life. By viewing Oppenheimer’s life through the prism of the atom and structuring his story around it, Nolan crafts the perfect metaphor for how his protagonist’s life unfolded. We pass through the valence clouds, each vignette in his life an electron orbiting the nucleus that would define his legacy: the Manhattan Project.
Alternating between the politics that make the project possible and the science that makes it real, the protons and neutrons of the Project stack neatly together, like so many marbles filling up a fishbowl. The Trinity Test, of course, doubling as the fission that split Oppenheimer’s life and set his sky on fire. The rest of the world might not have burned, as once feared, but his soul certainly did.
It’s in these most human moments that Nolan makes full use of IMAX as a format, rendering the applause of his cohort upon news of the bomb droppings in Japan as percussive and damning as the hellfire that rained first in Alamogordo and later, across the Pacific. The blast is certainly impressive, even more so knowing no CGI was used to create it. No, alas, no computer can take the credit—nor the blame—for what Oppenheimer wrought, either. The fallout rises.
As it turns out, the flag that billows with grandeur as Oppenheimer’s scientists hoist him onto their shoulders following that successful first test flies the other way too, as the country he serves begins to doubt his loyalties even as he begins to question the ends that they served. Not only can’t a genie be put back in a bottle, but why would you want to when you still have wishes left, enquires an empire grown resentful of the man whose Promethean pride provokes the eagle on his country’s seal. It’s just as well. If his liver can’t exsanguinate the guilt spreading through his veins, it might as well be torn out to feed the beast.
Towards the end of the hearings regarding his security clearance, Kitty Oppenheimer asks her husband if he thinks he’ll find absolution in the tarring-and-feathering of the proceedings. Conversely, during their conversation by the lake where we first observe the atomic ripples of the raindrops, Albert Einstein prophecies that one day, Oppenheimer’s name will be cleared in the public sphere, though, he opines, not for the sake of Oppenheimer’s conscience, but for America’s