Oppenheimer [Movie]

Here be spoilers spoilers spoilers

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First, I just want to say how impressive (?) it is that Hollywood memed me into seeing two movies this summer that I would never have watched of my own accord.*

I often felt that this movie was aimed at some audience beyond The Audience. I'm not saying it was literally this but it felt vaguely like "the producers had a special interest in X and Y, and only agreed to finance the film if Nolan would throw in some unnecessary tributes/criticisms of X and Y."

My understanding is that Nolan is an auteur, and one of the few people in Hollywood powerful enough to make whatever movie he wants. So I'm trying hard to treat it as such, and figure out why The Director chose to do each of the things he did.

The thing is, so many of the choices in the film – big and small – made not-much sense to me, in a way that would be easily explainable as "this project was designed by a committee and therefore came out incoherently."

This came up a lot in the small stuff, e.g. the constant unnecessary-to-me cameos and references. Seemingly every famous physicist of the time gets namechecked, referenced or briefly shown on screen, alongside One Fun Fact about them; it feels to me like a teenager showing off their knowledge of a topic, rather than adding depth or texture to the story. The pinnacle of this trend comes at the very end, in a dramatic scene where a senate vote goes against one of the characters:

"There were some unexpected holdouts", says the senate aide.
"Who were the holdouts?" says the character [after a long dramatic pause]
[The aide looks at his piece of paper or something]. "Seems they were led by the junior senator from massachussetts. Young guy trying to make a name for himself. His name is John F Kennedy."

I'm not sure I'm doing justice to how unnecessary this exchange is; how much it deflates the drama of the moment; and how much it feels like it's only there to convey a Fun Fact: did you know, the senator who derailed Lewis Strauss' cabinet confirmation was in fact a young John F Kennedy?

(The movie is generally really into saying people's names, as if they're trying to get it Onto The Record. "One final question, Dr Hill: who was the person you were just describing who did the bad thing you just talked about?" "That was Roger Robb." "No further questions.").

The big-picture version of Why Did You Include This? was more important, and more confusing, though I really do want to stress here, the confusion may be on my end and I could totally believe that Nolan had a reason for his choices and I just missed it.

Basically, the movie has three simultaneous Threads:
1) physicists / Los Alamos / The making of the Bomb
2) Oppenheimer's security clearance renewal hearing
3) Lewis Strauss' cabinet confirmation hearings

There is such an obvious movie to be made which is basically just 1), the making of the bomb (and it's consequences), which would be dramatic and fun and easy to follow, and tackle the Important Theme of Oppenheimer's ambivelence (should I say regret?) about the thing he had unleashed on the world. And instead of making that movie, Nolan made a more-complicated movie in which Lewis Strauss' confirmation hearing is in some sense the Main Arc of the movie, and the bomb-making and Oppenheimer's security-clearance hearing are stories embedded within that story.

And you can make a joke here about how the reason Nolan made a more-complicated movie is because he's Nolan, that I should be thankful he didn't add a time-travel element (Oppie studied black holes and quantum physics! the oppietunity is obvious!) But...  it just feels like he must have had some reason for it.

I spent a bunch of time thinking about this, and the best I could come up with was that Nolan was trying to tell a story about fighting: showing us ~4 different options of whether and how to fight against bad events in the world, whether to acquiesce or fight underhandedly or fight explicitly or to remove yourself from the situation. That would maybe explain what the cabinet confirmation storyline and the security clearance renewal storyline were doing in the film. But I can't for the life of me tell you what Nolan was trying to say about those options. I'm hoping one of you can....

`* p.s. re: boppenheimer, there's a scene in the movie where a large crowd is chanting "oppie, oppie, oppie" and I swear if you listened with your eyes closed and no context you could parse it as "barbie, barbie, barbie". I believe someone with more skills and/or energy than I have could collect 1,000,000 likes (and the associated $5 payout) by excerpting this clip and Xing it in yanny/laurel style.