As a typically reluctant consumer of Christopher Nolan films—save for the occasion when they star a hot man and are apparently required viewing before or following Barbie—I had very few expectations walking into my sold-out screening of Oppenheimer this weekend.
I knew, at some point, that I would feel a very large boom or two, given the biopic’s premise about the invention of the atomic bomb, led by Oppenhiemer, and its catastrophic landings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. Aside from that, I had mostly been warned via tweets and some disparaging articles about another on-screen explosion of sorts (sorry!): the film’s two brief sex scenes, plus a nude post-coital scene, featuring J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) and his lover-turned-mistress Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh).
Already, one of the scenes has caused controversy overseas. The first, in which Tatlock instructs Oppenheimer to translate a passage from the Bhagavad Gita while they’re doing the act, has been criticized by Hindu nationalists for disrespecting the religious text. India’s information commissioner Uday Mahurkar even composed a lengthy tweet to Nolan, calling for the scene to be removed.
On Twitter and TikTok, users reacted to the semi-nude scenes—some before they’ve even watched them—in equal disgust and confusion, given the historical film’s notably unsexy subject material. Meanwhile, Murphy has argued in interviews that the scenes are “not gratuitous” and that audiences will find them “f—king powerful.”
So how uncomfortable are the sex scenes in Oppenheimer, on a scale of Cameron Diaz humping a car in The Counselor to Jennifer Lopez telling Ben Affleck “It’s Turkey time. Gobble, gobble” in Gigli?
I’d argue that neither scene is nearly as jarring or cringe-worthy as some of American cinema’s worst renderings of heterosexual couples doing it, simply because they’re both so brief and decidedly unerotic. Considering the rollercoaster ride the three-hour saga takes you on, they’re not really even that notable, aside from the fact that Nolan’s filmography has been mostly sexless until now. This is partly due to the fact that the female counterparts to his male protagonists are often dead.
The same “dead love interest” phenomenon coincidentally occurs in Oppenheimer with Tatlock, who suffered from severe depression and committed suicide at age 29. She’s the physicist’s first love interest in the film before he settles down with his wife, Katherine, called “Kitty” (Emily Blunt).
Oppenheimer meets Tatlock at the U.S. Communist Party gathering he’s brought to by his brother, Frank, who’s also a party member, and Frank’s girlfriend—another woman Oppenheimer views as disposable. When Tatlock is introduced to Oppenhiemer, they briefly flirt while they discuss their allegiance to the party. Tatlock, being cheeky, says she enjoys “a little wiggle room.” Cut to Tatlock straddling Oppenheimer on a bed while he lies there like a frozen corpse.
She then goes over to his bookshelf where she finds a copy of the Bhagavad Gita and has him read the Sanskrit text (“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”) before she straddles him again. The love-making here is obvious foreshadowing and maybe how Nolan envisions science nerds having sex. Funnily enough, there is a version of this scene that could be sexy, if Nolan were actually interested in making you feel anything at this moment.
The second sex scene—albeit equally impotent—is more problematic to me, although not for how visually unappealing it is or that there’s something immediately icky about seeing Pugh's naked body on display in front of a room full of mostly men in suits. It is, however, obviously a dream sequence.
At a 1954 security clearance hearing that frames the movie, Oppenheimer admits to the panel that he had had sexual encounters with Tatlock, a Communist Party member, during his marriage to Kitty. The camera pans behind one of the board members to reveal Oppenhiemer sitting no longer in a suit but completely naked before the board. From Kitty’s point-of-view, as she sits behind her husband, we suddenly see Tatlock straddling Oppenheimer again, fully nude, while Kitty watches in horror.
The scene is not not awkward and unsexy for the few seconds it lasts. But I argue it’s more objectionable in how it reveals the limited, stereotypically portrayed emotions Kitty is allowed to experience throughout this movie. Despite Blunt’s efforts to infuse her with some humanity, her portrayal is very distant, uneven, and hits all of the usual “Biopic Wife” beats, despite its attempts to subvert them by making her an occasionally tough figure. (She can support her husband and yell at him sometimes!)
Likewise, it’s frustrating that one of the few times viewers are meant to empathize with Kitty is when she’s experiencing envy toward another woman. During the hearing sequence, while Tatlock–or a vision of her, more accurately—is mounting Oppenhiemer, she stares directly at Kitty with a mischievous grin on her face. If not for the eye contact, it would seem like her gratification in this moment is solely sexual. But the fact that she’s devilishly staring at Kitty imbues this scene with a level of cattiness.
This is not to pull out the Bechdel Test and say these two women should have a more empowering interaction. But both the drama and horror of this scene, given that Kitty is already aware of her husband’s affair and seems generally disillusioned by her marriage, is frankly laughable.
All of this is to say that future Oppenheimer viewers have no need to mentally prepare themselves for much of anything regarding these extremely unenthusiastic and boring sex scenes. They’re treated less like concerted passages designed to titillate audiences and more like brief anecdotes you might encounter on a Wikipedia page—a vital one apparently being that the “father of the atomic bomb” got some ass.
