Of course Christopher Nolan wasn't going to make a “bombs are good” movie. What he did achieve is far more sinister.
Nolan is the kind of director whose “politics” fans and critics alike enjoy attempting to dissect. As he’s kept his real-world political leanings mysterious, it’s up to his art to offer any possible clues. Those who like picking these things apart quickly latched onto his Batman trilogy as a possible reactionary conservative wonderland, and those readings are certainly there if you look for them, though it’s impossible to tell if they're there intentionally. But there's a much simpler overarching theme to Nolan’s work that people miss when they try to insert political feelings that may or may not actually be there: Christopher Nolan makes movies about miserable men.
There are many tactics Nolan uses to make his men miserable. Maybe they’re amnesiacs afflicted with short-term memory loss. Maybe they’re twins who have to keep their twinship a secret for the sake of their magic show. Maybe they accepted a mission to the depths of space that will launch them light-years away from their family. Maybe they can’t tell anymore if they’re living in the real world, or in a dream. Maybe they’re a guy who calls himself “the Batman.” Maybe they don’t understand time travel. Maybe they’re fighting a war. Maybe their wife is dead.
What all of these miserable men have in common is that they do it to themselves. This is not subtext. Nolan’s films are blockbuster dramas about the lengths that people will go to to ruin their lives. It’s for this very reason that he’s the perfect director to tackle someone as challenging as J. Robert Oppenheimer, who gave us the gift of fire at the expense of our future.
Before Oppenheimer’s premiere, old criticisms of Nolan’s past work resurfaced. Specifically, many online were debating the old sticking point: the scene in The Dark Knight where Bruce Wayne saves hostages from a bad guy using the kind of total surveillance technology people write dystopian sci-fi novels about. Bruce has retooled a program Lucius Fox created and inserted it into every cell phone in New York City, using the audio feed to create a sonar image he and Fox can use to see through the walls and floors of a high rise. Hans Zimmer’s score soars as Bruce dispatches the Joker’s henchmen and Commissioner Gordon's SWAT officers alike before stringing up the Joker and dangling him off the side of the building.
It's easy to read a scene like this as a “good guy with a gun” fantasy. (It’s easy to read any superhero story that way.) How could the director who made this make a movie critical of the atomic bomb? But The Dark Knight is more critical of itself than some may notice.
“This is wrong,” Lucius says when Bruce shows him what he’s made from Lucius’ idea. Freeman’s reading of the line is definitive. It’s not his opinion, it’s a fact. His horror runs so deep that he resigns from Wayne Enterprises on the spot, but not before agreeing to help Bruce one last time—perhaps because Bruce is his friend, perhaps because he fears what Bruce could become if his power was left unchecked. Sure, yes, Batman was the only person who could have done it responsibly. But The Dark Knight is fiction. Batman doesn’t exist. As the scene closes, Lucius types his name into the computer, springing a failsafe that destroys it for good.
No such luck with the atomic bomb. The beginning of Oppenheimer’s tragic, masterful third act begins shortly after the Trinity test proved the destructive capabilities of the Manhattan Project's theory. Oppenheimer seems quietly bothered by the sight of his work being carted off in unmarked boxes by the American military. He’s brushed off by General Groves, and it's clear to him that his creation is no longer his own. That’s what bothers him, at first, as it would bother anyone.
And then the bombs drop, and we watch as he slowly realizes what we, who live in the future, already know. The joy of discovery, and of building something with his brilliant peers, shielded him from thinking about what the end result would be used for. Pointedly, it’s not until he imagines radiation melting the faces off of people he personally knows, as it must have done to people he never met and will never know, that he lets the truth in.
Nolan makes movies about men creating and using technology until it makes them wretched. They throw themselves into their Great Work at the expense of their lives. Things of beauty are corrupted into instruments of pain. The Dark Knight is a time capsule of the post-9/11 age, where our Amazon Alexas hadn't turned our homes into mini-surveillance states, and our government and law enforcement would save us from the terrorists running rampant through our streets. Oppenheimer is more mature, and thus more complex. There’s no caped hero, no happy resolution. In the movie’s final scene, Oppenheimer wonders if the physicists’ fears of starting a world-ending chain reaction weren’t true after all. (To this point, the reading of Oppenheimer as a mea culpa for spawning the “gritty” superhero blockbuster genre is not not there.)
In Hesiod’s account of the Greek myths, Zeus punished Prometheus by chaining him to a rock and sending an eagle to eat his daily regenerating liver. He couldn’t take away our fire, but he punished humanity, too: He sent us Pandora. And he gave Pandora a box. And we all know what happened next.
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Read more of our coverage of Oppenheimer HERE.
