When I was in high school I somehow absorbed — whether from a teacher, from something I read, or from my own observation I no longer remember — the idea that a movie, as a unit of art, is more or less equivalent to a short story. In other words, the idea that one can take a typical short story from the Western canon and it will provide just about the right amount of plot, characters, settings, and so forth to make a compelling 90-120 minute movie. And that, by corollary, a novel cannot be successfully made into a movie without paring it down or flattening it.
I don’t know if I still believe that, but it’s a thesis I thought about often when I finally got around to watching Oppenheimer on Sunday night, as it was in the process of winning several Academy Awards. On balance, I enjoyed it — though there were certainly many times when I exclaimed, out loud, “God, this is awful.”
What led me to devote three hours to watching the film was, largely, that I’ve been pretty sick since last Thursday. So I don’t really have it in me to write a coherent review, but still wanted to share some observations (and to try not to fall too far behind on the weekly publishing schedule I’ve been keeping up since November). Here goes:
I’m somewhat surprised that, at least on my social media timelines, there hasn’t been more made of the role played by the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians in the movie. FAECT was a small and relatively short-lived CIO union of which Oppenheimer was a member. In the film, it mostly serves as an indicator of Oppenheimer’s left-wing sympathies and connections to members of the Communist Party, but it seems to me its presence is also very of-the-moment, as the current wave of organizing in higher education has, unlike earlier waves, been led in no small part by workers in STEM fields. There also seems to be some renewed interest in the history of FAECT (which I only happened to know about from an article in Monthly Review that I came across over two decades ago).
That said, the depiction of FAECT, and left-wing organizing more generally, is incredibly reductive — particularly the weird scene where Oppenheimer’s grad students and lab workers are chanting “F! A! E! C! T!” at a meeting. I mean, I’m not going to claim that that kind of goofy chanting never happened in the 30s and 40s (goofy chanting is ... kind of a hazard of being on the left), but choosing to include that instead of, say, an actual one-on-one organizing conversation, does a disservice to how organizing and unions actually work. I’m not surprised that the director made that choice, but not happy about it either.
One of the things that I think the movie does do well is depict how damaging paranoia about security and loyalty is to any sort of collective endeavor. Oppenheimer’s connection to FAECT, and to specific Communist Party members in the union, meant he was considered a potential security risk. (Apparently President Roosevelt was concerned enough about the FAECT organizing at Berkeley Labs that he asked CIO President Phil Murray to order the union to disband Local 25, and Murray did so.) However, if Lieutenant General Leslie Groves — essentially, Oppenheimer’s handler in the military — had not maintained a fairly light hand with Oppenheimer and his many colleagues with left-wing sympathies, he might not ever have gotten his atomic bomb built.
I don’t really understand why the movie spent so much time on — indeed, is largely framed around — Oppenheimer’s security clearance hearing before the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954, his relationship with AEC Chair Lewis Strauss, and the blowback to Strauss’s own career (he was denied confirmation as U.S. Secretary of Commerce in 1959, in part because of his role in red-baiting Oppenheimer). I suppose it provides a nice comeuppance to Oppenheimer’s enemies at the end of the film, but in many ways that is precisely the problem — by doing that, it thereby exonerates the liberal state from the “excesses” of McCarthyism, showing it as a self-righting ship. And, of course, also exonerates Oppenheimer himself from turning in some Communist Party members while clumsily trying to protect those who were his personal friends. Had Oppenheimer not been subjected to such a high-profile red-baiting himself, we might remember him not as a victim but as someone who “named names.”
Lots of the weird film tricks, like having Oppenheimer’s Communist lover appear naked on his lap during the security hearings, ten years after she died by suicide, or Oppenheimer hearing premonitions of the fascist-like boot stamping as Los Alamos workers celebrate the success of the bomb, seem to me unnecessary. I would rather the film had addressed Oppenheimer’s psychology through more old-fashioned methods. Like, say, dialog and cinematography and acting.
In particular, the early montages in the film, when Oppenheimer is studying cutting-edge physics in Europe and also being exposed to modern art and music, are so poorly done that I think the film would have benefitted from simply cutting them. The light shows are, I guess, supposed to represent parts of atoms, in their wave/particle indecision? We see a copy of the score of Rite of Spring, but the music playing sounds like just standard-issue modern dramatic film music, no hint of Stravinsky’s revolution in rhythm and orchestration. Later in the film, Oppenheimer justifies his left-wing activism to a fellow physicist by likening the revolution in physics to revolutions in art, psychology, and politics — but the point wasn’t earned by the earlier scenes, so it just comes off as a quip.
Ultimately, it was just too many stories crammed into one movie. Given that limitation, it does a good job of creating a watchable, comprehensible, and enjoyable movie, but there are at least three stories I wish would have gotten deeper treatment in the film: the story of quantum physics as a branch of modernism; the story of Oppenheimer’s relationship with the Left on the one hand and the national security state on the other; and the story of Los Alamos itself — a fascinating story of a bunch of brilliant and mostly young people thrown together in the desert for several years, as a stand-in for which we mostly get random clips of the Richard Feynman character playing the bongos.
But that is what our lives often are: too many stories crammed together, without the time to explore each one in the fullness it deserves; mistakes we regret and accomplishments that we also sometimes regret; an incomplete intersection with history, the full significant of which we rarely if ever grasp. As a movie, as artifice, Oppenheimer is often disappointing, but as a life I think it did the best it could.