The Two Key Moments that Explain Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer
A pair of foundational events account this story of a shifting psyche and its painful regrets.
CAUTION: This piece contains major spoilers for Oppenheimer (2023).
There are two sequences in Oppenheimer that gradually reveal themselves as metonyms for the rest of the film. Early on, one demanding teacher gives a young J. Robert Oppenheimer a hard time over his mistakes. He punishes the talented-but-troubled student, facing some deep personal struggles, by denying him the chance to see his hero give a lecture.
So Oppenheimer, filled with frustration and a chance bit of inspiration, injects his professor’s apple with a dose of cyanide. He performs the deed clinically and methodically. When he catches the end of the lecture a moment later, he doesn’t seem the slightest bit perturbed by the fact that he’s committed an act of attempted murder, all to pay back the man who made his life miserable for an afternoon.
Yet, when he wakes up in the morning, Oppenheimer is wracked with guilt and all but spiritually compelled to undo what he’s done. He rushes to steal back the apple before the worst consequences of his actions take hold, a quest made all the more desperate when it turns out to be his hero, Niels Bohr, not his harsh instructor, who’s about to take a bite. Spurred by his quick-fire regrets, Oppenheimer snatches the fruit out of Bohr’s hand before it can inflict any damage.
That’s the key to understanding Oppenheimer’s behavior before and after the creation of the first atomic bomb. For so much of the film, our protagonist is single-minded to the point of myopia when it comes to achieving his goal. To his mind, the United States needs nuclear weapons, and needs them now, because the Nazi nuclear program is already in flight. Hitler and his goons are actively moving against Oppenheimer’s fellow Jews, and if the young scientist can help stop them -- if he use his mastery of physics to prevent the Third Reich from gaining the upper hand -- he feels he has a responsibility to do so.
So Oppenheimer ignores the protestations of his good friend and fellow Jewish physicist, Rabi, who doesn’t want to participate in an effort to rain death upon his fellow man. Oppenheimer dismisses the growing contingent of his Los Alamos workforce who are concerned about the ethical implications of their project. He brushes off his colleagues from Chicago who want him to tell American leaders not to drop the bomb. And through it all, Oppenheimer is practically overflowing with self-justifications and rationalizations.
Instead of taking those concerns to heart, the committed scientist is workmanlike and methodical in his goal to produce the atomic bomb. Though he gently raises the objections of his colleagues to the top brass, Oppenheimer presents himself as a mere vessel for communicating the views of others, rather than someone whose own opinions factor into the equation.
He is simply a man with a job to do, deadlines to meet, villains to vanquish. And even when Nazi Germany is defeated, he remains undeterred and under orders, still anxious to see the project reach its culmination, practically pacing when the day of the first bombing arrives and his work finally comes to fruition.
Except that then, once the job is done, in his moment of triumph, he suddenly feels nothing but the blood on his hands, the rot in his soul, the bleak feelings that had been tucked away in a dark corner until the job was complete. All of a sudden, he can compartmentalize no more. The film’s most bravura sees him in the afterglow of his greatest achievement, being cheered on by his fellow scientists, reveling in their victory, only to find himself haunted by the gravity of the hellfire he has wrought upon the world.
The sound, the light, the visions of blighted flesh and homes turned to ash, overwhelm his senses and drown out the singing of his praises. His rah-rah speech, divorced from cheers he is now deaf to, seems awkward and uncomfortable. It lacks genuine fervor. The emotional reckoning of what he’s done only hits after a delay, like the time-displaced sound wave from his own nuclear bomb. Only after he’s done it, does he feel it, and it’s then that he suddenly wishes he could take it all back.
It is the apple once more, a piece of nature poisoned, only now amplified in magnitude beyond human comprehension. And it is the peculiar psyche of this astonishing man, suddenly made to feel the weight of the history and destruction he’s authored, wondering what he’s unleashed.
Writer-director Christopher Nolan ensures the audience feels that weight too. Clocking in at over three hours, Oppenheimer plays as appropriately epic. The film aims to be more than the story of the creation of the atomic bomb, but also: to encompass the life of its creator by way of prelude, to examine the regretful aftermath that drives the title character beyond that seminal moment, and to explore the public clashes that consumed his life in the aftermath.
In that, Nolan and company hit a number of the standard biopic beats. The early portions of the film breeze through relationships and foundational experiences that, while specific to Oppenheimer, will feel familiar to anyone who’s seen a cinematic accounting of a historical figure. Grand speeches are given. Famous faces are introduced with suitable fanfare. The names of notable people and places are dropped with the freighted, portentous importance of an MCU post-credit scene.
And yet, there is a greater artfulness to what Nolan and his collaborators aim to do that sets Oppenheimer above its standard prestige comparators. Some of that is the pure aesthetics. If ever there were an argument for big screen viewing, it is the film’s monumental atomic test: a wash of blinding light, columns of all-consuming flame, the straightjacket of silence that envelops everyone gazing upon it, and the sonic boom that punctures the moment with dramatic fury. Theatrical viewing is a boon, maybe even a requirement, to feel the full strength of that awe-inspiring recreation of the moment when war became an existential threat to the planet.
At the same time, Nolan’s team goes for more impressionistic sequences amid their otherwise stately production. The aforementioned victory celebration gone awry is an achievement in using the cinematic form to contrast the external mask with one’s internal state. Similarly, the way the trappings of the nuclear explosion intrude in a later interrogation of Oppenheimer proves a creative way to show how the bombings still haunt him years down the line as he struggles to reconcile his past fervor with his present regret. And in a similar vein, the transposition of his ex, depicted in full passionate lovemaking while his infidelity is laid bare on the public record, underscores the guilt and the anger ginned up between Oppenheimer and his wife in visceral terms.
There’s also more formal creativity at play. Beyond the nonlinear presentation of the narrative that juxtaposes past and present in canny ways, Oppenheimer offers not one but two frame stories. One is fission, the recollections that turn out to be part of Oppenheimer’s adversarial hearing on the renewal of his security clearance. The other is fusion, with still more recountings channeled through the Senate confirmation hearing of Lewis Strauss, Oppenheimer’s colleague and erstwhile admirer.
The tangle of the two gives the film leeway to contrast and compare wherever it wants to put two meaningful moments side-by-side, regardless of where they fall in the timeline. It allows Nolan and his team to disorient the audience, lose us in the stretch of years, to where the tumult of events washes over the viewer. And it allows the director to hide the ball, bringing his two storylines into jaw-dropping clarity right when their inflection point will have the greatest impact.
Working in concert with that reveal, the choice to tell Oppenheimer’s story in color and Strauss’ in black and white helps distinguish them so the viewer can keep some track. But it also helps code that we’re seeing these events through each’s differing perspective. The approach helps color their different takes on what happened, and shield the twist that Strauss is not one of Oppenheimer’s defenders suffering unfortunate guilt by association, but rather a bitter, resentful and conniving rival, prepared to throw Oppenheimer under the bus to feather his own nest.
Therein lies the grand turn and irony of the film. When Oppenheimer is willing to do the dirty work of powerful men without question, he is given everything he asks for. They build towns in the desert for him. They give him billions in resources to build his war machine. They push through his security clearance despite his occasional dalliances with communism and, worse yet for the 1950s, with actual communists.
But when his conscience reemerges and he is a hindrance, not a help, to the cause of nuclear weaponry, men like Strauss turn that same infrastructure against him. He is dragged down by those jealous and full of disdain for his refusal to keep aiding their cause. He is written off by the President who championed him. He is torn asunder by the great forces that, as none other than Einstein warns him, are ready to minimize and punish him once he’s no longer useful to them. And worse yet, Oppenheimer wants it; he thinks he deserves it.
There is something elemental, even Shakespearean in that. And yet, the grandest flaw of the film is that you do not always feel it.
Oppenheimer has its pitfalls. The film is remarkably brisk for a three-hour runtime, but you can sometimes feel Nolan trying to cram anything and everything into his feature, whether it’s truly essential or just incidentally interesting. At moments, particularly after the big turn in the film, we don’t need to be so deep in the weeds. Likewise, the script indulges in some of the corniest biopic tropes, from a Senate staffer casually dropping the name JFK, to the same Capitol Hill operative delivering a Sorkinesque speech about doing the right thing and matters bigger than one politician’s aspirations.
But the biggest of them is that despite Oppenheimer centering itself on one man’s growing guilt, steady questioning, and eventual self-flagellation, the movie often feels cold and lacking in feeling. Perhaps that’s appropriate for a story anchored on scientists who are irregular around the margins, but who can be clinical in their work. Still, the thing about Nolan’s filmography is that he’s often better at crafting characters who feel like avatars for big ideas than he is at developing them as three-dimensional people.
The same affliction permeates this movie as a whole. Oppenheimer dives into the sweep of history with conviction, and its provocative notions about responsibility, myopia, urgency, and regret are keenly felt. But the emotions of its central players, so key to the film, do not always come through with the same piercing clarity.
And yet, if there’s something that helps cover for that shortcoming, it’s the downright relentless pace of the film. Part of how Oppenheimer makes the time fly by is the fact that it never stops. Clock the dialogue scenes. There’s barely a moment between retorts. Instead, there is a continual chugging quality to the film, conveying the Los Alamos team’s urgent need to complete this gargantuan task, and the restlessness of both Oppenheimer’s own thoughts and the history that led to this pivotal moment.
The same goes for the score, which pounds and rivets, rich with sonic beauty and the tick-ticking of Geiger counters, that makes the broad leaps across years, culminating in the bomb’s deployment, feel like one grand inexorable movement reaching its crescendo.
Until it stops. Two-thirds of the way through the film, the pace suddenly slackens. The score drops away. Freed from the irresistible pull of the mission for once, both Oppenheimer and the audience are given a chance to stop and reflect. And it’s then that the gravity of what’s been done truly starts to sink in. The way Nolan uses the pacing of his film to drive its central change of heart in these terms is downright masterful.
Because then it picks up again. Between the machinations of Strauss in his committee hearing, and the futile maneuvering of Oppenheimer and his allies before the body sent to rob him of his security clearance (and with it, his credibility), the rhythm kicks up anew, selling the controlled chaos that strives to match the frantic progress that preceded it. But in between them is that quiet moment of moral truth.
The rub of Oppenheimer is that the eponymous protagonist wants his punishment, no matter how unjust the source of it, because he wishes to atone for his sins. Contrary to the early assurances that their chances of destroying the world are near zero, he believes that he’s set off the chain reaction that will begin the apocalypse. Allowing himself to be publicly shamed this way stems from a hope that it could be his penance, his chance to pay for his sins.
It’s a desire tied to the other sequence that serves as a metonym for Oppenheimer and the wounded psyche of its main character. Once upon a time, Oppenheimer told his tempestuous young lover, Jean Tatlock, that he would always answer her, no matter what or when. Then, when his life went in a different direction, with a wife and a child on the way, he told her that he simply couldn’t anymore. And in the absence of his intervention, Jean killed herself, as her worst demons left her spiraling toward destruction.
That is the reason Oppenheimer acts so swiftly and so gravely in trying to put a stop to this hell he has unleashed upon the world. Because he knows, in ways personal and devastating, what happens when you sit idly by and don’t intervene to prevent the worst from happening. He knows what it is to blame yourself for the blood spilled when you could have stepped in, but instead shut yourself off from the possibility. After such a terrible moment, Oppenheimer has felt that loss, and in his post-Hiroshima activism, he feels it once more, on a grander and graver scale.
What if you didn’t get to the apple in time? What if you couldn’t stop what you’d started? What if the best and worst of your nature caught up to you all at once? For a troubled world, and for a troubled friend, J. Robert Oppenheimer fears that it’s already too late.