All Our Guilty Stains

On Nolan's Oppenheimer

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There are many sad moments in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, but one of the saddest is one of the quietest. Before Oppenheimer takes on the Manhattan Project, his wife Kitty has their first child, Peter, conceived while she was still married to her previous husband. (Oppenheimer was her fourth.) She is not a natural mother. She suffers from depression. The baby is perpetually crying, driving her to drink. One night, she sends Oppenheimer with the little boy to the home of their close friends, the Chevaliers. On behalf of them both, he has something to ask, something that nearly chokes him with shame: “Take Peter.” Not forever, but not just for a few days either. “For a while.”

In the awkward pause, he begins to apologize, “I know, I know, we’re terrible people. Terrible, awful people.” He stands up to go. He’s sorry he asked. But Chevalier gently stops him: “Terrible, awful people don’t know they’re terrible and awful.” He gestures at the couch. “Sit. Sit, sit…”

This friendship later comes back to haunt Oppenheimer when he’s stripped of his national security clearance, as it emerges that Chevalier was likely a communist fellow traveler. Chevalier himself is eventually exiled to France, unable to find work in the states. But to Oppenheimer, he will always be the friend who took Peter, on that terrible, awful night when there was nowhere else to turn.

I haven’t seen this exchange come up in discussions around the film, but I think it’s significant. Before he’s even built the bomb, Oppenheimer is already a guilty man. Before anyone has condemned him, he has condemned himself.

Kitty Oppenheimer will also reap as she sows. As her husband was once the other man, femme fatale Jean Tatlock will be the other woman. Florence Pugh plays Tatlock with just the right balance of manipulative vulnerability, by turns clinging to and pushing away the man who loves her. She rejected him when she had her chance to be the first woman. Eventually, her communism makes her too dangerous even for second place. After he says his last goodbye, she plunges into a depressive spiral and drowns herself. Oppenheimer is undone by the news. Kitty finds him slumped under a tree, shell-shocked and babbling, stammering out, “It was me.” Emily Blunt plays this moment with a contemptuous cold fury to rival Lady MacBeth, cutting her man down, then yanking him up. “You don’t get to commit the sin,” she hisses, “and then ask all of us to feel sorry for you when there are consequences.”

Like all of his sins, fictional and actual, the affair will be excruciatingly prosecuted during the security clearance hearings. Kitty can only sit and watch bitterly. In her mind, it’s as if they’re doing the act right there for all to see. (Nolan makes this literal, which I strongly object to, though I understood his intent.) By now, Oppenheimer’s double guilt over Tatlock’s suicide and the Project for which he finally left her have become hideously intertwined with each other. The shadowy committee asks, does he have “scruples” about that Project? “Yes,” he says, “terrible ones.”

Except that the committee isn’t judging him for building the atomic bomb. In fact, it’s his opposition to the even more powerful hydrogen bomb that has come under scrutiny, as some suspect him of treason with the Soviets. He is grilled mercilessly, asked just when his “scruples” over nuclear warfare did begin to develop. As his prosecutor swoops in for the kill, visions of death burst on his sight, brighter than a thousand suns.

His wife doesn’t understand why he submits himself to this purging. He tells her that he has his reasons. But these reasons are paradoxical. On one level, he wants to be a martyr now so that he can be a hero later. Martyrdom looks good on him, and he knows it. But on some deeper level, he believes he actually deserves it—not just for the many deaths, but for the one.

He deserves it on a mundane level too, or at least some of it. This is a weakness of the film, which provides all the reasons why Oppenheimer should never have had security clearance, then demands we root against all the men who want to take it away. Granted, his political arch-nemesis Lewis Strauss is easy to hate. Nolan told Robert Downey, Jr. to play him as the Salieri to Oppenheimer’s Amadeus. The analogy is apt. Oppenheimer gets away with more than the average man, because, as he himself modestly puts it, “Brilliance makes up for a lot.” Cillian Murphy delivers this line with a quality that can only be described as guileless arrogance. His whole performance embodies this contradiction. It’s a remarkable breakout turn, haunted and haunting.

Oppenheimer was many things, but he was no traitor. Here, at least, he is vindicated. Yet he is still cursed, for in the end, nothing can expiate what his genius has wrought—the worlds he destroyed, the world he made.

Nolan has said the film doesn’t strictly “take a side” on Oppenheimer’s great dilemma. This might be true in the sense that the work allows us to empathize with him instead of glibly passing judgment. And yet, we empathize with him precisely because he becomes acutely conscious that, as he famously tells Harry Truman, “I have blood on my hands.”

Truman, by contrast, is pure villain, mockingly waving a white handkerchief under Oppenheimer’s nose. “You think anyone in Hiroshima or Nagasaki gives a sh*t who built the bomb?” he asks, sneering. “They care who dropped it.” As the scientist leaves, we hear the President’s ice-cold drawl in the background, in a line you’d swear was fiction, except it uses Truman’s own words: “Don’t let that crybaby back in here.”

Meanwhile, Albert Einstein makes a gentle cameo appearance, waiting in the wings to make wise pronouncements at appropriate moments. Spencer Klavan critiques this in his review. He finds it not quite fair that the men of science get to “brood nobly” together, while Truman, the man of action who didn’t have the luxury of inaction, goes down in infamy. Is there no sympathy to spare for him?

This critique would have more force if the film was universally unsympathetic to “men of action.” But it’s not. Manhattan director General Leslie Groves is prickly, yet likable, played with gruff charm by a still boyish Matt Damon. Meanwhile, if Truman feels like a caricature, it’s because the real Truman insistently turned himself into one. Even the handkerchief business is a detail he added with relish when describing that fateful meeting, at least in some variations on the tale (it evolved in the telling). It would seem that he positively wanted to be remembered as the villain of this story. Nolan has simply granted that wish.

Nolan himself might even agree with Klavan that the bomb was “an awful necessity.” This film could be seen as the culmination of his career-long fascination with moral dilemmas. In the final analysis, it seems to suggest that all choices were equally terrible—that, to quote Leonard Cohen, “There is no decent place to stand in a massacre.” Nolan would also agree that everyone paid a price, including the men of action. But they didn’t all pay the same price. Some men paid the price of a tortured soul. Other men lost their souls entirely.

The film’s centerpiece is the iconic Trinity Test, the moment of truth when Oppenheimer and his team first understand what they have built. As he counts down the seconds, he murmurs, “These things are hard on your heart” — a line at once understated and profound.

The great scientific raconteur Richard Feynman, at the time just a young hotshot rubbing elbows with Great Men, recalls the aftermath of that test very well. He believes he may have been the only one to see it with the naked eye, protected behind the windshield of a car. In his first memoir collection, after a classically Feynmanesque account of all his Los Alamos adventures (you can spot him in the movie, grinning impishly and playing bongos), he pauses to reflect:

After the thing went off, there was tremendous excitement at Los Alamos. Everybody had parties, we all ran around. I sat on the end of a jeep and beat drums and so on. But one man, I remember, Bob Wilson, was just sitting there moping.

I said, “What are you moping about?”

He said, “It’s a terrible thing that we made.”

I said, “But you started it. You got us into it.”

You see, what happened to me—what happened to the rest of us—is we started for a good reason, then you’re working very hard to accomplish something and it’s a pleasure, it’s excitement. And you stop thinking, you know; you just stop. Bob Wilson was the only one who still thinking about it, at that moment.

Like Feynman, like all the rest, J. Robert Oppenheimer started for a good reason. He started because he loved his work, his country, his people. Because even though he didn’t know if we could be trusted with a bomb, he knew the Nazis couldn’t.

Of course, by the time we were ready to drop that bomb, Hitler was already dead, his army already broken and scattered. The final targets were chosen coldly, bureaucratically, picking out two Japanese names from a shortlist—made even shorter when one of the bureaucrats caught and crossed off a favorite vacation spot. The first time was to show what we could do. The second, as one higher-up matter-of-factly explains, was to show that we could keep on doing it.

Decades later, when asked if he still thinks the bomb was necessary, the real Oppenheimer chooses his words very carefully, his voice slightly faltering. “The ending of the war by this means, certainly cruel, was not undertaken lightly. But I am not…as of today…confident that a better course was then open.” A long pause. “I have not a very good answer to this question.”

As Chevalier absolves Oppenheimer, so does Nolan. But can the artist absolve the scientist? Can he wipe out the damned spot? Can anyone?

In Nagasaki, there was a cathedral, built on the land where poor Catholic converts were once forced to step on the face of Christ or die hideously. The Church would never grow in Japanese soil, or so her tormentors thought. But centuries later, there stood St. Mary’s Cathedral, a monument to their defeat. Until 11:01 in the morning on August 9, 1945, when it was utterly destroyed.

Fourteen years later, it was rebuilt. You can visit it today. Inside, you can see the statue they call the Burnt Virgin, or Atom-Bombed Mary. She was discovered in the cathedral ruins by a young Trappist monk, two months after the blast. Her eye sockets were empty, her face and hair charred. A crack ran down her left cheek like a tear track. Gently, the monk cradled her in his arms, and brought her home rejoicing.

Eventually, she was restored to her rightful place. Though sightless, she kept watch. Though silent, she pronounced judgment.

She judges us still.