Ready for Oppenheimer

I admire Christopher Nolan, respect his intelligence, and the seriousness he brings to a demanding craft. I’m looking forward to seeing his new film Oppenheimer, and sight-yet-unseen, I hope it will be successful. He hasn’t let me down yet. But I disagree with him here: “Like it or not, J. Robert Oppenheimer is the most important person who ever lived,” Nolan said at CinemaCon, the annual convention for movie theater owners. “He made the world that we live in for better or for worse. His story has to be seen to be believed”.

Let’s make some reasonable allowance for film-selling hyperbole by a filmmaker who really believes in his subject and needs to put it over. But his statement is wrong. Contrary to popular belief, Julius Robert Oppenheimer didn’t invent the atomic bomb. He wasn’t hired until the Manhattan Project was well underway, and wasn’t the head of the whole project. If he had never lived, we would still have had an atomic bomb, and probably by the summer of 1945. Yet he was unquestionably a key factor in what did happen.

Dramatists and filmmakers have always been fascinated by J. Robert Oppenheimer, but not because of the straightforward historical reason, that his well-regarded management of work done by his fellow scientists led to success in an urgent wartime project. No, “Oppie” is remembered as a tragic, heroic figure, for two reasons: First, he is supposed to have had to wrestle his conscience to work on the Bomb, regretting it from the moment of the first blinding flash of Trinity.

Second, because he was supposedly targeted by McCarthy-era gumshoes when he proved to have been insufficiently enthusiastic about putting his A-Bomb team back to work on the Truman administration’s new save-the-free-world project, the Edward Teller/Stanislaw Ulam configuration for an H-Bomb. That led to his security clearance being revoked, the martyrdom that ended his career in the atomic energy establishment. That’s the Oppie legend, fact mixed with fiction.

I’ve already got a bunch of Truth Detector traps set up for seeing Oppenheimer. I expect good work from Christopher Nolan, and I bet that’s what we’ll get, but there are certain “established” dramatic moments in J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life, and a number of them are oversimplified or bogus to some degree.

Right after the War, Hollywood made two patriotic films about aspects of the Manhattan Project, The Beginning or the End, and Above and Beyond. By the late Sixties, a translated German play called In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer opened on Broadway, enshrining Oppie’s new consensus image, as a persecuted martyr for peace. In the mid-Eighties, Fat Man and Little Boy was a serious but dull, utterly conventional treatment of the subject, whose biggest plus was Paul Newman as a glowering General Groves. More recently there was 2014’s fictionalized Manh(a)ttan on cable.

Up till now, IMHO, the best one of them all is the seven-part Oppenheimer BBC miniseries of 1980. Although it broadly follows the mainstream consensus, it did a surprisingly good job of challenging it here and there. It’s more honest than you’d expect towards its gifted, flawed subject. Yes, it hit a few of the cliche traps, but avoided a lot of the others. By today’s TV standards, let alone Chris Nolan’s 100 million bucks, the BBC produced a very modestly budgeted, but effective set of scenes. It could be an object lesson to young filmmakers in how to creatively make the most of what you have.

Why the Brits? Although Albert Einstein was prompted to send his famous warning letter about nuclear fission to FDR in 1939, beginning a limited US research program, there was no project to weaponize it until a committee of British scientists issued an urgent secret report in 1941, prodding America to build an atomic bomb. Here, for the first known time anywhere, was a practical outline of how a uranium gun-style weapon would work, what materials were needed, and how it could be made. If anyone “invented” the atom bomb, it was done in this long-forgotten bundle from Britain.

If we knew how, chances were the Germans, world leaders in physics, also knew, or could soon figure it out. The British underestimated the time frame and the cost, but they were our full partners in creating the Bomb, to the degree that America formally secured British approval to use it against Japan. That partnership would change in the years after the war. The 1980 Oppenheimer follows the plotlines of several of the British characters, some fictionalized composites, some real, like spy Klaus Fuchs.

Not long after the audience meets Berkeley professor Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, we learn that the Prof’s personal life is bit of a mess. He’s marrying Kitty, an abrasive woman who none of his friends like, an unfortunate, if far from unknown social situation that’s not exclusive to Ph. D’s. As it happens, Oppie’s also got an old flame named Jean Tatlock, and evidently somebody left a pilot light on. This wouldn’t normally be a national security matter, but Doc has taken a job, director of a top-secret weapons lab, and it just so happens that a lot of his friends and relatives are Communists. Could happen to anyone, right?

Although this was certainly alarming to Army security, triggering surveillance of Dr. Oppenheimer, he was deemed to be so useful to the project that it cleared him. Note that: they already knew, but under wartime conditions, cleared him anyway. That’s an important point in his favor during his later legal drama. He was, in fact, innocent. He didn’t pass information to anyone. But—a legal point that counts heavily against him—when he did report a possible approach for espionage he lied, fudging the story to try to protect someone, probably his brother Frank. The man Oppenheimer blamed, Haakon Chevalier, told his side of the story in Oppenheimer: Story of a Friendship.

Sam Waterston is a solid, competent actor. He does a decent job here, but is too un-charismatic to fully convey some aspects of Oppenheimer’s leadership of the lab.

You expect a BBC drama to be strong on dialog (written by Peter Prince.) A social event turns awkward with the presence of both Kitty Oppenheimer and the discarded Jean Tatlock. Kitty is talking about an upcoming vacation trip, in her haughty, la-de-dah voice. “Oh, Robert just loves traveling in…Arizona”. Tatlock, ignored, quietly corrects her. “New Mexico”, she says icily, thereby foreshadowing a rather significant phase of the story, as well as establishing that she knows him better than his own wife does.

A major plot point in the BBC Oppenheimer is a protest movement of project scientists who believed they should stop work once it was clear that Germany had no bomb after all, and was about to lose the war. By late 1944, agents of US intelligence had searched enough locations in central Europe to conclude that no threat existed. It’s hard to argue that the scientists hadn’t experienced a certain amount of bait-and-switch. They were, after all, recruited on the basis that the Allies had to beat Hitler to the Bomb, which in 1942-’43 seemed a credible possibility.

Even Edward Teller questioned the morality of using the bomb on Japan, a country with no real atomic program of its own. This put Oppie, later a saint of the anti-war movement, on the side of the Army, and he used all of his authority and all of his persuasion to get the whole team back to work. The 1980 Oppenheimer is honest and upfront about that, and its history is relatively generous towards Teller, who is often portrayed as a cross between Bela Lugosi and Dr. Strangelove.

The Germans had known that atomic fission was possible, but only after an industrial effort so expensive and time-consuming that neither they, nor any of their foes, could do it in time to make a difference in WWII. And where the European war alone was concerned, they were right, although by an uncomfortably closer time margin than they could have guessed.

In episode five of the seven-part BBC mini-series, we reach the Trinity test. Given the tiny budget and only a handful of actors, it’s a fine display of building tension with basic film craft. The soundtrack music does a great job, combining triumph with a you’ll-be-sorry shadow of foreboding. As the final minutes tick by, the overnight rain stops and the small control shack comes alive. The sound of the shortwave radio link is crossed with electronic noise and the distant interference of a Voice of America station. A whirring data recorder is set in motion as the PA system informs the site of the final countdown. Outdoor observers get into position, their backs to the imminent explosion. An oscilloscope abruptly goes off-scale as the control room is flooded with light.

Oppenheimer’s first reaction to the blast was, by his own telling, deep and philosophical. “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” Other Manhattan project personnel privately ridiculed his story, which provoked eye-rolling among some. It seemed both pretentious and presumptuous, as in, who does he think he is, “I am become”? He wasn’t Prometheus, just a vital cog in the gears of a national war effort. Some first-hand accounts of JRO in those first minutes of a new era convey a different mood, of a certain strut in his walk as the mushroom cloud dissipated in the dawn. One called him “darkly glittering, getting into step with the thing.” Oppenheimer grew to simplify his jumbled memories, conforming to his growing awareness of critical opinion.

In the BBC’s version, as he stands there, awestruck with a sudden sense of responsibility, explosives chief George Kistiakowsky insensitively slaps him on the back, seemingly blind to the bigger issues. “Oppie, you owe me ten bucks!” he declares triumphantly. It is an effective line to close an episode, as close as real life usually gets to handing a lucky screenwriter an Aaron Sorkin Moment, as if to say: Oppie was a moral hero surrounded by cynical, love-that-Bomb crassness.

It happened, sort of, but it’s not a true telling of the moment. Kisty had spent the previous two days under a cloud, a near-pariah in camp because a last-minute paper calculation erroneously predicted that implosion wouldn’t happen. Far from standing up for him, his boss, Oppenheimer, bet $10 against him. The sum was trivial, of course, but that lack of support stung. In the stunned aftermath of a colossal event, it was natural for Kisty to feel a giddy sense of relief. Far from being absorbed in verses of the Bhagavad-Gita to the exclusion of physical reality, Oppenheimer, still dazed, reflexively pulled out his wallet and mumbled, “I don’t have it. I’ll have to give it to you later.”

Nine years later, the final major act of JRO’s career in the government were the hearings to deny extending his security clearance. Alex Wellerstein, of the excellent Restricted Data—Nuclear Secrets blog, summed it up wisely: Oppenheimer was no spy and no traitor. But lying to security officers the way he did wouldn’t be tolerated even today, let alone in 1954, when World War III seemed to be right around the corner. Flashes of Oppenheimer’s irritation and sarcasm did him more harm than good, making him appear, in today’s terms, like a brilliant Columbo villain who thinks he’s outwitting the “dumb” cops. By the final episode, Sam Waterston played him as a graying Godfather of the A-bomb.

Before you go to see Oppenheimer, consider waving your Geiger counter at YouTube and seeing this more modest, but well-made and thought-provoking UK production. Forty-three years on, it’s still got quite a bit of half-life in it.

Let’s see how Nolan does. A reassuring fact: the budget was a “mere” $100 million, not today’s ridiculous and all-too-common $200 million and up. Nolan’s kind of serious grown-up movie, even if successful, may have a ceiling of success, and a $100 million budget gives Universal Studios a decent shot at making a profit. Good luck, Chris.