Sin Tax — Oppenheimer programme notes

I wrote these programme notes for Glasgow Film Theatre ahead of Oppenheimer’s release in July 2023.

Let’s reverse the flow of time and go back to Christopher Nolan’s palindromic sci-fi brain-hurter Tenet. John David Washington’s unnamed protagonist is being schooled on the destructive force of inverted weaponry, something that’s threatening to bring about a temporal cold war that could destroy the world. The impenetrable plot specifics aren’t important (“Don’t try to understand,” quips one character early on). What is important is what Dimple Kapadia’s mysterious arms dealer Priya is telling Washington. “We’re trying to do with inversion what we couldn’t do with the atomic bomb — uninvent it.”

Now let’s go forward in time, or maybe back, depending on whether or not we’re considering this scene as part of the production or part of the finished film. Either way Christopher Nolan is at the Tenet wrap party where the film’s other star, Robert Pattinson, has given him a present. It’s a book of the collected speeches of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, a man whose ambivalence about what he created was chillingly rendered in a public lecture he gave two years after the atom bomb incinerated 80,000 people in Nagasaki. “In some sort of crude sense,” Oppenheimer’s speech reads, “the physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”

Now let’s jump forward again.

“It’s eerie reading,” says Nolan. The director is recounting the story of Pattinson’s wrap party present to writer Tom Shone for his brilliant book The Nolan Variations. “They’re wrestling with this thing they’ve unleashed. How’s that going to be controlled? It’s just this most monstrous responsibility. Once that knowledge is out there in the world, what can you do? You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.”

Now cut to Oppenheimer, Nolan’s new biopic about the eponymous physicist, the film you’re perhaps about to watch, or might just have finished watching. It’s a film that’s very much about the implications of not being able to put the toothpaste back in the tube. This theme is key to understanding Robert Oppenheimer. Played by Nolan regular Cillian Murphy (it’s the sixth time they’ve worked together), the actor’s gaunt frame and sunken cheeks give him the look of a man haunted by the knowledge of what he’s done, or perhaps the knowledge of what he’s going to do. As this is a Nolan film both options are possible. The director’s penchant for fractured narratives, non-linear storytelling and temporal tricks is well established (see Memento, Inception, Dunkirk and the aforementioned Tenet for the most audacious examples), and he deploys them in evermore virtuosic ways in Oppenheimer, exploding the conventions of the biopic in the process.

A theoretical physicist with an innate understanding of the world behind the world, Oppenheimer is presented from the first scene as a Promethean figure, a flawed genius who harnesses the destructive power of the universe, only to be tormented by his choices and persecuted by the very government who put him in charge of the Manhattan Project. Nolan teases this out by jumping around in the timeline of Oppenheimer’s life, dropping little narrative clues that he’ll pay off much later and creating a discombobulating effect that more accurately reflects the jumble of memories our lives become over time. Not for him the dull chronology of a womb-to-the-tomb snore fest; instead he lets scenes from Oppenheimer’s later life explode into scenes from his younger days and cross-cuts between alternate framing devices to give us a thrillingly artful portrait of the man and his times, one that takes in Oppenheimer’s own perspective and that of Lewis Strauss, the somewhat shadowy chair of the Atomic Energy Committee, played here by Robert Downey Jr.

For all its dizzying narrative leaps, though, the underlying structure is elegantly simple, with the first half charting the race against time to create and test the first atomic bomb and the second half delving more deeply into the fallout from that decision. The narrative through-line, meanwhile, is really Oppenheimer’s gradual realisation that the war he signed on to fight against the Nazis is actually being transformed by his government into a covert war against the Soviet Union, an ideological shift that makes his earlier career as a freethinking academic with left-leaning politics more problematic as the Manhattan Project ramps up.

This gives the film epic scope and the top-drawer cast — a mix of Nolan regulars and Nolan newbies — get plenty of opportunities to shine. There are showy cameos for the likes of Kenneth Branagh, Rami Malek and Scottish actor Tom Conti (cast here as Einstein) and meaty supporting roles for Matt Damon (playing Oppenheimer’s Pentagon superior Leslie Groves) and Emily Blunt (as Oppenheimer’s formidable second wife Kitty). Florence Pugh, meanwhile, is sensational as Oppenheimer’s first wife, Jean Tatlock, a no-nonsense member of the American Communist Party whose affiliations will cause plenty of problems for both in the years to come.

But let’s go back in time again. Nolan grew up in the UK during the height of 1980s arms race when the pervasive fear of nuclear holocaust was genuinely terrifying and British films like When the Wind Blows and the TV movie Threads traumatised a generation of kids. Maybe Nolan saw those films, maybe he didn’t, but he told Wired recently that when he was 13 he and his friends thought they’d die in a nuclear holocaust. The worry eventually went away. “But the problem,” he elaborated, “is that the danger doesn’t actually go away."

Now back to Oppenheimer and the film’s stunning mid-point money shot: the testing of the atomic bomb. It’s one of the best things Nolan has done, a stunning, immersive, unbearably tense set-piece that capitalises on Oppenheimer’s own fears that detonating the bomb might start a chain reaction that could set the atmosphere on fire and destroy the world. Making innovative use of silence, as well as Nolan’s preferred large-format IMAX cameras, the sequence conveys the sheer awesome power they’ve unleashed. But it’s followed by an even better scene in which the full force of what Oppenheimer has accomplished registers in his mind in the middle of a victory speech he’s half-heartedly giving to his colleagues. Jubilation quickly turns to judgment as the the future carnage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki flows from the future into the present in the form of vivid images of flaying skin, charcoal remains and the ash of incinerated bodies. Cinema might be able to make time flow backwards, but technology can’t be uninvented, knowledge can’t be lost and the toothpaste can’t be put back in the tube.