When J. Robert Oppenheimer, portrayed here with haunting intensity by Irish actor Cillian Murphy, explains his research into nuclear fission, neutron bombardment and chain reactions, he emphasizes that all of this is actually impossible – and yet it is happening. It is paradoxical, and yet it works.
The scene is programmatic, because the productive contradiction is the guiding principle of the cinematic narrative that the British director Christopher Nolan simply called “Oppenheimer”: a modernist history painting at the center of which is a scientist who was responsible for one of the decisive turning points in human history – who created evil to do good.
Scene from Nolan’s “Oppenheimer”
This man not only worked with paradoxical hypotheses, he was also a torn man himself, deeply divided between political mission and humanistic thinking: on the one hand, he considered it not only legitimate, but even necessary to launch the most terrifying weapon of mass destruction imaginable in order to fight fascism and to provide the so-called free world with the ultimate leverage; on the other hand, he felt “blood on his hands” since the atomic bombs he and his team had constructed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki detonated in August 1945, claiming several hundred thousand lives. Oppenheimer fantasized himself as a kind of revenant of the mythological titan Prometheus, who stole deadly fire from the gods and gave it to humans, endowing them with knowledge and civilizing them.
From 1942, the nuclear physicist Oppenheimer headed a military research company that had been given the inconspicuous name “Manhattan Project” – with the aim of making the USA the first nation to have nuclear weapons. A few years after the war, Oppenheimer went from being a hero to a fallen angel: in the McCarthy era, he was attacked as disloyal because of his left-liberal commitment and his contacts with communist circles, interrogated in committees and finally punished with the withdrawal of his privileges.
Spectacle slider to 11
In the retelling of this story, director Nolan turns the drama dial to 11, but at the same time his staging takes place mostly in unimpressive locations, in the unadorned living quarters and laboratories of his characters. The visual power that Nolan nevertheless mobilizes is more subtle than usual in American prestige cinema; by concentrating on the psyche of his protagonist, he turns it inward, so to speak; Nolan works his way through the facial landscapes of his all-star ensemble (alongside Murphy, who acts with piercing pale blue eyes, are the likes of Florence Pugh and Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Benny Safdie and Robert Downey Jr. in central roles) and flashes electrifying close-ups of laboratory experiments.
The almost continuously present music of the Swede Ludwig Göransson shrills in the ears, sometimes even floods the dialogues, covers the dramatically exchanged words, as if it is no longer about grasping their concrete meaning, only about the larger context: “Oppenheimer” is a nuclear opera whose libretto was written by the military logic of aggression of the 20th century. The film also appears to be contradictory in its choice of media: Nolan’s emphasis on classic imagery and dramaturgy (historical settings, conventional biopic narrative patterns, dialogue scenes executed using the shot-reverse shot method) run counter to the innovative use of analogue IMAX 65 mm film material, which has an unexpected sensitivity.
Publicity photo from the shooting of “Oppenheimer”: Director Christopher Nolan (right) with the title character Cillian Murphy
In this respect, “Oppenheimer” has an almost taxing effect on the senses. The complex political intrigues and scientific debates, which in themselves would be fatiguing over the course of three full hours, are driven forward in a taut, almost breathless manner. But then there is the meticulous sound design, which oscillates between over-orchestration, obsession with detail and sudden silence. When the atomic bomb was first detonated for test purposes in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, this caused a long moment of absolute silence in the cinema: the blinding fireball in the distance grew into the sky before the deafening bang, the thunder of widespread destruction began.
pathos and decor
The sensory impertinence is intentional. The overabundance of a small-scale narrative, in which the historically objectifiable meets the hero’s traumata, may seem exhausting; the effort to make a popular film with an existential Fall-out burdening it in this way is respectable. Everything about this work is pomp and circumstance, to use Shakespeare’s words: Nolan stages a carefully ambivalently staged ceremony for a torn man. The noise that “Oppenheimer” makes is not unleashed for the sake of beautiful nothing, as is common in Hollywood, but rather for the big picture, the devastating state of the world – and our present: Nolan tells the history of a global devastation that still (and possibly more than ever) threatens us.
2023-07-22 11:25:29
#Paradoxe #Intervention #Christopher #Nolans #KinoAtomoper #Oppenheimer
