The World After Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer was one of my favorite movies to come out last year. Christopher Nolan’s established style and knack for layered, high-concept-but-not-quite-pretentious storytelling has been enough to get me into the theater to see his films for years now, but, as the recent awards season has shown us, there was really just something different about this one.
Throughout Oppenheimer, which tells the story of the development of the world’s first nuclear weapons under the Manhattan Project from the perspective of the project’s director, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, a sense of unease simmers and grows beneath each passing scene. I find it interesting that this manner is relatively undiscussed in popular discourse surrounding the movie, because it is, in my opinion, what makes it one of the best movies of the decade so far.
The film lends a great deal of time to the debate over whether such a power should be unleashed on the world. One truly gets the impression that these scientists, standing on the forefront of one of the greatest eras of scientific discovery in human history, are in fact not scientists but alchemists, toying with the divine bricks of the firmament to see within them the hands of God that built our universe, and, even more frighteningly, trying to harness that power. And they succeed.
The unease that grows throughout the film is so impressive to me because the film feels so real, so grounded, that by its end you see that the unease you’ve been feeling is like the beginning of some sort of rot on society. Seeing that sort of rot in its infancy, the way it transforms the definitions of power and violence simply by being dragged into existence by those brilliant men and women in Los Alamos, gives one a sense that it is absolutely not gone by the end of the movie. Rather, one gets the sense that it has only grown, as rot does, exponentially since the events that transpire in Oppenheimer.
And we can feel it today. The unease. The paranoia. A small handful of old, quirky men, whose interests quite often conflict with society at large’s, hold the power to destroy the world as we know it. Whether we like it or not, there was the world before Oppenheimer and there was the world after, and now as a result we simply wait, living in a quiet, passive fear anxiety as we wait for someone to make the mistake that blows up the world.