a Washington Post <\/i>article<\/a> this week points out that 11 percent of the staff were women, and many of those women were scientists. (free link.)<\/p>\nAnd I am sure that during Oppenheimer\u2019s years in Berkeley he ran in circles that included more women than the ones he slept with.<\/p>\n
It would have been possible to make a movie that included more women in significant roles, women who did in fact talk to each other, if the filmmakers had wanted to.<\/p>\n
One of my Facebook friends opined that director Christopher Nolan is concerned with \u201cMasculinity\u201d (definitely with the capital M), which I think explains this movie very well. It may also explain why I found it very watchable even as I noted the absence of women and, for that matter, the absence of men who were not essentially European in heritage.<\/p>\n
(Some of the men were Jewish, including Oppenheimer, and that is of course very relevant to a story from that particular point in history.)<\/p>\n
That is, I looked at it as an analysis of how men in a patriarchal society behave toward other men. That aspect of masculinity did not come off particularly well.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know if that\u2019s the movie Nolan intended to make, but that\u2019s the one I saw. <\/p>\n
I gather from the movie \u2014 and I think this is right historically \u2014 that the US was not particularly advanced in the study of physics in the early part of the 20th century. Oppenheimer went to Europe to study.<\/p>\n
He and many other US physicists of the time were acutely aware of the work of Heisenberg and others in Germany on understanding that could lead to the atomic bomb. Many of those physicists were also Jewish and were equally aware of the dangers from fascism.<\/p>\n
I think \u2014 and the movie makes clear \u2014 that those two factors meant that Oppenheimer and other physicists felt it imperative to develop a bomb ahead of the Germans.<\/p>\n
I have to say that if I had understood the things they knew at the time, I might have felt the same way, even if I also understood the various risks from the bomb \u2014 which included a very small chance of the end of the world as well as the obvious horrors of what it can do to human beings and other creatures on the planet.<\/p>\n
Whether it was necessary to drop the bomb on Japan is a different question, as was the decision on whether to develop the hydrogen bomb and continue to make more terrible weapons. As the movie makes clear, those decisions were made by politicians and the military, not by the scientists.<\/p>\n
Once the scientists had created the weapon, they no longer had any control over how it was used. No one listened to their objections.<\/p>\n
These physicists are presented as brilliant and, frequently, as arrogant, and certainly as very male. As with many very bright men, they come across in the movie \u2014 and perhaps in real life \u2014 as people who assumed they had power.<\/p>\n
The military men and the politicians were not as brilliant, but they were certainly as arrogant and as convinced that they had the right understanding of how the world worked.<\/p>\n
Given the circumstances, it was not hard for the political and military types to bring the physicists into the war effort.<\/p>\n
It was equally easy for them to stop listening to them after the war and even to throw some of them to the wolves.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t think Oppenheimer expected that. Some of the others, such as Lawrence \u2014 whose name adorns major labs in the Bay Area \u2014 were better at protecting themselves. Others, such as Teller, were delighted to go along with the politicians.<\/p>\n
One thing that struck me throughout the movie was that the security efforts all focused on people who had been Communists or otherwise on the left politically. There was no indication of investigations into possible German spies, even during the war, this despite the fact that we were allied with the Soviet Union and fighting the Germans.<\/p>\n
Now some of this part of the story may have been omitted and some of it could be explained by German arrogance about their science. It is possible that they did not expect to find out much from an American project, though one would think they would have wanted to know what was happening.<\/p>\n
But given the fascism present in the United States before the war, it strikes me that concerns about German spies and U.S. citizens who were overly friendly to fascists should have been addressed. I doubt that they were to the level necessary.<\/p>\n
The focus of security in the movie \u2014 and the political focus of the post-war United States \u2014 was on the Soviets. There is a theory that the bombs dropped on Japan were meant as a warning signal to the Soviets more than anything else.<\/p>\n
And of course the scientists had been inclined toward an international approach, especially before the war, which made them vulnerable to opportunistic and nasty male politicians.<\/p>\n
We had some very nasty politicians in the 1950s. If you\u2019re not familiar with the time, look up what HUAC did to people.<\/p>\n
One criticism of the movie is that it did not focus on the horrors of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but I think that\u2019s more evidence that the bomb in particular was a McGuffin. This movie is not about nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n
Another criticism is that the people who lived near the test site were affected by the tests \u2014 and in fact, people were displaced to build Los Alamos, a point that is tossed off casually in the movie. (I admit to being a little shocked that Oppenheimer wanted the project there because he loved that part of New Mexico.)<\/p>\n
Again, though, that\u2019s not what Nolan was making a movie about. That doesn\u2019t mean those stories aren\u2019t important \u2014 likely more important than the story Nolan wanted to tell \u2014 but given that any movie can only do so much, I\u2019m not sure their omission from this one matters as much as the fact that we are generally not telling enough stories about the evils done in the name of war.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, this is a story about a brilliant man who had his flaws \u2014 though a lot of men of the time would not characterize his relationships with women as a flaw \u2014 who was used by those in power and then tossed to the wolves. It\u2019s an old story and not an unusual one, given the way male society is structured, but it is not an unimportant one.<\/p>\n
In my mind, it argues for a completely different approach to the multiple issues facing the world. I\u2019m not sure that\u2019s the point that Nolan meant to make, but it\u2019s the one I got.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I grew up with the House Unamerican Activities Committee hearings, the Cold War, and the Doomsday Clock ticking toward midnight because of the bomb, which is why I decided I should see Oppenheimer. I don\u2019t always see movies based on recent history that I know well, because reviews and other information often give me a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,10],"tags":[744],"class_list":["post-2879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies","category-reviews","tag-oppenheimer-movie"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2879"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2880,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2879\/revisions\/2880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}