The Academy’s uninspiring choice glorifies American self-loathing.
It’s finally happened. Politics have trounced aesthetics. Christopher Nolan’s Oscar wins for the dreadful, uninspiring Oppenheimer confirm the destructive change that has taken hold in contemporary film culture. Audiences no longer look for beauty — or truth — but seek political confirmation. Millennial Americans have been taught to hate themselves, and Nolan’s Oppenheimer goes back in time to justify that hate, rooting it in the history of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s invention, the atomic bomb.
Nolan’s film is not only visually wretched, but its dim, dun-colored images reflect an attitude of shame, decadence, and demoralization. (At the Oscars ceremony, actor Tim Robbins referred to this as “the heart of darkness in our ancestral blood.”) Nolan’s technique demonstrates collapse. The three-hour story proceeds in blunt, lurching sequences. Styled and paced like a trailer, its TV-commercial technique relies on ADD edits, ADD rhythm, and an ADHD narrative that mixes banal black-and-white flashbacks of the post-bomb government-hearing scenes and squalid personal dramatizations in color: Oppenheimer (ghoulishly played by Cillian Murphy) confesses his own Snow White fantasy of wanting to kill a tutor with a potassium cyanide apple; he suffers a miserable marriage to Kitty (Emily Blunt doing Judy Davis anxiety); he has a pathological affair with Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh doing Kate Winslet harlotry); and he plays the sycophant to Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) and Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh).
Careerist Oppenheimer gets the enigmatic nickname “Opy” and, in a stunt of intellectual intimidation, is glorified for his smarts. (“You brought quantum physics to America!”) Nolan casts Brits to play Yanks, largely counting on Americans’ ignorance about their own history, especially the moral argument about the efficacy of using the bomb to end World War II. This is the same hollow anti-patriotism that ruined Dunkirk (the only Nolan film set in his native country since his debut, Following). As a cultural project, Oppenheimer is timed to coincide with the New York Times’ demoralizing 1619 Project — a continuation of the anti-American degradation that Nolan honed in his Dark Knight trilogy.
It’s fitting that when Nolan goes outside the fantasy realm (The Dark Knight trilogy, Tenet, Interstellar, Insomnia, Inception — the “I” for Inert trilogy), his junior-Kubrick craft finally fails him. But, unfortunately, Hollywood hype rescued this latest, most ambitious treachery. Now is the time Hollywood is selling American self-loathing. To believe that Oppenheimer is the best film of 2023 is to believe that the United States deserves to be invaded and conquered and morally overturned (revolutionized) from within.
That’s the obscure though conflicted message of combining Oppenheimer’s scientific risks with his moral uncertainty, then tying it to a vague and superficial rehash of the mid-century Red Scare. It doesn’t help that Nolan complicates the motives behind the Atomic Energy Commission hearings on Oppenheimer at the very moment when American government is befouling itself (the media and Democratic Party’s current ruse of pretending to protect “democracy” while actually destroying democracy).
A chorus of American actors — Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, Matthew Modine, Casey Affleck, Michael Angarano, Josh Peck, Rami Malek, Josh Hartnett — are cast as government and scientific dissemblers who all exploit or persecute Opy. In hour two, the film’s political vision goes from amoral to nihilistic since the Millennial audience groomed by Nolan’s Batman movies can’t tell the difference. It’s also the same audience that has been doubly indoctrinated by academia to idealize communism. That’s why Nolan goes slack about Opy’s foreign identification. The “suspected Communist” accusation from General Leslie Groves (Damon) provokes Opy to assert, “I’m a New Deal Democrat.” Then Groves retorts, “I said ‘suspected.’” It trivializes the disingenuous political muddle of our current national fissure — not fission.
The Oscars have always sentimentally embraced Hollywood’s liberal extremes. But Oppenheimer flips sentimentality into cynicism: invoking Eliot, Picasso, and Stravinsky to propose that “art revolution extends to political revolution,” romanticizing the Left’s myth about the Spanish Civil War (“a democratic republic being overthrown by fascist thugs”), attacking the bogeyman of Senator Joseph McCarthy, then literally repeating“Property is theft” from Das Kapital.
Nolan frets over a nihilist bomb (then fails to deliver an explosive money shot) yet refrains from detailing government paranoia that might be relevant to today’s spiritual exhaustion. Hour two’s Red Scare (minus the Rosenbergs) avoids showing communist infiltration in government and Hollywood. That’s the film’s sub-theme, but it’s not successfully conveyed by its bizarrely sexualized subtext. Instead, Nolan mystifies Oppenheimer as a cerebral political martyr and nihilist hero. In the “Fission” segment, Oppenheimer rejects the idea that matter is solid, holding to Karl Marx’s belief that “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” That Marxist tenet is the basis of Nolan’s so-called drama.
From there, the movie gets uglier: featuring two Philip Roth–style reverse-cowgirl sex scenes. It also features anachronistic rhetoric that is redundant (“Weapons of mass genocide”) and then repugnant (“Our one hope is antisemitism”). In facile Hollywood terms, Oppenheimer resembles a nerdy A Beautiful Mind but without Ron Howard’s knack for entertainment. Entertainment is now passé, along with aesthetics.
It’s impossible to actually enjoy Oppenheimer; what’s happened is that the current political chaos compels some to accept Nolan’s pseudo-history, in their effort to comprehend the present-day madness. Even pundits who should know better have fallen for this gimmick. Geeky Nolan thinks he’s an intellectual, which allows his fans to think they are, too.
Cillian Murphy’s atheist narcissist Opy may quote the highfalutin Sanskrit scripture, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” but it is Nolan who has bombed our culture. Nolan’s entire life-denying filmography has steadily built toward this ultimate nihilistic victory.