#83
Post
by John Cope » Wed Aug 02, 2023 5:30 pm
Noaln's greatest film? Maybe. Very possibly. I am by no means the biggest fan of his but this follows through upon and fully realizes the promise of its premise. When it was first announced I was actually excited for this despite being generally ambivalent about Nolan. It just seemed to me that this was the perfect project for him, tailor made for his sensibility. Obviously there are some (i.e. Richard Brody) who think it's too perfect for him, playing too much into his self-seriousness. But if there was ever a project that's utterly appropriate to channel that into surely it must be this. And that seriousness is evidenced too in the not inconsiderable cinematic acumen he applies. Stone's JFK has been mentioned by many as a relevant reference point and it absolutely is but so is Nic Roeg, who originated so much of this style of swirling fragmentation. Oppenheimer is, however, slightly more subdued in that technique as befits its subject but only slightly and that modification is itself made of minimal significance given the film's formal mode of extending this technique from beginning to end. It is relentless and exhausting but what is relentless and exhausting about it is not so much the narrative as the consideration of its ideas; Nolan finds a way to accommodate subjects clearly of great interest to him within a cinematic medium, a pop cinema distillation. To paraphrase the Pugh character from early in the film, it's not the medium, it's the ideas that drive it. The film is more about an intensified examination of dense layers of theory than it is about being much of a meditation or rumination upon them; there simply is no time here for that level of reflection and that too may be an insight.
Again, as befits its subject, the film's concentration upon its ideas and its eliding of any actual visualizing of combat keeps it profoundly theoretical and abstract throughout (as does the focus upon the various hearings); part of Nolan's focus here is exactly on working out a kind of parallel issue to the scientists he documents: how to bridge the gap or find and infuse the polarities of a kind of transcendent theory and the humanity that is conversant with it. He does this in a variety of ways. From a pure pop cinematic standpoint he employs not just a distinctively kaleidoscopic technique but also the virtual perversity of towering IMAX close-ups for what is mostly a film of tremendous intimacy. That seemingly paradoxical decision actually serves to emphasize that tension between the two extremes as does the almost insanely grand baroque score, a perfect complement to a relentless montage; the film is indeed operatic in that way (one wonders what Philip Glass would think of it), highlighting the significance in all the details, not just the most obvious ones (I have to admit that I'd kind of like that vast fucking chasm of sound to open up as I'm walking into the parking lot from the 7/11 with my Slushie). The sound walls overwhelm all but put all in high relief until one sudden moment of exquisite and profound silence. The dialogue is sharp and smart but it's almost self-consciously positioned as pop dramatic dialogue, hitting the highlights of any brief scene, bridging the gap then between rarefied ideas and a pop idiom of expression and mass communication. Nolan does a great deal visually as well, most obviously in the bomb test sequence but also in less notable ways throughout: the scene following the dropping of the bomb in which Oppenheimer addresses an assembly is, I think, already justifiably famous, a magnificently realized moment of a cinematically expressive subjective state; just as striking in a similar way for me, but much more subdued, is the scene with Truman in which the framing draws our eye (as an extension of Oppenheimer's) to the giant globe next to the President's aide which can't help but scream world domination by this point.
Beyond the strictly cinematic though we get into the substance of Nolan's concern with his subject. And as much as there is a relentless barrage of details related to the scientific specifics these are understood finally as adjacent to the practical world and all understood as along a continuum that extends from what lies beyond or at the source of external manifestations, with the embodied world then as an epiphenomenal veneer, however pronounced and present that may be to us. It's this realm of ultimacy and finality that draws the attention and ambition of the film and its central figure. Oppenheimer is addressed directly at one point as one who sees beyond the reality we all recognize that we inhabit; in this regard he is the prophet figure he is also referred to as. Intuition is understood as a baseline and what is consistently emphasized is that theory can only get you so far. The great Indian metaphysician Ananda Coomaraswamy pointed out that once lived experience verified belief in some way or other then that belief was no longer faith as faith had been surpassed. And this is of course what we get here as theory is not only realized in practical reality but finally understood as always already there, indivisible from it, just perhaps not recognized or understood. This is certainly a resolutely secular film but there are metaphysical intimations throughout: the brief reference to divine power, the men lying down in prostrate supplication before the detonation, the Trinity designation itself, the Bhagavad Gita reference, the invocation of the Prometheus myth; the apocalyptic is, after all, a theological category. This aspect is super-natural in the truest sense of nature at its apex, however inaccessible that may be to us now; this is a conflation Nolan seems to recognize well given his various narrative explorations of borderline subjects, perhaps especially the magic of The Prestige. This is the positive side; the negative, reductive side is glimpsed in those within the practical sphere who seek to harness knowledge for destructive ideologically inclined ends.
The film's seriousness about an ethical examination of all this is clear as well in how much screen time (not only the last hour) is given over to that. That's what all the endless seeming interrogations and congressional hearings are about. Not so much that these are sincere efforts by those involved to get at an ethical truth but that they posit the subject for our own consideration. This is also how the significance of the events and ideas surrounding Trinity seep out into the world beyond it, informing that world and transformed accordingly into whatever language is applicable. These scenes demonstrate how governments and nations respond, how big ideas are processed and/or subdued by them. As Liv Ullmann's physicist character says in my favorite movie Mindwalk (which actually references the Truman scene here): "I am responsible for the consequences of my discoveries. We never talked about responsibility at the University. Not in my time. We never discussed ethics. We were never taught value-thinking." This is the lament of Oppenheimer as well, the man and the movie, with the movie being finally a way of getting at an ethical awareness with Nolan's characteristic bombast harnessed for unique dramatic and philosophical effects.
