Three Real-Life Scenes that Nolan would be Crazy to Leave out of “Oppenheimer”
J. Robert Oppenheimer
UPDATE (11/12/23) to this now highly-outdated blog: it turns out Nolan was crazy enough to leave out roughly 2.5 out of 3 of the scenes I describe here, yet somehow his “Oppenheimer” still wound up a great movie. The second scene I mention below, with Robert Serber, did make it into the film, though in highly-truncated form.
American Prometheus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning source material for Christopher Nolan’s upcoming Oppenheimer, is both an information-dense, 600-page behemoth and a page-turner. Even with an apparent running time of three hours, Nolan’s film is far too short to encompass the biography’s exhaustive portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called “Father of the Atomic Bomb.” Going by trailers, it appears Nolan has made the obvious choice to focus on Oppenheimer’s management of the Manhattan Project and the later McCarthyist investigation that ruined Oppenheimer’s political career; still, Nolan will have to implement much dramatic simplification in order to package even those events into a mainstream entertainment.
American Prometheus is heavy on facts and insights but relatively light on self-contained scenes with inherent dramatic tension or stakes. Obviously, biographers Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin were more concerned with writing history than providing a cinematic blueprint for the director of Batman Begins. As a result, the few highly visual scenes that do occur in the book stand out and practically beg to be adapted on film.
The most memorable of these scenes are related to the top secret military base in Los Alamos, New Mexico where the bomb was developed, and which looks to be the setting for a large part of the film. For the duration of the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos was inhabited by an uneasy mix of mostly-left-wing scientists and the strict military command who oversaw the project’s security. A more light-hearted filmmaker than Nolan could make an entire MASH-like comedy about the tension on that base between the security-obsessed military and the naturally rebellious, countercultural academics who were creating the bomb. For Oppenheimer, the U.S. government’s tight security around the science of atomic energy was not a transient concern; after the war, he was an activist for more scientific transparency. It was partly this position that the McCarthyists used to slander Oppenheimer as unpatriotic.
If Nolan touches on that tension between security and transparency, and I think he’d have to, he’d be crazy not to include a perfect scene like this one:
On occasion, Oppenheimer absent-mindedly forgot about the all-too-visible armed guards stationed everywhere. One day he drove up to Los Alamos’ main gate and, without even slowing down, whizzed through. The astonished MP shouted a warning and then fired a shot at the car’s tires. Oppenheimer stopped, backed up the car and, after murmuring an apology, drove off. [pg 216]
That moment sounds like it was written up by a screenwriter to set the stage for exactly the tension which defined Oppenheimer’s relationship with the U.S. military. Like Oppenheimer, the other Los Alamos scientists had to adapt quickly to an environment where virtually everything they said and did was top secret. Sometimes that adaptation had to take place at a spur of the moment. Take the following humorous scene depicting one of the famous ‘Los Alamos Primers’ that physicist Robert Serber would conduct for arriving scientists as the lab was being constructed around them:
Serber […] would brief the assembled scientists, numbering no more than forty, on the task at hand. […] ‘Security was terrible,’ Serber later wrote. ‘We could hear carpenters banging down the hall and at one point a leg appeared through the beaver-board ceiling, presumably belonging to an electrician working up above.’ After only a few minutes, Oppenheimer sent John Manley up to whisper in Serber’s ear that he should stop using the word ‘bomb’ in favor of something more neutral like ‘gadget.’ [pg 219]
“Gadget” would become the bomb’s unofficial code name for the remainder of the Manhattan Project. Apparently, Serber will be played by Michael Angarano in Nolan’s film; since the actor specializes in nervous, humorous roles, one hopes he gets a chance to realize this instance of unusual levity.
Another of the book’s rare moments of physical comedy centers on young physicist Richard Feynman, before he became one of the most popular scientists of the twentieth century:
On another occasion, [Feynman] noticed a hole in the fence surrounding Los Alamos – so he walked out the main gate, waved to the guard, and then crawled back through the hole and walked out the main gate again. He repeated this several times. Feynman was almost arrested. [pg 230]
Feynman will be played by Jack Quaid in the movie; again, an actor known for humorous roles. Even if Nolan often lacks a light touch, these scenes are so perfectly self-contained and cinematic it’s hard to imagine any filmmaker not taking advantage of them.
Robert Serber (left) and Richard Feynman (right)
What is less obviously cinematic is Oppenheimer’s life story. The trailers generate a lot of suspense around the first-ever detonation of an atomic bomb, but the possibility that the explosion would ‘ignite the Earth’s atmosphere,’ although it frightened a lot of the scientists at the time, will not be very ominous for audiences in 2023. I am very curious how Nolan will apply his maximal style to a story about scientists doing physics, but I am most curious how Oppenheimer himself will be presented.
The Oppenheimer of American Prometheus is a thoroughly equivocal figure. Despite being ‘Father of the Atomic Bomb,’ he was not, that I can recall, personally responsible for any particular discovery or technical advancement that led to the bomb’s creation. Although there’s no doubt the man was a great motivator and a highly charismatic person, there was some ambivalence among his colleagues that he was ever a very brilliant physicist (if memory serves, his only significant contribution to physics was some work that led to the discovery of black holes). As a director of the Manhattan Project he was touted as a great leader, but it’s not obvious that the bomb wouldn’t have been created if he wasn’t involved. Before WW2, Oppenheimer was a committed anti-fascist and quasi-socialist, but he was quick to more or less leave all that behind once he got some clout in the U.S. political establishment. After the war, his career as a political consultant was characterized by a cycle whereby Oppenheimer would take a strong stance on a subject related to nuclear energy, the U.S. government would take the opposite position, and then Oppenheimer would acquiesce and fall in line with the establishment. Some of his ideas – such as sharing nuclear secrets with the Soviets – Oppenheimer was probably correct to drop, but it’s not obvious that he did so for reasons other than his own personal political benefit. When McCarthyism took hold, he (perhaps erroneously) fingered his colleague and friend Bernard Peters as a Communist Party member, effectively destroying Peters’ scientific career in the United States. On top of all that, the fruits of Oppenheimer’s great labour were Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Nolan is not averse to morally ambiguous protagonists as long they’re in the sexy/mysterious mode ala Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception. Oppenheimer’s inconsistency, on the other hand, arose from everyday human weakness. It is one of the great accomplishments of Bird and Sherwin’s book that they were able to convey the human being at the centre of such a crucial moment in history. Let’s see if Nolan can do the same on film.
