1. Fission
Awe is the word I'd use to describe it: that time in the mid nineties when I first saw James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgement Day, that time when I watched Sarah Connor scream as she is annihilated by nuclear fire, her flesh torn from her bones as she holds on to a steel fence. She is helpless, only one person against what seems like an unstoppable force; I felt helpless watching her, because at the time I thought the "good guys" always won, that the "good guys" wouldn't lose this badly. I was barely a decade old, and very naive. By this time the Berlin Wall had fallen, and the world was in a relative lull - the old enemies of the Cold War had apparently been defeated. The looming wars to come, wars against a different ideology, were nowhere to be found. Although the danger no longer felt immediate, the fear of nuclear annihilation haunted pre-teen me, so much so that it caused more than a few nightmares. Maybe we can hide on an island while the fallout happens, I thought, trying to dampen my fear. Nah, we're unimportant. No country would ever nuke us.
I would get chills as friends from abroad described their own experiences facing the threat of nuclear war - when one UK based friend recounted watching Barry Hines' Threads (1984) as a child as part of a school activity and being scarred for life, or when older friends recalled practicing nuclear drills in school even knowing deep down that in the event of a nuclear attack, it would help very little. As I would come to find out, in the event of a nuclear strike, the luckiest ones would be the people right in the blast zone, incinerated in an instant. I remembered a scene during Carl Sagan's Cosmos coming home from his ship of the imagination and finding a silenced Earth. There would be no winners in the event of a nuclear exchange: if the third world war was to be fought with nuclear weapons, the next one would be waged among piles of ash.
I am part of a tail end of a generation that lived with a civilization-ending, existential threat, one that is unprecedented in the history of man. As someone who knew of the potential of the nuclear bomb second hand, it existed in my mind as only a vague abstraction. I could only imagine what went through the people who lived during, say, the Cuban Missile crisis, when our collective annihilation was so close it feels like a miracle we didn't all die in the sixties. Awe in itself is reverential, and we often associate the word with wonder. But this particular kind of awe is one mixed with fear and dread, mixed with the helplessness borne from the knowledge of our own insignificance.
Christopher Nolan knows both meanings of the word; there are only a few filmmakers who are as obsessed with the idea of awe as he is. Over the years, his films have striven to create cinematic spectacles of all kinds, from intricate, nested set pieces in Inception (2010) to the propulsive pulpiness of his Dark Knight Trilogy to the spectacle of magic, real or otherwise, in The Prestige (2006). Such spectacle only overtly manifests itself in his latest film, Oppenheimer, in brief flashes of particles and light - abstract depictions of the invisible forces that govern our existence, and in what I believe is the film's emotional climax. Otherwise, the film eschews overt spectacle in favor of a tense political thriller, one that is held in board rooms or in American congress, much in the spirit of films like Oliver Stone's JFK (1991). A long, sprawling biopic of the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer's life, made in the way only Nolan can, it is a film about a man coming to terms with the effects of his own ambition.
The film can be divided into three acts, each roughly corresponding to one hour in the film's runtime: the first act deals with his life in college as an academic, the second act deals with his involvement in the Manhattan Project, and the third deals with the political and personal fallout from the second act, leading to the rehabilitation of his image. But, keeping with his style, Nolan intercuts from one plot thread to another, and scenes are segregated via different points of view that he labels "fission" and "fusion."
It's a story of people whose laser focus on a singular goal prevents them from looking at the bigger picture, their scientific achievements being co-opted to create weapons capable of the most heinous atrocities. It's a story that I've seen play out in the course of human history over and over again: the first thing that comes to mind is Fritz Haber, whose scientific discovery figuratively fed the world. Fritz Haber the German nationalist, who used his scientific expertise to use Chlorine gas during World War 1. Fritz Haber, whose scientific discoveries were used to create Zyklon B. Haber isn't the only one - history is filled with stories like his. Science by itself is noble, aspirational, aiming for things greater than ourselves, but science does not exist in a vacuum. For J. Robert Oppenheimer, his work on the Manhattan Project helped usher in a new age of man, an age of death and perpetual fear.
While that's all good and true, Oppenheimer's greatest weakness is how Nolan elects to portray the film's titular character. Nolan is at his best when he ties spectacle with human stories: Inception had its protagonist come to grips with the death of his wife; Interstellar had the concept of "love" anchor a mission to save humanity, and the Batman movies gave Nolan a fully formed character with decades of backstory to work with.
Beginning with Dunkirk, I've noticed that I've struggled to find an emotional anchor to Nolan's films: while he dealt with the abstract ideas of perseverance and the human spirit, the characters in those films felt impenetrable. In an ironic way, the filmmaker's focus on awe and spectacle leads them to neglect the humanity behind it. Oppenheimer is a cipher in this film, someone who has trouble committing to anything. He donates to and participates in various causes but does not formally join them. Other than his hatred of the Nazis and his views on atomic weaponry, his views on the war aren't clearly cut out. The only capacity we see him engaging in non-scientific, human social relations is usually with his wife and his tragic mistress, Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh.) Aside from a couple of sequences where he checks in his first child with a friend because of his wife's alcoholism, we don't see him interact with his children. In real life (or in the film, albeit not directly) he never did apologize for the use of nuclear bombs in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The man knew all about politics, and he knew that politics tends to make people lose their convictions in one way or another. But in the process, he makes himself a character that's not just complicated (that's a given for any good biopic) but hard to understand. Even after three hours, I don't really know what the man was about.
I had to read outside the film to see the man as he was: restlessly flitting from one scientific field (or woman) to another, unable to finish research, bored by the tedium of lab work yet engrossed with every kind of scientific idea, a man who, in the words of a friend, felt "difficulty expressing himself completely". It all felt oddly cold in this film, aside from some flashes in the first act.
Perhaps Nolan found an affinity with the subject of his film. Does he consider himself as impenetrable as the subject of his film, perhaps (even subconsciously) as a man who could not see the proverbial forest for the trees? Perhaps Nolan too also feels a level of guilt, though guilt at what, I wouldn't know. Would it be his contributions to filmmaking? His perception of the end of an age - the end of cinema? Nolan's films sometimes touch on the end of ages - to man leaving the earth and going to the stars, or a vigilante passing the torch to the next generation.
In that episode of Carl Sagan's Cosmos, the very last one, titled "who speaks for Earth?" he quotes from Deuteronomy 30:19, that states:
I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live,
Perhaps the most chilling thing in Oppenheimer, a technically impressive, well acted yet fundamentally flawed film is, in that moment, it protagonist, despite his redemption, unwittingly chose death.
2. Fusion
Awe is the word I'd use to describe it: that time when my grandfather told me stories when he fought during World War II. He was always a colorful storyteller. While our family hid far from the town where they lived, as the Japanese used our ancestral house as a sort of base, my grandfather suspended his studies and became a guerilla fighter. "Gorilla?" five or six-year-old me asked, thinking that there were Gorillas in our forests during WWII. "No, gue-ri-llas," my grandfather explained, spelling the word out and giving me the definition. He and his brother were eventually caught and joined the Bataan Death March. They escaped by pretending to be dead as the POWs passed through a rice field. After the war, my grandfather became a doctor, while his brother became an air force general. In a twist of fate, my great uncle met and married a Japanese woman. The daughter of a samurai family, my great aunt sold her land and possessions and left Japan to marry my great uncle. She has lived in the Philippines for around half a century now.
Less than ten years after that talk about guerillas, both my grandfather and great uncle died of cancer - of the lung and colon respectively. Perhaps one of them was diagnosed by an MRI - an invention made thanks to the scientific research by Isidor Isaac Rabi, one of J. Robert Oppenheimer's close friends and colleague in the Manhattan Project.
As my grandfather continued explaining what a guerilla fighter was, we passed by a long tunnel, and a truck sped beside us. He instinctively grabbed me and pulled me towards him. He had developed claustrophobia over the years for some reason. I wondered if it had something to do with the war.
As the years passed, I would hear many more stories from friends and relatives, as well as come across many films and forms of media about the war, and about the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only time a nuclear weapon was used against a human population.
I saw the effects of the war on both sides, indelibly etched into unforgettable frames: the sight of farmers fleeing their homes amidst an infernal background in Peque Gallaga's Oro Plata Mata (1982) or Nora Aunor holding her half-Japanese baby up over a high point, contemplating whether to kill her child in Mario O' Hara's Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos (1976), or the climax to Janice O' Hara's Sundalong Kanin (2014).
The Japanese, of course, show their scars from the war in other ways. Nearing death thanks to radiation exposure, Minami (Kumiko Aso) the protagonist of Kiyoshi Sasabe's Yunagi City, Sakura Country (2007) wonders, "Thirteen years afterward, I wonder if those who bombed Hiroshima are looking at me and saying: 'We did it! We were able to kill another person!' They should be."
Near the very end of Sunao Katabuchi's In This Corner of the World (2016), a young child holds on to her long dead mother in the aftermath of the atomic explosions. As the days pass, she continues holding onto the corpse until her mother rots away. The young child wanders the desolate streets of what remains of the city, eventually coming across the film's protagonist, Suzu. Earlier, Suzu had lost her drawing arm (and her niece) to one of the bombs dropped by the allies, and her mother and father die during the bomb dropping on Hiroshima. Suzu takes the child in, raising her despite all the things she had lost. Earlier in the film, her (then still very much alive niece) admiringly listens to her uncle talk about the seemingly invincible battleship Yamato; later Suzu is told that the ship had been sunk by the Allies.
Perhaps one of the most affecting pieces of media about the bomb's immediate and long term effects is Keiji Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen, adapted into a live action film series from 1976 to 1980, and into two anime movies in 1983 and 1986. Nakazawa, a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing, uses the manga to relate his experiences about the bomb, the years after the end of the war, and the arrival of the American occupation forces.
Perhaps you've already seen some clips from the first anime movie, especially the scene where the bomb drops: a little girl's hair and clothes burning off her body, her eyes melting from their sockets; a mother struggling in vain to cover her child as both are incinerated; the titular Gen getting saved by the initial blast by sheer luck. In the manga there's a scene, soon after Little Boy detonates, where bomb survivors jump into the Ota River to escape the fires engulfing the city. They are all injured and weak, unable to stay afloat. In a vain attempt to keep their spirits up, they try to sing as they drown one by one.
There's been a bit of discourse around Oppenheimer the film, in which the people decry the lack of "representation" from the Japanese. In my opinion, the lack of the Japanese perspective is the point of the film - politicians and maybe even scientists used that emotional distance, that abstraction, to distance themselves from the effects of what they have done. Tellingly, in one scene Oppenheimer and other fellow scientists are shown the immediate effects of the nuclear blast on the populace and he does not look, out of fear, out of guilt. Perhaps awe would not be the word I'd use to describe it.
When a populace is reduced to numbers and statistics, it's easier not to see the humanity behind those numbers until it is too late. In that sense, Nolan's depiction of staid, even boring board rooms filled with self serving, sometimes evil people deciding the fates of millions with little to no accountability for their actions, is effective.
But perhaps, a man's personal guilt is ultimately insignificant, an indication of his own (perhaps inflated) self importance. One of the first pieces of media I've seen regarding the effects of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is Akira Kurosawa's Rhapsody in August (1991), his penultimate feature film. In it, Kurosawa uses the story of a post-war Japanese family to depict how the bomb has affected each generation: for the latest generation, born after the post-war economic miracle, the bomb is a history lesson, one told only via second hand stories. For are the parents, the boomer generation who grew up right after the war and during the American occupation, the bomb is an afterthought, perhaps tying it with their experiences with the Americans. And finally, there is the matriarch of the family, Kane (veteran actress Sachiko Murase), who witnessed the bomb first hand and lost her husband in the blast. In the end of the film, to the tune of a Japanese rendition of Franz Schubert's Heidenröslein, Kane's grandchildren and children, spatially divided into generational lines, chase after their elderly matriarch, holding an upturned umbrella that looks like a black flower.
There is a scene in Rhapsody in August where Kane and her American-born nephew Clark (Richard Gere) talk to each other and Clark ostensibly apologizes for the bomb. Critics have said that this moment dismisses Japan's own role in starting the war, but I personally don't think that's what Kurosawa was trying to convey, and I'm not the only one. I highly recommend reading Brandon Habermeyer's review of the film, wherein he and a bunch of other friends try to deconstruct the scene. Clark isn't apologizing for war crimes, he has zero authority to do so. In their analysis, perhaps Clark is trying to apologize that he didn't know Kane's husband was a bomb victim, and his coming to Hiroshima to invite the family to Hawaii was a moment of bad timing. A single man cannot apologize for the crimes of an entire nation, and deep wounds between both nations cannot be healed overnight, with a single exchange. Perhaps what Kurosawa wanted to communicate was that it all starts with open and honest communication, and that's what Clark and Kane achieved in that short scene.
"Americans dropped the bomb," one of Kane's grandchildren states at one point in the movie. They don't know the names of the pilots who dropped it, or the scientists who named it. Oppenheimer and his ilk are as much abstractions to them as the Japanese were distant abstractions to the Americans. Perhaps Truman was right in Nolan's film when he said that they're not going to care who made the bomb, but they'd care who dropped it - or at least, a figurehead representing who dropped it, and that person wouldn't necessarily be Oppenheimer. The filmic and the real Oppenheimer might have tried to atone for their actions, or cast themselves as martyrs after what they had done, but in the end it was all to assuage their own guilt, rather than engage in the futile act of apologizing for which they had little to no authority to do so.
If you think about it, Oppy himself may have stumbled across this notion by accident. His singular, most famous quote is "I am become Death, destroyer of worlds," as if he implicates himself in the destruction that stemmed from his "invention." But Oppenheimer didn't really invent the bomb all by himself, and once again it feels like he is taking more credit for the creation of the bomb than what he is due. But in the quote's original context in the Bhagavad Gita, the quote has a completely different meaning.
In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna, the avatar of Vishnu, appears before the prince Arjun and tells him to go to war against his relatives. Arjun resists, but Krishna reveals themselves as the destroyer of worlds, implying that regardless of what Arjun does, the war will be waged, and he is only an instrument of the divine work. Without Oppenheimer someone else would have taken his place, someone else would have developed the bomb, perhaps different people would have died, but they would have died nonetheless. It's a story not about becoming a great destroyer, but how insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things, how sometimes we can only look helplessly on as events unfold beyond our control, like Sarah Connor beholding nuclear fire. People are inevitably swept up in the winds of war, and in its wake there are no true winners or losers, only waste and destruction and damaged people who live with wounds for the rest of their lives.
