Imagine a creature that can see gravity. Imagine that somewhere in the universe
there's a creature that can see gravity.
A creature that can
visualise inertial frames of reference and sense the sound of a collapsing star.
A creature that can see time. What a creature it would be. Far closer to God
than us. A long time ago humanity believed that the Earth was the whole
universe, that we were the pinnacle of all creation. But we learned that the
universe was not made for us. God made a set of physical rules, and got hold of a mass of energy, but everything else was a side-effect. We owe our existence to the fact that certain molecules bind with
proteins, not because God made us. We are a side-effect. A by-product of a
physical universe devised by a God whose mind was on other things.
But
perhaps one day we might grow to be a better animal. Already we can model some
aspects of the universe, but only a handful of human beings have come close to
actually sensing the structure of time, because there is a gulf between theory
and practice. Einstein felt it, maybe Picasso, but for most people the stars
are... well, a complex mixture of atoms being crushed by gravity, because I like
to imagine that people aren't stupid, but what does that mean? What does gravity
look like? What does the inside of a star sound like, taste like, smell like?
"It
is a joy to be alive". A joy to be alive. So said the official newspaper of the
Pan-German League on the outbreak of the First World War. The League believed
that Germany was poised to vanquish its enemies and take its rightful place as
master of Europe and thus the world. For most of my life I could only dream of
that kind of joy. I could only imagine what it was like to be happy and to own the future.
Until
now. Because joy is upon the world. How come? In a clever piece of
counterprogramming Hollywood has decided to release two completely and utterly
violently different films on the same day. One of them, Oppenheimer, is a
highbrow biography of a scientist directed by Christopher Nolan, who is a real man's director, and
the other is Barbie, a stupid comedy about a girl's toy doll directed by a woman.
But is
Barbie actually a clever film in disguise? And conversely is
Oppenheimer a stupid film masquerading as a clever film? Read on, dear reader,
and slowly drift away to sleep, and dream, but dream of me. And remember me.
They say that my generation was born too late to explore the world and too early to explore the stars, but those twin horizons seem small to me now, because I was there. I was alive to see Oppenheimer and Barbie on the same day, and I actually did it, I actually saw those two films on the exact same day. Sadly the experience was more exciting than the actual films, but I was there.
It would have been great if the two films had been really good. Instead Oppenheimer is a muddled, boring slog of a film and Barbie is only funny in places. What might have been the best year ever is merely a good year.
Let's take this
one thing at a time. First things first. Let's write about Oppenheimer. It's a
dramatised biography of US physicist Robert Oppenheimer, who was one of the key
minds behind the development of the atomic bomb during the Second World War. He
spent the first half of the 1940s developing the bomb, and the second half trying to cope
with the guilt of having made a device that could incinerate a city. A device that did incinerate a city. Two cities.
The
film is told as a flashback from the mid-1950s, at a point in time when the
US government decided to revoke Oppenheimer's security clearance. In the
post-war years Oppenheimer advocated for nuclear arms control talks with the Soviet
Union, but no-one in power wanted to share the bomb with the Russians. Things took a darker turn in 1949, when the Soviet Union
detonated its own bomb. All of a sudden Oppenheimer found himself under a cloud
of suspicion. Had he passed secrets to the Russians? Either out of misguided
loyalty to some of his former friends, or out of a desire to level the playing field? Or just because he was crap at keeping secrets? Or what?
To make things worse
Oppenheimer opposed the development of hydrogen bombs, the next generation of nuclear weapons.
He disagreed with the science, but his former colleague Edward Teller became
convinced that Oppenheimer's stance was political rather than scientific; and
with McCarthyism on the rise the US government began to wonder if Oppenheimer
was trying to hold the United States back. In the end Oppenheimer wasn't sent to prison - technically he wasn't convicted of anything, he was merely refused security
clearance - but without government support he no longer had any political clout.
He was left out of the loop while his
contemporaries continued to influence national policy. He metaphorically went fishing for the rest of his life and died of cancer in 1967. The general consensus
nowadays is that he was a good man who was chewed up and spat out by the
political establishment.
His story is potentially fascinating. But
there's a problem. If it was presented as a philosophical courtroom drama it wouldn't be a blockbuster. So the filmmakers had to cover Oppenheimer's work on the Manhattan
project, because nuclear explosions are intensely cinematic, but their hearts weren't
in it, so the end result is a potentially interesting character drama bloated up
with a huge, dull sub-plot about the making of the atomic bomb.
I'll go into more detail
later, but for the record I saw the film on the big IMAX screen at the Science
Museum in London. It was recorded and projected with 70mm film, old-fashioned
celluloid film, big film, lots of it. There were no trailers. The film gains
nothing from being seen on a huge screen. Perhaps because it was shot in 70mm
the cinematography has an almost three-dimensional sense of depth - I learn from the internet that three focus
pullers lost their lives during the course of production and a score more sustained horrific finger injuries and blindness - but it's not a visually spectacular film.
There
was a hitch. The projection broke almost at the very end of the film, so I don't
know what the ending credits look like. The last few minutes of the film are a
mystery to me. I did however see the two hours and fifty-eight minutes that
preceded the end.
A lot of people will go to see
the film for the bomb, but the one and only nuclear explosion is treated in a stand-offish fashion, as if the director didn't want to exploit the horror too much. If however you want to experience the awesome spectacle of atomic
terror I suggest you check out part eight of Twin Peaks: The Return, which is a
heck of a thing. It can't be easy to make Krzysztof Penderecki's "Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima" sound sinister and terrifying, but David Lynch did it.
In conclusion David Lynch's nuclear explosion is 9/10 and Christopher Nolan's
nuclear explosion is 2/10 the end.
I bet it hurts, Nolan. Two out of
ten. Now, Oppenheimer itself is better than that. It's not a two-out-of-ten film. I didn't hate it, I was just
disappointed. It's a solid film, technically well-made, but nowhere near a great
film. It's prosaic, flat, emotionally inert. But let's talk about the good
stuff. Terrific score. Terrific sound design. Grinding chattering devil violins
and thunkathunka footstep percussion in the style of Hildur Guðnadóttir et al.
Cillian Murphy is convincing as Oppenheimer. He looks the part and feels like
the man I have seen in interviews, or at least a twenty-years-younger version of
the man I have seen in interviews. If anything Murphy underplays the hamminess of the real man. The build-up to the Trinity test is tense,
but it can't be all that hard to make the countdown to a nuclear explosion
boring, so I'm not going to give the film any points for that.
One
scene stands out. Shortly after the bombs are used in anger Oppenheimer is asked
to address his jubilant colleagues, but his heart isn't in it. He tries to say
something jingoistic but it comes out sick and wrong. "I haven't seen the
results myself, but I bet the Japanese didn't like it!", something like that. As if he was narrating a newsreel film. It sticks in his throat and the room goes all wobbly. In
that brief moment Oppenheimer successfully conveys the feelings of a man
absolutely disgusted with himself, in a way that made me feel it as well. For the rest of the film I felt nothing.
Anything
else? The film has a lot of stunt casting, but one actor who stands out is Benny
Salfdie, who plays Edward Teller. He projects a mixture of arrogance,
brilliance, and menace. Edward Teller worked on the atomic bomb project, but
he's more famous nowadays for the thermonuclear fusion bombs he developed after the
war.
Thermonuclear fusion bombs use a nuclear explosion to compress hydrogen
until the hydrogen itself explodes, which generates vastly more explosive power than a plain fission bomb. The most powerful atomic fission bombs explode with
the force of around five hundred thousand tonnes of TNT, which is about the
upper limit of their yield. In contrast the most powerful hydrogen fusion bombs
are in the megaton range, millions of tonnes of TNT, enough to destroy a city out to its suburbs and flatten the next town along, and there is no upper limit to their power. The
US government was keen on thermonuclear weapons as a means of re-establishing
technical dominance over the Soviet Union, but Oppenheimer was opposed to their development on a
mixture of practical and scientific grounds. This pissed Edward Teller off.
Teller is a
controversial figure today. Far more so than Oppenheimer. Mainly because of his
seeming lust for ever-larger bombs, partially because of a perception that he
took too much credit for the hydrogen bomb from his colleague Stanislaw Ulam,
and also because his testimony at Oppenheimer's security hearing was somewhat
less than glowing. The film largely skims over the
thermonuclear aspect, but a mixture of deft writing and Salfdie's performance
convey something about the man. I came away with a mental picture of Edward
Teller. At times Salfdie's performance is OTT - all glowering menace and teenage
insolence, with a thick Hungarian accent - but there's nothing wrong with a bit
of exaggeration if it conveys a deeper truth.
Oppenheimer also has Klaus Fuchs, Enrico Fermi, Luis Alvarez, Kurt Gödel, even Albert Einstein, but I
didn't develop a mental picture of them, because it's stuffed with
characters who don't get a chance to shine. Actually, no. There's another
good performance. Casey Affleck stands out in a small role as an intelligence
officer who interrogates Oppenheimer. He manages to be cordial and menacing at
the same time. He stands out. So that's three good performances.
Mark Ronson also did the music for Barbie. It's a small world.
Otherwise
the film is a mess, because it tries to tell three different stories, and skims
over all three of them, despite having ample time. One part of the film is a
character study of Robert Oppenheimer, theoretical physicist. Another is the
tale of how Oppenheimer came to create a weapon that might still doom the world.
The third is the tale of how the US government chewed up this man and spat him
out.
The key, key problem is that the film is the wrong shape. I can
see why it went wrong. It might have worked if it had concentrated purely on
Oppenheimer's security hearings, or his relationship with Edward Teller, but
then no-one would have gone to see the film. It would be a classic tale of a
principled man pushed aside by his younger, more ambitious former pupil, but
no-one wants to see a film that's just talking. So the filmmakers needed to
include the Manhattan Project, but they weren't interested in it. So the film
comes across as a courtroom drama with a huge flashback in the middle that
doesn't actually have anything to do with the central story.
And
there's another problem, which is that the film's version of Oppenheimer is
uninteresting. I don't want to suggest that Oppenheimer, the man, was boring. He
presided over one of the most extraordinary scientific achievements of all time,
during one of the very few wars that had a clear-cut moral imperative. He had an
extramarital affair with an actual Soviet-era Communist. He ploughed her so hard
she killed herself. That's pretty impressive.
No, the problem is that
although Oppenheimer was an interesting man, the Oppenheimer of Oppenheimer
doesn't come across as an interesting subject. Beyond a brief scene at the
beginning of the film where he impulsively tries to poison his tutor - we never
learn why - he comes across as a passive man whose attempts to mould the world
around him only work in the lab. He awkwardly tries to broach arms control with
President Truman but messes it up. He tries to set up a union, but when asked to
stop he doesn't push the issue. He attempts to clear his name without betraying
his friends to the security services, but does so in a wishy-washy way that
fails on both counts. The Oppenheimer of Oppenheimer comes across as a dull man,
a passive man. Why was he so good with women? The film doesn't say, and believe
me I looked very hard for tips.
There's a cameo from Kenneth Branagh
as Neils Bohr, who led an equally interesting life. The Allies smuggled him out
of occupied Denmark in an aircraft bomb bay, with the Nazis in hot pursuit.
But he only has a tiny role in the film and the script never really explains why
everyone is so fascinated with him. Characters constantly say that so-and-so is
a genius, but we never see it, we never feel it.
The second story is
about Oppenheimer's downfall. This is presented as a courtroom drama, although there's no trial; Oppenheimer's opponents knew he was an effective
public speaker, so they stripped him of his power behind closed doors. On a
microscopic level the story works, at least as a political thriller, but it just
isn't engaging on an emotional level, because the film
does a poor job of making us care about Oppenheimer. I just didn't feel anything
for him.
Oppenheimer's story resembles that of T E Lawrence, in the
sense that they were both given a chance by their governments to indulge their
fantasies, and in the process they achieved a measure of success; but after
accomplishing their immediate goal they failed in their greater goal and were abandoned by their governments and
ended their lives as yesterday's men. Lawrence of Arabia gets under Lawrence's
skin. It uses clever cinematography and clear writing to portray a larger-than-life
figure who is brought down to earth by a mixture of his own character flaws and externalities, while at the same time not being afraid to
use broad, hammy acting to convey the essence of its characters.
In contrast
Oppenheimer left me cold. It comes across as the tale of a dull man who was
refused security clearance on spurious grounds, which is mildly annoying but not
tragic. The writing often feels like a greatest hits of Oppenheimer's public persona. There's "I have become death" etc, but it doesn't have any context. There's an explanation for the name of the Trinity test, but it comes out of nowhere. I didn't feel it.
The third story is the development of the atomic bomb. This
doesn't work either. The work is initially presented as a race against time, but
it never has any urgency. And the writers seem to have been worried
that the audience would be baffled by the finer details of nuclear chain
reactions, so the script explains nothing of the bomb's workings. There is talk
of neutrons and empty space, but it's very brief. The filmmakers had more than enough money to visualise atomic reactions on a microscopic scale, but the film doesn't try.
Now, a
couple of years ago I read a great book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by
Richard Rhodes. It won an award. And then I read the sequel, Dark Sun. I
remember wondering if the two books could be turned into a film, but I concluded
that it was impossible. They might work as a miniseries. The problem is that
atomic theory is unintuitive, counter-intuitive, bleak in its implications, and
it takes time to understand it, truly understand it, because there's a
difference between knowing a fact and understanding it on an emotional level.
July '23 was an unusually blockbuster-heavy month. Barbie and Oppenheimer have been widely anticipated, and as a consequence the Mission Impossible and Indiana Jones films were released slightly earlier in the summer, so as not to clash.
Have
you ever thought about the speed of light? Light travels at a speed of over six
hundred and seventy million miles an hour. But it's weird, because it never
changes. It's always six hundred and seventy million miles an hour, no matter
how fast you're going, or in which direction. Let's call the speed of light C,
because I'm not going to write six hundred and seventy million again.
The planet Earth spins around the sun at 67,000
miles an hour, and the sun itself is orbiting the core of the Milky Way galaxy,
dragging the solar system with it, and so we are all moving forwards
through space at over half a million miles an hour. But if we shine a beam of
light into the sky, it always appears to be travelling away from us at speed C, no
matter which direction we pick. Forwards, backwards, to the sides, it's all the same, always C.
The fact is that no matter
how fast we go, we can never catch up with light. It always moves away from us
at C. The frequency of light appears to change when we speed up and slow down,
but C doesn't change, only the frequency.
The
idea of a fixed speed of light is confusing. The only way it can stay the same when we speed up is if time
slows down when we accelerate. But only for us, which means that time is not universal, but subjective, perhaps a property of something. And I think space contracts in the presence of mass, but
I'm not an expert. And we gain mass when we go faster, and this has something to
do with time and space. Einstein determined that energy, mass, time, space, and
the speed of light were all related to each other, and that gravity was caused
by a distortion of the fabric of space caused by the presence of mass. And so was time. I don't know.
A
generation of scientists who followed Einstein concluded that the universe was
made of tiny quantum particles that could not be measured accurately and were
linked in pairs over a great distance and that nothing is real. Einstein's
theories of space and time and mass have been measured and found to be accurate,
and so have those of the quantum physicists who followed him, and those theories
have been used to create practical devices that actually work, including, yes,
the atomic bomb. Imagine trying to convey all that in three hours in a way that
makes sense.
I have to admit that I don't understand the first thing
about quantum physics, but while reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb something
struck me. Two things struck me. Until the tail end of the nineteenth century
poets, artists, philosophers, musicians and so forth could all claim that their
field had a monopoly on the human soul and the universe. Science was crap back
then. But as the twentieth century progressed science drew ahead. It produced
theories far more creative than the wildest imagination of artists. I don't know
if Einstein ever met Picasso, but I like to imagine that for all they had in
common, Picasso would have struggled to understand Einstein, while Einstein
would quickly have seen what Picasso was trying to do when he deconstructed time
and space.
And science got results. It gave us answers. We might not
have liked the answers, or the fact that it gave us answers at all - science
strips away the hope that comes from uncertainty - but ultimately it will be
science that will explain the universe, not poetry. The human soul will be
stripped bare by neurosurgeons and linguists and systems analysts, not
philosophers. We will have to accept that we are just animals, and we will hate
it.
With the explosion of the first atomic bomb scientists
conclusively proved that all the weird stuff about particles and space-time and
frames of reference was real. Almost a century earlier Darwin's Origin of the
Species confronted humankind with the notion that we might not be divine, but
the twentieth century went one further and suggested that the universe itself
might not be real, and perhaps in response to this the worlds of art and
philosophy retreated into insularity and postmodernism. They gave up on the
notion that they might explain the world.
The second thing that
struck me while reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb was a famous lecture by C
P Snow called "The Two Cultures", in which he bemoaned the lack of scientific
literacy among Britain's supposedly highly intelligent literary intelligentsia
of the 1940s.
Not just the lack of scientific literacy, but an
outright hostility towards science by people who believed that intimate
knowledge of the works of Vita Sackville-West and Edith Sitwell were all you
needed to have a complete picture of the universe. British society in particular
has always had a division between the unqualified, unskilled, inexperienced
imitation intellectuals who write newspaper columns, and actual experts, who are
typically portrayed as lacking a wider vision or a spark of humanity. The
implication being that it's okay to be a little bit smart, but not too smart.
I
mention this because Oppenheimer doesn't address any of the technical issues at
all. There are brief, individual lines about quantum physics and heavy water,
but they don't have any context. There's a discussion about black holes that
goes nowhere, and doesn't make a lot of sense because the atomic bombs were not
gravitational weapons. There are a few lines about the merits of gun-type vs
implosion-type bombs, but nothing in any depth. We see the Trinity bomb being
constructed - a metal core, surrounded by a segmented sphere - but the film
doesn't explain what those segments are, or why they have wires running from
them. The actual engineering of the bomb is fascinating, but the film ignores
it. And it's a shame, because without knowing a bit about the science behind the
bomb it's hard to appreciate why Robert Oppenheimer was so special.
For
example, there's a brief scene in which Oppenheimer visits a sports hall in
Chicago. We see some bricks, and hear a Geiger counter. There a few brief lines
about nuclear reactions, and then the film moves on. That's how the film covers
the very first nuclear reactor. It's so perfunctory as to be pointless. It's as if the writers were loathe to turn
Oppenheimer into a techno-thriller, but they had to cover all the bases, and the approach they settled for is
unsatisfying. The film shows us context-less highlights of the Manhattan project
as a series of greatest-hits clips, in a way that made me wonder why they
bothered.
I mean, did you know that iron is made from the exploded
core of a star? The same is true of uranium. Imagine a film in which a brilliant
character harnesses the power of a star, and is then cut down by his equally
smart but considerably more shrewd former pupil with the aid of the US government. It would be a fantastic film,
but it wouldn't be Oppenheimer.
