Oppenheimer Makes You ‘Uncomfy’? Good.

As I’ve gotten older, and as someone who grew up reading sociopolitical Tumblr Discourse™, my tolerance for buzzword-y online rhetoric from people not really using their entire brains, people who simply want to be mad about something, anything, has diminished to nearly zero. I don’t think I can accurately describe the utter rage that flows through my body when I read a half-baked take on Twitter without making myself out to sound like a complete maniac. It’s not so much that the takes I’m talking about are about politics; more often than not they’re related to media, whether that be a film, series, or book. But similarly to politics, when the only people you interact with about the things you’re interested in are people who think exactly like you, and when you only interact with these people in small groups or online, you end up in a kind of echo chamber where the opinions end up landing on don’t actually make to much sense, or are based on a set of non-universal, tunnel-visioned assumptions. And like, that’s not a hot take. Most healthy people want a diversity of ideas around them so that they themselves can become as well-rounded and well-informed as possible. But occasionally, and because Twitter has always been a terrible place to be but has especially become so since Elon bought it, I have the misfortune of reading someone’s ill-thought-out tweet about something I care a little too much about. So that’s how, after seeing the three hour long masterpiece that is Oppenheimer on the day it came out, I stumbled upon a tweet which read: “People seem to love #Oppenheimer but I’ll just say it: I was uncomfy watching yet another movie about tortured white male genius when the victims of the atrocities glossed over by the script—Japanese people, interned Japanese Americans, and Native Americans—had no voice.” Let me say right now — spoilers for Oppenheimer coming up.

Let’s start with the most obvious rebuttal to this tweet, which honestly should suffice, but then I wouldn’t have a blog post: a movie being about a person doesn’t automatically mean that person is a good one. Portraying a person doesn’t equate endorsing them or their actions, and having, y’know, actually seen Oppenheimer, I can say with utmost confidence that this film doesn’t show him to be a pure, righteous, or good man. We understand him, because this is a film about him, but we don’t agree with him. And that brings me to another point: this is a film about Oppenheimer, the man. This isn’t a cohesive look at World War II or the Cold War or any other geopolitical event. We do not get a scope of the world or updates on the war beyond bits that specifically pertain to the advancement of the story (Hitler dying, for instance, is significant — but so is the first ever splitting of the atom in Berlin, and they both have equal weight in the story). This is a film telling a very specific story about a single person. It is not automatic erasure to not include outside perspectives if the primary perspective being explored is from one man’s lens. (Christopher Nolan himself stated in an interview that the black and white sequences of the film are ‘objective’ and the color sequences are ‘subjective.’ Oppenheimer, however, is centered in both sequences — by name and subject objectively, and on screen and in his perspective subjectively).

Taking into account the fact that the very nature of this film demands that we stay with Oppenheimer (either literally with him or with his name constantly on the lips of the people who knew him), it’s not like this film completely glosses over history. The brashness with which (primarily) white men in power in the film refer to the Indigenous population at Los Alamos and the Japanese people is shown in sincerity because that is the truth. Oppenheimer says to Truman, when asked what to do with the New Mexican nuclear testing site, to ‘give the land back to the Indians,’ because he believes it to be true but also because he isn’t thinking about the generations of people who will be affected by the radiation. (Arguably he isn’t thinking about radiation at all considering the affects the chemicals must have had on all the people working at Los Alamos during the bomb’s building). He thinks giving the land back is the right thing to do, but for an intelligent audience, we know that this sentiment doesn’t negate the fact that a very wrong thing was done in the first place. Even when he’s suggesting Los Alamos as the testing site, he offhandedly mentions that it’s an Indigenous burial ground, but that clearing the people out should be no problem. This is small fry to people like him, who think with one thing in mind. Doing anything but show these events as they were would be telling a very different story. And when a military general says he and his wife vacation in Tokyo and therefore they won’t bomb the city, the film highlights the absolute hypocrisy and gall with which the men in charge approached this situation. The Japanese people’s lives mean nothing to them, and the film makes sure we know that. And if even that point was somehow too subtle, there’s the repeatedly called-upon idea that detonating a nuclear weapon could cause a chain reaction, lighting up the entire atmosphere and ending life as we know it. This obviously does not literally happen, but as we see in the final scene of the film, Oppenheimer expresses to Einstein that he’s afraid this has indeed happened. Introducing nuclear weaponry to the world, which the scientist had no small part in, changed the face of the world in a different way, and changed how the people with access to these tools of mass destruction view humanity. If the film’s ending on this scene isn’t enough to convince an audience of its stance, I don’t know what is.

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not all the way on the other side of this spectrum. I don’t advocate for making Barbie-style memes of Oppenheimer’s ‘I am become death’ quote. I think doing that (specifically taking the content of the film and meme-ifying it, that is) belittles the story, and ignores the gruesome scale of the tragedy at the heart of the film. Both those memes and the tweet that spurred the creation of this post are symptoms of a media-illiterate internet culture, though, in different ways. Where the memes demonstrate an inability to use critical thinking skills when it comes to corporations and marketing, the tweet is a prime example of the deterioration of language in a very specific way. Language evolves; I know this and most of the time, am in awe of it. But due to unofficial censorship on platforms like TikTok, there’s been a sanitation of language very specifically on the internet. People say things like ‘murd3r’ and ‘uncomfy’ in this weird way of cutes-ifying words, as a way of getting around the censorship or minimizing their own feelings on a problem. Personally I think if a platform doesn’t allow you to talk about serious topics then you maybe shouldn’t use that platform, but that’s a separate issue to the bleeding of this kind of vocabulary on other platforms. I’m nitpicking, I know, but using the word ‘uncomfy’ when raising what, in your mind is a serious grievance, completely undermines your argument to me. I can’t take a point seriously when, as a reader, I’m talked down to like that. Specific language exists for a reason, and that reason is so that we can be as clear both literally and figuratively as possible when communicating with each other.

At the end of this all, beyond by own personal grievance with the language use of the tweet, is the actual truth of it. Uncomfortable watching Oppenheimer? Good! Movies aren’t all righteous in their cause, and our protagonists aren’t all good people, especially with historical fiction like this film. More than that, movies shouldn’t all be righteous in their cause. You should be uncomfortable when faced with certain ideas and facts, that’s the only way conversation occurs and we actually enrich our minds and understand our world better. I’ll never forget what my high school choir teacher briefed us on the song ‘Matthew’ by Janis Ian that we would be singing at our shows and competitions for the year, and across venues on our European tour that summer; it’s a song about the murder of Matthew Shepard. My teacher told us that if the song made us uncomfortable, made us feel unpleasant, then good. He said we want to confront that discomfort so that our audiences can do the same. There is nothing easy or comfortable about a violent hate crime resulting in the murder of a young gay man, the same way there is nothing comfortable about the story of a morally gray scientist whose work resulted in the creation of a weapon that would go on to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people directly, let alone the many more affected by radiation. And that’s only the physical affects. No one watching Oppenheimer is supposed to exit the movie thinking he’s a swell guy. Frankly, I don’t know if he even thought of himself as one after the bomb. As the audience, we’re supposed to take in what the film shows us: that he was an incredibly complex person, perhaps much more bad than good if we want to use binaries. Displaying his psyche and perspective doesn’t invalidate the reality of the situation or portray the United States or its foreign policy as a positive. It just shows us the complexity of the situation at hand, to add to the truth of the historical narratives we already know. It just shows us a portrait of a man we maybe didn’t know much about prior to seeing the film.

In a more just world, there would be more mainstream films delving into topics like the United States’ treatment of its Indigenous peoples, especially during wartime. There would be more star-studded movies about the atrocities committed by this country and other colonizing forces in the name of peace or power. There should be more, but that doesn’t discount what’s already there. Grave of the Fireflies specifically deals with the bombing of Kobe in World War II. Rashoman is popularly seen as being allegorical to the atomic bomb. While not focused on New Mexico, Wind River tells the based-in-truth story of a murder on an Indigenous reservation in Wyoming. Martin Scorsese’s upcoming film Killers of the Flower Moon is focused on the crime and greed perpetrated by white settlers that sprung up in Osage Nation after a huge amount of oil was discovered there. I’m not saying these films are replacements for Oppenheimer, I’m not saying they provide the other perspectives that are being asked for in this specific historical event, and I’m not saying there’s no need for more films in this same sphere. I am saying that there are a lot of films that do exist, that do talk about the things that the person who posted that tweet wants to discuss, at least in some way. Oppenheimer is equally allowed to exist, if not for everything I’ve said in this post, then for a simple idea — this is a film told from a very specific, narrow perspective: Oppenheimer’s. If there is no note of the atrocities committed on Indigenous land, to Indigenous people, if there is little acknowledgement of the innocent people murdered in Japan, it is because Oppenheimer himself was not thinking of that. All he was focused on was building his bomb. Of pushing physics to a place it had never been, regardless of the consequences. And isn’t that the horrific enough? ⬥