I paid no attention to Christopher Nolan’s movies until I
saw Dunkirk, after which I promised myself I’d never miss another. But I did. For superheroes I give not a shrug. Oppenheimer, however, is worthy of the
writer-director of Dunkirk, though here the epic struggle is moral, which
makes it harder to keep us watching for three hours, even with Baroque-derived
tension music and flashbacks as fast as a chef chopping garlic.
1) Elon
Period movies are not about the past, any more than sci fi
movies are about the future. They are about the present. Here we are watching
our own legend build a village, coordinate his thinkers, engineer his
equipment, fight his society, worship his hero, and change the world.
And we’re watching the director’s generalship. See Napoleon,
below.
2) Communism
This is our issue even as it was the post-war world’s, and
Mr. Nolan’s script is very very very careful where it puts its feet on
that. Many among us (not me, of course, I’m a nice guy) would welcome a Joe
McCarthy, who is dismissed in the film as a “self-promoter.”
3) Time out for anachronisms
But why on earth spend a hundred million dollars to recreate
a period and then poison it with twenty-first-century jargon? “Self-promoter”?
“Weapon of mass destruction”? “They need us,” says Oppie, to which Alvarez,
“Until they don’t.” Farewell, illusion. See below the remarks on Carol.
4) Back to communism
It is clear to your reporter that no matter how
self-promoting McCarthy was, the film yearns for such a deliverer. Would James Woods executive-produce something
that didn’t lean away from the left? It handles communism by putting its
feet everywhere, making otherwise sympathetic characters enthusiastic Marxists (“smiling the serene smile of perfect socialism,” as Nabokov puts it), and by portraying that, quite accurately, as a matter of zeitgeist.
In the thirties communism was in style. “Fellow travelers” were everywhere, and students and other fanatics went so far
as to join the party and become, to use McCarthy's phrase, “card-carrying members,” just as flower children later endured a wretched
existence on “communes” while the rest of us fellow-travelled.
Future
right-wing Nixon-supporter John Ford made The Grapes of
Wrath: “A fellow ain't got a soul of his own,” says Henry Fonda, “just
little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody.”
Uh-huh.
Macho-man Howard Hawks made my beloved His Girl
Friday. Ros to a guy who shot a cop: “Now look, Earl, when you
found yourself with that gun in your hand, and that policeman coming at you,
what did you think about?...Could it have been ‘production for use’?” “There's
nothing crazy about that, is there?” “Nope. Nothing at all.” “You'll write
about that in your paper, won't you?” “You bet I will.”
And Hemingway joined the fashionistas who supported the
Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, commies, mostly, who slaughtered seven
thousand priests, nuns and monks. (See Hemingway
for Wimps.)
So did Chaplin, whose tramp was a natural symbol for the Revolution. In Modern Times he mocks that idea: Charlie, out of jail and
looking for work, sees a red flag fall from a long load, picks it up, calls to
the driver and follows him, waving the flag as a hundred demonstrators come
around the corner and fall in behind him. Back to jail. In the fifties, on the
other hand, he defined himself as a “peace-monger,” his A King in New York savages McCarthy, and Chaplin had enough trouble with him, and with the FBI, that he moved to Switzerland.
5) Pain and submissionQuick shot of Oppie, a poet and a literary man, reading The
Wasteland, symbol of a dreary present and a drearier future. The kinky “Batter my
heart, three-person'd God” needs a look. Even in his sacred phase Donne never
quite shed his seducer’s mode, and invites God to hit him around:
“Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish
me.”
6) Postmodernism
I don’t disagree with Jordan Peterson about much, but postmodernism was a movement in the arts before it was picked up by
French polemicists jealous of Jean-Luc Godard’s poetry. (Godard reveled in Marxism but poetry is poetry, and his influence, which is how we
measure a poet, on American, British and German filmmakers was enormous.)
The week after Nagasaki, James Agee wrote in Time Magazine:
All thoughts and things were split. The sudden achievement
of victory was a mercy, to the Japanese no less than to the United Nations; but
mercy born of a ruthless force beyond anything in human chronicle. The race had
been won, the weapon had been used by those on whom civilization could best
hope to depend; but the demonstration of power against living creatures instead
of dead matter created a bottomless wound in the living conscience of the race.
The rational mind had won the most Promethean of its conquests over nature, and
had put into the hands of common man the fire and force of the sun itself.
Can you blame us, who tried to follow even those minimal,
tangential, for-public-consumption explanations of nuclear fission and fusion
in Nolan’s movie, for losing faith in reality? (See What
We Know.)
“Semiology,” “deconstructionism,” “self-reflexiveness” (a phrase of the time), and the impossibility of “narrative” (that much-abused word) are
relatively recent weapons in the hands of our French and otherwise sadistic
oppressors. (See The
Marquis de Sade, Father of Modern France.) Long before that, they
characterized the work of distinctly non-leftists Jorge Luis Borges, Alain
Robbe-Grillet and Billy Wilder, for a very few examples.
Wilder found himself
no longer able to tell a story. Sunset Blvd., a semiotic analysis of
Hollywood, almost entirely quotations of one sort or another, is narrated by a murdered screenwriter,
A Portrait of the Artist (so a friend of mine put it) as a Dead Man. There is
nothing in Godard, minus the politics, that is not already in Wilder. Here is his
Holmes:
“Mrs Hudson! Mrs Hudson!” “Yes? What is it? What have
I done now?” “There is something missing from my desk!” “Missing?” “Something
very crucial!” “What?” “Dust! You have been tidying up against my explicit
orders!” “Oh look, I made sure I hadn't disturbed anything.” “Dust, Mrs Hudson,
is an essential part of my filing system. By the thickness of it I can date any
document immediately.” “Well, some of the dust was this thick!” “That
would be March 1883.”
7) A new eraSure, but how new is the mushroom cloud? Whether it’s
boiling oil or radiation dissolving your flesh, war is death and dismemberment.
Always has been. What’s new is that we don’t understand anything. Well, wait a
minute, that’s not exactly new. What’s new is that we used to have
formulae that more or less worked, and now we don’t understand the formulae.
8) Bravo, the actors!
Pretty-boy Cillian Murphy disappears into his role. I was unable enjoy Matt Damon (something hey-let's-play-baseball about him that he seems finally to have dispensed with) until his Lieutenant General Groves. And Robert Downey
shocked me with his power and versatility. (Kenneth Branagh I have still not forgiven for his Hamlet.)
Some didn’t care for Emily Blunt, which seems to
me to be a response to her skillfully performed character. But then, in Oppenheimer
as in Dunkirk, Nolan doesn’t have much time for women, and almost alone now is a maker of films about white men, though I did see a black
physicist in a single Oscar-qualifying shot.
9) The ending
In our intensely political time we suffer
visions of brutality, our own as much as anyone else’s. The online world has
transformed us, like it or not, into a demanding rule-bound collectivity.
The bomb and the internet: Oppie gave us the one, the Cold War gave us the
other.
Toward the end of the film people keep asking him if he knows
the good or the evil he has released upon the world. They accuse him of not
knowing, until knowing becomes the theme of the third act. And though he has a
moment of panic when he tries to warn the president, he doesn’t know. He ends
not knowing.
Excellent.
Robert MacLean is an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a film reviewer, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. No brains, but an intellectual snob.
“Picasso says he’s a communist. Neither am I.”—Salvador Dalí
I paid no attention to Christopher Nolan’s movies until I
saw Dunkirk, after which I promised myself I’d never miss another. But I did. For superheroes I give not a shrug. Oppenheimer, however, is worthy of the
writer-director of Dunkirk, though here the epic struggle is moral, which
makes it harder to keep us watching for three hours, even with Baroque-derived
tension music and flashbacks as fast as a chef chopping garlic.
1) Elon
Period movies are not about the past, any more than sci fi
movies are about the future. They are about the present. Here we are watching
our own legend build a village, coordinate his thinkers, engineer his
equipment, fight his society, worship his hero, and change the world.
And we’re watching the director’s generalship. See Napoleon,
below.
2) Communism
This is our issue even as it was the post-war world’s, and
Mr. Nolan’s script is very very very careful where it puts its feet on
that. Many among us (not me, of course, I’m a nice guy) would welcome a Joe
McCarthy, who is dismissed in the film as a “self-promoter.”
3) Time out for anachronisms
But why on earth spend a hundred million dollars to recreate
a period and then poison it with twenty-first-century jargon? “Self-promoter”?
“Weapon of mass destruction”? “They need us,” says Oppie, to which Alvarez,
“Until they don’t.” Farewell, illusion. See below the remarks on Carol.
4) Back to communism
It is clear to your reporter that no matter how
self-promoting McCarthy was, the film yearns for such a deliverer. Would James Woods executive-produce something
that didn’t lean away from the left? It handles communism by putting its
feet everywhere, making otherwise sympathetic characters enthusiastic Marxists (“smiling the serene smile of perfect socialism,” as Nabokov puts it), and by portraying that, quite accurately, as a matter of zeitgeist.
In the thirties communism was in style. “Fellow travelers” were everywhere, and students and other fanatics went so far
as to join the party and become, to use McCarthy's phrase, “card-carrying members,” just as flower children later endured a wretched
existence on “communes” while the rest of us fellow-travelled.
Future
right-wing Nixon-supporter John Ford made The Grapes of
Wrath: “A fellow ain't got a soul of his own,” says Henry Fonda, “just
little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody.”
Uh-huh.
Macho-man Howard Hawks made my beloved His Girl
Friday. Ros to a guy who shot a cop: “Now look, Earl, when you
found yourself with that gun in your hand, and that policeman coming at you,
what did you think about?...Could it have been ‘production for use’?” “There's
nothing crazy about that, is there?” “Nope. Nothing at all.” “You'll write
about that in your paper, won't you?” “You bet I will.”
And Hemingway joined the fashionistas who supported the
Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, commies, mostly, who slaughtered seven
thousand priests, nuns and monks. (See Hemingway
for Wimps.)
So did Chaplin, whose tramp was a natural symbol for the Revolution. In Modern Times he mocks that idea: Charlie, out of jail and
looking for work, sees a red flag fall from a long load, picks it up, calls to
the driver and follows him, waving the flag as a hundred demonstrators come
around the corner and fall in behind him. Back to jail. In the fifties, on the
other hand, he defined himself as a “peace-monger,” his A King in New York savages McCarthy, and Chaplin had enough trouble with him, and with the FBI, that he moved to Switzerland.
5) Pain and submission
Quick shot of Oppie, a poet and a literary man, reading The
Wasteland, symbol of a dreary present and a drearier future. The kinky “Batter my
heart, three-person'd God” needs a look. Even in his sacred phase Donne never
quite shed his seducer’s mode, and invites God to hit him around:
“Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish
me.”
6) Postmodernism
I don’t disagree with Jordan Peterson about much, but postmodernism was a movement in the arts before it was picked up by
French polemicists jealous of Jean-Luc Godard’s poetry. (Godard reveled in Marxism but poetry is poetry, and his influence, which is how we
measure a poet, on American, British and German filmmakers was enormous.)
The week after Nagasaki, James Agee wrote in Time Magazine:
All thoughts and things were split. The sudden achievement
of victory was a mercy, to the Japanese no less than to the United Nations; but
mercy born of a ruthless force beyond anything in human chronicle. The race had
been won, the weapon had been used by those on whom civilization could best
hope to depend; but the demonstration of power against living creatures instead
of dead matter created a bottomless wound in the living conscience of the race.
The rational mind had won the most Promethean of its conquests over nature, and
had put into the hands of common man the fire and force of the sun itself.
Can you blame us, who tried to follow even those minimal,
tangential, for-public-consumption explanations of nuclear fission and fusion
in Nolan’s movie, for losing faith in reality? (See What
We Know.)
“Semiology,” “deconstructionism,” “self-reflexiveness” (a phrase of the time), and the impossibility of “narrative” (that much-abused word) are
relatively recent weapons in the hands of our French and otherwise sadistic
oppressors. (See The
Marquis de Sade, Father of Modern France.) Long before that, they
characterized the work of distinctly non-leftists Jorge Luis Borges, Alain
Robbe-Grillet and Billy Wilder, for a very few examples.
Wilder found himself
no longer able to tell a story. Sunset Blvd., a semiotic analysis of
Hollywood, almost entirely quotations of one sort or another, is narrated by a murdered screenwriter,
A Portrait of the Artist (so a friend of mine put it) as a Dead Man. There is
nothing in Godard, minus the politics, that is not already in Wilder. Here is his
Holmes:
“Mrs Hudson! Mrs Hudson!”
“Yes? What is it? What have
I done now?”
“There is something missing from my desk!”
“Missing?”
“Something
very crucial!”
“What?”
“Dust! You have been tidying up against my explicit
orders!”
“Oh look, I made sure I hadn't disturbed anything.”
“Dust, Mrs Hudson,
is an essential part of my filing system. By the thickness of it I can date any
document immediately.”
“Well, some of the dust was this thick!”
“That
would be March 1883.”
7) A new era
Sure, but how new is the mushroom cloud? Whether it’s
boiling oil or radiation dissolving your flesh, war is death and dismemberment.
Always has been. What’s new is that we don’t understand anything. Well, wait a
minute, that’s not exactly new. What’s new is that we used to have
formulae that more or less worked, and now we don’t understand the formulae.
8) Bravo, the actors!
Pretty-boy Cillian Murphy disappears into his role. I was unable enjoy Matt Damon (something hey-let's-play-baseball about him that he seems finally to have dispensed with) until his Lieutenant General Groves. And Robert Downey
shocked me with his power and versatility. (Kenneth Branagh I have still not forgiven for his Hamlet.)
Some didn’t care for Emily Blunt, which seems to
me to be a response to her skillfully performed character. But then, in Oppenheimer
as in Dunkirk, Nolan doesn’t have much time for women, and almost alone now is a maker of films about white men, though I did see a black
physicist in a single Oscar-qualifying shot.
9) The ending
In our intensely political time we suffer
visions of brutality, our own as much as anyone else’s. The online world has
transformed us, like it or not, into a demanding rule-bound collectivity.
The bomb and the internet: Oppie gave us the one, the Cold War gave us the
other.
Toward the end of the film people keep asking him if he knows
the good or the evil he has released upon the world. They accuse him of not
knowing, until knowing becomes the theme of the third act. And though he has a
moment of panic when he tries to warn the president, he doesn’t know. He ends
not knowing.
Excellent.
Robert MacLean is an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a film reviewer, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. No brains, but an intellectual snob.
“Picasso says he’s a communist. Neither am I.”—Salvador Dalí
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