Chekov's Bomb
Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer: unexploded device
The other night, I did my part as an American, saw Oppenheimer at the cinema, and walked out feeling like a philistine. (Damn high-tone, talky picture show, three hours long and no bang for your buck.) Once I remembered that I write film criticism and live on planet Earth, this still felt about right.
Early in its second act, Christopher Nolan’s drama about J. Robert Oppenheimer, architect of the atom bomb, delivers the Los Alamos nuclear money-shot so artfully, abstractly, and “inventively,” that you soon forget this is a story that includes the detonation of an atomic bomb.
This, a symptom of Hollywood’s “intellectual” side, feels close to malpractice here. We all live in the shadow of the events that this film subsumes into quirky-brainiac portraiture (A Beautiful Mind, Theory of Everything) crossed with product-launch narrative (Jobs, Air, Ford Vs. Ferrari, complete with a role for Matt Damon). If the argument for eliding a presentation of the actual world-ending force at the center of this tale is that moviemaking quails before such a spectacle, see what David Lynch managed on a small-screen in the famous episode 8 of “Twin Peaks”’ third season. And ostensibly, Oppenheimer is a movie.
When Inception opened in the wake of Enter the Void, by Gaspar Noe, the two films provided a telling contrast in ambitious feats of sensory overload. In Enter the Void, Noe, an auteur of so-called “New French extremity,” threw absolutely everything he had at a psychedelic epic of a soul’s migration, enacting a POV plunge into the lurid, druggy consciousness of a drifter club-kid in the margins of Tokyo nightlife who gets shot to death and enters the Bardo. When I interviewed him at the time, Noe struck me as a wild-man zealot of cinema, educated at École nationale supérieure Louis-Lumière, obsessed with cinematographic innovation, who’d wanted to make this film ever since he watched 1946’s first-person POV Lady of the Lake on mushrooms. A messy, visceral, dazzling art film, literally about life and death, Enter the Void had what art critic Clement Greenberg would call “medium specificity”: a work aligned with all the qualities that make its medium unique.
With Inception, Nolan tapped far greater resources for his dream-weaver conceit, filling the screen with all the latest bells and whistles—cantilevered cities, imploding hydraulic sets, vast baroque surfaces rendered by a small nation animators—and delivered a hinky corporate espionage caper about high-priced dream invaders. A James Bond action thriller whose trailer began with DiCaprio intoning the Nolanism: “What is the most resilient parasite? An idea.”
Right. An idea.
This version of thinking, and lack of feeling, undermines most of Nolan’s gee-whiz sci-fi fantasy corpus, whose films evaporate the second the images fade from your retina. When he passed the point of diminishing returns with the frictionless, pointless Tenet, my guess is the director looked back to the relative success of Dunkirk and began scrolling through Greatest Generation stories, landing on one he deemed worthy of his imperial might.
I saw Oppenheimer a regular multiplex—that is, a jacked-up, Dolby-ed out, huge-blast-radius modern cinema—really hoping for some kind of transcendent, or at least memorable, vision. But an hour in, I was just wondering what possible benefit there’d be in springing for the IMAX version. To see Cillian Murphy’s gimlet-eyed, wax-carved face fill a six-story screen? To feel the stilted dialogue in sub-bass 44-speaker sound? To follow the sotto voce disclosures, subcommittee speechifying, and meaningful scowls of saturnine, baggy-pantsed WASPs as they convene for the tiresome bits of political intrigue by which the framing device eats up the story?
The long, talky-talky sections might not have been so disagreeable if the characters exerted their own gravitational pull. But by the third or fourth monologue, I found myself wondering how much time Nolan ever spent around a place like MIT or Berkeley’s LeConte Hall. Obviously, no one would sit through five minutes of a film with quantum physicists looking and talking like quantum physicists, but aside from Cillian Murphy’s eerily compressed (and bizarrely Robin Williams-sounding) performance, this array of whimsical, rumpled Nobelists came off like decadent poets or a spectrum-y Ocean’s 11. And somehow, against the backdrop of a war against fascism and the birth of apocalypse tech, the real stakes of this film are whether Shiva the God of Death keeps his security clearance.
I realize this film is based on a long, important Oppenheimer book I’ll likely never read. But even a 19th-century dramaturge would be puzzled by its decision to effectively leave the first-act gun on the mantle. Maybe John Adams correctly perceived opera as this story’s proper medium. But if a dark cathedral with surround sound isn’t a site for shock and awe, and if this isn’t the subject to bring it, the term “movie” needs reclaiming, urgently.
Why now, Norris?
For 20 years, I made my living writing cultural criticism and reportage, a habit that’s still with me after the outlets largely imploded. I’m launching this because I miss big movies with big ideas, it-books that are fun to read, only bands that matter, and non-binary criticism. I miss creatively engaging with art, artists, and products that move me—and with you all—and don’t have it in me to mount a days-long, sizzle-reel charm offensive to an overworked editor to get 500 words greenly.
Who cares?
Maybe you read Spin in the mid-'90s to mid-‘00s, when I was writing a lot of its cover stories and dark heartland features. Maybe you caught some of my work in The New Yorker, New York, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Film Comment, Mens Journal, and GQ, or NPR's "All Things Considered. Maybe you thought, ‘Good point!’ “What a nut!’ or ‘My, who’s that fascinating so-and-so?’ Maybe you read RZA’s The Tao of Wu and (for some reason) wondered about its co-author. Maybe you’re trying to raise a kid in a city like New York and seek commiseration. Maybe we get each other.
How often
I figure I’m good for one of these a week, if you’re interested. Let’s figure it out together.
