Oppenheimer undoes decades of American denial
Of the many details worth returning to in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, one of the most striking comes only after learning how the film was made. In what might be the movie’s most harrowing scene, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) delivers a victory speech to the assembled scientists of the Manhattan Project after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While Oppenheimer gives a jingoistic speech to rapturous applause, Nolan depicts the physicist to be in internal anguish, as visions of destruction warp his perception of the event.
Oppenheimer imagines the nuclear flash blinding the crowd, as the rumble of their stamping feet (an auditory motif heard throughout the film before we finally see where it comes from two hours later) gives way to the shockwave of atomic devastation, and a young woman pleads to Oppenheimer as her face peels away in the radioactive fallout.
The scene is nightmarish on its own, but it has one final emotional wound to give: That woman is Flora Nolan, the director’s daughter. In an interview with Vulture, Nolan, a middle-aged father of four who lived through the latter years of the Cold War, notes another of his children was initially dismissive of a movie about the atomic bomb.
“‘No one really worries anymore about nuclear weapons and war,’” he recounts his child telling him. “To which my response was, ‘Well, maybe they should.’”
Nolan is sympathetic to the younger generation’s indifference. Earlier in the interview, he talks about how the culture can only really handle one apocalypse at a time, and it’s not like we’re lacking in doomsdays to choose from. So how does one make people reconsider a doom they’ve moved on from? By making it personal.
He puts his daughter in the frame, and
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