What would Robert Oppenheimer say about 'Oppenheimer', the movie?

Watching Oppenheimer is an unsettling experience. The movie is great, yet it fails to deliver its own message. And the message – recurring like a nightmare throughout the film, and most importantly coming from the fictional (and real) J. Robert Oppenheimer himself, is the following: The glory of the Manhattan Project wasn’t worth it. Dropping bombs on foreign civilians was the end, not the beginning of American glory, and a profoundly demoralizing experience for the whole world.

But even though director Christopher Nolan seems to understand what the historic figures he is trying to bring to life were trying to say, he couldn’t resist the admiration of a cinematographer for the “big boom” of Aug. 6, 1945. And that of Aug. 9, 1945. Explosions are what Hollywood likes best.

A conversation with Oppenheimer’s grandson, Charles Oppenheimer, who has been leading the Oppenheimer Family Foundation since 2018, only deepened my sense of uneasiness. The meeting was organized by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, the largest nongovernmental organization dedicated to training specialists in combating the spread of weapons of mass destruction. A group of diplomats and students joined him at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies on Sept. 25.

“Now it takes Hollywood to spark people’s interest.”

People wanted to know if the Oppenheimer family had any control over the movie (it didn’t), had he met Cillian Murphy (he did) and will he get any money from the movie (he won’t).

“I was prepared to hate it,” Oppenheimer says about the movie. “But I generally liked it. One thing that was missing from the film was Robert’s schooling experience between age 7 and 17.”

Charles emphasized on the role of his grandfather’s environment back then – well-educated, secular Jews in New York, who very much cared about international affairs. It was solid education in the 1920s and ’30s, Oppenheimer claims, that brought up people like his grandfather, who then thrived in mathematics and quantum physics.

“Now it takes Hollywood to spark people’s interest,” Oppenheimer says, not without irony, wondering aloud if the foundation should be taking politicians and other public figures to see Oppenheimer to make them understand global nuclear danger that hardly passed with the Cold War. Sadly, Hollywood seems to act faster and have a broader reach than a U.N. committee.

“What Nolan did was he created an opportunity to talk about a subject dear to us,” Oppenheimer says. That subject is nonproliferation. Charles’ father, Peter Oppenheimer, was a staunch pacifist, who learned the lesson from his father.

However – in the times when we use Hollywood productions as history textbooks and ethics education – it’s important to understand how the world of the movie plot works. For example, the famous poisoned apple that Oppenheimer supposedly left for one of his professors stems from nothing but an unconfirmed anecdote that will, sadly, now enter the historical record.

Agata Popęda is a staff writer at the Weekly.