Was J. Robert Oppenheimer plagued by guilt for his role in creating the atomic bomb?
Or did he ultimately see himself as a hero for his scientific achievements?
The ending of "Oppenheimer" attempts to answer these questions, and many more.
There are a number of primary threads that weave their way through "Oppenheimer."
First and foremost is the Manhattan Project, but that arc doesn't begin until the middle
act.
The first hour primarily concerns Oppenheimer's early years, including the beginning of his
time at UC Berkeley.
Before he's recruited to build the bomb, he becomes involved in a number of leftist political
organizations.
These are later held over his head as both leverage and the weight with which rival Lewis
Strauss attempts to sink him.
The rest of the film follows the development of the A-bomb, which sees Oppenheimer drift
ever further from the morals that once guided him.
After the war, he seems a shell of his former self, and is made an enemy by his own government.
The final act of "Oppenheimer" truly starts after the Trinity test.
Every moment before builds up to the first A-bomb detonation.
It’s the inescapable event around which the whole movie revolves, and everything that
happens afterwards is in response to the weapon’s creation.
Early on in the construction of the Los Alamos facility, Oppenheimer’s close friend and
colleague Isidor Isaac Rabi objects to the project of building a bomb, telling him that
the military is only using the scientists as tools.
“They need us,” Oppenheimer tells him.
“Until they don’t,” Rabi replies.
As soon as the successful Trinity test is over, we see just how right he was.
General Leslie Groves, who up until this point has been one of Oppenheimer’s strongest
supporters, quickly brushes him off.
He promises to keep the director updated on plans to use the bomb against Japan, but his
cavalier tone lays bare the emptiness in his words.
Later, after the horrific bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer makes an appointment
with President Harry S. Truman.
"Truman needs to know what's next?"
"What's next?"
In the meeting with the president, Oppenheimer argues for heavy international regulation
and strict bans on further atomic weapons use.
Truman laughs him off, sends him away, and calls him a crybaby.
After the end of World War II, “Oppenheimer” shifts focus for its final act.
Lewis Strauss becomes a primary villain of sorts, as it’s revealed that he orchestrated
the farcical hearings to revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance.
Because so much of the film is spent on the Manhattan Project itself, we don’t get as
much time developing the relationship between the two men.
Early on, we see how Strauss courts Oppenheimer to chair the Institute for Advanced Study
at Princeton after the war.
We also see Oppenheimer embarrass him on several occasions, generally related to his opposition
to the H-bomb, of which Strauss is a huge proponent.
Though his efforts to sweep Oppenheimer off of the political stage are successful, Strauss
is later punished when he's denied a cabinet appointment.
What’s the purpose of Strauss’s story in the larger scope of the film?
Aside from being the man who made it his mission to destroy Oppenheimer, Strauss represents
an opposite kind of historical figure.
He wishes to be remembered for his impact on the world, and is obsessed with how others
view him.
Oppenheimer, by contrast, is made famous whether he likes it or not.
His actions immortalize him as a hero to some and a villain to many others.
Strauss never achieves that level of infamy, though in a twisted way, he wants it.
The security hearings that stripped Oppenheimer of his reputation play an important role in
the film.
One of the earliest scenes shows Oppenheimer reading a statement to the assembled review
board, even though he knows it won't go over well.
As Rabi tells him, it’s a kangaroo court, but Oppenheimer still fights hard to preserve
his name.
It’s not technically a trial, but the effect is the same.
And while the U.S. government puts Oppenheimer on the stand against accusations of communist
sympathizing and anti-American activity, the film puts him on trial for much larger issues.
So how are people today to judge him?
Perhaps he’s right that someone else inevitably would have built the bomb had he not, but
his repeated claims of not being responsible for how it’s used ring hollow.
Oppenheimer tells Truman that he has blood on his hands, and he does — quite a bit
in fact.
During the hearings, his wife Kitty says that history will never forgive him, whether or
not he lets himself be tarred and feathered.
Despite his progressive political leanings, his support for organized labor, and his persistent
pushes to stop nuclear development after the war, Oppenheimer cannot be cleared of the
crimes his work allowed.
"I don't know if we can be trusted with such a weapon."
The Lewis Strauss plotline ends in pretty dramatic fashion, with his cabinet nomination
officially getting blocked, thanks in part to a vote from a young John F. Kennedy.
An unnamed political aide, puts a bullet on the Strauss arc with a line that calls out
the villainous character’s enormous ego.
After hearing of his rejection, Strauss puts the blame on Oppenheimer, stating that he
turned the scientific community against him.
According to Strauss, it all started when Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein had a conversation
about him by a pond at Princeton.
As the aide points out though, Strauss has no way of knowing that the new physicists
were speaking about him.
Perhaps, he suggests, they were discussing “something more important.”
In the film’s final scene, we learn that Einstein and Oppenheimer were indeed talking
about much larger issues.
Strauss’s self-obsession is reflective of one of the movie’s main ideas — that men
who aspire to be “great” often disregard the greater ramifications of their actions.
There’s a distinction between Einstein and Oppenheimer, both of whom carry a level of
intense regret for their successes, and Strauss, who only cares about being on the cover of
Time.
During the final moments of “Oppenheimer,” we get a glimpse of the physicist’s twilight
years.
In 1963, he receives the Enrico Fermi Award from the President of the United States, signifying
a rehabilitation of his national image in the annals of history.
Still, it’s a hollow moment.
In their conversation by the pond, Einstein predicts that Oppenheimer will receive an
award for his work.
However, he also says that it won’t really be for Oppenheimer, but for the people who
give it to him.
Such is the reward for great men who yield terrible consequences, Einstein tells him.
In the wake of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, Oppenheimer is plagued by guilt.
This is one area where the movie takes a fair share of creative license with the real Oppenheimer’s
life.
We know from his work that he opposed the use of atomic weapons after the war, as well
as the development of even more deadly weapons like the hydrogen bomb.
However, it's impossible to know whether or not he was truly stricken in the way depicted
in the movie.
But in Nolan’s version, Oppenheimer begins to have horrifying visions immediately after
the end of the war.
His speech to the other scientists at Los Alamos, in which he claims that his only regret
is that the bomb wasn’t finished in time to be used against the Nazis, did happen.
"It's about unleashing the strong force before the Nazis do."
In the movie, this becomes a loaded claim, as Oppenheimer seems far less confident in
the way the weapon was used against Japan.
His conviction is largely based on the necessity of beating Hitler to the superweapon.
However, without that concrete enemy he seems lost.
During his Los Alamos speech, Oppenheimer begins to experience hellish visions of the
end of the world.
He sees flashes of white light that mirror the explosion at the Trinity test, followed
by grotesque shots of the skin peeling off of the assembled scientists.
Outside, he sees a couple cowering in fear, and a young man vomiting uncontrollably on
the ground.
It’s the film’s way of showing a tiny portion of the atrocities committed by the
U.S. against Japan, imagined through Oppenheimer’s perfect knowledge of the weapon and channeled
through his own corner of the world.
In the film, years pass, but the visions don’t stop.
Oppenheimer is plagued by dreams of fire engulfing the Earth, which punctuate every act of the
film as grim reminders of what he’s wrought.
Then, at the very end, we get an even more vivid vision of the future — one that hasn’t
actually come to pass.
Chatting with Einstein by the pond, Oppenheimer sees the intercontinental ballistic missiles
that later grow out of his creation.
He imagines himself in the cockpit of an airplane, watching the sky as nuclear warheads blaze
by overhead.
A patch of peaceful, sunny cloud cover is shattered by countless rockets launching.
From orbit, we see the very atmosphere of the Earth catching fire.
Thankfully, this nightmare hasn’t come to pass in the real world.
But even in a post-Cold War age, the threat remains.
In his conversation with Einstein by the pond, Oppenheimer lays bare his guilt.
The older scientist tells him that he’ll spend the rest of his life grappling with
the consequences of his achievements.
Accomplishment means nothing when the thing you’ve accomplished is a nightmare, the
movie seems to say.
Though Oppenheimer completed everything he set out to do at Los Alamos, the conviction
that initially compels him has turned hollow by the time the bomb is dropped.
In this moment, it’s easy to reflect on his earlier scenes.
His first class taught at UC Berkeley to only one student stands out.
Despite a practically empty classroom, Oppenheimer is filled with excited energy.
He talks about light, space, and his black hole theories.
He talks about the magic of quantum physics, and there’s a genuine joy in his voice.
What would have become of him if he had instead stayed in that field of study?
What if he had continued his labor organizing and focused solely on quantum theory, leaving
the Manhattan Project to others?
When he signs on, he believes it’s a necessary evil to defeat Germany, but that turns out
not to be true.
By then, though, he believes he’s too far gone.
He can’t go back to the classroom in the same way.
So he chooses to see his “achievement” through to its conclusion, murderous though
it may be.
Throughout its entirety, “Oppenheimer” keeps coming back to the idea of chain reactions.
It’s the core principle that makes nuclear weapons work, and it’s the final note of
the final scene.
While speaking with Einstein, Oppenheimer recalls making calculations that led him to
believe that an atomic detonation might set the entire planet on fire.
Though this proved to be wrong, he believes that they still started a chain reaction that
will destroy the world.
The whole movie is filmed like a chain reaction, with fragmented scenes spliced in between
each other, constantly rolling from one thing to the next with no breaks.
It’s a cascading series of events that no one, viewer or character, can stop.
After successfully building the bomb, Oppenheimer can't turn back the clock.
Physics takes over, leaving him with the weight of what he’s done.
"Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."
In time, this chain reaction blows back on him, leading to the security hearings and
the revocation of his government clearance.
His wife is forced to hear the ugly details of his affairs, and though she stands by him,
their relationship is deeply scarred.
The A-bomb begets the H-bomb, which leads to an ongoing wave of world-ending weapons.
What we’re left with at the end of “Oppenheimer” is a full portrait of a man.
He loves literature, language, and art.
Is he a communist?
According to him, only sort of, though he opposes fascism on all fronts and donates
to numerous left-leaning causes.
He’s a father, but not a good one, by his own admission.
He’s an excellent scientist.
From a certain angle, however, he may be the worst of them all.
By the end, Oppenheimer is fully aware that he’s anything but a hero, and that he may
not even be deserving of pity.
And yet, he knows that history is anything but concrete.
Alfred Nobel created dynamite, he reminds us, but is remembered for his contributions
to learning.
Perhaps the most unsettling thing about “Oppenheimer” is that we still don’t know what his full
legacy will be.