Having now read the book that Christopher Nolan's
Oppenheimer is based on, one of the most intense parts of that whole read is the trial the
took place surrounding the atomic bomb's creator.
The trial of Oppenheimer by Lewis Strauss and the prosecution reflected the most humiliating
and tough period of Oppenheimer's life and it was an extension of McCarthyism
at the time, where alleged communists would be campaigned against and attacked heavily.
These moments in the film are going to be shown using black and white IMAX photography
and Nolan has made a big deal out of capturing these
moments intimately using a big scale format.
So having read both the book and knowing what Nolan has said about filming the black and
white sequences, I'm going to be discussing how
he might adapt the trial to the big screen.
This video continues my Road To Oppenheimer series, where I'm posting essays and topical
videos on the Oppenheimer film and the American prometheus
book that it's based on.
There will be spoilers, so if you haven't read the book or want to go into the film
as blind as possible, then I'd recommend watching this video at a later
time.
Before I get into it though, if you want to keep up to date on any of my content surrounding
Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, then don't forget to support this upload by giving
it a like rating, subscribing to the channel and turning on your notifications.
But without further a do, lets dive into the trial scenes
from Oppenheimer.
So the Oppenheimer hearings were known as a trial, because the influencial figure was
put through an excruciating ordeal, one that interogated much of the work he had done for
the government and the things he protested against
afterwards.
On one side Oppenheimer had been accused of feeding information to the soviets having
had ties to communism through friends or family previously connected to the party.
Communism had changed over the time since Oppenheimer had connections and both his stance
on it and how he used his connections to provide money
for causes ended up coming back to haunt him.
One particular moment was the Chevalier problem, a dinner with his friend where he had aparently
been asked to share information with the soviets.
He declined but the ambiguity surrounding that and how it was heightened by an FBI interview
years later made the suspition surrounding his connections to the party even more
prominent.
What came after this would become even more troubling though.
After the experience of hiroshima and the Government's push towards developing more
bombs, Oppenheimer was against the development and use of a hydrogen
bomb and he believed that it was outrageous that that the government could go that far
with creating an even more powerful weapon of
destruction.
But to others, including the government and AEC member Lewis Strauss, who is played by
Robert Downey Jr in Nolan's latest film, Oppenheimer's outlook on this was too soft on
communism.
So these main reasons were behind the attack on Oppenheimer himself and it gave his enemies
more power to remove him from his position.
And combining them with the hysteria surrounding McCarthism, Oppenheimer was a
prime victim in all of those centered campaigns.
So what happened in the trial and what did this mean for J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Well at the end of 1953, a letter had been sent to the director of the FBI, J. Edgar
Hoover, claiming that Oppenheimer was a Soviet spy.
And during this pariod of McCarthism, all it took were weak allegations or witch
hunts to bring the forces down upon the accused.
The FBI director showed the letter to President Eisenhower, who then ordered that his
security clearance be held until an investigation be undertaken by a Security Board.
And again while they were known as hearings, this actually turned out to be grueling trial.
It was behind closed doors, the prosecution had access
to all the transcripts and incriminating info that was in that mentioned letter, and Oppenheimer's
lawyers had no access to a lot of it.
They weren't allowed to see this information because it was deemed classified, a matter
of national security and it so happened that a lot of it was based of wiretaps that the
FBI had used on Oppenheimer throughout the many years
during the bomb project and outside of it.
On top of this, much of the evidence used against him came from unnamed individuals,
and because the hearings weren't in a courthouse they
could get away with a lot of the convictions.
So right from the get-go, Oppenheimer was doomed in this trial and his enemies, including
that of Lewis Strauss and his lawyers, were going
about these hearings with methods that shouldn't have been allowed in the first place.
Before the trial even began, Albert Einstein told
Oppenheimer that he's a fool to even accept challenging his charges, because the US government
had already made up their mind.
And he wasn't wrong because years earlier President
Truman, who I suspect is being played by Gary Oldman in the film, deemed Oppenheimer a cry
baby scientist in his efforts to decellerate the development of more bombs.
While the hearings were supposedly intended to examine whether Oppie had any connections
to communism and were supposed to be using incriminating evidence, they become primarily
focussed on destroying him personally.
They centred on his past associations in a time where communism was quite different.
They focused on the affair he had with Jean Tatlock, and her
relations to communism.
They focused on the troubled information surrounding the Chevalier affair, a moment that didn't
provide all the precise details needed to claim that this man was
guilty of sharing information with the soviets.
And they focused on his stance towards the H bomb after the bomb project, one that to
us and many others would appear reasonable given the
history of the atomic bomb's destruction.
What we know is that his opinion wasn't a result of commiting a treasonous act for russia,
but rather the process of trying to halt their unstable decisions in an arms race.
It was his fear towards global destruction and also the fact that it went against the
idea of more openess in the world, something that the book
really goes into well.
Oppenheimer believed that the US goverment should be open with Russia and other nations
so that we could limit the destructive implications of the future
surrounding the weapon.
By not being open, and accelerating the nuclear arms race, things would only get more tense.
And when we look at what's happening today, that point turned out to
be very true.
During the trial, much of the scientific community came to Oppenheimer's defence, but one of
the main scientists who didn't was Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen
bomb, who was against Oppenheimer's outlook on the H-Bomb's future.
The rest of Oppie's fellow scientific freinds and workers on the bomb project, including
General Groves, came to defend a man who had inspired and motivated
them in Los Alamos.
While Oppenheimer's friends and defendants were truthful and powerful in what they said
about the man they trusted, the prosecutors still found ways to swing the trial in the
opposite direction.
In claiming that Oppenheimer had not been clear about his communist past, they primarily
used the Chevalier dinner in 1943 to bring him down.
When he had dinner that night with his friend from Berkeley, Chevalier had
apparently tried to convince Oppenheimer to give information to the Soviets about the
bomb project.
Oppenheimer refused, but he had also refused to give specific details about the
incident afterwards, including Chevalier's name a year later.
This was because he was protecting a friend, but to others it looked like he was
hiding communist connections.
So even after Oppenheimer, his wife and friends tried to explain that very point, he was still
destroyed and humiliated by the prosecution.
The hearings came to an end and the Security Board voted
against him in regaining his clearance.
And while their report summarised that there was no evidence that Oppenheimer was a member
of the Communist Party, they put it down to bad judgment,
destroying the reputation of a man who had done so much for them.
We learn throughout the pages of American Prometheus that he was the
time of person to make rash decisions when he was put under pressure and all the interrogation
surrounding the chevalier affair, his time with Jean Tatlock, his stance on the Hydrogen
bomb and their limited access to the information surrounding this, made it almost impossible
for him to overule the claims of these hearings.
The result was passed on to the Atomic Energy Commision, and they voted four to one
against Oppenheimer, with Lewis Strauss making influencial moves close to other voters.
They said that Oppenheimer was to be denied future
security clearance due to the proof of fundamental defects in his character.
In reaction to all of this humiliation, Oppenheimer soon took his family on vacation to their
house in the Virgin Islands and when he came back to the Institute for Advanced Study,
his opponents, including Strauss, tried to stop
the school from renewing his position as its director.
They failed, and while he did step down years later, the world had already changed and
many looked back at the trials with disgust that a man who did so much for his country
had so much bad done to him.
Indeed, his entire life was full of many contradictions, and the trial
summed those up in a more humiliating fashion.
Oppenheimer led the greatest experimental mission of the last century but he also became
responsible for a new era of war.
He tried his upmost to convince the government to slow
down on the arms race and have more openess, but the path of destruction had already been
set.
Oppenheimer built his career and rose to fame after the development of the Atomic Bomb,
but then his career was destroyed by the construction of an even more powerful one.
The man who was trusted to keep the world's greatest secret
and held the fate of the world, became the one who wasn't trusted and was cast aside
by a troubled government.
Of course, McCarthism died out and the government was embarrassed by their
past treatment of Oppenheimer, and in time, they offered him the Enrico Fermi Award for
the excellence that he did inspire.
It was too late and Oppenheimer didn't fully recover from the
ordeal he experienced and the effect that had on his relationships and family life.
He died of throat cancer on February 18th, 1967.
Today we see the impact that Oppenheimer had not just
on US but the world, and his strive for an open one is a path that could have been taken
post the atomic bomb's development.
The US didn't go down that route and it has led to the world
we see today in which there are increasing fears towards a future nuclear war and a stronger
desire amongst nations to keep heightened secrecy.
The trial only reflected the hysteria of that period even more and it's a decisive
moment in Oppenheimer's life and even the world, that really speaks to where things
have gone today.
Both with the matters of security and with the world's outlook towards openess.
So how will Christopher Nolan bring that trial to life on the big screen.
Well, what we do know about the trial sequences is that they are going to be shown in black
and white, and are going to be intercutting throughout the film
with the colour sequences.
Those colour scenes will be focused on the Atomic Bomb's development and will be focused
on a subjective first person telling of those events.
On the flip side, the trial scenes will be shown through an objective lens, so we will
essentially see the events in Oppenheimer's hearing as they
unfolded, detailing the many transcripts that are available.
While his life was told in broad strokes in the American Prometheus book and in many other
novels, the trial had a lot more accuracy due to the transcripts being available,
so Nolan actually has all the material to work with for them.
Based on my read of the book, the hearing is mostly at the end of the novel
as it happened in real life.
But if Nolan is intercutting it throughout, then he's essentually using these moments
that took place later on to guide the story, shifting between the
humiliation of the man vs what actually happened from his perspective.
So the subjective colour will detail Oppenheimer's perspective, while the objective trial scenes
will essentially show his downfall from the perspective of
someone else.
Nolan said in a recent interview, "I knew that I had two timelines that we were running
in the film.
One is in colour, and that’s Oppenheimer’s subjective experience.
That’s the bulk of the film.
Then the other is a black and white timeline.
It’s a more objective view of his story from a different character’s
point of view."
So if I had to guess I'd say that we see this mostly from Lewis Strauss's perspective, as
he has been included in a lot of those black and white scenes in the story.
And to understand Oppenheimer's story better and
what he was up against, that's probabaly is the right way to go.
I think this can be a really powerful way of telling the story and it does
also mix it up from other biopics that we've seen in the past.
Of course, Nolan loves to do that with every genre of film he approaches and he uses time
both as a narrative and a structural tool in many projects.
And when thinking about the particular case of Oppenheimer, it's definitely a more powerful
storytelling choice than it is a filmmaking one.
So overall, reflecting on the central themes of the book
and Oppenheimer's story, I think the trial scenes can really guide us through the 45
years of Oppenheimer onscreen, providing us with a
greater sense of fluidity to the questions we have throughout the narrative.
It will make us question the idea of trust and whether the world can really be as open
as Oppenheimer hopes it can be.
And the unique usage of big scale filmmaking to capture more intimate close ups and moments
of dialogue in these hearings, could really do things that no other biopic has
captured technically before.
But that was my video discussing the trial scenes from Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer.
Like I said, the hearings are some of the most intense moments from the American Prometheus
book and I think translated to screen, these moments
can have a lot of storytelling power throughout the course of the 3 hour runtime.
On one side they can be game changing for IMAX
filmmaking, utilising new black and white cameras that have been designed to capture
more of the intimacy of a performance with better dialogue.
And on the other side they can act as a hugely decisive moment in the overall story,
making us see just how far Lewis Strauss, the FBI and others went to bring down the
Atomic Bomb's creator.
I can't wait to see what Nolan does with these moments and specifically how
he intercuts them throughout the film's colour scenes.
But to those who have read the book or know even more about the details surrounding
the Oppenheimer hearings, how do you think Nolan will go about bringing it to the big
screen.
Let me know down below in the comments section, and stay tuned for more video essays and
topical videos in my Road to Oppenheimer series.
For much more videos and news on Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, then subscribe to the
channel and turn on your notifications.
Also if you enjoyed this video remember to leave a like
rating and follow me on social media via the links in the description.
But anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed it, I've been Cortex and as always make some noise.