‘Oppenheimer’ is a disappointment − and a lost opportunity
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March 08, 2024
Naoko Wake, Professor of History, Michigan State University -
The Conversation
With 13 Oscar nominations, all signs point to “Oppenheimer” as the star of the 96th Academy Awards.
Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster about the making of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has already garnered all kinds of accolades – five Golden Globes and seven BAFTA awards, not to mention a sterling 93% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
This narrative has long informed how Hollywood and the U.S. media have addressed nuclear weapons. It paints the bombs’ creation as a morally fraught but necessary project – an extraordinary invention by exceptional minds, a national project that was a matter of life or death for a country mired in a global conflict. To use the bombs was a difficult decision at a challenging time. Yet it’s important to remember that, above all, the bombs saved democracy.
There is something that strikes me as so inward-looking to this narrative – it is so focused on the stress over losing an arms race, on fears of making a mistake, on anxiety over what would happen if bombs were to one day be dropped on the U.S. – that it drowns out what actually did happen after the bombs were detonated.
A barren cultural landscape
When Nolan was pressed over why he chose not to show any images of Hiroshima, Nagasaki or the victims, he said, “less can be more” – that the subtext of what’s not shown is even more powerful, since it forces audiences to use their imaginations.
But what images from popular culture do audiences even have to pull from?
From the 1950s to the 1980s, many Hollywood films explored the fear of a nuclear apocalypse. Only a few depicted mass deaths on the ground – “The Day After” comes to mind – but virtually none showed survivors who looked or sounded like real survivors.
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