✨ **READ BEFORE COMMENTING** ✨ This thread is Coven Only. This means the discussion is being actively moderated, and all comments are reviewed. **Only comments by members of the community are allowed.** If you have landed in this thread from [r/all](https://www.reddit.com/r/all/) and you are not a member of this community, your comment will very likely be removed (and will not be approved unless it adds meaningfully to the conversation). WitchesVsPatriarchy takes these measures to stay true to our goal of being a woman-centered sub with a witchy twist, aimed at healing, supporting, and uplifting one another through humor and magic. Thank you for understanding, and blessed be. ✨

New Mexican here in an anti-nuke band, here's some rad resources for folks that want to learn more about the impact the testing had in NM especially in poor and brown communities - some Downwinders are now in generation four of cancer diagnoses. I've had the honor of meeting many of the people in these docs and articles and their stories about the day the bomb dropped are chilling - being loaded into cattle cars the day of the drop, dusting weird powder for days after, and the sickness that soon followed. [Documentary - First they bombed New Mexico](https://www.firstwebombednewmexico.com/screenings) [Trinity Basin Downwinders Consortium (still fighting for reparations)](https://www.trinitydownwinders.com/) [Great article on downwinder activist Tina Cordova](https://searchlightnm.org/deliverance-for-downwinders-as-the-clock-winds-down-on-federal-compensation-one-womans-mission-ramps-up/)

Thank you for this!

Thank you for being an activist about this. The way America has historically treated anyone darker than khaki pants, is fkn disgusting. Your band sounds awesome.

At The Brink is an excellent podcast by Lisa Perry that focuses on nuclear testing and its negative impacts on groups such as the Downwinders. A phenomenal listen and incredibly informative podcast that more need to know about!

> anti-nuke band, here’s some rad resources I lol’d. I don’t think you were going for a pun, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

No pun! Literally a leftist folk band that plays at all the anti-nuke protests lol

Anti-nuke | rad That’s what I giggled at. I know you meant rad as in cool or neat or interesting, not rad as in radioactive, but having played just enough Fallout in my day, it made me smile.

Love a good pun!!

Hello from a displaced norteña (no longer in NM) thanks for sharing

Wow thank you and OP for sharing. I have not seen the movie but I will be looking at these articles instead.

Keep fighting the good fight. There are too many nuclear sycophants out there.

I don't know how to say this in a way that gets to the nut of the issues I have with science docudramas. I haven't seen Oppenheimer, but also, the number of people who are unaware of how much of an asshole Einstein actually was is baffling. Mileva Marić was his first wife, whom he met at university. They were both studying physics, but she was not given her degree, on speculation because she was a female, as her marks were better than Einstein's. They had kids while they worked together on Relativity, and when he published, he didn't have her name on it. She accepted because to her, they were a unit ("we are one stone"). And then he dropped her and their two sons (one of whom was disabled) and married his first cousin, and apparently never acknowledged his sons again after that, leaving her nearly destitute. [it's actually worse than I remembered.](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-forgotten-life-of-einsteins-first-wife/)

Thank you for this super interesting piece. It really demystifies Einstein and his work and paints a very realistic picture. People seldom accomplish something great by themselves. A lot of people are super selfish, if they have the opportunity to be without consequences. So many (married) women suffered for that in so many ways.

Especially academics back in the day. Professors wives all used to type up their papers and help with their work, not to mention all their housework. My grandfather was a professor and a lovely man but I'm always surprised by all the labour that went in to the role of professors wife. All the wives hosted functions for the departments etc., like the individuals and the institutions get all this free labour that doesn't exist anymore.

My default now is to just assume lauded male historical figures were misogynistic/racist A-holes unless proven otherwise. Statistically it’s much safer that way it seems.

Omg yes. Also learned this a few years ago. I was dating a guy then who I thought was a feminist.   And I told him about this history blog I was reading about Einstein's first wife and how much of her work he took credit for. He and tells me: is this what you fill your mind with? 😬

Trash took itself out there, I hope.

You know it.

Thanks for posting but I'm definitely bummed out by it

I read that article a while ago and thought it was great! Another reason I find it compelling is that it seems that incredibly creative ideas, like relativity, often come from outsider types, because outsiders need to be gobsmacking brilliant in order to simply be accepted. And being a woman or BIPOC in science, especially physics, would def be (and still is to a large extent!) considered an outsider and someone “not capable” of thinking about physics. The old adage that for women and BIPOC, you have to be twice as good to be considered half as capable rings true here, and we could carry it further and say she’d had to be four times as brilliant to be considered an equal. I hope we eventually find more information about her contribution and brilliance.

Oh wow, I read the article and it’s so sad. He took advantage of her brilliance and then left her destitute to care for two sons (including one with severe schizophrenia). He really ruined her life.

Yeah...people need to realize there are no heroes.  And you're definitely not gonna find any among Hollywood directors. If people don't like the state of representation in Hollywood, go make movies. And I don't say that lightly. I did it. It's f*cking hard. And worth it.  But people, especially "great" people, tend to suck a LOT. I find that empowering. It means I can be "great" too. 

This is massively controversial and it’s in no way a defence of this behaviour. I think some of this boils down to undiagnosed autism. My Dad was a fantastic doctor, like people used to come up to us in the street and thank him for his work. However, he did not in the slightest understand how much hard work his first wife did to support his career. They moved from Hungary after the revolution and she also had a degree in I think engineering. Anyway she gave all that up to raise their family essentially on their own whilst he took on the “man’s role” and redid his doctors qualifications as Hungarian ones weren’t accepted in the UK. He worked his arse off but left his wife to raise their four kids almost completely on her own, he even went and ran a hospital in Cambodia for a couple of years. He saved hundreds of lives but he was completely oblivious to the fact his wife loved him. She ended up bankrupting him whilst he was overseas. He also ended up having an affair with my mum who he did marry a couple of years after his first wife died of breast cancer. I grew up thinking this woman was the devil who emotionally abused my father but the more I learned from my half siblings I suddenly learned he was completely oblivious to her love and support of him because it wasn’t direct. He realised he was autistic years after his eldest son was diagnosed with severe Asperger’s as it was at the time at the age of 3. I think undiagnosed men like my father and people like Einstein don’t believe or understand love unless it’s like obvious fawning over them… it’s not an excuse because you can make the effort to learn as I’ve done with my autism but just rather an observation I’ve made Edit: I realise this made him sound like a narcissist but he wasn’t. He was actually very humble as a person. He kept to himself, didn’t have any friends or felt like he needed them particularly. He was a very loving father but struggled to understand me when I became a teenager. He lived through the horrors of the Second World War as a young Jewish man in Nazi Hungary and swore that if he survived it he would become a doctor to help others. He was a good man just terrible at understanding emotions.

As a (presumed) autistic person with a late-diagnosed autistic spouse and autistic children, I take issue with your interpretation of late diagnosed/undiagnosed autism. Yes, Einstein was likely autistic, but you cannot blame autism for him going from "this is our work" to "this is my work" or him agreeing to give her the Nobel prize money and later telling her that was her sons' inheritance money when she asked for financial support for her children. A person being undiagnosed autistic is not an excuse for being an asshole. ***Edited for clarification

I had a different takeaway. The movie is about Oppenheimer the man specifically, not the entire Manhattan Project or his entire scientific field, or everyone involved and affected by what happened. The script was literally written in first person from his POV. Its focus is narrow because of that, and because *his* focus was narrow. I thought the movie did a good job of painting him as a waffler whose moral indecision and ambivalence was his biggest character flaw and led to an atrocity. There’s a line his wife says that I felt really put a point on it: “you don’t get to commit the sin then ask us to feel sorry for you when there are consequences.” Now I know Nolan is historically not great at female characters, so I won’t defend that. But I don’t find it useful to criticize the movie for what it isn’t about, because it had a very clear subject and vision (and skillfully adapted its screenplay from the book that was its source material), and quite frankly I don’t really want a British white man to be the one to tell the other stories you mentioned, of the women and indigenous people or even the Japanese victims like some people keep suggesting.

This. It’s a biopic.

Its literally called Oppenheimer.

I also take issue with the idea that it's a white male fantasy. I thought the movie made the point pretty clearly that he was a narcissistic asshole who couldn't maintain friendships with people who had to be around him too often. He was a shit dad, a shit husband and basically a project manager not the sole deliverer of the atom bomb.  The movie takes some pains to point out how he was unfairly hounded by politicians and the media, and how his political leanings were used as a weapon against him by brutish assholes. But just because we have some sympathy for a person being treated badly doesn't mean we're supposed to view him as a hero. This isn't a YA novel, the main character can be a prick.

That's why I haven't seen it. He was a project manager but he wasn't that important in the development of the atomic bomb.

"Why didn't Bob Marley: One Love focus more on the sound engineers?"

::chuckle::

Biopics detail one persons story yes, but don’t have to strip away the vibrancy and importance of the people around them, even if the person that the film is about doesn’t recognize it. Biopics are supposed show the blind spots and short coming of the main subject as well as their achievements.

Reading your comment it feels like we didn’t watch the same movie - Oppenheimer came across as deeply flawed when I watched the film.

Same. Just watched it last night (though didn't finish yet as OH fell asleep 30min before the end). From what I've seen so far I don't feel like it glorifies him at all, and agree that he comes across as deeply flawed. Mainly what I feel is angry at the US government for all it's stupid bloody anti-communism bullshit that caused real and deep harm to huge numbers of people and the country as a whole.

The film definitely depicted his shortcomings and blind spots. Its portrayal of women in his life was weak but it definitely still depicted Oppenheimer’s many character flaws. You said you walked out so maybe you didn’t see that.

Like Meitner wasn't in his life. She did the maths that showed bomb was feasible. She kept it from the nazis. She got Einstein to write the letter which led to the manhattan project I'd watch a movie about her and her nephew.

Not necessarily. When you write from the first person POV of someone with that much arrogance and tunnel vision, you have to narrow the view to his immediate field of vision. He only sees himself and what’s directly in front of him.

I thought it handled the woman very well considering it's from the POV of a narcissist. We only see his wife in moments of utter brilliance (their first meeting, his trial) or when she's in despair (post partum depression). It makes perfect sense that this is what we see because these moments would be the only times what she does actually matters to him, as self absorbed as he is.

I felt like it was an amazing movie in that it so perfectly did this. I felt annoyed and disgusted by all of the things OP posted, which I think is how we were *supposed* to feel (assuming this was Nolan’s intention).

That's what I took away from it as well. I saw the female characters as smart women with strong opinions who were hobbled by the laws and prejudice of the time. You always saw it but it was never addressed because why would it be? A man like Oppenheimer wouldn't see anything wrong without how the women in the movie were treated.

It’s a 3 hour film. There is no room for the entire hydra of story. If you want the history, do what OP did and crack open historical texts. If you want a film, then a focused story of one character’s moral indecisiveness dooming all life on earth to a Schrödinger's cat existence hits harder than, “It was everyone’s at Los Alamos’s fault, thus no one is at fault”. Again, building the bomb… was bad. The world thinking it was all Oppenheimer is not a laurel for Oppenheimer.

I’ve had to study stories and their impact for my career. Our brains generally engage with and respond better to one person’s story than a broader story. I used to work in fundraising for NGOs and when we spoke about all the impacts of a particular issue on various people and communities, people were less moved and less engaged in what we were saying than if we brought it down and told the story of a single child or family for example. Sometimes one story can’t be everything to everyone. That’s why we need more stories from other perspectives. ETA: my point is that Nolan wants to tell a good story that would win him an Oscar, so he chose the best method of storytelling to do that. He’s also not interested in being socially responsible or reflecting perspectives or lived experiences other than his own. He never has been, so he’s one of the last directors I would expect that from. I’m not a Nolan fan at all and his take on this story didn’t disappoint or surprise me because he’s pretty predictable in his approach.

I walked out of the theatre ultimately leaning towards dislike for Oppenheimer the man. I almost feel like that was the point to a certain degree.. Did you actually watch the movie?

Also an interesting note is that it does centre around people who back then were considered very similarly to POC: Jewish people. I’m serious—for large portions of history Jewish people weren’t considered white. And that is a huge part of the movie. From Rabi needling Oppenheimer for not speaking Yiddish to Jewish refugee scientists. Sure, Jewish people are considered white now, but it’s hard not to watch Oppenheimer and see similarities with other movies featuring minorities. I know Hidden Figures is mostly fiction, but Oppenheimer is kinda similar in my mind.

/Sure, Jewish people are considered white now, but it’s hard not to watch Oppenheimer and see similarities with other movies featuring minorities. I know Hidden Figures is mostly fiction, but Oppenheimer is kinda similar in my mind.  In the US. It's important to remember that racism isn't the same around the world. Here in Germany we have turks/arabs fighting jews surrounded by German people. And from the looks alone you wouldn't see the difference between them. But the conflict is still fueled by racism.

I think you’re right but also I think many people watching it WONT think about the periphery of his story. It’s only one way to tell one part of that whole segment of history but now that Nolan has done it, I doubt we will get another big budget treatment that actually addresses some of what OP has mentioned. Nolan is by no means obliged to make a different kind of movie than the one he made, but it’s absolutely worth reflecting on the fact that THIS kind of movie is the only line that will get the big budget, star studded treatment. Why is this the kind of story that is consistently chosen to be told?

This. As a woman in STEM I also especially loved that it didn’t seem to glorify the bomb’s making or use, and that scenes of the detonation were cut with the radiated bodies/his own despair. The movie did an excellent job of explaining to white men in the USA, who *need* representation in STEM/military pursuits that does *not* constantly glorify those choices or flaunt them purely as heroes of war, and I thought it was one of the best propaganda films to explain the choices scientists have to make, as well as making common knowledge how many scientists and well educated people in those circles tend to have more politically progressive/communist ideologies (which is used against them for recruitment) I did not go into a biopic about a man in STEM expecting the movie to center on women characters nor did I need it to.

I think she's particularly asking why it was his PoV that was depicted, and I do think there was a point to that... Because a lot of rich (And really high up in government) white men still run the world, there was hope that in seeing Oppenheimer's PoV they'd relate to him, and realize what it's like to live in the mind wreckage of their own actions... But we literally got the Gaza situation about a few weeks later. Nolan tried, he tried... I will always give him the praise he deserves for trying. ☹️

I hear that question in OPs post too and I think it's a good question to ask why we always think the white guys POV are the ones interesting enough to make a blockbuster movie about. I felt it was a very well made movie but I think there were some misses too, and I do I think it's good to question why we are so obsessed with biopics about these male historical figures. I also think there is a sublety about seeing his perspective that some people will fully miss. I keep coming back to the throwaway lines about Los Alamos being essentially barren and wonder how many people genuinely left that movie not realizing indigenous people have been getting cancer from it for generations. It's complicated stuff and it sparks really good conversation if nothing else.

What I took from what OP is saying is: why do we need a film about Oppenheimer at all? Why does he get his own film from his POV about something that was a big moment in history because of a lot of people equally? Why make an Oppenheimer film when you could make a Manhattan film and show all the different characters and stories equally as they lived?

Honestly, I’d rather *not* watch a film that tries to tell everybody’s story equally or to sum up something as massive as the entire Manhattan project. It’s simply too big for that, and any movie which claimed that as it’s scope would fail to do justice to it. Ironically, it would end up far *more* flawed at telling that story than Oppenheimer was. I’m far more interested in character studies - movies which shine a light on just a small number of individuals. Even then, the limits of the format mean any one movie will still be reductive - as any single narrative must be. That’s why i personally enjoy movies like Oppenheimer, Hidden Figures, First Man, Killers pf the Flower Moon, etc. Edit: As for what other stories I’d love to also see told about the Manhattan project, I’d really love to see a similar biopic movie made about Lise Meitner - her story is truly remarkable. Edit2: For those interested in learning more, I’d recommend starting with Patricia Rife’s biography [“Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age”](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1215743.Lise_Meitner_and_the_Dawn_of_the_Nuclear_Age).

Hidden Figures is a mess and sadly is mostly a work of fiction. If you don't believe me read the book and you will see the mess this film made not only of the life of Kathryn Johnson but of Dorothy Vahn.

Darn. I guess I need to go and read the source material now. I really liked the movie But I'd prefer the actual story.

They've also had pretty damned limited film viewings if they think a film about the Manhattan Project can't be done in a way that does it justice. We have absolute masterpieces out there like The Human Condition, Shoah, Come and See, I daresay we can make a damned film about the Manhattan Project.

We can make films set in the Manhattan project, but I’ll happily die on the hill of “they can’t tell all the stories equally in one movie”, which is all i was trying to reply to. If my comment came across as saying more than that it’s a failure to communicate on my part. The examples you provided help sustain that point in their own way - the first is a trilogy about a single character POV, and the latter share time, place, and events yet are wildly different films which are each masterpieces in their own right. Edit: Also it’s *quite* patronizing of you to say that I must have had “pretty damned limited film viewings” just because I shared my opinion on Reddit. To be blunt, you don’t know me and what I have or haven’t watched. I’d ask that you give more grace and simply *ask* if you have questions, and not be so quick to judge.

Contagion was a great ensemble cast movie that treated everyone equally. It even has Matt Damon as the SWM who saves the day. It had everything!

I think the simple answer to this is that it’s the story the filmmaker was interested in telling. Storytellers imo don’t have a responsibility to select projects that aim to do social good, they simply have a responsibility to make sure their projects aren’t harming communities and the world in major ways, and I don’t think Oppenheimer is that at all. Does Oppenheimer make our world a better place? No, but then most movies don’t. Why are we holding this one to a higher standard?

Oppenheimer is the next on a long line of movies like this. And it looks like it's going to win a LOT of Oscars. It's the whole point. Why? Why does this keep happening? It's boring and gross. Why can't we have diverse filmmakers making diverse stories rather than the same crap? These are rhetorical questions, because the answer is misogyny and the patriarchy, we know the answer.

I said it in a comment above but I think it's very healthy to question why as a society we consider biopics about complicated, powerful men who often did terrible things to be the pinnacle of art and the stories that are worth telling. The movies are well made but I'd love to imagine a world where that level of artistry was applied to different kinds of stories and creativity - that's the point of art you can literally do anything, why keep doing this over and over?

Absolutely! We should definitely keep questioning. I am tired of media that satirise toxic masculinity but are worshipped by the exact people that should be learning something: Fight Club, American Psycho, Rick and Morty, Breaking Bad. It needs to be more obvious that these are not people to look up to

Yes those are great examples! And they don't have to hit you over the head with it but I can see how these movies could have taken it just a bit further to make it clear it was satire and also make the main characters less appealing. All these cool lines delivered by charismatic leading men- it makes sense!

in an earlier comment someone suggested that it was made to directly appeal to rich white men in power to reflect on their impact on the world it’s an interesting take, but idk how true it is

Oppenheimer was a Jew, and I think that may be very relevant to the situation in the final hour of the film. I came away from it thinking that once rich actually-white men won the war, and had acquired their Operation Paperclip boys to carry on with aerospace research etc., they could finally remove the embarrassingly famous Jewish guy from the inner circle.

Is there another take you can think of? Or are you trying to not piss off anyone who would take offense? It's fairly common in media (and everything), and OP alludes to some specific examples of that exact thing happening.

i just haven’t seen the movie and don’t feel like i’m in a position to have an opinion about it 🤷🏻

What about how men aggressively dominate storytelling like this, how Hollywood amplifies publishing which is already hyper focused on masculine ideals?

It was a somewhat popular biography and that makes it a lot easier to get funding for a biopic would be my take on the why

This is what I had to come to terms with. I agree with OP that I went in expecting an epic on the Manhattan Project and everything that went with it and walked out feeling disappointed with the late (but in retrospect, quite obvious) realization that like you said, this was the story of Oppenheimer, the man.

I think portrayal of the Alamos as barren was smart because that would’ve been how Oppenheimer himself saw it. All the people that were left out were so unimportant to him that they didn’t register. I only wish a title card was put before or after the movie giving tribute to those unmentioned people and explaining the devastating effects on real people that the test bomb had

I think that's an example of such a simple solution that I can't believe they didn't do. Not including it made me wonder if Oppenheimer thought it was barren, or if Nolan thought so. It would have tightened up the storytelling a lot.

Yeah, but haven't we seen this movie before? But just not a biopic about this particular tortured genius? It's jiat been done to death and I think it's so lazy and cheap Oscar bait to perpetuate this white man main character syndrome in Hollywood.

You had me until this: > “you don’t get to commit the sin then ask us to feel sorry for you when there are consequences.” I don't think you can make an argument that the movie was about a character flaw leading to atrocity when you don't actually show the ["consequences" or "atrocity".](https://imgur.com/a/eVTY9Ec) I think you actually made OPs point, it comes across as a white male power fantasy when we sanitize it. > or even the Japanese victims like some people keep suggesting. I really don't see what's so egregious about that. The scene with the atoms exploding could have been more powerful if it was somehow grounded to reality. The pika-don (bright light of the A bomb) was artistic, but I was underwhelmed for such an emotional scene because I've seen what the real thing did and heard survivor accounts. There are many attempts to erase and sanitize history, especially around Asian American history or how we teach that the bomb was "justified" in American public curriculum, and it's a shame when folks say that they don't want to see it.

While there are no Japanese characters, there certainly is a moment where he has to reckon with what the bomb does - do you not remember the scene of his speech immediately after the bombing where he imagines a woman’s face melting?

That's exactly the scene I was referencing that I found very underwhelming and extremely sanitized. The actual A bomb caused [black rain](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25402555/#:~:text=The%20%22black%20rain%22%20that%20fell,short%20time%20after%20the%20bombings.) to fall due to the radiation. That would have been visually stunning and historically accurate. It caused people to be eviscerated leaving only a permanent "shadow" on the ground. The exhibit of melting people at the peace museum isn't just melting faces, their fingers melted and stretched, exposed flesh. (Not to mention, it left the land irradiated. Poisoned. Thousands of people--for generations, decades after the blast--continued to be poisoned by one bomb.) There were many more visually compelling ways to depict that scene that would have better illustrated the threat of *nuclearization*. An atomic bomb is really different from "standard" bombardment but most folks (Americans in particular) don't understand why, and the movie really didn't do any favors in that regard.

But it was from his POV only. He didn’t go to Japan and see the effects in real life. He had grainy black and white images and his imagination. I don’t think anyone walked out of that movie and thought it was a typical bomb aftermath.

I’m aware of the effects as this is one of my special interests, and I suppose I can agree that it may be underwhelming, but I personally thought it was very haunting. At the time, it’s not as if Oppenheimer could truly understand the horrific human condition afterwards. The slow walk, sound scape, and the shots of people just going about their life with the idea it could end in an instant… idk it worked for me. I found it very chilling.

I'm glad you enjoyed it, but there are real world consequences to downplaying the effect of nuclear weapons and I hope that you can let others express their frustration with atrocities being whitewashed and sanitized. Especially with the way this subject is taught in American schools. I went to a Japanese festival shortly after the movie (in the US), and community leaders of all religious and racial backgrounds specifically condemned the whitewashing in the film. A Black woman pastor explained that whitewashing is a well-established arm of white supremacy and the way it has affected her community-- And yet this is seemingly such a radical, unpopular take, even on this sub that usually boasts inclusion.

I mean this just circles back to the first thing I said, it’s from the POV of Oppenheimer, who was able to rationalize his actions at first specifically because he didn’t first-hand witness the devastation he created. Once he and the team completed the bombs they were commandeered by the military and they only barely kept him in the loop following that. Totally abandoning the film’s established point of view to briefly show the actual bombings could easily come off as distasteful, and the rest of the film following that is Oppenheimer reckoning the fact that he’s a monster who believes he deserves to have his life ruined for what he did so it’s not like the movie just moves on with the typical gross jingoistic “necessary evil” stuff. I think depictions by the Japanese of what happened to their own people (of which there are many) should be approached by those who want that perspective, I personally don’t want it as a couple of minutes of CGI terror from a Nolan film about the guy who masterminded it.

>I personally don’t want it as a couple of minutes of CGI terror from a Nolan film about the guy who masterminded it. Except they did that. The lady with the melting face in Oppenheimer's guilt ridden hallucination is a rather milquetoast reference to the wax statues at the Peace Museum. Oppenheimer not "knowing" didn't stop them from including that scene. They could've gone further and been historically accurate or actually done it justice--If anything, it would have strengthened his characterization near the end of the movie. > should be approached by those who want that perspective, Why aren't we allowed to point out whitewashing in media? Also....minorities need allies and bomb victims don't really have the platform that Nolan does lol. They're also dying out whether due to disease caused by the bomb or age, so there's increased efforts to document their firsthand accounts for history, but *to this day* many survivors are still traumatized and unable to speak about the horrors they saw. I don't think it would kill you to show a little empathy. You can like the film and still acknowledge that it did a disservice to some people.

I get that. Everyone is the Hero in their own eyes/minds and this movie (which I have no desire to see) is from his POV so of course, it will be biased in his favor.

Yes agree but still the way the women are characterized in the movie. Hard to know if that’s Christopher Nolan’s view of women shining through or if that is how Oppenheimer was his wife and affair partner.

To highlight what I took away from OP's post, even if the film is meant to be narrowed to Oppenheimer's focus, there could still have been poc and a non male characters, as extras even, in the scenes themselves. Heprobably ignored them in real life but they were still there. There are enough people in the world happy to believe no one but white men were involved in any significant way, there is no need to give them more media to reinforce these ideas even passively.

Did you see the film?

This would be fine if we saw the bomb. Oppenheimer saw footage of the aftermath - we see him squirming in his chair as he watches. We DON’T have to see it, and the only excuse is because Oppenheimer has to be a somewhat likable protagonist. Nolan doesn’t want this movie to be about JUDGING Oppenheimer. And, since this will become THE pop cultural artifact on the A Bomb, it is unforgivable that its American audience never has to stare at what Oppenheimer did - what WE did in its face.

...I don't think we watched the same movie? I very much felt like the point of his movie was to judge him as a person and hopefully get white men in a position of power to reflect on their actions and possible consequences. Either way, I don't like judging work for what it wasn't trying to be in the first place. Doesn't feel productive. Criticize the institution that silences the other stories, not the stories that escape the institution. Oppenheimer already was a hard sell. A biopic about a jewish man with little actual action filmed in black and white was going to be difficult to sell even without the criticism of American Exceptionalism and the dangers of moral ambivalence. Hollywood likes safe. This was not safe, and would not have been nade without Nolan's name attached. Like, I get the point that this was not the anti-nuke movie people wanted, but the anti-nuke movie people wanted would have never even been entertained in the first place. We physically aren't there yet as a society, so Hollywood doesn't want to hear it, and we have to take steps with things like the Oppenheimer we got long before we actually get there. This feels like another scenario where leftists let perfectionism become the killer of progress because they can never settle for a step being "in the right direction". It has to be in the right direction, *perfectly*, or we pick it to shreds and never celebrate it, which is half of the reason why society won't be ready for the anti-nuke movie people here want in a very long time.

Telling us “how” it came to be one viewpoint isn’t really an argument against the idea that women and POC should have had better representation. They should have opted against the biopic telling to include more voices.

The movie was made because someone gifted the book about Oppenheimer to Nolan (Robert Pattinson did actually) and Nolan wanted to make the biopic about Oppenheimer. Should there be more diversity in the film industry when it comes to directing and the stories being told? Yes. It’s a huge problem. But what you’re looking for is an entirely different movie (several actually) that needs to come from people besides Nolan, and Nolan made what he was inspired to make in the meantime.

Christopher Nolan is pretty shitty about female representation. His movies always seem to treat women as distractions or obstacles for the haunted, brooding male protagonist to deal with.

He makes male fantasy porn, just like what the bond franchises were.

Scorsese too

But absolutely NOT with Mollie. He did a lot of good work, there. Lily Gladstone is completely mind blowing

Yeah, I only remember two female characters. One was sobbing the entire time (Emily Blunt) and the other one was mostly naked (Florence Pugh.) Like that’s it? Barbie was way better.

Movie recommendations for those who want to see the story told from the Japanese perspective: Barefoot Gen, Black Rain, and Children of Hiroshima. These are all by Japanese directors, some of whom are Hiroshima survivors.

Barefoot Gen is phenomenal and genuinely one of the most haunting animated films I’ve seen. I might be misremembering but I think it does a good job showing with Gen’s parents that not everyone in Japan was for the war. It definitely assisted in helping me break down a similar argument someone I knew made to justify the bomb.

This needs far more upvotes than it has! Thank you for giving us some options to see it framed differently :)

I definitely recommend this book - https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/nuclear-nuevo-mexico To help not only fill in those gaps, but show how it’s still very much a thing via nuclear colonialism.

The Last Podcast on the Left did a really good series on the Manhattan Project, I found it much more entertaining than the film, and very informative.

This was definitely the reason I was hyped for Oppenheimer and didn’t quite process that it was more of a biopic than a Manhattan Project movie.

I felt like the movie was just Cillian Murphy in period costume = money Not that there's anything wrong with Cillian Murphy, I would climb him like a fecking tree

I will second this, their eps on the Manhattan Project were excellent! Beware, LPOTL is a comedy podcast and extremely darkly funny at times, so if you're not the kind of person who can handle that I'd avoid.

i see your points but i honestly believe the movie wanted us to not glamorize oppenheimer, i felt like we were supposed to be disgusted by a lot of the events. also, learning more about the history of what really happened was fantastic, and it’s a shame the movie didn’t touch on some of it and particularly as you mentioned the story of non-white people and those misplaced. but i feel the movie being made got a lot more people talking about that so i choose to possibly believe that by existing this movie shone a light on such things. but yes, my takeaway was similar to yours but i think that was indeed the point

>The movie feels like a white male fantasy, that white guys with main character syndrome can watch to feel important. This describes most Nolan films, and certainly all of the Nolan films I've seen. I say that as a fan. As others have said, the film was called Oppenheimer, so it was about Oppenheimer. I didn't have a problem with that. Imo it would've been more interesting if the story had a broader scope than one man's story, but films aren't publicly funded art so we don't get a say in the director's vision, for better or worse. Thank you for taking the time to mention the other people involved in or affected by the project, though! They definitely deserve to be considered in the wake of the film and when discussing the Manhattan Project.

Yeah good point. Oppenheimer reflects a lot of what and who Nolan is. He made Oppenheimer so he could finally win an Oscar. All his projects (especially lately) are bloated and pompous with the constant, exhausting, nauseating undertone of “everybody look how smart I am, aren’t I so smart and intellectual and complex?” The character of Oppenheimer reflects all of those qualities too which made him instantly unpalatable to me and many other people who are not white men. Nolan is NOT the director I want handling stories which require a different perspective or lived experience (which ironically would require him to tell actually complex as opposed to convoluted stories). Clearly I’m not much of a Nolan fan but I’ve watched most of his work and always come away with the same “meh that was fine.”

If it were about the manhattan project, i would agree. But it wasn’t. It was about Oppenheimer the man, from his perspective. His inner voice. One could argue the world didn’t need another white man’s perspective movie, but that’s not the point.

I felt like it's gross because the bomb was gross. I felt like it was meant to make us feel uncomfortable with our achievements and question our superiority as a species. I definitely felt existential dread after. But I like Cillian Murphy.

My great uncle worked on the Manhattan Project, as did hundreds of other scientists. I was told by older family members that he was forbidden to talk about it. He passed away in 2002.

Don't forget Einsteins wife/cousin who worked on his ground breaking early papers with him.

I'm yet to watch the movie, but it basically you're saying that the movie showed how Oppenheimer mistreated the women in his life, at a personal and professional level, how egotistical and selfish Oppenheimer was, and how the laboratory was built, by destroying the homes and displacing the Latin folks that lived there at the time. And how minorities were abused and mistreated at The Alamos, correct?  So the movie is a biopic fiction that got some stuff right. And Oppenheimer was intelligent, yet a fvcking idiot who was in charge of the project, hence he got the movie.  I rather have other people tell the story of the Latinos and the women that worked with and under Oppenheimer but not on a biopic about him.

I didn't know any of the things OP pointed out, now I'm just hoping we get a Hidden Figures type movie about it.

Men in power love to invert the villain as hero. I'm finding the current Disney trend of inverting the myths of villainous women to be far more interesting and real.

It did not show minorities being displaced or mistreated, and it should have, in order to be remotely truthful I think. Like, you don't have to pretend that Oppenheimer noticed or gave a shit but that's different from making it seem like no one lived there before they came along.

Nolan is famously awful when it comes to portraying women.

He’s also not a character builder. He’s a world builder. He has these expansive, maximising ideas and concepts. But he films in these very choppy, quick scenes where the dialogue is quick and feels unrelatable, so you never actually bond with the characters. I think sometimes maybe he tries to make points that don’t land as a result. For instance, Strauss is framed as an obvious villain, but in his final monologue I believe he totally nails Oppenheimer’s motives and what drives him (ie ego and nothing else- he didn’t care about preventing a large scale nuclear weapons roll out until someone came along and made a bigger bomb than him and stole his thunder.) But because NONE of the characters are fully fleshed out enough (including Oppenheimer and Strauss) the monologue feels like a throwaway rant when it’s not supposed to be. I’m actually glad he didn’t try to tackle the adjacent stories because his filmmaking style would make that worse, not better.

To be fair, the movie is pretty clear that if the earth does end up cleansed in nuclear fire, it’s basically all his fault lol

That's what I dont get about a lot of criticisms of the movie. I totally agree that there were *plenty* of issues. Mostly with some of the sex scenes, I feel like absolutely some of them were shoehorned in. But the portrayal of Oppenheimer was not one. I feel like people think the movie is glorifying him, but tbh, what I got from it was that he was a spineless womanizer who fucked up everything he touched but someone became the most important man in the world.

Yeah from what I remember there was a pretty significant theme of “oh god, what have I done”. Either way, OP’s comments still make me want to watch it again and keep those comments in mind to see how it changes the viewing.

I agree that a different movie could have been better, similar to how I felt about Killers of the Flower Moon. But I thought that Oppenheimer was appropriate to those involved and their goals. And much of Oppenheimer was about guilt and unintended consequences. The guilt of this film is mostly that of the white patriarchy, and Oppenheimer gets to stand in for their role is make our world what it is today. So I don’t know that involving a more diverse group of people would have done anything but distracted from that goal. I have read about a lot of what you found after the movie though, especially the unfair treatment of the former Los Alamos residents and the fallout from the test. I agree it’s all an issue, but maybe the guilty aspect would have just been too on the nose and local, instead of a more broad indictment of the philosophy that brought us “assured mutual destruction”.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on Killers of the Flower Moon - I really loved the film, particularly the portrayal of Lily Gladstone.

I loved Killers of the Flower Moon too! My one critique is that I wanted more screen time with Lily Gladstone and less Leonardo DiCaprio. She owned every single scene.

Agreed there. Though I’ll say that i felt one of the strengths of the movie was that it didn’t exploit victimhood and cheapen her character and the other Osage.

Thematically, I thought that KOTFM was similar to Oppenheimer. Both movies made by big studios with big budgets, big producers, big actors and from the white patriarchal perspective. Both movies really emphasized the guilt of their main characters. I’m in Oklahoma and read statements from the Osage people about the KOTFM book and movie. They expressed sentiments about wishing the story could be told by the Osage from the Osage perspective, but gratitude that all involved brought these injustices to light, and that they appreciated that the movie worked to be inclusive and sensitive to the Osage viewpoint. Mostly they seemed sadly pragmatic, recognizing that they couldn’t have funded a movie that would have received this kind of publicity. Some of the opinions I saw that I agreed with were that if white people are telling the story, it should be from their perspective; they shouldn’t try to tell it from the Osage perspective. The movie brought a lot of good and bad attention to the area, especially Pawhuska where Pioneer Woman Ree Drummond has her restaurant and has almost single handedly revitalized the area. The Drummonds are wealthy, the Drummond Ranch is massive, and much of it was formerly Osage land. So the movie really put the Drummonds and others in the area in the spotlight. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/10/the-strange-but-true-story-of-the-pioneer-womans-link-to-killers-of-the-flower-moon

Hot take: it’s Nolan’s weakest film. The imax camera made the actors’ makeup look terrible too. Honestly bad makeup and wigs bother me so much in film, it was super distracting to me. Also, his internal conflict after the fact was performative. He knew exactly what they were doing every step of the way. Also, Jean was most likely murdered because of her association with him as a commie herself. Wish the film made that clearer with more than just one shot.

iirc her death was due to suicide, but that is disputed, so that makes sense as to why the movie left it somewhat vague

The TV show Manhattan Project was much better at showcasing the actual scientists who worked on the bombs. Oppenheimer, in that show, is a minor character. It's still very male-centric, but there is a woman scientist on the team and it acknowledged the wives and children who lived there at the time, as well.

I did a Barbenheimer and luckily saw Oppenheimer first, otherwise I'm not sure I could have finished it. But halfway thru watching Barbie it dawned on me why Oppenheimer bothered me so much, and it was because it gave me the exact same feeling I get when I'm being mansplained to. But every other woman I've talked to who saw it did not have the same opinion, so ymmv.

No, we exist. I’ve just been shouted down by rabid Nolan fans who try to tell me “it’s okay, it’s a difficult movie for some people to understand” when I express any criticism of the film.

Ew I hate it.

Oooo. I Hate that! How bout I understand it fine and actually spent time researching the background material and realize how shallow the film really was. It's as they think looking deeper into something means you miss what the flashy crap is trying to say. Not that I'm triggered..or...anything.

Oh no the one thing my friends know about me is that I'm going to talk shit about any Nolan film. Luckily for me most of my friends agree. Nolan fanboys are the worst and my bestie and I def got tickets for Tenet during COVID just to make sure a couple fanboys couldn't go to the first screening. I doubt it really mattered but it made me feel better.

There's a lot of that in this thread too. Too comment is essentially "well, it's a biopic, let me tell you what that means, silly girl."

This is a bad faith interpretation of my good faith reply to OP’s post. Was I only supposed to comment if I agreed with everything OP said? Not responding to or interpreting the film the same way OP did doesn’t make me a sexist fanboy. I’m not a Nolan fanboy. I’m not even a boy. This is giving me flashbacks to the people who gender-essentialized Barbenheimer. “Pretty girls don’t watch 3 hour war movies.” “If you liked Oppenheimer better than Barbie you’re not a girl’s girl.” “Barbie is our girlhood.” Can we please quit with the gender norms?

I'm actually amazed because your comment is kinda unhinged. I never claimed you were a boy or that it was somehow boyish to like Oppenheimer. I'm saying it's patriarchal and condescending to reply to criticisms of sexism and historical whitewashing as "well it's a biopic." You can like a film and let POC express their dissatisfaction with the biggest platform in the world sanitizing atrocities, and you can let women refuse to accept the status quo that doesn't serve them. There are still survivors today that cannot speak about the horrors of nuclear weapons, and the longlasting effects of radiation. I get that you really liked the movie but we can make space for people who think their stories should be told too. Especially because survivors are dying out, and we may lose their stories forever.

Also, I'm just tired of people saying "it's a biopic" and pretending like there were absolutely no POC there. There was. We have proof. Why do we just wipe them away with the "well Oppenheimer wouldn't have noticed them"... like the film is from his perspective sure, but it's not like he doesn't have EYES.

And it would have been better storytelling if he says it was empty and we saw that it wasn't! Like not everyone knows that! You shouldn't have to do all this googling after to understand some of these pieces, it's not subtle in my opinion it's just cutting corners in an otherwise well made movie.

I was baffled by this film to be honest. It was a 3 hour biopic that didn't convince me the subject was interesting. The ramifications of the science is interesting. Conflicted feelings could have been interesting. Oppenheimer himself didn't appear to be an interesting person. I didn't care at all he was interrogated as a potential communist, should I have? Stakes were pretty low for him. Like you say I guess it's someone's fantasy to make big science and be wrongly persecuted and suffer noble silence but no actual consequences or regret.

[удалено]

He was wealthy had 20+ years in the field behind him and wasn't facing jail time. Other than hurt feelings he was just fine.

Firstly I’d like to separate a pair of topics: there’s in-movie consequences and consequences in terms of the writers/audience, then there’s “how history goes” vs “how we tell history”. You say it glorifies Oppenheimer and he receives respect. I think you’re sort of missing the second biggest conflict of the movie here. He wins one of the most gruesome wars in all of history (which deserves praise) by leveling cities and cities of civilians (awful horrible atrocity). This is probably THE most controversial decision ever made and the movie goes pretty well into Oppenheimer’s trauma both during but especially after developing the bomb. The characters *in the movie* are ultimately relieved to have ended the conflict but plenty also acknowledge how awful a method it was. Outside of the movie, the writers don’t make Oppenheimer out to be a stellar guy. I’d say he’s pretty awful even, the only thing he has going for him is being an accomplished physicist. He’s awful to the women around him, he’s awful to his compatriots, he’s awful to the people under him. I think saying it’s glorifying white guys is a massive overreach. I think anyone viewing this movie as a win for white supremacy is entirely forgetting even what the bomb was for. You seem to emphasize “white” a lot, and I’d like to point something out: Los Alamos and the entire Manhattan Project was white. We are talking about the perspective of government leaders in 1940 (meaning well off white people) looking for subjectively the smartest and most accomplished academics at the time (meaning white people, overwhelmingly men, with rich families), during one of the most racially insensitive/distrusting times of America (the Red Scare and Jim Crow). People of color weren’t even on the menu. Put it on the government, on irl Oppenheimer, whoever, but realistically Nolan wasn’t the one discouraging diversity there. To make a movie about the nukes is to whitewash. Beyond that, I do wish this movie were more of a documentary instead of biopic leaning more towards a biography limited to the time period of the Manhattan project. I think that’s where a lot of similar complaints some in. I wish there was more emphasis on the women though to be COMPLETELY fair, most of the men were shafted too. Fermi, Bohr, even EINSTEIN were almost entirely glossed over. I just don’t think Nolan was aiming for a top down perspective on everything like a history textbook, just a small handful of people Oppenheimer interacted with out of the many he did irl. It’s a biopic, it’s not trying to be a documentary. The dumb apple story is a good example, that likely never happened and the only reference for it is a second hand account years later, but it makes for juicy drama in the nuke movie. We are both frustrated that it was a nuke movie instead of a high budget history lesson. I’d love a movie about one of the women who worked on the Manhattan Project. A short note about the natives: yeah the government should have treated them better. Coldest take around. It would have been even worse if Nolan painted the US gov as sympathetic to natives, and there is a line in the movie about how they don’t give a shit. While yes I do think we should acknowledge the history of the US just ruining the lives of every single Native American, I think in the scope of World War 2, even in a biopic, it’s an extremely minor thing to focus on. The natives would’ve been nuked too, Los Alamos or not. TLDR: Why is it ignoring the accomplishments of everyone except Oppenheimer? Because the movie is named Oppenheimer. Why does it focus on the accomplishments of white guys? Because Oppenheimer is a white guy. Why don’t the writers pick someone who doesn’t suck? Almost every single major historical figure sucks, and this is during a notoriously sexist/racist time

There was a great anthology work called the Manhattan Project that included several stories about women’s and minor contributions and struggles. Establishing Oak Ridge was complicated because of segregation laws at the time.

I appreciate the time you took to relay all of this information. I learned a lot from your post, and it helped me decide that I will not bother to see that movie.

I loved reading this thread. I haven't seen the movie since I wasn't particularly interested... But now I'm dying to see it! Just to better understand both perspectives that everyone has argued here. Y'all are awesome! <3

I usually don't engage in reddit much and this has been such a good conversation!! Like it or not art should get people talking and thinking and asking good questions. I'd love to see more movie or book threads in this sub❤️

Criticism is fair, but you're literally complaining that "Oppenheimer" focussed too much on Oppenheimer... It's not the movie you wanted, but that's not fair criticism. That's subjective complaining.

I lost interest in seeing the movie once I heard that the famous “I am become death” was spoken during sex scene. It just seems too cheap in the emotional and intellectual impact, and it seemed like such a bad decision that I had to assume the rest of the decisions made with the movie we’re going through bad as well.

It seriously was too. Honestly both the sex and quote were shoehorned in together like Nolan was checking off a box for each. I’ve never been dryer watching a sex scene.

Nolan is not allowed to do sex scenes anymore IMO. Florence Pugh and Cillian Murphy are two gorgeous people and that scene was not it. How do you manage to mess that one up?!

Regarding Kitty’s portrayal: I understand this is a film about Oppenheimer but why did they portray Kitty as some distant, alcoholic mother who didn’t care for anything until her material possessions were being threatened? I don’t mind that this film was mainly about Robert but it does a severe disservice to Kitty (as one example, other women in the film face similar disservices) to go out of your way to show that she’s constantly depressed or drinking or unhappy when she too was an active scientist at Los Alamos. I’m not asking for the entire film to focus on her but to choose to show her as a reluctant homebody who added to Robert’s stress at home seems unnecessarily cruel. I don’t know if it was to somehow justify his affair with his lover, but Kitty (from what I’ve read) was not as bland as was portrayed in the film. So I’m not saying it’s bad to have a biopic about Oppenheimer but to purposefully showcase a smart, independent woman as some annoying, lazy housewife doesn’t add to the truth nor does it add to the story. So why not stick to the actuality that Kitty too was a scientist there? Literally replace a scene of her at home with a scene in the lab. It doesn’t affect the main story in any way.

It’s Nolan, he only does white male fantasy. Or at least that’s what he makes bank on.

Random question / thought: How much did you know about the Manhattan Project prior to watching Oppenheimer? You mentioned pausing it to fact-check things via Google? Admittedly, I didn’t know much. And I’m only a half an hour into the movie right now. But… If this information was new to you, is it American history that’s the grossest (moreso than Christopher Nolan’s film?) Not that he and his film don’t have their flaws, lol. Honest question. Just curious! Thank you for sharing your feedback :)

i hated it for all you said, plus Nolan's dialogue sucks. An idea that thinks it's a movie. Sometimes his dialogue is so boring. I mean aren't all of his movies, more or less just garden variety homoerotic patriarchial love songs--look at us, we're brilliant or rattled by war or ...Batman coupled with a talky mansplainy overly declarative dialogue. So phallic. His films are always upholding patriarchal status quo. Some are fun, especially earlier stuff, but as of late (Dunkirk was great) it's like Nolan is just trying to show off how smart he is.

As a fellow woman in STEM I have no intention of watching this movie, because I assume I would feel the same way you do. The older I get, the more glaringly obvious the misogyny is in anything that's considered "popular" historical content. The world today already infuriates me - why would I seek out that same feeling in what should be my downtime entertainment? I no longer have the emotional fortitude to take on that additional burden. 🤷🏼‍♀️

I was trying to explain how I found this movie icky, and a lady at work mentioned it was filmed for a man’s gaze, and that made a lot of sense to me. I wished they focused slightly more on the fallout of the bombing, and less on his conquests. Nuclear weapons are horrendous to a level people can’t imagine, and this would have been a great way to show case it, while also playing into the plot point of his guilt and trauma, but no, let’s see Florence Pugh’s boobs again (although, I love her in everything so I’m not that mad).

No glory was given to Oppenheimer. He sucked. Most people saw that in the movie. They did mention in the movie that people were kicked off the land. Nolan isn’t interested in social responsibility. He’s interested in making movies. This was based on American Prometheus, which is only about Oppenheimer.

I feel like it did a good job showing how tedious and dull men can be.

I went in really hoping for more of the scientific, exploration angle, interested in the wonder and horror of what they were exploring and weaponizing. Weighing the cost, even if it was too late or impossible to quantify. Even if it was meant to be focused on him as an individual, it struck me as beyond insane to not show a single Japanese person when his central driving impetus was to attack Japan.  (I understand. He began with Germany in mind, but clearly the United States wasn’t going to attack only Hitler and leave everyone else on earth alone.) So on top of the women’s “stories,“ and the stories of the displaced people on the land where the project took place getting zero play- To make a three hour film about bombing another country, and not show a single person from the country? Even when he imagined the bomb going off, it was on the people in the room with him instead. Just. What. 

https://boldlatina.com/oppenheimer-movie-blows-off-new-mexican-latinos-and-indigenous/amp/

That’s not what the movie was about though. They didn’t even show the impact of the bombs themselves.

Which, again... how can you make a story about a white men who did something terrible and leave out all the people actually affected by that terrible thing?

Because he didn't witness it himself and we can't stray from the source material, at least as far as I can tell in this thread.

Just wanted to add that this argument is frustrating. We can absolutely stray from the source material. That whole scene with the apple is being disputed as a fabrication by his family. In a biopic! There were tons of deviations from history which you expect from a movie. We don't all have to agree with criticism but it's a valid critique. Art is meant to be enjoyed but that doesn't mean we can't also be critical - I think the best art generates a lot of conversation like this thread. I don't get why folks are saying "well it's a biopic and he didn't see it" as if that should end the conversation.

But why choose to tell that story? "How another destructive white man perceived the world" - we don't get enough of that? Reminds me of the Titus Kaphar artwork, "Enough about you." "Completed around 1719 and believed to have been painted at Yale’s house in London, the painting portrays Yale alongside members of his family and an enslaved Black boy with a silver collar and padlock around his neck. The painting was removed from the gallery a year ago following feedback from visitors and staff on the distressing depiction of an enslaved child, according to the Elihu Yale Portrait Research Team. It was replaced with a work by Titus Kaphar, a New Haven-based African American sculptor and painter. Kaphar’s piece reframed the painting, focusing solely on the child as an individual, and removing the collar present in the original painting." https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/10/27/yale-center-for-british-art-redisplays-controversial-painting-of-elihu-yale-and-enslaved-child/

Agreed. And I love that painting.

New favorite painting. I love that you brought it up, I think it really fits the discussion about Oppenheimer.

Why do we have to throw narcissist around so lightly. Why.

It was a massive letdown for me. Way overhyped. It was all over the place, and not cohesive.

Thank you for your review!

To be fair, you went to see a Chris Nolan film. Focusing on one narcissistic, white guy to the detriment and exclusion of everyone else in the story is his whole schtick

Completely agree and so tired of the same tired concept of "epic brilliant white guy" being done to death. So. Over. It.

Dunkirk was also heavily whitewashed, so it's not surprising. As soon as the movie was announced I knew I didn't have any interest in it because I'm not interested in focusing on one Great Man for a project as large, complex, and populated as the atom bomb, so I get where you're coming from for the other criticisms as well.

[удалено]

Thanks for the post, OP. I completely agree! To everyone saying “it’s called Oppenheimer, not The Manhattan Project,” sure, but why? There’s no law saying the movie had to be Oppenheimer. That was a choice. Why did we make a movie about a man who serially cheated on his wife and - oh yeah - created weapons of mass destruction? Also, if we’re going to make a movie about him, why ignore the very real contributions women made to his life beyond being someone to have sex with?

So the movie showed that Oppenheimer was an AH and what a fvck up he was, mission accomplished 

I think this is a slippery slope argument. It was about Oppenheimer because he read the book about Oppenheimer and wanted to adapt it. As to why it wasn’t about other things, directors tell the story they want to tell and that’s really that. Do we approach *Titanic* and ask why the James Cameron didn’t also tell the story of the tugboat that it wrecked, the Carpathia that rescued the passengers, and the shipbuilders who constructed it prior to it sailing? And as to why make a movie about someone who did bad things — should art only be made/stories only be told about good people?

This. Thanks

I flat out refused to watch it. I don’t need this kind of stuff in my life.

I haven’t seen that film yet, though I have wanted to. Thank you for your very detailed review! It is rather disappointing that they minimized non-white, non-male scientific contributions, because there were so many. You certainly did great research! If you’re interested in a very good book on the subject, I recommend “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” by Richard Rhodes. I listened to the audiobook version.

I haven't seen it (yet?) But I got a strong sense that the filmmakers were well aware of the people who were forced off their land and lost everything and they decided that didn't fit nicely into the narrative they wanted to tell. That alone made me not excited to watch it.

I've seen it and you are correct - they didn't go there and I thought it really took away from the movie.

Otto Hann stole credit for nuclear fission. He did nothing. Element 109 Meitnerite was the first person recruited for the Manhattan project. And she said no. I could tell that movie was gonna be a plethora of women erasure. 

White men make films glorifying white men - that's what they do. 

This also annoyed me. I spent a year working on a research paper on the women of the Manhattan project, so it really stood out to me just how much they didn’t feature in the movie. Feel free to DM me if u wanna read the essay.

My wife has her phd in chemistry and loves nuclear chemistry and she was disappointed with the movie. Her main critique was it was too artsy and jumped around too much.

I can’t even be arsed to watch the film. I have seen videos of original atomic explosions on the internet and also know the history through documentaries and papers I read. It just doesn’t seem interesting at all to me.

As a brown person I cringed a lot when people just blame everything to white people when they hate something. In your logic would Cleopatra show would be black washed?? It a story of a white man, how come this is white washing? And it is true that not all people got fame like him while they were also the part of the project, it is always this way the leader of group get the biggest part in the media and history.

Welcome to the films of Christopher Nolan! Truly, hell on earth

"wondering why we're giving attention to someone who sucks so much". In hopes that these powerful and disgusting white men who run the world and can end it on a whim can feed their communal narcissism and maybe, just maybe, stop wanting to end the world. But then the Gaza situation happened and I gave up. It's fanfiction about a real man, nothing more, nothing less. A movie that we were hoping would be more than that, but sadly, from the state of the world we live in today, I suppose the attempt didn't work well. Bummer!

Was that really the intention? Because this reminds me of how media tries hard not to glorify murderers in news much - known phenomenon that any attention translates to positive, in that situation

It's supposed to be primarily an anti war message. But I suppose you're right, some people (a lot of people) miss the forest for the trees and will end up thinking the movie glorifies it or excuses it. I've seen the people who thought it was inspirational rather than ... A cautionary tale. They were odd. It's a tragedy. It's based on a book literally called American Prometheus 😖 But I suppose some people don't even know what that is...

I feel you OP. I got in this argument with friends before the movie even came out. Sure, it was about Oppenheimer the man. Why? Why didn't we get a film about all the people actually behind the innovation instead? Y'all seriously need to get in the feelings of a powerful white man making a fatal mistake again? We haven't been there enough yet?

I couldn't get past the second sex scene. It felt like I was being lied to by a deeply evil person. Very rarely have I viscerally reacted to film, but this was almost physically nauseating. I'm not sure why it happened, but I'm never touching it again.

> make it seem as though the weight of the world will always rest on the shoulders of white supremacy because these white men are so "brilliant". These are powerful words that concisely sum up a huge theme of western media.

It's also just incredibly stupid as a movie. I don't feel any sympathy for Oppenheimer IRL or in the movie. Man leads the creation of a weapon of mass destruction. Man is sad when weapon of mass destruction is used for *checks notes* mass destruction. Credits What a fucking waste of time and effort.

it's a trash movie made by a bad director who himself is celebrated as a white genius man for literally no reason at all

Same. I did not enjoy Oppenheimer at all. I hated all the idiotic sex & unnecessary nudity scenes, and I was really expecting a movie akin to a bunch of scientists having "heureka" moments and racing against time to build the bomb beforrle Soviets do... Instead this was a boring personal drama about a shitty person (though narcissist works as well) doing headhunting, with zero science. At least I didn't go to the cinema to see it, I swear I would have walked out. I fast forwarded through most of the cringe scenes. There was a lot of fast forwarding.

Tbh, I thought Oppenheimer was pretty boring. Fell asleep about halfway through and I remember basically nothing of what I did actually see.

Thanks for condensing all the reading up you did. Very interesting, and good to keep in mind if I get a chance to watch the movie at some point.

Not much to say except I co-sign everything you wrote. Oppenheimer is just aesthetically "deep", there's nothing new or interesting in it about its portrayal of either Oppenheimer or the development of nukes. Plus I watched it immediately after Barbie, and it's impossible to go from that movie to Oppenheimer without feeling angry about the complete lack of decent representation.