‘Oppenheimer’ Is Not an Anti-Nuke Movie

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Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I’m Mona Sharon sitting in today for Charlie Sykes. And I am delighted to be joined by my Bulwark colleague, Sunny Bunch. Sunny is our culture editor and also host of two podcasts of his own across the movie aisle, and the Bulwark goes to Hollywood. I host another bulwark podcast, Beg to Differ and appear on a secret one with, with Charlie called just between us, which is only for members.

And we thought in light of the arrival of the Oppenheimer movie that we had both seen that it would be fun to do a little mashup and it’d have Sunny and I talk about the movie and the book on which it is based. Now a little warning, there are going to be spoilers coming. So if you don’t know that the bomb was indeed successful and was dropped, you might wanna turn it off, go watch the movie and come back. But I don’t know. Sunny, thank you so much for doing this.

Nice to talk with you.

Always always happy to be on Mona. And, yes, it’s it’s tricky discussing spoilers for a historical drama because you never you can never be sure what people know.

Alright. But here Here’s the thing. My first reaction to the film is gratitude to Christopher Nolan for not mangling the history very badly. In fact, it’s pretty faithful to real events. Do you agree?

Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting to, read this book and then see the movie and see all of the stuff that’s pulled almost verbatim out of it. Yeah. I mean, literally verbatim in some cases, you know, the line, like, I don’t want three centuries physics to culminate in a weapon of mass destruction, right, stuff like that.

Excuse me. That was said by I I Robbie. Correct?

Yes. That’s right. That’s right.

He’s

played by, David Crumholtz in the movie. So the it’s very interesting to read the book and then see the movie because movies aren’t always like that. You know, one of my favorite movies of the year so far is this movie called Blackberry, and it’s about the rise and fall of the, you know, the little handheld email device. And it’s a great movie. It’s an absolutely fantastic movie.

And then I read the book it’s based on. And I was like, oh, this movie bears very little resemblance to to the actual story of the book. Yeah. That actually doesn’t bother me that much because it’s a movie is separate from real life. They are not necessarily the same thing.

Your dramatization is always going to deal with some some changes and some papering over. But this is a very, very faithful adaptation of the book, American Prometheus.

By the way, the book itself was tremendously long. I thought I mean, it’s good book, but wow. I mean, I felt I don’t know about you, that I really didn’t need to know every single hallway argument that occurred at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton that they could find evidence of, that kind of thing, but still it was good. And so I’d like to spend a few minutes talking about Oppenheimer the man, which I do think comes across really well in both the book and the movie. Namely, He was a conflicted, but fascinating human being.

Your thoughts.

Totally. And what is interesting about both the book and the movie is that the the movie doesn’t actually touch on this very much. The the book gets into it more. He had a period in his twenties where I think we could call him disturbed a little bit. There’s a scene in the book that is very briefly referenced in the movie, where he literally poisoned the apple of one of his teachers at Cambridge.

Believe it was.

This really happened. Yes.

Really happened. And luckily, nothing really came of it, but he got in very serious trouble with the school. He was almost expelled. But he he was able to get it together. And there are many stories like this.

He went to see a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist didn’t really help him. And in fact, made him probably worse in some ways. And then he kinda pulls it together in his late twenties, thirties, and forties. And the the interesting thing about him is that he was not In terms of the physicists he was working with, he was not the one making a lot of the actual breakthroughs.

I mean, I think in the book, it talks about his one his one real big breakthrough in physics was essentially discovering the black hole, the black holes and how those work, which is interesting and fascinating in and of itself, but his great skill was synthesizing. He can put everybody’s ideas together and explain them and help move them along and ask the right questions to get things going, which is why he was, you know, turns out the perfect person to lead, the Manhattan project.

Yeah. So in the book and the movie, there is that quotation from General Groves, Leslie Groves, who oversaw the whole project and chose Oppenheimer. And, he said that the best decision he ever made was picking Oppenheimer to do that job. And you’re right. I mean, the kind of traits that he had his ability to quickly, really quickly synthesize complex material and understand it and to know who would be best to do what.

All those things were critical to the success of the, Manhattan project. And as a human being, though, you know, he, in a way. I don’t know if you’ve ever known people like this. I kind of have where somebody is just so good at everything they touch. That they almost have a tendency to become dilettantes because they don’t have to focus on any one thing.

Everything comes easily to them. And that was the a little bit of the wrap on Oppenheimer as a scientist is that he was too broad. He was too good at too many things. Like, one of the things that comes through in the film. It’s his unbelievable capacity to just learn languages like nothing.

And there’s a true story or trade in the film where, you know, he was studying in Germany at the time, but he was invited to Holland to deliver a series of guest lectures on quantum physics. And to the amazement of his students, he showed up one day and delivered a lecture in Dutch, which he had just, you know, picked up. And he could do that. He he learned Sanskrit. He read the bhagavad Gita in the original.

That’s all true. One of the stories that I loved from his childhood that is related in the book When he was about nine years old, he was once overheard telling an older cousin, a girl, ask me a question in Latin, and I will answer you in Greek.

That’s like the nerdiest flirting of all time.

Yeah. Fair enough. So he was amazing. But let’s talk about the meat of the drama of his life, which is that before the war, he was a very obvious fellow traveler to the communist. That is he gave two causes that were supported by communists He was sympathetic, a lot of his friends, his wife, his brother, a lot of his associates were either communist party members or very close.

To the Communist Party. And one thing that I think comes through well in the book and the movie is that He was a fellow traveler, but that didn’t mean he was disloyal to this country. He was not a communist.

I mean, look, the book is very interesting to me because it is a classic of a very specific sort of history of mid century America that is written by progressives, by Liberals.

Yes.

It’s a great book, but it it has this very funny tick throughout where the authors feel compelled to note because they’re honest. Mhmm. You know, these liberal organizations Yes. There were communists in them. Yes.

They supported a lot of communists. Yes. In many cases, they were actually headed up by literal communist. But, you know, that was all just kinda coincidental and And not that big of a deal, really. It doesn’t show massive infiltration in our various governmental organizations or academia or anything like that.

It was just liberals the communist found common cons with them. I find this amusing just as a tick to see repeatedly deployed over and over again. Because, look, there’s a slightly bigger question of whether or not Oppenheimer was actually a card carrying member of the Communist Party. The big question is, does it matter, as you say? Mona doesn’t matter whether or not he was if after nineteen thirty nine after the Mullenteuver Ribbentrop Pack, he realized, ah, crap.

These are actually flip sides of the same coin. And America could be more liberal, but we don’t need to actually take the stalinist line on things. The most interesting character in the movie to me in a certain way aside from Oppenheimer himself is Leslie Groves, general groves. Mhmm. I don’t think anybody would accuse general groves of being a liberal or, conflicted about the development of the atomic bomb.

And, indeed, in the, hearing that takes part of the film where Oppenheimer is having his security clearance revoked, Groves admits that under the security clearance parameters, he has handed you know, for the atomic energy commission, he would not have recommended Oppenheimer be be given his clearance. But that doesn’t negate the fact that gropes, obviously, deeply respected him, never regretted bringing him on to the Manhattan project, and indeed protected him from some of the more rabid anti communist figures in the the government at the time, which I think Oppenheimer himself, you know, always respected and admired him for, and even even with the admission from Groves that he would not have signed off on off an Irish security clearance in the nineteen fifties, under the new rules, there’s still this moment in the movie when Oppenheimer learns that Groves essentially protected him from this madman colonel patch who was a, the son of a white Bolsheovic who went back to Russia to fight and kill communists and, like, wanted to get to the bottom of Oppenheimer’s various dealings with the Communist Party, there’s this look that Oppenheimer gives him that really reflects a sense of deep gratitude and thankfulness.

Yes. And it’s hard to know all these years later and with the difficulty of getting accurate records or accounts, How much of what Groves said at that hearing was because he was kind of sandbagged. I mean, the standards had changed. So, you know, one thing is that he knew about Oppenheimer’s left wing passed in nineteen forty three, and it didn’t stop him from believing that he was a loyal American, and there was nothing new in nineteen fifty four. Okay?

But what had changed In fact, the only thing that was new was that O’ Byheimer had moved further and further away from his one time left wing Super Left Wayne sympathies. And in fact, he’d become like a member of the establishment, a pillar of the establishment in the intervening years. But what had changed is the standards of what would be considered disqualifying. And so maybe Grows was just saying, well, you know, by the new standards, yeah, you know, I couldn’t recommend him under those standards, but I couldn’t have recommended any of those guys, you know, that kind of thing.

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So another theme of the movie that has gotten some criticism, and I’d be curious to hear what what you think is that the language among the scientists and the the conversations about what they were engaged in, the monumental task of actually creating an atomic weapon was not believable that people don’t talk that way and that that’s not true. What do you think of that?

Well, I mean, there is always a need to streamline things for dramatic purposes. I mean, condensing a again, what what is this? It’s a six hundred page book before notes and index and all that down to three hours is very difficult. And again, there is a lot of stuff that is verbatim from the book in the move I mean, the idea that these guys don’t talk that way is not, I think, correct, just because I think people underestimate how prickly and weird, legitimate, genuine, genius physicists can be. They’re a weird breed.

And they did have a deep sense of the monumental task they were undertaking. And so I think it does a disservice to say, oh, nobody would talk their way. No. They they did. And in fact, One of the things that comes through in the book.

I’m not sure how much it yeah. I guess it is also conveyed in the film, is that even as they were working on this, and even as they knew that the alternative was to have the Nazis get this technology before us, and so they were very strongly motivated to do it. They couldn’t do it without some, you know, misgivings and mixed feelings. I mean, this was going to be a huge change in the nature of warfare. And I wanna pursue something with you, Sonny, because in your review, you said Oppenheimer is less concerned with parsing the moral difference between the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and the fire bombings of Tokyo and Dresden for good reason since there is none.

And you write and more concerned with the consequences of humanity’s unfortunate discovery of the ability to destroy itself. So let’s talk about this a little bit because it does play a big role in the film, and it’s it’s something that has implications for our current moment because, obviously, we are dealing now with another breakthrough technology that people worry Will Saletan out of human control and possibly destroy us all. So your mention of of, the fire bombings is highly relevant because people forget they know that tens of thousands of people were killed instantaneously with each of the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But what they sort of overlook is that we also, in the course of this horrific war, firebombed Tokyo and killed a hundred thousand people and Dresden, and the numbers are staggering in all these cases. But You say there is no difference.

And let me propose something to you. I think there are a couple differences. What is the creepiness factor? Okay. The fact that you’re dealing now with a weapon that Not only kills when it explodes your body, but there were people who crawled out of the rubble in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and thought, wow, I escaped.

Lucky me. Only to die slowly vomiting their guts out over the next several weeks. It’s the radiation poisoning that is horrifying to people or the fact that people’s skin fell off their frames or, you know, all of those things were new. And I don’t think it’s correct to pass over them as being irrelevant to the nature of the weapon and what it means. Your reaction to that first.

I mean, I, I’ve I’ve seen people with third degree burns, and I I’ve seen what happened to the cities of Tokyo and and Hamburg and Dresden, after the firestorms there. Again, I’m just not I’m not convinced. We we’re talking about degrees of difference — Yeah.

—

as opposed to actual moral differences. The argument against Hiroshima and and Nagasaki, this is a an argument that everyone has been having for the last eighty years. The difference between Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the others, that we just mentioned are, I think, minimal. The argument against Hiroshima and Nagasaki is an argument against the war as it was fought in World War two. If we wanna have that argument, that’s that’s fine.

Having a discussion about the justness of total warfare absolutely relevant. There’s a reason we don’t fight like that anymore. There’s a reason that we, you know, the only time that’s been deployed is against two genocidal regimes that kinda started it first.

Yeah. Let me stop you right there because it it prompted another thought One of the things that Oppenheimer’s critics at the time went after him for, and these included Edward Teller, who was a scientist at Los Alamos, who went on to become the father of the hydrogen bomb, and Lewis Straws, who became the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, and is the villain in the movie and and in the book. It’s slightly differently because for dramatic reasons, I think they made him a little bit more, surreptitious than his sabotage against Oppenheimer in the movie, right, than he is in the book. And the book was much more straightforward. But anyway, what they objected to, they and and even Truman to a degree.

Truman thought, so Oppenheimer in a meeting with Truman This did happen, said that he had felt that he had blood on his hands, which was a mistake. And Truman was really offended and called him a crybaby scientist and didn’t wanna have anything more to do with him. But the argument against Oppenheimer by all those people was, you know, Here he is worrying about the effects of this bomb or about the effects of thermonuclear bombs, the h bomb, whereas you know, obviously, what we need to do is get as many of them as we possibly can and dominate the Soviets. So I I think that Oppenheimer turned out to be wrong about the h bomb in the end, but I can’t get on board with blaming him for worrying about the consequences of these weapons. I mean, if you were alive in nineteen forty five, would you have predicted?

That the existence of these weapons would actually keep the peace between the super powers rather than leading to a global conflagration.

This is an interesting thing in the movie because the the way the movie kind of portrays Oppenheimer’s own mind is that he sees the world in quantum terms. He sees things in terms of probability, right, in terms of, like, things happen and they don’t happen. So for instance, in one scene, There’s a big, essentially, pep rally after the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. He’s talking about how, you know, I think he said something like the only I only wish we had it earlier so we could have dropped it on Germany and people cheer.

Mhmm.

And it’s kind of like a horror movie almost at this point

that — Yeah. —

background noise goes out and his his focus gets blurry. And then he sees a blinding flash of light in the room that doesn’t actually happen, but it’s an idea of, like, well, now these things exist and it can happen at any point. Right?

Right.

So the way I described it perhaps clumsily in my review is that he sees the world in terms of instead of Schrodinger’s cat, Shrodinger’s annihilation, the world is simultaneously saved and destroyed at the same time. This is why the closing shot of the film is a kind of imagined launch of nuclear missiles and, you know, nuclear holocaust spreading around the world as the atmosphere is destroyed and we’re all immolated in the fire. And this is the top alleged sword of mutually assured destruction. Right? Yes.

It did put an end to great power warfare. Yes. It has put an end to great power warfare for the last eighty years. There’s still the chance that everything ends

— Yes. —

at any point. It’s terrifying to consider, but it worked. I mean, look, one thing I like about this movie is that it does not portray Oppenheimer as inherently opposed to the atomic bomb or its deployment. Right? And that’s true to life.

That’s true

to life.

Like, there’s a line in the book. You know, the the authors are saying, he had become convinced that the military use of the bomb in this war might eliminate all wars. Oppenheimer explained, that some of his colleagues actually believe that the use of the bomb in the war might improve the international prospects and that they are more concerned with the prevention of war than the elimination of this specific weapon. And then a little bit later, he’s talking to a New York Times reporter, and he, he says lots of boys not grown up yet will owe their life to it, that it being the bombing of Hiroshima. And I think that’s right.

That is right. And at the same time, again, you know, there is there is an enormous danger there. The H bomb is a is a weapon of terror, and it is a weapon that has kept everybody more or less when I say everybody, I mean, the, you know, the Soviet Union in the United States, more or less in check these last eight decades or so. And I think it’s, it’s such a hard thing to think about and consider. And one of the things that I think is good about this movie in this book is that it reminds us of that ever present threat that we have kind of stopped thinking about, I think, since, you know, nineteen eighty nine.

Yeah. That’s a that’s a really good point. By the way, I used to be terrified when I was a kid growing up of nuclear war. I thought about it all the time. And, whenever international tensions would flare.

I would be concerned that we might all go up in a mushroom cloud. That was just part of life. And there’s no way to back out of that once you’re in it. And so I think one of the reasons that this movie is so interest thing is that so clearly, the reason we developed these terrible weapons was because we were in a race with an enemy. And the book goes into this movie.

Didn’t have time for it, but later in after the war Oppenheimer went through a period I think of kind of naivete where he he thought perhaps there could be an international commission or or agency that would control nuclear power. And everybody would agree to it. There were all kinds of crazy ideas about anybody caught cheating or or any nation that was you know, gonna deploy nuclear weapons without the permission of this international body would be the victim of a nuclear attack by the other nations. I mean, there were all kinds of nutty things. He put his hopes briefly in this idea of international control, obviously didn’t didn’t work.

But now with AI, Couple things. First of all, it does remind you that even though something is horrific and hard to think about and and has the capacity to destroy life as we know it, It doesn’t necessarily come to pass. I mean, it do we didn’t blow ourselves up at least not yet with nuclear weapons. And maybe similarly, our current panic about AI is a little overblown, but there’s another dynamic about the whole AI thing that is the same, which is You know, people are now talking about, well, there should be some sort of international compact to limit the development of AI. And what stands in the way of that?

Well, The fact is that we would be loath, and China would be loath to, you know, give the other side an advantage. And as long as we’re competing with one another, we’re not gonna have an international tribunal to control it. Right?

Well, I mean, the other thing about AI as opposed to nuclear weapons is that is much easier to develop in a private tiny little organization?

No. I’m not so sure about that. I’m not so sure about that. People that I’ve talked to say the only people they’re concerned about are China and us or the Europeans, but it’s not possible to do it, you know, in your garage.

I mean, maybe I’m sorry. I don’t mean tiny as in, like, you know, one man tinkering in his garage. Like, I don’t think we’re gonna have a Timothy McVey situation here. I mean, like, an organization like Google or whatever Elon Musk is calling his various organizations now.

You know, say say say what you

mean about Elon. The one thing he has had a a pretty clear eye on is the the danger of AI.

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To bring it back to Oppenheimer. I mean, I I do think that and it’s very interesting to look at how Oppenheimer sought of nuclear weapons. You say naive, and I think that’s the perfect word for it because he said he did not want to develop the so called super, the hydrogen bomb, He thought that we should limit our resources to focusing on creating a series of tactical nukes that could be used on the battlefield. Right? This is the guy that, you know, people were like, oh, he didn’t believe a new weapons.

This is an anti nuclear weapon movie. It’s not Jay Robert Oppenheimer literally argued for the development and deployment of tactical nukes on the battlefield in order to stave off the hydrogen rum program. But I think teller and straws are right, essentially, that once this genie is out of the bottle, there is going to be an arms race. And look, we can laugh about tell her as, you know, the real life Doctor Strange love.

That movie was based on him. Right?

Yeah. The character of Doctor Strange love is based at least partly on doctor teller down to the accent that Peter sellers uses. But, you know, we can laugh about, oh, getting worried about the H bomb gap, but we know that the Russians are creating and preparing an H bomb of their own. There is no option except to continue in that line of research and to make those weapons because, again, mad mutually assured destruction, it’s a real a stand off situation, but if you’re in a Mexican standoff and your gun doesn’t have any bullets in it, you’re in a lot of trouble. You know?

Well, that’s exactly right. And, it’s horrific that that’s how the piece was kept, but the piece is still better than the alternative.

Yes. This whole concept of, you know, annihilation happening and not happening simultaneously, like, maybe it still does. We don’t know, but it has worked so far, and I think we should be mostly thankful for that.

Yep. Okay. Talk a little bit about Lewis Straws. He’s the villain, both in the movie and in the book. First of all, Robert Downey Junior.

Amazing performance. Right?

Oh, so good. I if if Robert Danny Junior doesn’t get, an Oscar nomination for this, there’s no point in having the Oscars.

Just throw away the whole Sarah Longwell

I mean, I I’ve said this in a couple different places, but I think you could really stock the entire supporting actor Oscar lineup with guys from this move Yeah. I mean, Matt Damon and Robert Downey Junior, Gary Oldman comes in and does an amazing scene. Casey Affleck comes in and does an amazing scene. Yeah. Josh Hartnett is great throughout Rami Malek,

you know? Agreed.

Yes. Oh, and that Rami Malek thing so that’s not in the book. Did you notice this? The scene where it’s, it’s at the hearing that’s going to determine whether straws can be secretary of commerce. By the way, my husband said, I was thinking throughout that whole scene, it’s like all this to be secretary of commerce.

It’s such a trivial post. But, anyway, But that scene where he plays doctor David Hill, who testified against straws, because of his treatment of Oppenheimer. And, and that’s not in book, but it was it did happen. Nolan found it on his own.

That’s interesting. I didn’t realize that wasn’t in the book because it feels like something from the book.

No. Nolan found it. He used the transcript of that hearing.

Oh, that’s great. Yeah. No. I I actually had I I didn’t realize that. I because again, the rest of the movie is so huge to the book very closely.

Right. True.

I I find it fairly hard to believe that Oppenheimer recited the I am become death destroyer of world’s line, well, in the middle of, intimate relations with

Yes.

It was a bit much.

And, you know, that again, you get a you get a little you get a little poetic license when you get a little of this.

That’s fine. So straws is an interesting character in his own right. So he, like Oppenheimer, he was also Jewish,

came from a Southern

Jewish family, self made, But he, unlike Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer was a left winger. He was a very strong right winger, very conservative, and really, I think driven much more. I mean, they they make something of Oppenheimer’s mocking of him, and that may have played a role. Who knows? But I I think a lot of it was straight up policy differences.

And also there was this. I found this quotation about straws, which I thought was really great. They said it’s somebody said about him. If you disagree with Lewis about anything, he assumes you’re just a fool at first. But if you go on disagreeing with him, he concludes you must be a traitor.

Yeah. I mean, look, I I think you’re right. I I think their big difference in reality is probably rooted more in the actual dynamics of developing the H bomb versus not I mean, I I think they have a legitimate policy disagreement as we’re discussing here. And I don’t look, I I don’t mean to, you know, out myself as a warmonger or anything, but I don’t think that he and tell her are wrong precisely. I really don’t.

Mhmm. And, you know, again, this into a big debate over the use and misuse of red scare tactics in the nineteen fifties and the extent to which communist infiltration was real or imagined And whether or not this was the best or most suitable way to attack Oppenheimer is, I think, a fair question.

It was both, wasn’t it? It was both real and imagined.

It was both real and imagined. I look, this is the thing that, you know, that drives me the craziest about all this chatter is that two things can meet you at the same time. Right? McCarthy can be a jackass and an idiot and overreaching and, you know, full of it. But he also could be right that there was, in fact, a great, number of communists and communist sympathizers in both the government, the the media academia, Hollywood, elsewhere, the digress slightly here.

One of my favorite movies of the last decade or so is, Hale Caesar, the Cohen Brothers movie. I don’t know if you’ve seen it

—

No.

—

Mona. But there’s a there’s a subplot in this movie, and it’s it’s treated as kind of a joke, but also kind of serious about an actor who is actually a communist agent, and at the end of the film leaves America. He, like, gets on a Russian sub that has pulled up in the Pacific Ocean and, you know, sales off to the, to to the motherland. Again, it’s played for humor. It’s played for laughs that he’s accompanied by a coterie of screen writers who, you know, are are doing praxis.

Through all this. But it but it’s it’s very funny. And also, like, a joke, but also kind of right, kind of real. It it was a very interesting and weird time. And if you if you have not read Whitaker Chambers’s witness, you

should. Oh, I have. Yeah. Amazing book.

I know you have Mona. I’m saying for the for the for the others out there. Everyone else out there.

Yeah. No. No. That was an incredible incredible book. I remember I came to it kind of late, but when I read it, I I was just transfixed.

It’s so well done. Here was somebody there was a whole ring of people in England They were all alger hisses in the sense that, you know, they were all very high ranking people in British society, including in the Secret Podcast, who were actual spies for the USSR and and so forth. But but I do think that looking back on our own history in the nineteen fifties, there was a it was huge over extension of the idea that, you know, we had to be careful about infiltration of the security services and certain other secure things by people who might not be who who might be working for the Soviet Union and thinking that every high school or college teacher who had communist sympathies had to be fired.

Right. So Right. No. Totally. In all things balance, and and things got very badly out of balance.

In the nineteen fifty.

That’s right. And that’s what Straws did. So the fact that he had, a, a legitimate policy disagreement with Oppenheimer, he should have thought it out in the halls of Congress and in the administration and not succumb to the temptation sort of set him up with this Kangaroo Court, the Atomic Energy Commission, you know, hearing where the defendant as it were, of course, he wasn’t really a defendant. It wasn’t a real trial, but that meant that they all had all of these documents and they all had all of these phone tap records and things that He wasn’t allowed to see and his lawyer wasn’t allowed to see, and the whole thing was just it stank.

Yeah. The book and and the movie both get at the very un un Americanness of it all. In in the sense of just unfairness — Yes.

—

fair play. Like, I I, you know, we can debate over the the need to root outs, the commies, and all that. But, like, the the simple fact of the matter is that it was unfair. It was it was a star tragic job Star chamber. It was Kafkaesque, whatever term you wanna use.

It was, it was awful. And, again, another two great performances in that whole sequence, Macon Blair as Upenheimer’s attorney is, like, put upon

— Mhmm. —

you know, Harry’d attorney. He’s so good in that role. And, Jason Clark as the, I guess, prosecuting attorneys the wrong term, but the as the

Bob or Bob

He is so good. I just again, that whole that whole sequence is is wonderful.

Yeah. I mean, I coulda done without the the whole former girlfriend coming in and humping him dirt because

Well, it’s interesting too because

I, you know, one one thing people often criticize Christopher Nolan for is that they describe his movies as as sexless as as passionless as, you know, he And it’s it’s very funny that almost the it’s not quite the first because there is actually a a sex scene earlier in the film, but basically the in the the first sex scene of Christopher Nolan’s career is, showing sex to be a shameful thing that is, judged by committees looking to looking to destroy you. I like, there’s a there’s a there’s a Freudian something in there.

I I don’t

think it’s

That’s interesting. Well, but I did think, by the way. I don’t remember if it before or after there’s an actual scene with her sitting on his lap. But maybe before that, one thing that I thought was tremendously effective. Was there they are in this room and he’s being interrogated by these people and and basically it shows him sitting there stark naked.

Yes. Exposed.

And that was brilliant. Yes. You know, when you feel like you’ve been stripped naked, that was just great. Yes. What did you think about Emily Blunt?

She’s good. I mean, I she is

probably the character who gets the shortest shrift, and the the the major character from his his life who gets the least screen time and and efforts really to flower as a character. But she’s still so she’s still so good as that kind of Asteer and serene, but also, like, kind of drunk and angry. I love her. She’s a great actress. I love I love Emily Blenton.

About everything she’s in.

So She she is fantastic, and I, and I thought she was fantastic in this. And, actually, it’s a much nicer her depiction of Kitty Oppenheimer then comes through in the book, where she had she had she had a lot going on.

Yeah, it’s it’s interesting, to to kind of read some of the reactions to her. I mean, look, I I get the sense she was kind of a a drunken mess, a lot of time. And if you are somebody who has to be around a drunken mess, a lot of the time, that engenders a lot of resentments.

Yeah. Well, the stories that struck me about her in the book that really put me off wasn’t the drinking, although maybe that was part of it, because it it disinhibits But there were two things. One was she had two children, and in both cases, she she went away for, like, three months and left her babies with somebody else. And that bothered me. And I know people can have postpartum depression and stuff, but I don’t think that’s what this was.

And the other thing was that People around her described her as being very cruel. That put me off.

Yeah. I mean, I the children are almost entirely absent from the film. And they’re not in a lot of the book either. And that’s because, like, they were kind of tragic. I mean, his his Oppenheimer’s daughter killed herself.

His son kind of disappeared off into the countryside, I think. I but he he was not in he was not involved in in academia or anything like that. He just he was kinda out of there. Yeah. He he they were not good parents.

No. I think is is the easiest way to put that.

Absolutely right. Alright. Well, any other observations that you wanted to make about the book or the movie or the prospect of nuclear conflagration?

No. I I I love this movie a lot. And, you know, the the two movies, it kind of most reminds, you know, me and other people of, and Nolan and Downey Junior and killing and, Murphy have have talked about this. One is Amadeus, the, the great movie from the early nineteen eighties, one best picture. But it it in the sense that it is very much the story of a rival who was not the equal of an actual genius who used various levers of power to destroy that rival, which kind of an interesting way to think of these straws up andheimer relationship.

Even if, again, I think it’s not entirely fair to to real life. It makes for good drama.

Right.

And, the other, of course, is JFK and JFK, I think this movie is much more true to history in real life than JFK was. Oliver Stone’s, film about the assassination of John f Kennedy.

Yeah. I boycotted it. I didn’t see it.

Oh, you

know, I I can understand why because it is it is a it it’s a wild piece of conspiratorial, nonsense

—

Mhmm.

—

just as just as history. But as filmmaking, it is it is propulsive, absolutely, compulsively watchable because Oliver Stone and his editors layered the story together in this incredibly detailed complex way that, again, you the story moves forward through editing. And that is what Christopher Nolan has done here. I mean, this is a movie that’s three hours. Literally, it’s three hours of guys talking about physics, and guys talking about communism and guys talking about political backstabbing in Washington, DC.

It’s three hours of that. Guys talked on screen And I never once was like, god, why are these guys still talking? This is the dream forever.

It’s true.

It just zips along.

It does. I mean, I was not bored for a minute. It was really well done. Alright. Well, thank you, sunny, and, I really appreciate it.

And I guess we have to give the podcast back to Charlie now. But, thank you for for doing this, and, I wanna thank our producer, Katie Cooper, and our sound engineer, Carl Taylor, who’s also editing for us tonight. Thank you very much. And we will be back tomorrow and do this all over again.

Former Navy Seal Sean Ryan shares real stories from real people, from all walks of life on the Sean Ryan Show.

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