OSCAR WATCH 2024 — World on Fire: Reflections on 'Oppenheimer' (2023) and Contemporary Hollywood

This is the first of a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards.

If ever there was a film of the moment, Oppenheimer must be it, right now. The film ends ominously with the image of the globe’s surface being consumed by (nuclear) fire (Figure 1), doing so at a time when the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has set its Doomsday Clock, both in January 2023 and in January 2024, at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest to the end of our world it has ever come since the clock’s inception in 1947. With two nuclear powers (Russia and Israel) currently involved in large-scale wars and all the others (the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan and North Korea) involved in border disputes, limited military interventions and/or nuclear posturing, all of which could quite conceivably escalate at any moment, the ending of Oppenheimer is uniquely resonant. Many viewers, journalists and other commentators have reflected on these resonances, as have I.

figure 1: world on fire in oppenheimer (2023)

But there are other things to consider as well. A critics and audience favourite (judging by its ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic and its ranking in the IMDb users chart, as well as the numerous awards it has already won), Oppenheimer has been nominated for 13 Oscars; only three movies have ever received more. Members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences love biopics and, more generally, films more or less closely (or loosely) based on real events. Best Picture Oscar winners of this kind range historically all the way from Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and The Life of Emile Zola (1937) to Spotlight (2015), Moonlight (2016), Green Book (2018) and Nomadland (2020). The academy also loves Christopher Nolan and his movies which have received dozens of nominations since 2002, including for Best Director, Screenplay and Picture; but despite eleven Oscars awarded for Nolan’s movies, so far there has been none in these last three categories. As a Nolan-written-and-directed biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called “father of the atomic bomb”, which meticulously reconstructs the events leading up to the first nuclear explosions at the Alamogordo Bombing Range and in Hiroshima as well as important post-war developments, Oppenheimer would seem to be tailor-made for this year’s awards ceremony.

And there is yet more to say about the timeliness of this film. A surprise hit at the box office (at number three in the global chart for 2023 with revenues of almost $1 billion, the second highest figure ever for an R-rated movie), Oppenheimer breaks with the dominance of franchise movies as well as free-standing fantasy/Science Fiction/superhero/action and animation movies at the top of the annual global box office charts. Together with the underperformance of some of the usual suspects for global box office glory and the surprisingly successful transfer of the Barbie and Super Mario Bros. phenomena to the big screen (making up numbers one and two in the chart for 2023), some commentators have taken the financial success of Oppenheimer to indicate a possible sea change in cinemagoing habits and preferences – although it is not at all clear in which direction this may go: newmovie franchises and/or a return to biopics and historical epics (the latter arguably the most successful genre at the box office until the 1960s with a major revival in its box office fortunes in the 1990s).

Before one can speculate about whether Oppenheimer might initiate certain trends, one needs to get a better understanding of what kind of film it actually is, and to do so means, among other things, acknowledging that it explores one of the key themes of global blockbusters since 1977, namely large, even global, communities under threat, with high levels of spectacular death and destruction being put on display. From the Death Star’s destruction of Alderaan to Thanos’s erasure of half of all life in the universe (with the added threat to perhaps wipe out all life so as to enable a new beginning), Hollywood has entertained the world most successfully for over four and a half decades with stories about wide-ranging devastation.

And Oppenheimer arguably does this as well, even going as far as using the kind of mythological framework that also underpins other hit movies from Star Wars and Superman (1978) via the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings movies all the way to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. After all Oppenheimer’s opening caption reads: “Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this, he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity.” As already mentioned, the film’s final image is of the Earth on fire; fire stolen from the gods (in Greek myth or in 20th century science and engineering) goes together with infernal punishment – in Oppenheimer’s case not primarily for the bringers of fire but for all of humanity.

The film also makes interesting (and controversial) use of Oppenheimer’s famous quotation from the Baghavad Gita: “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” In the final scene, Oppenheimer reminds Albert Einstein of the scientists’ fear that the explosion of the atomic bomb “might start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world”, and then concludes: “I believe we did.” The following image of the burning planet suggests that Oppenheimer (and his team) will indeed one day have to be regarded as destroyer(s) of a world.

It should also be noted that, like so many other blockbusters, Oppenheimer makes extensive use of otherworldly special effects imagery, which here is mainly to do with what appear to be the subatomic and cosmological realms. This imagery could be – just like the final image of the globe on fire – related to Oppenheimer’s imagination, but it feels, to me, quite separate, not anchored in anyone’s subjectivity but more like yet another framing device: the story and the story world are not only placed in a mythological frame (Prometheus, Baghavad Gita) but also on a scale in between the unimaginably small and the unimaginably large, the world of human experience revealed as only a very thin slice of physical reality.

At the same time, the film – quite unusually for a Hollywood blockbuster and even more so for one of the biggest ever IMAX releases – is for long stretches basically made up of talking heads (not necessarily in close-up, though). There is lot of dialogue and also some silent contemplation, but not much action; or perhaps one could say that the dialogue is the action. Now one might expect that this being a biopic, the dialogue reveals a lot about Oppenheimer, and in a sense it does: one gets a strong sense of his arrogance and his tendency to offend and alienate certain people, but also his ability to convince people, to win them over, to mobilise and guide them. It is strongly suggested that much of the time he merely plays a part, in that he carefully calculates what he says and how he generally presents himself to others with a view of manipulating them.

There are very few scenes revealing his “true” self, as it were, his genuine beliefs and feelings (his breakdown after he receives the news of Jean Tatlock’s death being one such scene). Importantly, the closest we may come to understanding him perhaps are comments made by his wife and by his nemesis, Lewis Strauss – and they do not paint a flattering portrait: Oppenheimer is said to be a narcissist who revels in having led the atomic bomb project and who, instead of feeling genuine regret or guilt, just wants to shift the public’s perception of him, if necessary by playing the role of a martyr in the security hearings. This gives an extra charge to his final (flashback) dialogue with Albert Einstein. What exactly are we to make of his facial expression and tone of voice when he says “I believe we did” (start a chain reaction that will destroy the entire world)? Does he feel guilt and regret, or perhaps a perverse sense of pride?

I have to admit that I have only seen the film twice, and I may well see it very differently when I will finally go through it scene by scene, shot by shot, conceivably even frame by frame. But I think the film will continue to fascinate and deeply engage me and many other viewers for many years to come. Unless, of course, – and this is a genuinely frightening but, unfortunately, not really that far-fetched thought – the film’s final image of the burning Earth becomes our reality, and we (or rather: those of us who survive) will have more important things to do than analysing and appreciating movies.

Biography

Peter Krämer is a Senior Research Fellow in Cinema & TV in the Leicester Media School at De Montfort University (Leicester, UK). He also is a Senior Fellow in the School of Art, Media and American Studies at the University of East Anglia (Norwich, UK) and a regular guest lecturer at several other universities in the UK, Germany and the Czech Republic. He is the author or editor of twelve academic books, including American Graffiti: George Lucas, the New Hollywood and the Baby Boom Generation (Routledge, 2023), and has published over ninety essays in academic journals and edited collections.