OSCAR WATCH 2024 — Video Essay Reflections on Character in ‘Oppenheimer’ (2023)
/This post is part of a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards.
This post features two video essays responding to the 96th Academy Award Best Picture winning film Oppenheimer (2023): Kai after Kai’s “The Guilt of Oppenheimer” and Ella Wright’s “Fission, Fusion, and Character in Oppenheimer.” I encourage you to pay particular attention to the sound in each piece, the careful dichotomies between loudness and silence in “Fission, Fusion, and Character in Oppenheimer” and the menacing yet also space age-y melodies of Kai after Kai’s original music in “The Guilt of Oppenheimer.” Both essays use sound to reinforce their critical points, rather than simply to ground their audiovisual timelines.
“The Guilt of Oppenheimer” by Kai After Kai
“The Guilt of Oppenheimer” is a powerful mediation on the morality of both the historical Oppenheimer’s actions and director Christopher Nolan’s framing of Oppenheimer’s story. It places Oppenheimer as perhaps the paradigmatic brilliant asshole, whose genius supposedly allows him (and it’s always a him) to mistreat the people around him and yet still somehow garner sympathy when he feels bad about what he’s done. But while such characters are often fan favorites, Kai after Kai asks us to consider the real damage they do on both interpersonal and geopolitical planes.
“Fission, Fusion, and Character in Oppenheimer” by Ella Wright
“Fission, Fusion, and Character in Oppenheimer” uses the metaphors of fission (Oppenheimer) and Fusion (Strauss) to characterize what we might call the protagonist and antagonist of the film. While Oppenheimer continually struggles to reconcile morality with science/politics, Strauss is completely immersed in his obsession with Oppenheimer. Neither of them find joy or comfort in their atomic metaphor, and, as the ending suggests with its invocation of the continually escalating dispersal of ever-more deadly nuclear weapons, perhaps they don’t deserve to.
If you’re not familiar with the world of video essays and videographic criticism, I hope these two pieces piqued your interest! You can continue on to Kai after Kai and Ella’s channels to see more of their work. There is a lively and sophisticated field developing between the academy (such as the SCMS Digital Humanities and Videographic Criticism Scholarly Interest Group) and popular intellectual creators (such as the essayist community The Essay Library) that we hope to feature more on this blog.
Biographies
I'm Kai After Kai (A.K.A James Makepeace), a video essayist, actor, music artist and overthinker. I make videos about whatever I happen to find interesting at that particular moment, be it film, music, anime, games or just general philosophy, often companied by my own ambient, electronic compositions. I'm currently working on an album, a short film and a variety of intermittent videos.
Ella Wright is a doctoral candidate at the University of Birmingham, undertaking an audio-visual PhD. Their research explores what is termed as ‘the video essay’, face to face with notions of embodiment, materiality, logocentrism and epistemology regarding video making research-by-practice. Ella is also a documentary filmmaker and editor, having recently completed editorial work on their first feature length film ‘Children of the Wicker Man’, directed by Justin Hardy, and directorial work on a documentary short 'Pushing the Boundary', examining the inclusion of people with learning disabilites in the workplace.
Samantha Close earned her PhD in Communication at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include digital media, theory-practice, fan studies, gender, race, and Japanese media. She focuses particularly on labor and transforming models of creative industries and capitalism. Her documentary, I Am Handmade: Crafting in the Age of Computers, based on her most recent research project, is hosted online by Vice Media’s Motherboard channel. Her writing appears in edited volumes and academic journals, such as Feminist Media Studies, Transformative Works and Cultures and Anthropology Now.
