2
Let’s start with the time. It’s 6:52 p.m. when I pull into the Walmart parking lot. I make a point of checking the clock because I’m on my way to see Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s new biopic about the physicist who supervised the development of the atomic bomb. Time is always a big deal in Nolan movies. I actually watch as the clock switches over from 6:51 to 6:52. This strikes me as a satisfyingly Nolanesque touch. “Nice,” I whisper to myself. Then it hits me that the truly Nolanesque touch would have been watching it switch from 6:51 to 6:50, or from 6:51 to -2:a9, for reasons that had recently been explained to me by a man in a very sharp suit.
3
I live in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a town of 20,000 people in the middle of the Keystone State. We have one semi-highbrow movie theater, a crumbling old vaudeville palace on High Street that shows foreign films and art films and sells quaintly tiny servings of popcorn in rigid boxes with “Popcorn” written on the sides. But the place to see Nolan movies is the multiplex on the edge of town, the R/C Carlisle Commons, a minor outlying island in the concrete sea surrounding Staples and Walmart. It’s got eight screens, a gray lobby, a couple of arcade games, industrial carpet. When I lived in L.A., I went to all the fancy theaters, the ones with ushers and light meters and the correct film stock. I liked that, but it never seemed to have much to do with the reality of moviegoing in America. I saw Zero Dark Thirty at the Carlisle Commons. Some of the crowd, though not all of it, cheered during the torture scenes.
4
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There’s a big crowd at the theater. One of the entrance doors has a sign on it that says, “Please Use Other Door.” People are freely going in and out through this door; I can’t decide whether this would irritate Nolan or not. Inside, the lobby decor is a pink fever dream of Barbie paraphernalia. We’ve got a Barbie van, life-size Barbie cutouts, Barbie posters. But it’s a Nolan crowd in the concessions line. There are teen boys in fedora-ish hats. There’s a cool girl in suspenders and wide canvas trousers. There’s also, uh, a nonzero number of guys who match my general description, men in their 30s and 40s who’ve come to see Oppenheimer alone. Something about the scene strikes me as comically incongruous—all these people in somber clothes who are waiting to see a movie about the extinction of life on earth, surrounded by Barbie iconography in a theater next door to an Applebee’s—but there’s something a little unsettling about it, too, an eerie quality of foreshadowing that I will struggle to identify until well into the third act, when it will hit me like a thunderclap, all at once.
-2
I have a special reason to be curious about Oppenheimer. A few years ago, I talked the army into letting me visit the Trinity Site, the spot in the New Mexico desert where the first atom bomb was detonated a few weeks before the bombing of Hiroshima. The Trinity test, I’d read, is the climax of Oppenheimer’s second act, so the site plays a big role in the movie. It’s open to visitors twice a year, on the first Saturday in April and the third Saturday in October. That year I’d missed both dates, but I emailed the army and they agreed to give me a private tour. I still don’t know why they said yes. I was supposed to be working on a story about the historical unconscious of the American Southwest. Really I was just traveling around to convince myself I wasn’t depressed. I’d been to Roswell and Los Alamos and the gates of Area 51. I’d driven Route 66. I was going through one of those spells when it feels like you’ve fucked up every single part of your life, and all these eerie old desert places had gotten mixed up in my brain with the state of my own emotions. Even at the time this struck me as embarrassing and solipsistic, but I got it into my head, in some quasi-mystical way, that the way out was to go to the Trinity Site. I would stand on the spot, and then my life would change. This sounds at least as dumb to me now as it probably sounds to you, but at the time it seemed important. And a kind press liaison at the White Sands Missile Range agreed to take me, even though the irrational nuclear lyricism at the heart of my project seemed to offer negligible PR value to the army. In the end, it did help get my head into a better place, though not for the reasons I expected.
-1
White Sands, where the Trinity Site is located, is one of the largest military installations in the United States. Saying that doesn’t convey the sheer felt enormity of a zone of inaccessible desert that’s larger than Delaware by almost 1,000 square miles. My military guide, whose name was Lisa, drove a beat-up old pickup. When she met me at the Tularosa Gate, she was dropping off a U.S. senator and the senator’s aide, who’d been on their own tour of Trinity. The senator’s aide gave me her phone number and told me to call her if I ever wanted to talk about stories I could write on American nuclear policy. I said I would, and didn’t.
0
From the gate, it takes over an hour to reach Trinity. Bare terrain. Scrub grass. Low mountain ridges in the distance. That strange, semi-purple New Mexico light. Occasionally, you’ll pass an outcropping with three or four white military buildings. You don’t see other people unless a jeep drives by, in which case you see it coming from a long way off and your paths take forever to cross. Eventually, you come to a wide, flat stretch of open ground encircled by a rusty chain-link fence. There’s a beat-up old oil drum standing in for a trash can. Some distance away, behind the fence, there’s a black obelisk, not very tall. This is where the bomb exploded. When I arrived, a plastic bag was fluttering on a bare shrub outside the fence. Seventy years earlier, the pillar of fire sucked up unimaginable tons of sand and fused with it into a bizarre new crystalline substance called trinitite. There are still kernels of trinitite all over the area. A crooked sign on a flaking pole announced that it was a crime to take any away with you, though Lisa said people do it anyway. We went through the fence and stood there by the obelisk. All around the obelisk were little tennis-ball-sized holes in the ground. I spent some time trying to work out what could have happened during the atomic blast to create all these precise little holes. Lisa explained that the holes had nothing to do with the bomb. They’re rabbit holes. The army can’t figure out how to stop rabbits from burrowing under ground zero. “Everything is an accident,” I thought.
5
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle holds that the speed and position of a particle cannot be known simultaneously. At the movies, I experience a moment of snack uncertainty (popcorn or candy?) before finally buying some Skittles and a truly gigantic Coke Zero. I get to my seat just as the trailers start. I’m sitting all the way on the right by the aisle, which means the surround sound is all wonky at my listening position. Half the dialogue sounds like it’s being spoken through a bass clarinet. When the lights go down, an older guy two rows ahead of me refuses to turn off his phone. His wife is nudging him; he simply does not care. He’s playing some kind of game, zapping colorful balloons. He keeps zapping them while Cillian Murphy’s beautiful, gaunt face is intercut with squiggly nightmare visions of the quantum universe. The phone game goes on for most of the first act. It’s distracting; people are whispering about it. Oppenheimer injects cyanide into an apple; thousands of sparkles from the tiny phone screen indicate that the man has hit some kind of bonus score. He’s raking in all kinds of coins. Oppenheimer meets Einstein; a purple baby dragon (?) talks to the man via a speech bubble (??). The position of the particles in my Skittles is centered in the cupholder of seat F9. Their speed is 1 mph as I raise them to my mouth.
6
“Theory will take you only so far,” Oppenheimer says in the experimental physics lab at Berkeley. He means that what the math says on paper can’t always predict what will happen in real life. The man finally puts his phone away. Kids in the front few rows are chattering and knocking into one another’s shoulders. The first time the movie drops Einstein’s most famous quote, I think, How could anyone spend five minutes around human beings and think God does not play dice with the universe? God loves dice. But the movie is so riveting that I only half notice what the teens are doing. Like all Nolan films, it’s sleek, refined, immaculately paced, flawlessly edited. Nolan movies have a way of making other directors’ movies look, on a basic level, unprofessional. The hits of information, emotion, and adrenaline land at just the right moments. Over three hours, I’m never bored, and I’m never confused despite a density of biographical and scientific material that seems sufficient to start a fusion reaction by itself. The movie’s symbols (apple for original sin, hat flying off Einstein’s head for quantum uncertainty) all fit together with total precision. I probably miss half the brilliant little touches, especially given that so much dialogue is bass-clarineted out of audibility, but what I do notice is deeply impressive. I make a mental note that during the run-up to the Trinity explosion, Ludwig Göransson’s score obliquely references Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. After the Trinity test, it references the “Lacrimosa” from Mozart’s Requiem.
7
The contrast between the unruly theater around me and the gorgeously coherent parable on-screen is hard to miss. And maybe, I think, it’s Nolan’s quality of machine-tooled perfection—so unlike anything you experience in real life—that makes his films so alluring. Even when they’re dark, there’s something comforting about them. They make sense. “Theory will take you only so far,” Oppenheimer repeats in the thrilling run-up to the nuclear blast (pouring rain, eerie light, driving music). When the blast hits, I’m thinking that the process of creating art is partly about that tension, the push and pull between theory and real life. The impulse to make art often seems to come from a feeling that real life can only take you so far: that the way to find meaning is to capture the feeling of being alive within a form that gives it coherence, a set of rules that make life make sense. And how far an artist goes toward one pole or the other, toward pure form, like Nolan, or messy reality, is part of what determines what their work can offer its audience, what they can say as an artist.
8
Critics have argued that J. Robert Oppenheimer, as a man struggling to live with a demonic machine of his own creation, is a stand-in for Nolan and his colossal obsession with intricate narrative structures, which is probably unmatched in the history of film. I suspect the opposite is actually true. I suspect Oppenheimer is a nightmare figure for Nolan: a man who harnessed the chaos of the quantum realm (rather than the underlying order of all Nolan’s art) to build a device that destroyed the world’s equilibrium (rather than restoring it). I suspect Nolan loves the complexity of quantum physics while feeling genuine terror about the idea that underneath the surface, reality is simply incoherent. He loves making movies about men who acquire secret knowledge, but the point of their secret knowledge is always to reveal how the game works, not to reveal that the game doesn’t work at all. Nolan’s heroes don’t always reach happy endings, but even his most ambiguous conclusions—think of Inception’s spinning top—sit comfortably within the pure logic of his narrative premises. I suspect that the bomb, for Nolan, is less about the horror of mass death than the horror of the world not making sense.
9
By the time any of this occurs to me, however, I really, really, really have to pee. God may not play dice with the universe, but I have played dice with a large Coke Zero, and I have lost. When I come out of the bathroom, Barbie has just let out next door. My path is blocked by a horde of women in pink. Six of them are wearing matching hot-pink T-shirts. They’re taking pictures of one another. Making my way through them takes so long I feel as if I’m in Tenet, running chronologically backward. I miss the entire announcement of the Hiroshima bombing, probably the pivotal moment of the movie (I wouldn’t know). My Coke Zero is become death, destroyer of worlds.
1
What I mostly remember about visiting the Trinity Site is the drive away from it. On the way to the site, I’d seen several road signs that seemed, inexplicably, to depict the heads of African antelopes. On the way back, I discovered what they meant. It turns out that the White Sands Missile Range is home to thousands of African ibex. Lisa says that back in the ’60s, a base commander flew in a stock of ibex from the Kalahari because he wanted to have big-game hunts on the missile range. Without lions to thin their numbers, the ibex thrived, and their great-great-great-grandchildren are still living in the New Mexico desert. On the way out of Trinity, I saw them, an immense herd some distance from the road. It was the strangest thing. They looked up—small, angular heads; enormous, curving horns—and watched the truck go by. It filled my heart; I can’t explain it. Unintended consequences are always more unintended than you think. Oppenheimer detonated an atom bomb in the desert in the 1940s, and as a direct result—because the missile base came into being around the bomb project—thousands of square miles of American desert are now dominated by alien megafauna.
10
During the last hour of Oppenheimer, while Robert Downey Jr. (excellent, one of his best performances) is watching his political career go up in smoke due to a far more orderly set of unintended consequences, I’m finally able to put a name to the source of the uneasy feeling I had in the theater lobby. It’s impermeability. Nolan’s films are so mathematically exact that they feel sealed off from real life, with its imprecision and awkward timing and uncertainty. Compare Oppenheimer to something recent like Season 2 of The Bear, a beautifully crafted piece of art that’s nonetheless full of mess and rough edges, and you’ll see what I mean. Nolan’s movies are so hugely pleasurable because they’re self-contained systems. His films, especially his more recent films, represent an extreme solution to the tension animating artistic creativity. They simply leave disorder out. Dunkirk is the only Nolan movie I really dislike, and I dislike it for the silliest possible reason. The beach is too clean. There are thousands of soldiers trapped there, and we’re supposed to be invested in their ordeal, but nothing about the setting suggests actual human occupation. It’s just a bunch of quiet dudes standing in single-file lines. The movie is meant to be a stirring depiction of a rescue, but the people being rescued are essentially game NPCs; all Nolan’s attention is concentrated on the temporal gimmick and on the opposing war machines. Tom Hardy’s face mask is more of a character than most of the characters. I don’t mind this so much in action movies like Inception, but what’s the use of a history movie that leaves humanity out of the history it represents?
11
Oppenheimer wants to imagine the annihilation of human life on earth. But as I’m sitting in the theater, what I’m thinking is that if its darkest vision came true, this is what would be annihilated: the kid throwing popcorn at his friend, the old man popping balloons on his phone, the girl in suspenders, the idiot missing a key moment of the movie because he goes to the bathroom and gets overrun by Barbie superfans. A movie about our extinction should include us to some degree, but Oppenheimer is polished to such a high sheen that the world whose destruction it asks us to imagine doesn’t look much like our world at all. It’s like Murphy’s impenetrably beautiful gaze up there on the screen: a hard, reflective surface that doesn’t really see us looking back at it. Oppenheimer is a parable about sin, but to frame the invention of the bomb as a parable means to sanitize it, to place it in a two-dimensional realm outside human contingency and confusion and desire. (There are films about the bomb that understand these things; watch Hiroshima Mon Amour or, failing that, Dr. Strangelove or Twin Peaks: The Return.) “Theory will take you only so far,” the film says, but this, I’m thinking, is the lesson Nolan doesn’t quite want to learn, the secret knowledge he can’t quite accept, the fear he doesn’t quite know how to face. He wants to design a world without accidents; when he imagines the apocalypse, he imagines ground zero with no rabbits. As theory, as an orderly parable, Nolan’s film is virtually immaculate. His technical control is astonishing. But God ought to learn to play dice.
