Barbenheimer

This is my review of the film Oppenheimer, which will be followed by a blog about the film Barbie.

This is a film about Robert Oppenheimber, the man credited with the creation of the nuclear bombs used to at the end of WW2.  So you know the story.  You can't claim to be dissapointed when the bomb explodes and it doesn't drop loads of confetti and rose petals on Japan who laugh so much they decide to surrender to the Allied forced out of love.

That doesn’t happen.  The film is quite clever because it tells the story about a race to develop a nuclear bomb before the Nazi’s alongside a second story, that being how Oppenheimers reputation was subsequently trashed after the war in the McCarthy era witch hunts against suspected Communists.

History has been relatively kind to Oppenheimer, and perhaps this film will help further restore his legacy.  Clearly he was someone who could easily be described as a genius.  In the film he is seen meeting Einstein and discussing the direction he is taking the knowledge provided by Einstein.  But also, Oppenheimer is the next generation, Einstein may have been able to see the power within his equations, but it was chalk on a blackboard.  Oppenheimer took it to its next step.  Harnessing the release of an enormous amount of energy correctly in a war ending bomb.  For all the scientists in the chain, Einstein included, the weight of that knowledge must have been a quite a sinister burden.

The film shows the arrogance thats associated with academia, an arrogant quest not only for knowledge but to display that knowledge to your peers.  On the whole, academia is a world where collaboration and sharing is at the heart of what is done, but where certain personalities can become far too egotistical and where the desire to outshine collaborators and compete to show yourself as the most knowledgeable becomes the end in itself.  In Oppenheimer it shows the malice that can occur in these instances where public embarrassment can turn into bitter feuds that last years, destroying reputations even when the person being destroyed has delivered something which is claimed to have won the peace.

For me Oppenheimer was interesting because of the light it shines on something we all know about American culture.  That is the cultural dislike of Communism they have. 

Americans today have been raised by multiple generations who saw Communists as the enemy and Communism as the failed alternative economic system to american democracy. But American Democracy isn't an economic system. Capitalism is the economic system. And in America, it's hyper capitalism, communism is as compatible with American Democracy as hyper capitalism is.  

Democracy is taken to mean emancipatory freedom in terms of economics, politics and society.  Communism is also about this freedom.  Of course, Soviet communism and Chinese communism isn’t about these freedoms, they are authoritarian, but also, neither of these things were, or are true Communism.

Russia and China are countries controlled by a small group of people with more money and power than the rest in society.  A description which puts them in the same camp as America and Britain.  Soviet and pre-1990 Chinese communism had a facade of socialism, America and Britain have a facade of democracy.

There is a belief in America that with the fall of the Berlin Wall Communism was shown to have failed and Capitalism won, the end of history as its known in some circles.  But all that happened was that Soviet states failed. Communism was never being truly or properly practiced.  You could say that China is showing that Communism is winning, but China is not pursuing Communism either, its a capitalist authoritarian state.  Perhaps the end result of the hyper-capitalism pursued by America and Britain is the same as that pursued in China, its eventual implosion when there is no one left to buy anything because all the wealth has concentrated into so few.

In the US today, Communism remains a dirty word which is easily linked to Socialism, which merges into being one and the same.  Oppenheimer showed the US in peak McCarthyism, in reality, did the Soviet Union ever want to destroy the US?  Even if it did, was this Communism or just a Soviet Russian state, or just American paranoia?

But back to the film, I am someone who does buy into the story that fighting in Japan was savage and very costly in terms of soldiers and Japanese civilians. Maybe politicians were too excited to test their new toys. But you can’t deny that the stories they were getting about fighting were probably equally grim.

The film is odd in a few areas. A totally unnecessary use of a really good acctress who seems to be nude for no reason. It adds nothing. And the total absence of Japan or any real mention of the impact of the bomb even 80 years later. These things feel like quite singnifiact issues which do bring the film down a bit.

But at the heart of the film is a story about the tension between politicians and scientists, a story which doesn’t seem relevant most of the time, but one which becomes relevant if you are in a race to build a nuclear bomb or if you are going to lockdown society because of a new virus. And in this respect it does speak to us today.  Politics and science do not mix well, and when they do, it can have awful consequences.