cheeky lil film rant (oppenheimer)
you ever watch a movie that pisses you off so much you're compelled to write a newsletter about it?
This past weekend Ville was in Sweden, which left me as king of the castle. Truthfully, my routine didn’t change much in the four days he was gone, but I did fashion a ‘Helsinki Cosplay’ (daring to dress like the hipsters I see around town and so admire) and took myself on a date to Kiasma, the local contemporary art museum. While a late-spring blizzard poured outside, I listened to a frequency on my headphones and sat in front of this painting for twenty minutes. Honestly, I would have stayed longer. This picture doesn’t do the work justice.
Over the weekend I also finished reading two books: Dinosaurs by Lydia Millet and Pedigree by Patrick Modiano. I hated Dinosaurs, and I’m starting to think that I just don’t enjoy ultra-modern books anymore. On my many excursions to the local library I’ve found myself reaching for classics, getting a silly adrenaline rush from my genuine enjoyment of them. I mentioned this already in my reading round-up newsletter from 2023, but I’ll say it again for the people in the back–reading classics at your own volition is a complete game changer from being forced to read them in high school. I really recommend it.
On that note, this morning I started reading Catcher in the Rye for the first time. For some reason it was never on my mandatory reading lists back when I was a teenager. I firmly believe that no piece of art should be required simply for the sake of being a ‘classic,’ but this book does feel like one I should read. More thoughts on that later.
Strangely–and completely not on purpose–I’ve been reading a lot of books related to World War II. One of my recent favorites, She Came to Stay by Simone de Beauvoir, was a fictional existential novel set against the backdrop of France right before the war started. Pedigree was a short autobiography from Patrick Modiano, a young man who was born in France shortly after the war ended—the book focuses mainly on Modiano trying to recount and understand the lives of his parents during German occupation. Last month I also read Shame by Annie Ernaux (why so many French books? I don’t know. My library seems to have a lot of them).
There is a direct through line of all these books–the sheer magnitude of the war, the lingering psychological, emotional and physical damage done as a result. Reading perspectives of people who lived through it–specifically young adults trying to make sense of a disrupted world–is giving me context I never gleaned in history courses. The parallels between that moment in history and now echoes within me a bit too clearly.
On Saturday night I watched Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer for the first time, probably under the best conditions: in bed, on my laptop, going absolutely nuts with a box of Jaffa cookies. I fell asleep halfway through and finished it the next day. There’s something to be said about watching blockbuster movies long after the hype has passed. I wanted to see it in theaters, but ended up not…because I have sensory issues and I wasn’t down to have my eardrums annihilated. Alas.
I expected relief to finally have seen it, maybe a passive appreciation. Like any former film student, I was also looking forward to writing a stupid review on Letterboxd. Instead I was full of rage so strong that it compelled me to write this newsletter.
I will preface this by saying that I genuinely enjoy Nolan’s work. Inception was incredibly formative for me when I was an aspiring director in high school. Interstellar is one of my favorite films of all time, to the point where I wrote two essays about it in college. Against my better judgment I also enjoyed Tenet, so much so that Ville and I made the trek to several of its filming locations in Tallinn, Estonia. That being said, I have major grievances with Nolan, mainly about his inability to write female characters with any semblance of complexity.
Oppenheimer (if you haven’t seen it–and honestly, you don’t need to), follows the story of Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) as he works on the Manhattan Project–aka, the atomic bomb. I won’t get into the history of everything. I’m no expert, and all of this can be googled.
Very intentionally, this is a film about male ego. A narrative plays out after the successful completion of the Manhattan Project in which Lewis Straus (former United States Secretary of Commerce) attempts to discredit Oppenheimer. The reason for this ends up being incredibly petty. Oppenheimer made Straus look foolish, emasculated. This is the driving force of Straus’s calculated, public revenge–not the fact that Oppenheimer manufactured a bomb that killed an estimated 220k people.
And this is exactly my issue.
Over the course of exactly 3 hours I watched a wide ensemble of (mostly) white men strive tirelessly to create this bomb. There are jokes about the possibility that its ignition will set the world’s atmosphere on fire. Even more back and forth about Oppenheimer’s brilliance. As a side note, it was incredibly surreal to see footage of UC Berkeley as the backdrop to a lot of the initial nuclear research. Berkeley to me is a place where improv comedy happened. To others, it was a lab for mass destruction. Moving on.
Mixed in between it all are haphazard attempts at romantic subplots. There are only two female characters–Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty and his communist situationship(???) Jean Tatlock. Kitty is played by Emily Blunt, Jean by Florence Pugh.
I was mostly excited to see Florence Pugh, tbh. I think she’s great. I also read a bit about real life Jean Tatlock and was very intrigued. But Nolan–unsurprisingly–managed to take a very complicated woman and whittle her down to a flat, unstable mistress who ultimately ends up killing herself.
There is one scene in particular that made the rage burn white-hot inside me. If you’ve seen the film you probably already know what I’m talking about. Oppenheimer is being interrogated about his relationship with Tatlock. Instead of having a proper flashback, Oppenheimer sits in the interrogation room, facing a council of about eight suit-clad men. His wife Kitty sits behind him. All of a sudden Oppenheimer is naked. And then Pugh is there and fully naked too, riding Cillian Murphy as he sits there, answering the jury’s questions. This goes on for an extremely uncomfortable beat while the council of men watch. At the last moment, Pugh raises her eyes and looks over Cillian Murphy’s shoulder to make eye contact with Emily Blunt. This is the only time the women ‘interact.’
Like, come on. Nolan is showing blatantly what’s always been more subtle in his other films. Women are either mothers or mistresses. They are vessels for the male characters to pour their dissatisfaction, their grief, their angst. They do not have any role in his narratives other than to further the development of the male leads—for better or for worse. But this particular directing choice goes far beyond his weak writing. Here Nolan is showing us that it’s always been intentional, the way he uses women in his films. You don’t become a world-renowned director without knowing why you’re making certain choices…over and over again.
What’s worse is that I can tell that Nolan thought he was doing something here. Like, did he place Pugh in a ‘dominant’ role during both of the sex scenes to feign feminism?
Did he show Emily Blunt exclaiming her frustration at having to single-handedly take care of their newborn baby as a way of stating–look, here’s a mother not happy about being a mother for very understandable reasons! How subversive!
Over and over again, Tatlock throws away the flowers that Oppenheimer brings her. Nolan, real question: in your mind does female coldness = complexity? To me, it seems so. But even coldness would be interesting if it contained any depth–and here, it doesn’t.
I also can’t stop thinking about what it was like to film the interrogation / sex scene. Obviously I’m aware that Florence Pugh is an actor and this is her job. But something about her being fully nude, doing this particular scene in front of a whole cast of cameo-d men wearing suits just didn’t sit right with me.
I want to highlight the fact that this film swept the Oscars this year. If this was a smaller film by a smaller director, maybe I wouldn’t be so angry. But Oppenheimer won Best Picture.
A genuine question has been reeling through me ever since I finished the film. At what point is Hollywood going to realize that we’re tired of these types of stories? Personally, I couldn’t believe that in the year 2024, I was watching such a recent, big-budget, critically acclaimed film about the fragility of white male egos. Especially when this film is literally based on a crime against humanity, one that never should have been built.
We don’t see the bomb dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. We see the bomb drop in New Mexico. We see cheers and congratulations. Later there’s a slideshow of the effects of the bomb. We see the audience wince. Oppenheimer looks away. We don’t see any of the images. We don’t hear about the impact of the people displaced in Los Alamos, the enduring effects of the radiation on the land or its inhabitants.
I’ve heard the argument that we don’t see the bomb’s aftermath because we all already know what happened. And I do see the merit to this conclusion. Certainly a lot of the substance of this film is common knowledge. But there’s a reason why Nolan chose to do such an in-depth character study of Oppenheimer: there was more to the story; a deeper truth clawing to get out.
This film is so close to saying something. There’s a scene where they’re debating on where to drop the bomb, and one guy says ‘Not Kyoto. It has historical significance. Also my wife and I had our honeymoon there.’ There’s another scene where the only female scientist working on the project is criticized for the possible ‘effects on her reproduction system.’ Even the empty scenes with Kitty and Jean Tatlock ring with potential.
There are so many interesting, complicated threads unraveling in this film. But Nolan chose to highlight the flattest, most overdone ones, and achieved great success for it.
No thanks.
Coincidentally, Oppenheimer’s rival Barbie (what a sentence) outperformed Nolan’s film in the domestic box office. I went to see Barbie in theaters on the day it came out, gleefully dressing up in hot pink for the occasion. It was truly beautiful to see the audience pink and packed, practically pouring over with love and excitement.
I don’t see a lot of films in theaters these days, and Barbie was a reminder that the experience of going to the movies is an experience of willful submission–you’re allowing yourself to be moved, consumed, awed, frightened, bored. For two hours (or longer) you’re signing away your lease on the real world–living, if only briefly, in a different one. I laughed, I cried, I felt the Kenergy vibrating into my bones through the surround-sound. It was awesome because it was so collective. If I had seen the film on my laptop, I doubt I would have enjoyed it as much.
That being said–am I a hypocrite for being critical of Oppenheimer? Me, a fan of Nolan, me a laptop-viewer? Granted, I probably would have been awestruck seeing Oppenheimer in theaters, at least on a cinematic level. But the awe would not replace my criticism; it would just muddle it a little. I wonder, too, if this is exactly it: can the critical acclaim of a film be linked to how dazzling it was to see in theaters? Everyone was talking about how loud the bomb scene was. Did the sensory success of Oppenheimer actually manage to hide the blatant misogyny draped between every beat?
Collectively I believe that we’re hungry for the type of stories like the one in Barbie–ones that explore the vast complexity of womanhood and gender, ones that challenge our old ways of thinking. And yet, Oppenheimer is still the type of film that’s winning all the awards, getting all the money.
Change is happening. I know it is. But I’m curious as to when we’ll see that change reach Hollywood on a significant level.
~
In Pedigree, Modiano writes: “Was it merely the illusion of twenty year olds who always think the world began with them? The air felt lighter to me that spring.”
I’ve wondered lately about the way this moment in time will be studied in the future–100 years from now, 200. What will be said about the people who lived between it all? The ones not directly impacted by the effects of war, but are still in tune with the air’s growing hum?
Coming into adulthood amidst a discordant world isn’t a new concept. Art tells us otherwise. But every generation is different. Every generation carries the weight of the ones before it. The role of the artist–in my opinion–is to draw from this vast prehistory in order to make sense of the present. Our present, the one that will soon become a prehistory too.
~
At the modern art museum, in the same room as the massive painting I mentioned before, there was an exhibit about evolution. The plaque beside it read: “Before everything, there was a primordial soup. We carry the memory of this soup in our cells.”
Oh man.
This week I munched on these brilliant essays:
Dating in the Digital Panopticon by Helena Aeberli
How to Live Without Your Phone by Sam Kriss
The Loneliest Love by Jenna Clare
I finally watched Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God. I’m currently on a mission to watch his filmography after getting my mind shattered by Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Recently I also watched:
Love and Other Drugs (2010)
Poor Things (2023)
Sanctuary (2022)
This Substack, gemini rites, landed me a job as a freelance writer for the travel website SheBuysTravel, where I’m being employed to write about Finland. I know. Insane.
My first article came out this week!
Also, I’ve joined the team as a reader/editor for a very cool project, The Lost Poetry Club. My short story The Glare (previously published here on Substack) will be appearing in the first episode as an experimental audio piece. Currently we’re curating the second episode—do check out the submissions page if you’re looking for a place to submit short stories!
I am so grateful to be a part of this project and work alongside other experimental and surrealist writers.
Cosmo Sheldrake’s brand new album: Eye To The Ear. The album is an hour long masterpiece. Please listen.
Other songs I’ve had on repeat:
I Love You - Woodkid
Feel Real - Mating Ritual
Fire Apartment - Tora
In the Garden - Two People
Warmth - ford., sophie meiers
Goliath - Woodkid
That’s all for now, hope you’ve been well!
xx Sidney