One of this summer’s blockbuster movies, “Oppenheimer,” tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who helped develop the atomic bomb that the U.S. used against Japan in World War II and who later warned against the dangers of a nuclear arms race. Kevin Hamilton, the dean of the College of Fine and Applied Arts and an art professor of new media at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is the co-author of “Lookout America!: The Secret Hollywood Studio at the Heart of the Cold War,” about the Lookout Mountain Laboratory film studio that documented nuclear testing for the U.S. Air Force. He spoke with News Bureau arts and humanities editor Jodi Heckel about the movie.
How does this portrayal of the development of the atomic bomb compare with the propaganda films made by the Lookout Mountain Laboratory?
The government-produced films my colleague Professor Ned O’Gorman and I study (and which can be found collected at www.lookoutamerica.org) are products of the process “Oppenheimer” depicts. “Oppenheimer” is as much about the process of building an organization of unprecedented scale – an operation – as it is about the building of a bomb. Within that operation – which eventually knit together the newly formed Air Force, Atomic Energy Commission (led by Lewis Strauss), and corporate and research entities around the globe – films served as “explainers” for these complex organizations and their human and technical components, much as “Oppenheimer” does with all its dense exposition. A significant difference between these films and “Oppenheimer” is that, in the interest of convincing audiences that systems are trustworthy where people may not be, the government films I study downplay the role of any individual human actor. Lastly, both “Oppenheimer” and Lookout Mountain Laboratory’s films rely heavily on emotion – but to different ends. I invite others to compare.
How does the film depict the complicated legacy of J. Robert Oppenheimer?
Among what sets “Oppenheimer” apart from so many previous artistic depictions of the Manhattan Project are the ends to which it places the age-old questions about the moral culpability of this one significant scientist. I doubt that many theatergoers leave “Oppenheimer” debating whether they see Oppenheimer as a “good guy” or a “bad guy.” The film foils that through all the ornate play with perspective and subjectivity that marks many of Christopher Nolan’s films. In the end I see the film as wrestling – and I mean really struggling – with how to see one individual (if extraordinary) human’s decisions as even relevant when systems grow as large, destructive and seemingly out-of-control as nuclear weapons have become as a political and technical project. The tragedy of “Oppenheimer” is not one man’s story, but the inability to bring these destructive planet-changing processes into a human frame of reference – a scale at which we can make deliberate and intentional decisions together toward a common good.
The film has a scene portraying the Trinity test – the first detonation of a nuclear bomb – but not the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What do you think of that decision?
Having viewed far more images and films of atomic and nuclear explosions than I ever would have wished to, I appreciated very much how “Oppenheimer” represented these detonations. Notably the film’s staged footage of Trinity avoided “mushroom cloud” imagery to emphasize light, fire and – most surprisingly – silence. In a recent audio documentary published with scholar Johanna Gosse, I explore how elusive the actual sound of these historic explosions has been, and how decades of filmmakers “faking it” with edited sound from other sources has served to help distance us from the real and ongoing consequences of these tests on people and the planet. In that light too, I appreciated the scene in “Oppenheimer” where a group of scientists view projected images of victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions in a darkened room. Instead of showing us explosions or even the images themselves, the film returns to its most frequent subject – that of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s face – as he, like so many, turns his eyes away.
How is this story relevant to today’s world? What lessons can we learn about how politics, ambition and personal rivalries shape the trajectory of historical events?
“Oppenheimer” is in part about our struggle to make sense of human-initiated processes and systems of such massive scale, seeming inevitability and destructive potential as to defy our ability to even see them, let alone change their course. Emotion of the kind cinema excels at evoking will be a necessary part of facing the colossal advance of nuclear weapons proliferation, climate change or the role of artificial intelligence in our lives. That very emotion may draw us – as it clearly does director Christopher Nolan – to the puzzling challenge of what one person can do or influence in these fearsome processes. But as much as these and other moral challenges absolutely require personal introspection and action, reducing them solely to questions of individual guilt actively keeps these supra-human efforts on their destructive course. Our nation’s polarized civic discourse on race, class, gender and the appropriate role of the state in civic life also attests to this. I hope the summer’s many welcome conversations about “Oppenheimer” continue long enough for us to find some new collective ways of seeing the history and present it portrays.