Weekly Readings #76 (07/17/23-07/23/23)

man(t)ic ekphrasis

This week I posted “Corporal Works of Mercy,” the latest chapter in my serialized novel for paid subscribers, Major Arcana. With the tale it tells behind us—the adolescence of Diane del Greco: the novel’s mother, wife, paramour, muse, model, painter, and most pivotal character—we are prepared for the next chapter, dropping Wednesday: a scene in an Italian restaurant dramatizing the fateful first meeting as couples and collaborators between Simon Magnus and Ellen Chandler, on the one hand, and Marco Cohen and Diane del Greco on the other. Please subscribe!

For today’s essay, I respond to Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Much as I hesitate to participate in a hype campaign, I feel obligated to write about Nolan for reasons given in footnote three below; even if you don’t care about Oppenheimer, that footnote, along with footnote five, contains crucial lore for the Pistelli-maxxer, maybe mentioned on Tumblr back in the day but (I think) never before on Substack. (When it comes to the Weekly Readings posts, you can skip the main text, but you should never miss the footnotes.) Plus, Op’s a very good movie, I think. It’s also kind of nostalgic fun to be back in the monoculture; I am willing to abandon my critique of corporatist culture for a weekend and pretend we’re Athenians, all deliberating over the same tragedy and the same comedy at the same time. (I personally have no interest in Barbie, though—my apologies to its patron goddess.)

What follows is neither a review nor a formal argument. I don’t write movie reviews because I find the genre dull and ad-adjacent; I don’t write academic essays on film because I don’t have the qualifications to do so; this is more in the mode of manic ekphrasis than film analysis. (I was aiming for “mantic,” but “manic” was all I could hit.) There are spoilers, if one can spoil a film based on the historical record. Please enjoy—and spread far and wide wherever less adequate takes threaten to prevail!

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Revolutionary Requiem: Notes Toward Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer official trailer

The film’s first shot: rainfall in a puddle. Each droplet ripples out in concentric waves to create a fluid interference pattern over the surface. Text and metatext begin. World and film are meniscus or tympanum, the droning chaos of its agitated surface discernible as order to the eye of genius; the acts of genius are further chaotic additions in an infinite pattern requiring an infinite—and recursive, thus circular—process of interpretation. The rain falls in the final scene, too, on a pond by which Oppenheimer and Einstein stand—but only on the pond, not on the two men, like something out of Tarkovsky.¹

Nolan’s Oppenheimer stares at a Picasso, reads The Waste Land. He quotes Eliot’s favorite, John Donne: “Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” the “break, blow, burn” sonnet about wanting to be ravished by the divine. Chided by an all-American colleague for his left-wing sympathies, he asks how the man can accept the revolution in physics but not the revolution in everything else: he names Picasso, Stravinsky, Freud, Marx.

The splitting of the atom was a product of international modernism—no less than the painters’ break-up of the picture plane into multiple perspectives, the poets’ shattering of the lyric into montage and myth, the novelists’ stream-of-consciousness implosion of narrative, the composers’ abandonment of tonality, the psychologists’ discovery of the unconscious, or the revolutionaries’ faith in immanent emancipatory eschatology.

“You just need to get laid,” Jean Tatlock, Oppenheimer’s unstable psychoanalyst-communist lover, tells him. (In real life, though not in the movie, she introduced him to Donne.) He first says the line from the Bhagavad Gita as she’s straddling him with the Sanskrit text in her hand. Nolan’s films have often suffered from a lack of both sexuality and the unconscious, two lacunae that proved fatal to the lumberingly affectless Inception. He almost makes up for it here with this foray into vulgar Freudianism: is Oppenheimer’s erection of the mushroom cloud just another symptom of the womanizing physicist’s general priapism?

Nolan also deploys, rather daringly in resurgent feminist times, the body of Florence Pugh as Tatlock, naked in half her scenes. She stands in (or, as it were, lies down) for the self-harming, water-and-earth, irrational feminine matrix of the other-harming, fire-and-air, rational male structure—as Mal (Marion Cotillard) did, albeit less vividly, as the bottom of Inception’s oneiric architecture. Oppenheimer’s wife, in contrast, is a more a three-dimensional character, though one ultimately subservient to his aims, played with marvelous old-time dignity by Emily Blunt despite Nolan’s somewhat mean-spiritedly caricatural focus on her dipsomania.

I’m not Laura Mulvey;² I have no political objection to the appearance and reappearance of Pugh’s IMAX-filmed breasts; but still, there’s not much here thematically. Nolan is still feeling his way around the madness of eros—no pun etc.—but Oppenheimer’s assay of the sexual, rare as it is in the auteur’s oeuvre, gives it more texture than any of his productions since The Dark Knight, whose cross-dressing and gash-mouthed Joker was—as one of that film’s harshest critics once put it somewhere, extrapolating (I believe) from Theweleit’s Male Fantasies—“a talking vagina.” Aesthetically if not politically, Oppenheimer’s sensual dreaminess (Picasso, Stravinsky) more than atones for the killing literalism of Inception.

Politically, Nolan may not know enough Marx even for vulgar Marxism. In another scene, Oppenheimer and Tatlock mistake Proudhon’s famous line about property and theft for a quotation from Marx. Since Oppenheimer is an avowed modernist, we trust him to know that “a man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery,” in this case the discovery of a tension between anarchist and collectivist revolution, between the anarch’s will-to-truth and the uses the collective will-to-power would make of them.

Nolan’s is just another film about “a tormented white man,” complained a viral Tweet. Not so. Oppenheimer makes clear his impetus in the film: to save those he explicitly calls “my people”—not the white people, but the Jewish people. The film doesn’t shy from Jewish prominence in what I have called “international modernism.” Hitler will be beaten, Oppenheimer assures Leslie Groves, because he will restrict the genius of his nation by creed and ethnicity, rejecting “Jewish science,” while America will put the genius of international modernism—prominently though not exclusively Jewish—at its disposal. It’s not a topic one wants to discuss too casually given the stakes of misunderstanding it, but I think I sufficiently explained it to myself in my 2015 essay on Djuna Barnes’s great philo-/anti-Semitic modernist novel Nightwood.

As I almost never do, I will quote my bête noire, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, to sum up the whole issue, with the caveat that the theoretical physicist before 1945 had as much in common with the “artist” as what we think of in our totally scientistic time as the “scientist”:

The literary and artistic field attract a particularly strong proportion of individuals who possess all the properties of the dominant class minus one: money. They are, if I may say, parents pauvres or ‘poor relatives’ of the great bourgeois dynasties, aristocrats already ruined or in decline, members of stigmatized minorities like Jews or foreigners. One thus discovers, from the first moment, that, at the level even of the social position of the literary and artistic field in the field of power, a property which Sartre discovered within the domestic and in the particular case of Flaubert: the writer is the ‘poor relative’, the idiot of the bourgeois family.

The structural ambiguity of their position in the field of power leads writers and painters, these ‘penniless bourgeois’ in Pissarro’s words, to maintain an ambivalent relationship with the dominant class within the field of power, those whom they call ‘bourgeois’, as well as with the dominated, the ‘people’. In a similar way, they form an ambiguous image of their own position in social space and of their social function: this explains the fact that they are subject to great fluctuation, notably in the area of politics… (The Field of Cultural Production)

The postwar McCarthyist turn against the independence of the scientific community—knowing what he’s made, Oppenheimer counsels restraint rather than expedience in its use—suggests a regression to the national or nationalist mean. Oppenheimer’s antagonist, the scientific politico Lewis Strauss is, Nolan has explained, Salieri to Oppenheimer’s Mozart, motivated by the envy and resentment of the less gifted man for the greater. Oppenheimer’s fight to retain his independence from power wins him Nolan’s and our own respect.

The national security state—the deep state—that Strauss manipulates against Oppenheimer: this is a cancerously bureaucratic trap from which the trammeled intelligence threatens never to emerge. Only one politician critical of how the deep state has treated Oppenheimer gets named in the film; with the utterance of this name, in the film’s penultimate scene, we are to understand Oliver Stone’s JFK not only as a stylistic influence on Nolan, which it magnificently is, but also a sequel, with consequences for the film’s politics I don’t have to spell out.

Nolan, usually said to be some kind of reactionary,³ proves politically illegible in this film. Here as elsewhere he exalts genius in its rootless-cosmopolitan mode over the passive and inert nation, as when Einstein urges Oppenheimer to share his research with the Soviets; but the film’s more-than-implied polemic against the national security state, perhaps a mea culpa for The Dark Knight’s complicity in Bush-era surveillance, has an almost populist edge given the left-liberal political disposition of today’s bureaucracy and intelligence community.

Nolan has no respect for left-wing thought—he either can’t tell the difference between Marx and Proudhon or doesn’t think it makes a difference—but we are better off, he implies, and “we” might be a narrow band, with the political errors of genius, by their nature interested in utopias, than that they have their precious time wasted being interrogated by dull, sallow mediocrities in cramped offices. (Two modernist names missing from the film’s litany shine darkly by virtue of their very absence: Nietzsche, Kafka.)

When Bourdieu later called for “a corporatism of the universal”—an international collective of the potentially universal class of artists and intellectuals against state and market depredations—he echoes Nolan’s humane and sad-eyed Einstein, chiding Oppenheimer that crucial information about the bomb’s potential danger must be shared with Soviet and possibly even Nazi scientists—who, if they are scientists, are scientists before they are Nazis or Soviets. This is hard to hear so shortly after the world was collectively terrorized for years in the name of “science,” but, as in the film, the power-plays of government may—I almost hope they did—have had more to do with these abuses than the ambitions of scientists themselves.

Nolan effectively transvalues our political values, reminding the expert class (after its pandemic-era dalliance with overweening biopower, even at times psychological bioterror) that statist bureaucracy might as well be this class’s enemy as its friend, and that this caution owed more to the moral intuitions of the left than the right during the Cold War. As a political film through and through in an age of ideological sermonizing, it’s a surprisingly sophisticated, subtle piece of work.⁴

The film’s implied case for and against the deployment of the atomic bomb is balanced, but tilted against. Oppenheimer’s haunted visions of the grotesque carnage and his hellish encounter with a cackling Truman, portrayed as a man both cruel and stupid, establishes the film as a tragedy.⁵ And I know little enough of music, but I suspect the keening strings of Göransson’s film score allude to Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima.

“Theory will only get you so far” is the film’s refrain, yet the modernist genius’s practical applications often prove disastrous, whether communism or atom bomb. (Might this argument perhaps extend to the destruction of the painting, the novel, the poem, the symphony, the psyche?) Oppenheimer thinks he’s Vishnu, but we know—the film’s quasi-epigraph tells us—that he’s really Prometheus. A doorstopping biography I have no plans to read furnished Nolan with his source material,⁶ but I interpret Oppenheimer instead as an adaptation of Boris Groys’s Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin, except that where Groys’s avant-garde artists portend the total state, Nolan’s avant-garde physicists prepare the only thing worse: the annihilation of the planet.

Nolan splits not the atom but the difference: stylistically, he’s not even quite as Promethean as Oliver Stone, but he is more daring than almost anyone else now making blockbusters. His film is impressively modernist in technique—surreal imagery, visions and hallucinations, disorienting montage, the switch between color and black-and-white⁷—while delivering the pleasures of the biopic, the political thriller, the Western. To avoid a Promethean tragedy of his own, Nolan takes modernism in small doses, this to fortify rather than to atomize traditional and popular modes of address. We used to call such a practice “middlebrow,”⁸ and it used to be a term of reproach, but in an age without a middle of any sort—in an age of endless puddles, endless raindrops, endless concentric circles interfering with each other’s infinitude—the gesture has a heroism of its own.

Oppenheimer is probably Nolan’s finest work—abetted, it must be said, not so much by its half-gimmicky cast of thousands as by the uncanny charisma alone of Cillian Murphy’s stark and pale-eyed visage. Nolan has mounted the gesamt before, and no one doubts he’s done the werk, but here at last is the kunst.

1. No one’s ever written a comparative study of Alan Moore and Christopher Nolan, though they are probably the most influential English popular artists (excluding musical artists) of their respective generations. They have transformed the same American corporate material, creating arguably the two most indelible versions of the Joker archetype; both are narrative formalists obsessed with the simultaneity of time. The opening shot of Oppenheimer echoes both the opening panel of Moore’s Killing Joke and the opening panel of the nuclear-obsessed Watchmen’s most formally virtuosic chapter, “Fearful Symmetry.” For the significance of this image to narratives and metanarratives about an attempt to control inherently chaotic structures, whether atom or story, I have to quote from Geoff Klock’s How to Read Superhero Comics and Why on The Killing Joke:

The image with which the story opens (and to which it fades) is that of the concentric rings created by raindrops in a shallow puddle. [Frank] Miller has already cast forty-five years of fictional superhero history as a spring of water to be drawn upon, and connected the Joker with the element (Michel Foucault remarks in Madness and Civilization that “water and madness have long been linked in the dreams of European man”). Bloom writes: “The anxiety of influence is an anxiety in expectation of being flooded.” Jung’s writings on the unconscious have already been cited in regard to comic book continuity and tradition, and it is important to recall that his dominant metaphor is one of water. I think it can be suggested that Moore picks up on this imagery placing as bookends—and using at two key moments within the story—this depiction of rhizomic creation, arbitrarily centered reverberation upon a field of signification that itself has no center. The randomly falling raindrops that create lesser or greater waves upon the puddle’s surface stand for individual superhero stories and their effect on the field of storytelling.

Many commenters have pronounced Oppenheimer refreshing since it is not a superhero movie. It is, however, an Übermensch movie in the sense of Nietzsche’s transformative and world-renewing messiah, a modern and modernist archetype of which the comic-book superhero is the tamed vulgate version, usually less a tragic Prometheus than a comic-pathetic elevated Everyman constrained in his ambitions by the complexity of the world and by his own moral conscience.

2. In her classic 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Mulvey promoted the Brechtian destruction of realism in film. The seamless narrative illusion created by realism shores up the spectator’s “male gaze” by giving it a stable point of identification, like the eye safely at the center of a perspective painting. This guards the male gaze from being scotomized by the threat of sexual difference (and its implicit threat of castration in the Freudian and Lacanian mythologies) posed by the spectacle of the woman who is that gaze’s object. Mulvey declares in one of the essay headings, “Destruction of Pleasure Is a Radical Weapon,” though Plato and the priests who wrote Deuteronomy might have told her that it is the oldest and most conservative weapon of all. The theater where I saw Oppenheimer had a one-time engagement the day before for the apparently very Mulvey-esque Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, recently crowned the best film ever made by the Sight and Sound poll. In a fit of patriarchal pique, however, I decided not to attend. I thought I didn’t need my pleasure to be destroyed quite as thoroughly as that reputedly punishing film threatened to do. As for Nolan, his use of Pugh’s nudity as the locus for the protagonist’s explosive desire obeys the logic Mulvey identifies.

The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of the story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative.

She would probably argue that Nolan’s vaguely science-fictional braided-timeline technique, rather than departing from realism, represents a totalizing superrealism unavailable to the classic Hollywood director, and less self-implicating in its godly phallic presumption than the Hitchcock of Vertigo who, to quote Greta Gerwig, both does the thing and subverts the thing, the thing in this case being the “male gaze.”

3. Mortifyingly, my single most successful piece of writing—it has been taught in college courses and cited in doctoral dissertations and print books—is my proto-woke 2008 review of The Dark Knight, “Hollywood’s Terror Dream.” Only read it if you can stand to see young John in the kind of high dudgeon against fascism or whatever that wouldn’t become broadly fashionable for another decade. It never should have become fashionable—it’s agitprop, not art criticism—and I’m happy I outgrew it, even if Nolan, strictly speaking, is a man of the right (see the next footnote). (Also, young John—I can’t believe I’m rereading this crap—it’s not “free reign” but “free rein,” an analogy drawn from horsemanship.)

4. Even political artists don’t have political positions so much as arenas of political inquiry to which they’re drawn over and over again. Nolan’s obsessive problematic is the neoreactionary one as Yarvin and Land have described it—how to ensure ongoing human excellence after the supposed obsolescence of its modern vehicle, the democratic nation-state—and he has often flirted with neoreactionary solutions: demoting the state beneath sovereign corporate structures as in the Dark Knight films, Inception, and Oppenheimer; exalting the heroic nation over the prostrate state as in the nostalgia of Interstellar’s can-do Americana and Dunkirk’s patriotic Churchillian peroration; celebrating the concerted agency of great men against the threat posed by various forms of chaos usually associated with the feminine, the natural, or the lowborn, as in most of his films; and fearing and/or longing for the creation of systems capable of carrying this agency forward as quasi-machinic emergent intelligence in the absence of single agents, as in Batman’s implied heroic lineage and Interstellar and Tenet’s redemptive time-loops. Oppenheimer brings the latter desire to its logical terminus in the final image of the uncontrolled chain reaction consuming the earth. Oppenheimer, then, subverts the political desire usually animating Nolan’s narratives—as if a glossy issue of Palladium magazine self-combusted in one’s hands. This, and the film’s implicit defense of communist sympathizers, prove how labile an artist’s politics can be even in pursuit of an overt goal definitively belonging to the left or—as in this case—the right.

5. Some claim we must attend to the victims’ narrative first. By all means, read Barefoot Gen (I’ve taught it), but that’s no cogent objection to this movie in particular. And when this argument is annexed to a racialist narrative that would cast Imperial Japan qua political entity (as opposed to its noncombatant citizens) as one of the victims of modern history, forget it. Skeptics of Nolan’s film further argue that the U.S. has never confronted the atrocity that Hiroshima and Nagasaki represent. Here I can only offer my own testimony. In the ninth grade, our civics teacher held a mock-trial in which Truman was prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity for dropping the bomb. This was in suburban Pittsburgh in 1997. I played the prosecuting attorney—and I played it with total conviction as I believed with the passion of a 15-year-old that the decision was indefensible (I still for the most part believe it). (As I watched Oppenheimer’s cast of thousands pass across the screen, I kept thinking, “I cross-examined him and him and him…”) The jury—i.e., the rest of the class—acquitted on war crimes, seeing (I suppose) some narrowly military justification for Truman’s call, and convicted on crimes against humanity, presumably judging the human toll of the bombing too great to go unpunished. He was sentenced to 10 years behind bars. Truman’s defense attorney was played by the girl (or person) in the story I told here—the graphic novel I wrote for her was written concurrently with the mock-trial. One day after school, our teacher drove past us while we were in an outdoor embrace; the next day, he told the class he was glad to see the prosecution and the defense were still getting along. I had the same teacher in 11th-grade too, for AP U.S. History; there he made us read Hersey’s Hiroshima. The magnitude of the atrocity, then, was part of my own official education, tied up, even, in my nostalgic adolescent memories of romance: love and death.

6. See here for a video interview between Kai Bird, one of the biography’s co-authors, and an old Marxist professor of mine I sometimes mention on here—not about Oppenheimer but about a different kind of 20th-century revolutionary, Edward Said. Like a puddle in the rain, it really is a small and resonant world.

7. The film consists of two narrative strands—“Fission,” shot in color, from Oppenheimer’s point of view, and “Fusion,” shot in black and white, from Strauss’s—which braid and coil around one another in complex and non-linear patterns until, toward the end, Nolan is frantically cross-cutting between them as they interrupt and amplify one another. (This reprises and deepens a technique I thought merely gimmicky when I watched Memento in the movie theater 23 years ago.) Nolan claims that the color section represents subjectivity and the black-and-white objectivity, but I would argue that it indicates something else: the revolutionary modernist virtuoso sees a richer world than does his inadequate Salieri, who has opted for mere politics. Thus the political Strauss deserves little better than to be depicted in the visual rhetoric reserved for those imprisoned in history, forever caught on old film stock and print headlines, while the immortal aesthete Oppenheimer merits the full spectrum.

8. While I have my pirated pdf of The Field of Cultural Production open in another tab and am trying to remember from my rapid grad-school exam-reading the intricacies of the argument, let me quote Bourdieu again on why middlebrow or pop works like Nolan’s films (or Moore’s comics)—especially insofar as they are late entrants in their genres—are more or less destined for the canon despite the sometimes understandable scorn of “pure” intellectuals who only read 900-page experimental novels translated from the Romanian:

A genre containing ever more references to the history of that genre calls for a second-degree reading, reserved for the initiate, who can only grasp the work’s nuances and subtleties by relating it back to previous works. By introducing subtle breaks and fine variations, with regard to assumed expectations, the play of internal allusions (the same one that has always been practised by lettered traditions) authorizes detached and distanced perception, quite as much as first-degree adherence, and calls for either erudite analysis or the aesthete’s wink.

This, incidentally, is also Klock’s argument for the literary stature of late-20th-century superhero comics, borrowed not from Bourdieu’s extrinsic sociological analysis but from Bloom’s intrinsic literary argument for the similarly weighty worth of post-Miltonic Romantic poetry. Against the dreams of primordial gnosis or naive wisdom that would elevate “early” art from the Odyssey to Action Comics #1 as more authentic than later art, late-coming entrants in all genres—whether Nolan in the history of genre cinema, Moore in the history of superhero comics, or Ashbery in the history of Romantic lyric—may structurally always be more interesting, at least to the critic, than early entrants, this due to the weight of the past they must confront and assimilate. On the other hand, I take the ultra-sophisticated Homer to be a latecomer too, only in a tradition we don’t know.