Oppenheimer’s Nihilism: Where Is Christopher Nolan?

In March of 2001, Memento was released in US theaters. The film, initially having a difficult time securing a distributor, became a financial and critical success. Memento was, paradoxically, one of the last 90s indie films as well as one of the first films of the digital age—it had a catchy Web 1.0 website to draw in both film geeks and geeks in general. The film was deeply cerebral in its content and avant garde in its structure. At the same time, it was—like the films of Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, and Paul Thomas Anderson—stamped with a distinctive feeling of “Gen X Cool.” The handsome and confident Guy Pearce, dressed in a (very 90s) suit and driving around a Jaguar, played the tormented Leonard Shelby who puzzled his way through the labyrinth of postmodern (but not quite yet postmillennial) Los Angeles.

Memento was hand crafted by the then little-known Christopher Nolan. However, it was not quite yet a “Christopher Nolan film” (more on that in a minute). The Anglo-American (an identity that Nolan, according to critic and Nolan friend Tom Shone, embraces) director previously had released the 1998 Following, a noirish, Hitchcock-like, small budget thriller. Memento, however, launched Christopher Nolan’s Hollywood career, enabling him to direct a medium budget remake of the Norwegian film Insomnia, starring Al Pacino, Robin Williams, and the then rising star Hillary Swank. Like Memento and Following, Insomnia showcased Nolan’s signature “early” style: philosophically rich postmodern ideas, coupled with noirish moral ambiguity, and tightly woven into a multilayered and complicated plot carried forwarded by skilled actors in unconventional roles (in Insomnia Robin Williams plays an unstable novelist turned murderer). This early Nolan would be repeated in 2006 cinematic adaption of Christopher Priest’s novel The Prestige, one of the few movies that are genuinely better than the book.

With 2005’s Batman Begins, Nolan proved that he could perform the rare feat of crafting a blockbuster film that was philosophically rich as well as cleverly crafted—this feat would be repeated with The Dark Knight (2008), which, with help from Heath Ledger’s performance as Joker and Jonathan Nolan’s writing, cemented Nolan’s position as one of the most talented (and lucrative) directors of the twenty-first century. However, The Dark Knight definitively changed Nolan into becoming a director who was required to make big budget blockbusters. Some cynical Nolan fans see The Dark Knight as Nolan’s climax while others point to The Prestige as Nolan’s last good film out of the quartet of Following, Memento, Insomnia, and The Prestige.

2010’s Inception can be seen as a triumphant, nay, even life-changing Christopher Nolan film that further explores the themes of illusion, (self-) deception, and existential angst that define Nolan’s work (some even see the film as an intellectual sequel to Memento). However, it also has been read as an ultimately big-budget, clumsy, failure that is only redeemed by moments of intelligent dialogue and philosophical reflection. This paradoxical tension between intellectual brilliance and masterful filmmaking and a convoluted and bulky plot mark both The Dark Knight Rises (2012) and Interstellar (2014) and almost crash in what is widely considered Nolan’s worst film: 2020’s Tenet.

Nolan’s 2017 Dunkirk stands as a curious, mid-twentieth century historical period piece that showcases masterful direction and (both sound and visual) editing. However, it is the first time in which the nihilism that has creeped in the background of Nolan’s work frequently sabotage’s the viewer’s experience of the film. World War II films like the Patton (1970) and Saving Private Ryan (1998) are often (humorously) chalked up as “dad movies,” that is, films that a Gen Xer or Millennial would watch with his dad (and/or grandpa) reveling in the strength and moral goodness of the Greatest Generation (and early Baby Boomers) who saved world from Nazism and set the stage for the eventual struggle with the brutal and inhumane communism of the Soviet Union (the Soviets are either spoken of negatively, like in Patton, or entirely absent like in Saving Private Ryan). Despite redeeming qualities, Dunkirk, in contrast, feels flat and hollow and lacks the moral force of even the campiest World War II films despite its sentimentally patriotic ending. Its nihilism cannot be brushed aside.

Nolan’s most recent work, Oppenheimer, starring Cillian Murphy, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr, and Emily Blunt (among a host of other stars), has been receiving rave reviews across the board. Although outperformed at the box office by Barbie, which was released the same day, Oppenheimer is on track to be another Christopher Nolan success and is sure to garner multiple Oscars. Like Tenet, the film is, on one level, about theoretical physics—although Oppenheimer is much more comprehensible and coherent than Tenet. It is also a film, like much of Nolan’s other work, that subtly celebrates liberal democratic America as being essentially superior to its political competitors (Nazism and Communism). Moreover, the film is about a tormented and ethically complicated individual who attempts to create a world for himself and others and whose family must pay the price for his craft.

Critics have rightly praised Cillian Murphy’s performance as Robert J. “Oppie” Oppenheimer. There is little doubt that Murphy has achieved the quintessentially postmodern feat of creating a fictional character whose pathos and powerful will define (and perhaps even overshadow) the real historical figure. Matt Damon is excellent as Lt. Gen Leslie Groves as is Robert Downey Jr. as the vindictive and power-hungry rival to Oppenheimer, Lewis Strauss. The film is tightly edited, but, as some critics have complained, drags out in its third act, testing the audience’s patience. Three hours is a long film, even for a blockbuster.

There are two key pieces of dialogue in the film that provide a map to understanding its intellectual structure. The first is when Oppenheimer explains that the weakness of the Nazis against which they are competing is their anti-Semitic prejudice. Adolf Hitler infamously denounced quantum physics as “Jewish science,” hamstringing the German science effort. America, in contrast, is a (relatively) more free and meritocratic society in which people of a host of cultures and ethnicities can excel. This philosophy has undergirded much of Nolan’s implicit political philosophy in his films. In the Batman Nolanverse, a host of characters such as Batman Begins’ Ra’s al Ghul, The Dark Knight’s Joker, and The Dark Knight Rises’ Bane have all challenged the dominate Anglo-American order (represented by Gotham); however, Gotham’s heroes always (albeit sometimes reluctantly) fight to protect that order and eventually triumph. Similarly, in Oppenheimer, despite the flaws of the American military and political establishment, the United States of America is better than the threatening alternatives of Soviet Communism and German Nazism even if this is somewhat passé in contemporary intellectual circles, especially online and in elite universities. America is imperfect, yes, but is still good and better than the rest.

The second key piece of dialogue in the film occurs when Murphy’s Oppenheimer explains to a woman the nothingness that lies at the heart of existence according to certain strands of theoretical physics. This nothingness is present in all of Nolan’s films, but, in Oppenheimer, as in Dunkirk, it eats away at too much of the film. Nihilism is now at the forefront of the film. No figure represents nihilism more than Oppenheimer himself. On one level Nolan celebrates Oppenheimer as a dashing and brilliant intellectual who (like Nolan himself) achieved fame and fortune in the United States. In the film, Oppenheimer pushes the Trinity Project to success, rides horses across through the New Mexico desert with a beautiful woman, reads T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and savors other elements of European High Modernism (showing him as a cultured man saving the best of western culture), stands up to Nazism, sweeps multiple women off their feet, clashes with the American military establishment, raises a family, mourns the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and ultimately becomes an advocate for world peace and arms control. Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a loyal friend and advocate for workers rights, while, in Nolan’s reading, remaining loyal to America and avoiding the pitfalls of communism. Nolan’s Oppenheimer is the nihilist superman, a man driven to success in an ultimately empty universe of nothingness by sheer force of will.

Yet at the same time Nolan’s Robert Oppenheimer is a selfish academic whose womanizing has catastrophic consequences on family and friends (Oppenheimer has some of Nolan’s most graphic sex scenes that may offend some viewers). He is further tormented by ambition and guilt and spends much of his time detached from those around him. We finally do not know, by the end of the film, how much guilt the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan should be laid at the feet of Oppenheimer and how much others are to blame. However, Nolan’s nihilism that seeps through much of the film causes us to question why, according to Nolan’s moral framework, we should care either way about Oppenheimer’s triumphs or his serious moral failings? 

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is ultimately a deeply nostalgic movie set in an America when the country was united in purpose and in which the American dream could be realized with hard work and talent (meritocratic mobility). It is also a cautionary tale about the underbelly of the American Century, the Pax Americana forged by American military and scientific domination, often at odds with each other but also often collaborating with each other; the relative peace and prosperity of the world since the end of 1945 came with a dark cost. There is a curious scene after the dropping of the bombs in which Oppenheimer looks with horror on a cheering crowd of Los Alamos residents who erupt with excitement over America’s triumph. Nolan brilliantly depicts Oppenheimer viewing a series of symbols of the decadence, violence, and crassness that would overtake late twentieth century America. While Oppenheimer stands out among the morass of contemporary culture as a thoughtful and mostly well-crafted film it has very little of the feel of Nolan’s earlier work, and thus may prompt Nolan-fans to ask: Where is Christopher Nolan?

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