Just give me a little atomic bomb Not too mutch

Bukowski

It took me a while, but I finally saw Oppenheimer. I didn’t want to be disappointed or tortured by the three hour running time but it’s only 10 minutes too long, maybe. Otherwise it really is transcendent, and you hardly notice the length. For a biopic about physicists and senate confirmation hearings it moves forward like a freight train. There may be spoilers here, though I’m not sure how you can spoil the story of Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, who was so ambivalent about his child.

A lot has been made of the fact there are so few female characters in the movie and they don’t have much a role…well, the Manhattan Project and subatomic physics was a very male endeavor, despite the seminal contributions of Marie Curie and Lise Meitner. But the two women of Oppenheimer the movie are significant because Oppenheimer himself is such a fragmented figure, both black and white, a monster and a savior, irredeemable and in the end redeemed.

Florence Pugh plays Jean Tatlock, a communist psychiatrist and lover of Oppenheimer. I obviously can’t diagnose the actual historical figure but the movie portrays her as someone with down the line borderline personality disorder, pushing Oppenheimer away even as she demands his love and loyalty, calling him to come to her even as she rejects him and throws out all his flowers. Eventually she kills herself after he rejects her for his new wife and child. In his grief for Tatlock, his wife, Kitty Oppenheimer, herself a troubled, dysfunctional character who drinks too much and can’t always be trusted with their children, shakes Oppenheimer and tells him to get it together. He’s needed. He’s depended upon. Tatlock, in the movie, is his only emotional anchor.

Oppenheimer is a deeply wounded character, tortured by his genius and living half in the subatomic world spinning in his brain, neutrons and protons and electrons flung at each other and dancing according to the rules of the subatomic forces. I think any feeling person, genius, artist, or scientist is sometimes wrapped up in a mental world that doesn’t quite come together and you strive to explore and define. His was a nuclear density that when split became the power of a sun. One could see how he lost sleep over it.

He calls his younger self emotionally immature as he was away from home in Europe studying physics, but it’s not just emotional immaturity that leads you to try to poison your teacher when he mocks and embarrasses you (the remedy back then for physics geniuses was two years of analysis not law enforcement).

I noticed some time ago among psychiatrists that the most chill among them practiced shock therapy, or ECT. It’s a controversial yet vital therapy that is used for suicidal depression, psychosis, and catatonia that don’t respond to other interventions. Psychiatrists are mostly the opposite of surgeons, we use words, and time, and some medications, and sitting with patients to try to enact a cure. But ECT doctors can set up with a nurse and anesthesia and be well on the way to a cure of psychotic depression where the patients won’t eat and thinks she is possessed by Satan with one or two quick treatments.

Oppenheimer created the atomic bomb but did little to protect himself or react when his security clearance revocation hearings occurred in the McCarthy era. Kitty Oppenheimer kept urging him to fight back, she threw her glasses of spirits and refused to shake hands and declared she would have spit at Teller when he spoke against her husband. She stands up for him at his security clearance hearing and conquers the opposing counsel with icy and angry aplomb, despite the flask she keeps in her purse.

Jean Tatlock was his heart and Kitty was his rage, both of which he had a hard time feeling around the noise of atomic particles dancing in his mind and the paralysis of depression and feelings that subsumed his rage, the latter he set loose with the invention of a tiny sun dropped on a fascist country to end a dreadful and solider-churning world war.

Ultimately the movie is about Strauss and his senate confirmation hearing and Oppenheimer, but the subplots of the women are fundamental, because nothing really makes sense or comes together without them, like our grandmothers of physics Curie and Meitner.

And in the end we are meant to feel ambivalent. Light behaves as a particle and as a wave. Both characterizations are correct and both are wrong. And that’s okay, we will to hold both truths at once. Just as we adore our lovers and hate them, and care diligently for our children and send them off tottering and only as prepared as we can make them into the world.