By Stuart Mitchner

Searching for a phrase to describe the tumultuous score by Ludwig Göransson that propels and illuminates Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, I landed on “It’s like writing history with lightning.” But who said it? Emerson? Thoreau? Melville? No, it was Woodrow Wilson responding to a 1915 White House screening of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.

Both responses have a certain eerie resonance if you’ve just seen a monumental film about the “father of the atom bomb” in which a scene following the successful first test shows the crowd at Los Alamos wildly cheering the explosion of a device that will obliterate Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, as Oppenheimer feared, that could ultimately destroy the world.

A Princeton Story

While Wilson is the last person I wanted to bring in to a discussion of Oppenheimer, which opened with a special showing at Princeton’s Garden Theatre last Thursday evening, the association makes sense for a picture that could be called a tale of two cities — one the Los Alamos founded, in effect, by J. Robert Oppenheimer, his creation, and the other the home of Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study, a target of the politicization of science at Oppenheimer’s expense, an earlier manifestation of the same social media hysteria defaming scientists like Dr. Anthony Fauci and still going strong during the run up to the 2024 election.

Laying Out the Music

According to nbc.com, Christopher Nolan let Göransson “pretty much run free when it came to laying out the music,” the exception being his suggestion that the violin be a “point of entry for the whole piece.” In a press release Nolan comments, “There’s something about the violin to me that seemed very apt to Oppenheimer. The tuning is precarious and totally at the mercy of the playing and emotion of the player. It can be very beautiful one moment and turn frightening or sour instantly. So, there’s a tension — a neurosis — to the sound that I think fits the highly strung intellect and emotion of Robert Oppenheimer.” 

In Göransson’s words: “With the violin serving as the emotional core of the music alongside string ensembles, an impressive display of brass and nuclear synths underpinning what was to come, the score swiftly transcends from a personal journey to a grandiose and almost operatic spectacle, oscillating between realms of hope and despair.”

Oppenheimer and Music

Trying to imagine what Oppenheimer would make of such an expressive score, especially the notion of a “grandiose operatic spectacle,” I checked in the biography on which the film is based, Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird’s American Prometheus, which, as I remember, gave the impression that he had little interest in music. In fact, a fellow student at Harvard who was “very fond of music” recalled that “Oppie” would leave after the first act of an opera: “He just coudn’t take it anymore.” Herbert Smith, his favorite teacher at New York’s Ethical Culture School, once told him “You’re the only physicist I’ve ever known who wasn’t also musical.”

Given Oppenheimer’s passion for reading, I find it hard to believe that he went through life without being moved by music. The two references quoted are from his student years. This is someone who says his life was changed by Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, where music is a central metaphor, and who read Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil aloud in the original French (the work he put at the top of a Christian Century list of the ten books that “most shaped your vocation and philosophy of life”). If you’ve heard Oppenheimer’s speaking voice (as in the See It Now interview with Edward R. Murrow), you know that when he read poetry aloud, he’d have read it well.

A Gift for Einstein

Although Christopher Nolan had good reason to focus less on Oppenheimer’s 16 years as IAS director, a period overshadowed by the film’s emphasis on the ordeal of the AEC hearings, Sherwin and Bird include an account of his leaderly thoughtfulness that has a musical component. In 1948, aware of Albert Einstein’s love of classical music, and knowing that his radio could not receive New York broadcasts of concerts from Carnegie Hall, Oppenheimer arranged to have an antenna installed on the roof of Einstein’s home without his knowledge. On his birthday, the director showed up with a new radio and suggested that they listen to a concert together. 

Chain Reaction

There’s no place for such niceties in the scene between Oppenheimer and Einstein (Tom Conti) that closes the film. Set in Princeton, on the grounds of the IAS, the encounter is a reinvention of the previous exchange between the two that had been observed from a distance by Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) and became one of the presumed slights leading to his vendetta against Oppenheimer. Said to take place in 1947, two years after Hiroshima, the revised dialogue centers on the apprehension Oppenheimer and other scientists shared before the test — that the chain reaction set off by the explosion might ignite the Earth’s atmosphere and destroy the planet. When Einstein says “I remember it well. What of it?” Oppenheimer says “I think we did.” He means  that the chain reaction of nuclear proliferation is already underway; as he speaks, the droning on the soundtrack takes on the intensity of a siren, and, according to Bilge Ebiri in an article on vulture.com, “We see explosions across the surface of the planet, their blast radiuses unspeakably vast. Then, a ring of fire begins to consume the Earth. The very last image of the film is Oppenheimer’s face in extreme close-up, staring at the droplets in the pond, and closing his eyes,” a reprise of the film’s opening images of young Oppenheimer in close-up, looking at droplets of rain in a small pool of water.

Ebiri suggests that Nolan’s placement of the subject “gives grim cinematic life to the generational fear that nukes are effectively Chekhov’s gun: a weapon introduced in an earlier act of our lives that will inevitably be used before our story ends.”

Paging Tommy Shelby

One of the key scenes in Nolan’s film depicts Oppenheimer’s disastrous meeting with President Truman (Gary Oldman) at which he haltingly confesses, “I feel I’ve got blood on my hands.” Disgusted, Truman scornfully dismisses him (“Don’t let that crybaby in here again”).

If I had the skills to put together a YouTube video remake of that painful scene, I’d liberate the ego-memory of the actor Cillian Murphy as he overhears Truman’s parting slur. Instead of a beaten down, diminished Oppenheimer, we’d see Murphy in the role he played for six seasons as Tommy Shelby, the icy-blue-eyed killer in the great BBC series Peaky Blinders. As he walks away, the show’s riveting theme song takes over, sheer syncopated menace about the “tall handsome man in a dusty black coat with a red right hand.”

The Christmas Dinner episode of Season 4 comes to mind whenever I think of Oppenheimer sitting there like a student in the principal’s office. “Blood on my hands” is right, my Oppie-Tommy mutant thinks, smiling fiercely to himself as he recalls walking into the kitchen where a bloody-aproned Italian chef is butchering game for the Shelby family Christmas meal. When Tommy extends his hand and introduces himself, the chef nervously holds back his hand (“But my hands have blood”). Murphy says “Mine too” without missing a beat, and a minute later when an assassin disguised as a sous chef appears gun in hand, Shelby guts him with a meat hook, grabs his gun, drags him bleeding and thrashing across the floor and blows his brains out at point blank range. In the last shot of my homemade video, we see Cillian Murphy as he looked at the end of that scene, slathered with gore, bloody-faced and bloody-handed. Amazing, so powerful had been Murphy’s Oppenheimer, so driven, so mesmerizingly on target from the first scene to the last that I had no time to think of Tommy Shelby.

A Great Night

Thurday night’s festive gathering in front of the Garden and in the lobby was a joy. Sitting on the aisle way up near the top of the stadium seats in Theatre 2, I didn’t fidget, didn’t cross my legs once for three hours. For three hours the audience was as one, no intrusive sounds, not so much as a cough. It was my first time at the Garden since Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood four years ago. In the week since the showing, we’ve seen four Christopher Nolan films at home: Dunkirk, Inception, Interstellar, and Tenet, none of which approach Oppenheimer as a work of cinematic art. Nolan transcended himself when he took on the challenge of the American Prometheus.

Note: On the question of Oppenheimer and music, my wife, who has been reading “American Prometheus”, just pointed out a sentence on p. 256 about the transformation of Los Alamos into a community with a Town Hall and a low-powered radio station that broadcast news, community announcements, and music, “the last drawn in part from Oppenheimer’s large personal collection of classical records.”