as Lt. Frank Drebin announced in Naked Gun 33⅓
Saw two young ladies in the lobby of Fitchburg’s AMC movie theater wearing all pink. Turns out they were lined up to watch Oppenheimer. Perhaps they had just seen Barbie.
Friday’s showing was our first time inside a movie theater in over three years. It’s the kind of movie one should witness on a big screen and, despite the admonitions of the life coach protecting us from becoming our parents, applause broke out at its conclusion — even though no one who made the movie was in the theater for that showing.
Memo to self: show up in the Barbie audience wearing a fedora and hanging a cigarette from my lip a la Jean Paul Belmondo. They didn’t know cigarettes were bad for your health in the early 1940s but then again, neither were nuclear bombs.
The two movies are a cultural phenomenon — one the most escapist of films, the other the most immersive. And they’re cleaning up at the box office.
The Head Groundskeeper consults the movie reviews after watching to see if he missed anything — like the point of the whole exercise! Big controversy over Oppenheimer is whether it should have ended after “Oppy” addresses the successful team at Los Alamos. That’s where he says it’s too early to judge the full impact on Hiroshima (John Hersey would define that in his full-issue New Yorker classic in 1946.) But he was “pretty sure they didn’t like it.”
NY Times columnist Ross Douthat (fast becoming a go-to guy), writing in National Review thinks, “The scene at war’s end, when Oppenheimer speaks to a cheering, flag-waving crowd while his mind is assaulted by intimations of Armageddon, could have ended the film as well, and I would have walked away satisfied.” Instead the movie skips forward to the Atomic Energy Commission hearing in 1954 that yanked Oppy’s security clearance. Surprised that another National Review(er) judges:
Robert Oppenheimer was, beyond the slightest of all possible doubts, a security risk. The security-review panel was far from the gross miscarriage of justice that [diretor Christopher] Nolan depicts. The wonder is that it voted only two-to-one to revoke Oppy’s clearance.
— “Great entertainment, disfigured history”
That would have been the second-best place to end the movie but it continues with the comeuppance of Oppenheimer’s champion turned nemesis, Admiral Lewis Strauss, five years later when the Senate refuses to confirm Strauss for a cabinet office. For much of its running time,” Douthat continues,
Oppenheimer does a good job with the ambiguities of its protagonist’s relationship to the commonplace communism of his intellectual milieu — showing that he was absolutely the right man for the Manhattan Project job but also that he was deeply naïve about the implications of his various friendships and relationships and dismissive about what turned out to be entirely real Soviet infiltration of his project. [Klaus Fuchs, anyone?]
But The ending trades away some of this ambiguity for a more conventional anti-McCarthyite narrative, in which Oppenheimer was simply martyred by know-nothings rather than bringing his political troubles on himself.
— “Oppenheimer’s brilliance is diminished in the final act”
Blaska’s Bottom Line: But it would have deprived us of Robert Downey Jr.’s greatest scenes, playing a jealous Salieri to Oppy’s Mozart. (You would never guess it was the Iron Man, so thoroughly has Downey disappeared into the role. Either that or has aged badly.) A fershure best supporting award. As is Emily Blunt as Mrs. Oppy, Cillian Murphy as the tortured brainiac, Nolan as director, et cetera — a Ben Hur kind of sweep.
Wouldn’t it be a Dean Martin kick in the head if Barbie
swept the Oscars awards over Oppenheimer?
(No, not Klaus Barbie!)
4 responses to “It’s the bomb!”
[…] This post originally appeared at https://davidblaska.com/2023/07/31/its-the-bomb/ […]
Ok, Dave, putting aside the ironies, you may have a possible point that, through the lens of 1954, Oppenheimer, whose patriotism (and desire for glory, sure) drove him to orchestrate the enormous task of developing a fission bomb, there were reasonable factual grounds to question his security clearance. This, even though that would mean sweeping aside the fact that, without hindsight, being sympathetic to communist policies in the midst of the Great Depression was, then, driven among millions of those who wanted to end poverty and racism, with absolutely nothing to do with Stalin plotting. Only post-WWII hindsight gave that earlier affiliation a bad odor.
Now to turn the tables, you need to reconsider your Trumpian cry that, at the time around the 2016 election, there wasn’t overwhelming evidence from Trump’s own public statements and commercial record had subjugated America’s security interest, and joint interests with NATO and other allies, in his drive to gain the good favor of Putin for a Moscow Trump Hotel, all of which was in complete repudiation of 70 years of consistent Republican policy.
The additional fact of the several Trump associates who had sometimes real and substantiated and at other times unsubstantiated but strongly suggested connections to Putin’s network created a eminently justifiable inference of, in addition, a direct link — a conspiracy with — Putin.
The fact that Mueller was LATER unable to find prosecutable evidence of the latter conspiracy does nothing to invalidate — at the time the Democratic hew and cry arose — that the demand for an investigation, and the FBI’s decision to investigate was not just reasonable, but compelled. (BTW the fact that the FBI publicly announced its investigation of Hillary — twice — while keeping its investigation of Trump during the campaign secret, would seem to upend your argument that the FBI was politically biased against Republicans, especially in that the second announcement about the Hillary investigation, one week before vote, has been linked to a key contributory reason for her defeat, not Putin’s trolls.)
As I’ve laid at your door before, and to turn the tables on you if I may, in order to think the Democrat’s demand for an investigation had no proper basis when made would require you to imagine that, in 1946, if FDR, then on death’s door, had insisted on Henry Wallace continuing to be his Vice Presidential candidate, you, the Republican Party en masse, and Hoover’s FBI would not have been moving heaven and earth to uncover Wallace’s links to Stalin, you would be lying through your teeth, I would aver. (And BTW, it needs to be noted that after Mueller issued his report stating he hadn’t found that Trump had gone beyond obeisance to America’s Number 1 enemy to actually conspired with Putin, the so-called Mainstream Media (except for Rachel Maddox), stopped waving the red shirt about that.)
Mr. Anderson with a mic drop! Facts and logic are met with crickets.
No need to worry about “Barbie” sweeping the Oscars as both its lead stars are white. Given that there’s an actual black Barbie doll, it’s astonishing the film-makers didn’t tap a black actress–ANY black actress–for that role. Remember when hit movies–that were also great movies–weren’t based on comic books and plastic toys? Every time you think American culture can’t possibly get more debased ….