1. I’m starting my job training in classical education Monday, so beginning a new phase of existence as you might say.

2. I saw Oppenheimer last night and I’m still settling on what I thought about it. It certainly leaves the viewer with a lot to think about, and it’s a film that demands to be taken seriously. From what I understand, baring the necessary time compressions and streamlining of events, it’s very historically accurate (e.g. the scene where young Oppenheimer impulsively tries to poison his professor then later tries to walk it back actually happened, and about that same time he met Niels Bohr and was impressed by him, but Bohr wasn’t present at the poisoned apple incident). Certainly it doesn’t sugar coat or soften Oppenheimer or the people around him. Or at least, I hope it doesn’t because they’re all extremely flawed people at best. Oppenheimer himself is shown having numerous affairs, for instance (on top of the aforementioned impulsive attempted murder), while his wife is an alcoholic with mood swings. Neither are shown to be at all affectionate parents, etc.

There’s an interesting dichotomy with Oppenheimer himself. On the one hand, he’s notably arrogant and commanding when it comes to his own subject. He knows what is possible and what isn’t, he’s the smartest man in the room, the great genius of his time, and so on. On the other, he’s strikingly naive about how the world works, expecting that the bomb might usher in world peace and thinking he might be able to make appeals to the better angels of the political establishment. He flails about helplessly against the world of national security, saying the wrong thing, playing the wrong cards, leaving himself open to attack, which ultimately leads to his downfall.

I also really liked his development on the topic of the bomb: at first he’s all for it, caught up in the excitement of the project and naively thinking that it will usher in a period of peace (I found it noteworthy that, when a newly-arrived Niels Bohr reports that the Nazis are on the wrong track in their bomb development, no one suggests pulling the plug on the Manhattan Project, even though the justification was that they have to get it before the Nazis do). Then, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he suffers a growing crisis of conscience and tries to rein in the nuclear genie that he helped let out. Which struck me as very real, and fits with one of the film’s central themes of the difference between theory and reality.

3. I personally thought the movie felt overlong, almost like two separate films stitched together into one. The first film deals with Oppenheimer’s career and the lead up to Los Alamos and the building of the atomic bomb. The second is a political thriller about his battles with Lewis Strauss, head of the Atomic Energy Commission, ultimately leading to his exile from the wheels of power. Both films are good, but they give the film a somewhat lopsided structure. After the Trinity test, the natural climax, everything else felt like a long denouement. Your mileage may vary, and the post-war events are important to the story, but to follow an atomic bomb test with another hour of men in meeting rooms is a little wearying. Especially as it’s mostly tired “wasn’t the McCarthy-era horrible” stuff that we’ve seen a million times before. It’s true to life for Oppenheimer’s experience, as far as I understand, and interesting enough as far as it goes, but that doesn’t make it drag any less.

4. The Trinity scene is spectacular, by the way. When the bomb goes off, all the sound cuts out except for the music, so that we have a pure visual of the fireball as it expands and rises into its mushroom cloud. Only after the fire fades does the blast wave and with it the sound of the explosion hit the observers. It’s a brilliantly done scene.

5. Wow, I actually did not recognize Gary Oldman at all! He plays Truman and serves as the film’s “one scene wonder;” showing up to give a scene-stealing performance for a few minutes and then never showing up again.

Truman is not played sympathetically here, in case you were wondering.

Needless to say, the film makes good use of its cast of veteran, powerhouse actors (and wow, between this and Puss in Boots, Florence Pugh is really making a name for herself as a legit actress).

6. Oh, on that subject; fair warning, the film does contain a couple fairly graphic sex scenes, including one where the characters sit and talk while completely naked. I actually didn’t know that going in, so I had a “Oh, there’s the R-rating” reaction.

7. Politically, the film is pretty much your standard lefty-Boomer politics: Communists and Communist sympathizers are well-meaning intellectuals concerned with the plight of the working man, Fascists are the devil incarnate, anti-Communists are implacable pseudo-fascists, Conservatives are narrow-minded, overbearing jingoists, etc.. We even get a rather elaborate nod to Kennedy (seriously, who cares about JFK anymore?). It’s not universal, though it’s fairly consistent.

On the one hand, this seems to pretty fairly tally with Oppenheimer’s own views, so it’s fair to play things from his point of view. On the other, it’s both very predictable (that’s been the view of almost every mainstream piece of Western Media since the 70s) and, from my perspective at least, naively out of date and thus kind of dull.

Seeing these tropes trotted out again and again is like watching a fading cult reciting its founding myths in route fashion, unaware that they’ve lost their power to convince.

Though it occurs to me that this whole topic requires a lot more space than I can give it here.