The message of Oscar-winning ‘Oppenheimer’

There was much expectation that the much-acclaimed director Christopher Nolan deserved to win an Oscar at least, and he did it with his ‘Oppenheimer’, the biopic of a theoretical physicist who was director of the laboratory that made the atom bomb. The movie won seven Oscars apart from the director. And the American media is also celebrating Donna Langley, the woman heads the NBC Universal studio, which produced the film because she fully backed the unusual project of the biography of a scientist who is not as iconic as Albert Einstein, the popular hero of 20th century physics. The man who portrayed Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy dedicated his award to all the peacemakers in the world. It might seem ironic that the man who led a team of scientists to make the bomb should have anything to do with peace. But that was the contradiction that Oppenheimer. Nolan’s film is almost a fawning celebration of an American hero, but Oppenheimer was in many an anti-hero.

The Oscar awards were of course in recognition of the American hero, and not the man who flirted with communism and felt deeply about peace in the world. His British biographer, Ray Monk, writing in The New Statesman magazine, said that Oppenheimer was a difficult man right from his growing up years in New York as the child of Jewish parents. He was lonely and precocious, and Monk says that told his schoolmates that if they asked him a question in Latin he would give the answer in Greek. Monk says wryly that it was inevitable that he was no good in making friends with this kind of an attitude. Nolan though showed his leftist political leanings, played more on his fascination for the Indian classical language Sanskrit, and how he learnt the language to read the Hindu religious books in the original including the Bhagavadgita, a verse from which he murmurs to himself when he sees the mushroom cloud after the test explosion of the bomb in the New Mexico desert. And after the war, Oppenheimer stood out as the anti-establishment man, up against the American military and political establishment because he wanted restrictions on the manufacturing of the atom bomb. But after the Second World War began the Cold War with the then Soviet Union, and both the Americans and Russians felt compelled to increase their stockpile of bombs. Nolan’s film is eloquently silent on Oppenheimer’s politics for peace.

What the world perhaps needs is dissident scientists like Oppenheimer, and not the one who are part of the establishment. And it would appear that with a few honourable exceptions, there are not many like Oppenheimer in the world. A key aspect of Oppenheimer’s personality is that when he was in Harvard, he read widely in subjects which would be called humanities. He is said to have spent a lot of his time in the Harvard University library devouring the books which had nothing to do with physics. Yet, he is recognized as a brilliant theoretical physicist. He was also known to be a clumsy experimental physicist because he just was no good in handling laboratory apparatus. Oppenheimer also explodes the stereotypical picture of an obsessed scientist who cannot look beyond the narrow confines of his subject. Oppenheimer was anything but a blinkered scientist. Even as the euphoria of the film, ‘Oppenheimer’, winning seven Oscars fades away sooner than later, it would be interesting to remember the real Oppenheimer, the genius who was curious about religion and philosophy, and who knew there was much more to the universe than scientific equations. Even as technology-induced climate disaster stares the world in the face, there is need for a man like Oppenheimer who understands the complex human situation.