At one point near the end of American Prometheus—the 2005 biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin detailing the physicist’s effort to create the atomic bomb and the effort of his political enemies to tar him as a Communist after the fact, and the book on which the film Oppenheimer is based—the authors highlight Oppie’s annoyance with a popular play that closed with a monologue announcing his feelings of guilt about the creation, and deployment, of the atomic bomb.
“Such melodrama somehow cheapened the character of his ordeal,” Kai and Sherwin write. “In short, he thought the script poor drama precisely because it lacked ambiguity.”
I have no idea what Oppenheimer would make of Oppenheimer, but it is decidedly ambiguous in its treatment of two of the great moral quandaries of midcentury America: the development and deployment of the atomic bomb, and the maniacal effort to root out Communist infiltration (or “infiltration”) of America’s political, social, and educational classes. Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) himself rests at the intersection of these two tempests, and it is through him that this storm will rage.
Read the whole thing.
