The last realization of the now paragon of the great cinema of author and show attacks to the problematic and promethean figure of the one who allowed himself to say by quoting the Bhagavad-Gita that he is the « destroyers of worlds ».
Coincidence of the opposites
Nolan's film deals with the subject. The problem of quantum physics as expressed in the film is a matter of theory and assumptions (intuitions). Quantum physics observes a world filled with empty space, that is intuition. This empty space between things allows them to become material or at least convince us that they are. These intuitions are formulated by the main character in a scene of encounter between him and his future wife.
The attraction of the bodies would then be a coincidence of the opposites to the image of this painting by Picasso which looks, fascinated, the character in which the representation of a body suggests his own disappearance or his own appearance. The body or matter becomes a figuration, an anticipation of what it might be. A figurative intuition...
The film itself is a plastic form whose risky, if not contradictory, images find a logic sometimes more risky than the editing comes to organize. The latter then becomes for the filmmaker the subject on which the images find a support and a logic of meaning. It is a writing principle that organizes the meaning of the image.
Nolan chose to make a movie with resolution rather than problem. He opts for a purely transitive perception whose object would be his own reception. Oppenheimer is a character to judge and above all to recognize. He is the object of the film both as a body to know and as a matter to recognize. It is a document of history.
However, the falsely open aesthetic, whose triptych fission-fusion-explosion is like what the image-spectacle does more simplifying, not to say grueling. If sensitive, open images seem to coexist in this magma where the emancipation of the image seems impossible (we think for example of the cracked/emaciated face of Oppenheimer, the only out-of-field visible in the horror spectacle), Nolan's objective is to blow away the few contradictory coincidences that exist within this (biopic) image.
Iconization overtly of these encounters between great spirits tired and disappointed. They appear more like a rough highlight of what American genius represents. They convey the idea that history takes place in these events and as the character played by Alden Ehrenreich, we are excluded from these meetings because they are not addressed to us. From this iconization comes this last scene, this last encounter too little human, and in which we have to remember that this demeaning moral which Einstein would make thanks to the character.
Recognition would come from forgiveness: an interested pardon since he addresses first, according to Nolan, to the one who authorizes the act of charity. Why not... but would it not be better to retain this photograph of Einstein that addresses to the one who recognizes it in his gaze, a grimace or the sign of stupidity.
Morality more than representation
As for the women in this film, they are not even elevated to ghosts or ghosts. The image does not document them, it instead transforms them into mythological paper-painting. This gross intrusion of the nude into a trial that exposes the protagonist (we will have understood) reinforces the feeling that Nolan does not trust his image or his spectator (in this regard, read again the critical of the Mr Wilkes).
It is not a question of recognizing Oppenheimer's right to have existed and to invent, but rather of imputing to him the fissure of an imagination or intuition that would not be limited to solving itself in the object of the memory moral. The first scene, that of the wave formed in a puddle, is the image of the film: on the surface...
Interesting analysis. It's nice to be focused on such a focused angle. It's hard for me to make a judgment at the moment like I haven't seen the movie yet. I will go through the catch-up session soon, probably in Granada.
What I fear from the beginning is the iconization of Oppenheimer and the American tendency to tell history under the spectre of his great figures, which you evoke in your critique. I have the same fear for Napoleon by Ridley Scott even though The Last Duel (read our critical) had fascinated.
It's interesting to note that you and Mr. Wilkes made the same judgment about the representation of women in the film. ^^^
Loïc, welcome to MaG... 😉
By the way, a very interesting first article to read. Bravo!