Thoughts on Oppenheimer

You know that old saying: you wait four years to go back to cinemas after a global pandemic, and then you go twice in the course of a month.

I caught Oppenheimer this afternoon with my dad and his lady. He'd expressed interest in seeing it, since it features scientists that he was (in some cases) vaguely acquainted with at Caltech, and since it's been the subject of cultural buzz for a while. Neither of them wanted to make it a double-feature with Barbie, so I'll have to save my Barbenheimer hot takes for another day. 

Though it's worth noting: what a point we're at in our culture, where the two biggest movies of the moment are a surprisingly grown-up take on a children's toy tie-in, opposite an impressively art-deco biopic of one of America's greatest scientists. It's hard to think of two concepts more diametrically opposed, but here we are: Barbenheimer's a thing.

Anyhoo:

The first thing to say is that I really liked it. Like a lot of Christopher Nolan films, it plays with the timeline, starting us off at the hearings where Oppenheimer's security clearance was stripped from him, and at the confirmation hearings for the man who, it turns out, engineered those other hearings. And then from there we see Oppenheimer himself, portrayed as a younger man at university. 

We jump among each of these timelines throughout the movie, and I suppose the jumps are meant to evoke the quantum strangeness of the fundamental physics that Oppenheimer studied. It's hard not to see that theme in the recurring shots of rain on puddles, which is sometimes a stand-in for nuclear detonations across tactical maps of the world. It doesn't play out like a formal experiment like the time jumps did in Dunkirk, but it's clear the two films share some DNA.

The casting is pretty great, as Nolan's tends to be. Cillian Murphy is not necessarily the person I'd have tapped to play Oppenheimer, but he's otherworldly enough to play to that sense of a man never quite at his ease in the world. I also appreciate the casting of Matt Damon as Leslie Groves of the Army Corps of Engineers, who oversaw the Manhattan Projects - despite the "Maaattt Daaamon" jokes of Team America, Damon's a pretty versatile actor who does a good line in that type of character. It reminded me a little of The Good Shepherd, which is not a great film and it's a different character, but it belies the sense of Damon as an interpreter only of youthful parts.

I'd also give a nod of recognition to Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer's wife Kitty, who has some great scenes and lines. I especially like the reference in her first appearance to the fact that Kitty's a biologist - acknowledging that women could aspire to be more than housewives.

Likewise, the cinematography is as good as always for a Nolan film. It may not be bombastic like the flipped-over semi in The Dark Knight, but the shot of the gantry at Los Alamos where the Manhattan Project is about to explode the first test device was still breathtaking. Just as breathtaking are the shots of the Earth being ravaged by nuclear explosions, or the interstitials of reactions that punctuate the scenes of high stress for Oppenheimer.

I also loved the score, which put me in mind of that for Interstellar (probably my favorite Nolan movie, and among my top favorites ever). It doesn't achieve the same soaring qualities that marked out that previous film, but has similar tonality and motifs. The sound design is good in general, as well, with Nolan not afraid to make you jump out of your seat by keeping the visual of the atomic explosion silent for a long time, then hitting you with the roar of the bomb like a wall of sound.

Thematically, there are two things I appreciate. First is how anarchic scientists are among themselves. They drink, they joke (at one point Enrico Fermi is taking odds on whether or not the test explosion will ignite the Earth's entire atmosphere), they womanize. We see Oppenheimer sleeping with Jean Tetlock (played by Florence Pugh), married to Kitty, and only toward the end of the film is it confirmed that he's also had an affair with someone else.

There's also the political side, with Oppenheimer's contacts with labor unions and out-and-out Communists, including both Jean and Kitty. This is the other theme that I appreciated, which was a little more nuanced in its treatment of Communism and the arms race than you typically get from American movies. Nolan's themes frequently feel more conservative, so it's interesting to see how the characters grapple with communism and leftism generally here.

Overall, I liked the movie, and like any number of Nolan's other films, I can see myself exploring it further, trying to tease out its complexities. Most importantly, I'm glad I saw it in the theater, because as much as I love watching movies on my dinky 32-inch screen at home, this has big enough visuals and sound that watching it at the cinema really lets you get lost in the story. I'm even tempted to go check it out in Imax at some point soon, to see how it hits in that format.

Strange New Worlds: Those Old Scientists is Pretty Great, Y'all

Like probably all fans of Star Trek: Lower Decks and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, I've been eagerly looking forward to the crossover episode that was teased after the first season of SNW came out. If you're eagerly awaiting it, but haven't watched it yet (I just finished it half an hour ago), be warned there will likely be spoilers after the jump.

But to whet your appetite, I hope it isn't hyperbole to suggest this one is up there with the classic Deep Space 9 episode Trials and Tribble-ations. Read on for my thoughts:

Just Desserts: Affirmative Action and the Doom Patrol

Just yesterday I picked up the collected edition of Rachel Pollack's run on Vertigo's Doom Patrol. I remember seeing listings for it back in the 90s, when she started writing it, and I was struck then by the announcements that she was a poet and novelist - which crystallized for me that the book was something different, if you followed up Grant Morrison with a poet, of all things.

Even back then I had some inkling of who Grant Morrison was, even if I hadn't actually read any of his comics. Though I guess that feeling of the "grown-upness" of Vertigo came from the descriptions of the other books being published in the line at that time: beyond Sandman and Hellblazer and Swamp Thing were Shade, the Changing Man; Enigma; Moonshadow; Chiaroscuro. All of these, going by the descriptions, dealt with more mature themes than the mainline DC books, so it made sense that the line would hire a "proper" writer.

I never picked up Doom Patrol at the time, though I did come across some early Grant Morrison issues in Italian compilations that I'd buy on vacation. I think I skipped past those pages, though, because I was just buying these books for the Justice League and Legion of Superheroes issues that they contained. So I didn't actually encounter the Grant Morrison Doom Patrol until a couple of years ago.

More recently, I heard of Rachel Pollack's passing, so I was reminded of her time on Doom Patrol, and learned that they had indeed collected her run. Those issues have probably been impossible to find for the last 30 years, because they weren't plagued with particularly stellar sales. I've spoken here before of the pleasure of finding old comics from that period that are rare but not valuable, so I appreciated the chance to get my hands on these issues.

Anyway, in the collected edition there's a foreword from series editor Tom Peyer, in which he talks about the prank he and Pollack played in the original issues' letter column (Pollack also mentioned it, and the snippets of the letters are pretty funny). They'd already hired her, but they ran letters from her in each issue, where she asked with increasing insistence to be made the new Doom Patrol writer, culminating in the announcement in Morrison's last issue that Pollack would indeed be the new writer.

The thing that set off a lightbulb in my head was Peyer's line about "the great American terror that someone, somewhere, is getting something they don't deserve". This terror is what's driven some of the worst behavior by the west in recent years (not just here in the US, but in Europe, and probably Canada too): Comicsgate and Gamergate are two examples, in which right-wing trolls threw a fit about women in the comics and video game industries.

(As a quick aside, those 90s solicitations for Pollack's Doom Patrol made no mention of the fact that she was a trans woman, a fact I didn't learn until the last decade. One imagines that DC might have made a bigger deal of it if they'd hired her now, which would have led to a predictable backlash from those Comicsgate idiots. But also, Pollack makes a nice counter-example to those who think gender transitions are something new)

But it's also what's driven the decades-long campaign against affirmative action, which seems to have culminated this week in the US Supreme Court's decision to limit the ways that Harvard and the University of North Carolina can apply race in their admissions process.

I don't want to debate the merits of the SCOTUS decision, or of the defense by Harvard or UNC. I'm not a lawyer or legal scholar, and I appreciate it's a thorny topic, given that Harvard seems to have been using some pretty gross racism against Asian students to prioritize Black and Hispanic students.

But that line by Tom Peyer is a perfect encapsulation of why affirmative action has been so controversial for so long. The opposition to it turns on the idea not that you're attempting to right historic wrongs, but that you're taking jobs or university places from deserving, qualified (read: white and/or male) people and giving them to undeserving (read: non-white and/or non-male) people.

That formulation speaks to a lot of people's sense of fairness, which is why it's been so successful in cutting back affirmative action, especially in higher education. Even the most fair-minded people want to see jobs go to the most qualified people; conversely, nobody wants to see critical jobs go to someone who has no idea how to do these jobs based only on their skin color or other circumstances.

However, support for affirmative action varies depending on how you ask the question. A lot of people who might support measures to reduce wealth inequality among different ethnic or racial groups will express opposition to these measures if they're painted as giving jobs to the "undeserving". The other way to look at this is that a lot of people who don't care about racial inequality can go around saying they want to do something for disadvantaged groups, but it has to be the "right" measure, whatever that may mean.

Unfortunately, affirmative action is another of those areas where the left has allowed reactionaries and the radical right to define the terms of the debate. Instead of being able to defend access to good jobs and education as the way to improve outcomes for historically disadvantaged groups (because the right also doesn't want these groups getting access to welfare, again the "undeserving" idea), progressives are left looking silly by defending a system that seems like it's just there to advance incompetent people. Not that anyone ever notices when a white guy is shown to be incompetent (ahem *Frank Lampard* ahem)

Progressives also end up unwittingly bolstering existing racial tensions, where people of certain disadvantaged groups feel they're competing with other such groups for the scraps left by the dominant group. Harvard's black-balling of Asians is a good example: there's a sense among some Asian parents, anecdotally in my experience, that their kids are working hard for places in college only to be denied by affirmative action for "less deserving" students.

Funnily enough, we got a clear picture of who the "less deserving" students were a few years ago, when the Varsity Blues scandal erupted. Here was a group of parents paying extraordinary amounts to fudge their kids' standardized test scores and extracurriculars, in order to get into elite schools (and USC) that they wouldn't have been able to get into otherwise. And, uh, most of those parents were white, which means, for example, Lori Loughlin's kid (who didn't even want to go to college) was taking a spot from a "more deserving" student.

There was talk about affirmative action then, too, and what this admissions scandal meant for students of color. What's depressing is that the question of how to properly address these racial gaps and provide opportunities fell by the wayside again until this week. Signs suggest that once the dust has settled from this latest decision, that question will get ignored again, and Americans will go back to worrying that someone who "shouldn't" be getting into Harvard, or being promoted to manager, or even writing a comic book, will be getting those things.

Across the Spider-Verse Was Enough to Get Me Back to the Movies

Despite the title of this post, this isn't a review, or at least not entirely. Though I will say that, if it's maybe only 90-98% as good as Into the Spider-Verse, that still makes Across the Spider-Verse a pretty great movie. It's emotionally resonant, filled with inventive visuals, and the voice acting is fabulous (there are also some nice live-action cameos, which made me squeee with pleasure).

It's more a musing on the act and fact of going to the movies, after being away for so long. There are a number of things I have yet to cross off my list from three years ago, but now I can say I've once again gone to see a movie in the theater. The last movie I saw in theaters, before the pandemic hit, was 1917, and in the interim, I've relied on simultaneous releases on Disney Plus or HBO Max, or just waited for the movies to show up on streamers. In one or two cases, I even rented them on my Apple TV.

The streaming factor is the other reason I haven't been back to the movies yet, not just the pandemic. I'm fully vaccinated, relatively healthy, and I wore my mask throughout the entire movie (as near as I could tell, the only person in the theater who did), so it didn't seem like too big a deal. But it struck me at one point that, despite missing the communal experience of movie-going, I've really gotten used to just watching films at home.

Maybe I'm getting old, forgetful and cheap, but $17, plus a $1.80 online purchase fee, seemed a lot for having to wear pants and shoes while watching a film. It also didn't help that the lady next to me decided to start texting on her phone toward the end. Luckily she wasn't talking to anyone, but the screen was bright enough for me to notice (and seethe about it).

On the other hand, we've been having a mini heatwave this weekend, so it was worth it to enjoy some air conditioning for a couple of hours. Heck, I even providentially brought my jacket, so I could bundle up a little against the AC. The movie didn't have the crowd jumping out of their seats, but it was nice being part of some of the laughs the movie got. Most of all, it was nice watching something immersive, on a much bigger screen and with a better sound system than what I have at home. I'm not one to spend a lot on a fancy, gigantic, top-of-the-line TV and surround sound system, so it's nice to catch a big, wild movie like Across the Spider-Verse on a decent AV setup.

I guess the price is what it is because of inflation and theater chains' need to recoup some losses after the enforced shutdowns in the pandemic. And not all of them survived: I still rue the loss of our beloved Palo Alto Square, which showed a different class of films than what does well at the multiplex that I went to yesterday (JoJo Rabbit, Honey Boy and Little Women were some of the more recent viewings I had there). As for the annoyances of getting dressed up and being around people, well, I was used to that kind of thing once, and I can get used to it again.

For the time being, I'm probably not going to watch a movie at the cinema every weekend, but it's good to have that option open again. And honestly, paying almost $20 to enjoy some relief from the heat is a better idea than my plan last September to stay at one of the hotels across the street from my house ($300 or so per night, to give you an idea). I'm also likely to continue watching most of my movies at home, on one of the many streaming services, but it'll be good to have another option for the really exciting films.

At the very least, when the third Spider-Verse movie comes out, I'll want to see that in theaters too.