On Barbie and Oppenheimer, inevitability and guilty

This week: what four decades of population shifts tell us about London and Britain. But first: Barbenheimer.

Of the two films, I wanted to like Barbie more, I really did. The trailers had been funny and clever and maybe subversive, and I couldn’t stop watching them. With Oppenheimer, by contrast, I hadn’t even seen the trailers: the only things I knew about it were, well, large chunks of the plot, admittedly, but mainly that it was coming out the same day as Barbie and that it had become a meme to see both in a double bill, and that, terminally Twitter-brained as I am, I had been looking forward to doing that for ages. 

So on Friday, in the absence of my usual cinema companion, I met my former New Statesman colleague Stephen Bush, who’d been kind enough to invite me along to his regular cinema, and we saw the two films back to back. It was a lovely evening, my only regret about which is that I failed to get Stephen to pose for a picture in a giant Barbie box (“This Barbie wears pink – but not for the reasons that you think”).  

And Barbie was good. If I’d seen it in isolation, I might have thought it was great: it’s incredibly funny, with a great twist which elevates it above just being a live-action remake of The Lego Movie with a different toy and a feminist desktop theme. My only slight complaint was that Ryan Gosling got vastly more funny lines than Margot Robbie, and that, given the movie’s themes, this maybe feels a bit off. (Caspar Salmon had more extensive complaints, and wrote this excellent piece about them.)

Oppenheimer, though, is one of the most incredible bits of cinema I have ever seen. Maybe this is my straight white man-ness reasserting itself. Maybe there’s some other reason. Or maybe it’s just really, really good.

It’s not an easy film to spoil – the central event is one you already know about going in; I’m going to write about tone and theme rather than plot anyway, and when I do have to touch on the latter I’m going to file the serial numbers off as best I can. But if you’re someone who really wants to go in cold, the danger zone doesn’t start until after this poster for Oppenheimer. Assume spoilers until you see the all-clear Barbie. 

Much of the discourse surrounding the film on everyone’s favourite hell-site, X¹, has concerned the question of whether it erases the victims. Around 200,000 Japanese people died in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, and untold thousands more through their later ill-effects. In the film, we don’t meet a single one of these people. Nor do we meet any of the (relatively small number of) homesteaders who were thrown off their land, like untold other hispanos or native American tribes over the centuries, so as to enable the Manhattan Project to first build a town and then bomb an empty patch of desert. The film instead focuses on the life and experience of the director of that project, who just so happens to be a white man.

In some ways this is a reasonable critique: there is a culture-wide problem of telling almost every story from the perspective of, well, people who look like me.² There’s an extremely good case for telling more stories from other perspectives, and whenever someone does this the beancounters in Hollywood seem absolutely blown away by the response (see: Barbie), before immediately going back to focusing on projects that foreground white men. 

All that said, though: a film about the victims of the bomb would be an entirely different film. Nolan’s Oppenheimer is not really about the story of the bomb. It’s a story about guilt.

(This is where it gets properly spoiler-y. You have been warned.)

Early in the film Oppenheimer, in the grip of some kind of episode, tries to poison someone, but thinks better of it and manages to undo his mistake. Later on, his actions – thoughtless, but not malicious; a level or a kind of selfishness that many of us have engaged in at some point – result in an already damaged person taking their own life.

These two moments between them encompass the range of possible interpretations of exactly how culpable the physicist was for everything that flowed from his work. In one reading, Oppenheimer is the man who headed the project, and the man whose name will forever be attached to the bomb: surely, then, he must be accounted the man responsible for those deaths.

In another, equally reasonable reading, though, things quickly become more complicated. The bomb was used in place of more conventional weapons because, rightly or wrongly, there were those who believed that the priority was a quick Japanese surrender: anything else would have ultimately cost more lives, American and Japanese alike. (I don’t know enough to know if this is true, but it’s not entirely implausible.) The allied determination to develop the technology first had grown in large part out of fears that the Nazis were working on a bomb of their own: surely an American deterrent was preferable to a Nazi one? (The Nazis never got that close and had anyway been defeated by the time the allies got there; but all this is hindsight not available in 1942, so this one I broadly buy.) 

And as the film’s version of President Truman suggests, it was he, not Oppenheimer, who chose to use the bomb. Oppenheimer was a bureaucrat: plans for the Manhattan Project pre-dated him, and if he hadn’t been its director someone else would have been. There’s an argument that he, personally, just wasn’t that important. 

This is precisely why Oppenheimer’s own suggestion, revealed in the final moments of the film, that the Manhattan Project did unleash an ultimate nuclear catastrophe – it just hasn’t taken place yet – is quite so haunting. It suggests that the whole thing – the bomb, the arms race, the potential horrors that still hang over our world – can’t be pinned on the actions of any one man, but are an inevitable result of the interaction of politics and particle physics. If it hadn’t been Oppenheimer it would have been somebody else. That only makes the bomb and everything that flows from it much,much harder to stop.

But. You can make that argument about many, perhaps most, historical figures. Huge swathes of writing are dedicated to debating when individual “great men” matter more than historical forces or not. 

And Oppenheimer was the project’s director. If it hadn’t been him, then probably it would have been somebody else. But it was him. His name was on it. That’s why he spent his later years campaigning for arms control. The paradox is unresolvable. 

You can make an analogous argument for many historical atrocities, from imperialism on down. They result from impersonal historical forces; they were also the actions of a particular group of men.

That, it seems to me, is why this seems a story that was worth telling.

Honestly, though, see Barbie, too. You’ll need it. 

Some notes on population change

One of my favourite weird facts about demographics – yes, I have those – is that London spent most of the late 20th century shrinking. The population of what would later be Greater London peaked in the middle of the century, at just over 8 million. Over the next few decades, though, thanks to a combination of post-war planning policies and industrial decline, the city’s population fell by around a sixth, hitting a nadir of 6.6m in the 1981 census. It then bounced back, but even so it didn’t pass its previous peak until 2015. It’s probably not far off 9 million now. 

Much of the last month of my life has been spent taking the dog on long walks around the suburbs of London’s easternmost borough, Havering, where I grew up. In Romford and Hornchurch, Gidea Park and Emerson Park, it seemed to me, there has been a construction boom, with former industrial sites sprouting homes and individual home plots sprouting flats. I dimly recalled that a number of outer London boroughs had seen their populations boom: had Havering been one of them? Might that mean its politics (so right-wing and leave-y that for a time the Labour party was the sixth party on the council after Tories, UKIP and three different residents’ associations) finally began to move into line with the rest of outer London?