SCREAMING
the barbenheimer experience i had was so funny i saw oppenheimer first and in a quiet scene we could literally hear ken singing in the theater next to us and then during barbie it when was quiet we could hear a fucking explosion coming from the oppenheimer screening
There is a point in “Oppenheimer” Christopher Nolan’s treatise on not just the creator of the atom bomb but the confluence of events that led him to his fate as the “Father of the atom bomb”, where you realize Nolan is most definitely not doing a movie about white guilt, or a three hour bit of revisionist history with the hope that we all think kinder of the man. It comes about midway through the movie when one of the great loves of Oppenheimer’s life dies, and Oppenheimer (or “Oppy” as his friends call him) seeks solace to drown himself in guilt. His wife ( a rattlingly fantastic Emily Blunt) finds him off in the woods folded up like a baby in the cold ground of a the land he is in the midst of destroying and immediately runs over to grab him. What one would expect here, what usually follows- a pep talk from the wife who understands his genius, a loving confidence boost from the woman that acts as a kickstand in the mans moments of weakness - is not what's said, instead we get a viscerally livid Emily Blunt all but slapping him before she utters the magic words “You do not get to commit sin and make us feel sorry for you”. It is arguably the thesis of the film, and it was at this exact moment that what had only been hinted at, what felt like it could go either way, became definitive in a movie about a man that was anything but.
...there can be no other conclusion, but that this film is viscerally angry at Oppenheimer, while in recognition, that not only was he not alone, but was not fairly treated, even as he got what he karmically earned. [x]
Something something the leitmotif that plays when we see Robert Oppenheimer immersed in the forces of modernity shaping the world in the early part of the century, the leitmotif that shows us that physics was the avant-garde, lunging forward into the new history as wild and brilliant as the work of Picasso and Eliot and Stravinsky, the leitmotif that shows the awesome blessing of vision
is the same leitmotif that plays three hours later, when we see what has become of the world. What may become of the world. What hangs over the audience like a sword and Oppenheimer like an eagle returning every day. The same motif for the same actual thing: the endless charge of history, modernity, the destiny of the 20th century, something that was cracking open like a new birth and also doomed to crack open like a fissure in the earth.
(Because history is sometimes more elegant than narrative, many scientists at Trinity had their backs to the explosion, and were told to only look around through a welder’s glass, to prevent damage to their eyes.)
It’s a question posed by the score itself: can you unsee the hidden world? Can you unlearn Cubism, can you say Eliot’s hollow men weren’t the shape of things to come? The physics of the bomb were uncovered, not created. Is the deeply human act of seeing, of reaching to understand, the transcendent spark of something beautiful? Or is it, for this man, in this time, something profoundly unholy?
Light is both a wave and a particle. And it’s the same music in both scenes.