I ate movie snacks during the previews because that is what you do, and also because it felt better, somehow, to house a dozen Haribo before the atomic bomb movie began, rather than while it was unfolding. I am glad I ate them, and glad that I’d brought along the ginger lemon kind, which is not just the best Haribo flavor but also tilts medicinal. Those gummies steadied my stomach. Somewhere around halfway through its three hours, this movie had made me nauseous.
Oppenheimer is a confused, convoluted, Bechdel-failing ego trip of a movie that had something interesting to investigate but became too beguiled by its own imprecise questions and motions at human “complexity,” mistaking a braided structure and shimmery aesthetic for a movie that might grapple with actual depth and actual consequences — and I wouldn’t waste time writing about it if I had since read a single take about it that mentions its egregious, negligent historical omission.
While Oppenheimer was Oppenheimering and Strauss was Straussing and the U.S. government was building a case to justify using Japanese civilians as human examples of America’s unprecedented power-to-destroy-life TWICE, turning Nagasaki’s residents into a truly evil We mean it! — i.e., while the movie’s events was happening — the U.S. government was forcibly relocating an estimated 120,000 American citizens because they had Japanese heritage, a racist violation that was not enacted against any other group of American citizens whose European countries of origin were also war enemies.
Okay, but maybe the Japanese American concentration camps — a history that is barely taught in schools and seems in danger of being forgotten — are not directly relevant to the specific story Nolan is telling? No. The anti-Asian, anti-Japanese racism that passed for patriotism at the time cannot be bracketed away from the U.S. government’s decision to drop two atom bombs on Japanese civilians. In this context, the omission of the Japanese American concentration camps from a movie about this figure in American history is irresponsible, at best.
The person I went with did a little googling afterwards and quickly discovered that Oppenheimer had spent years of his life in close proximity to two places impacted by Japanese American internment. The movie spends a lot of time in Berkeley and in Los Alamos, closest to Santa Fe. Oppenheimer would have been very aware not just of the forced relocation of UC Berkeley’s Japanese American professors and students, but also of the Berkeley Committee on Fair Play that formed to protest it — just as he was aware of all the other organizing that would later cost him politically, and which is a central plot point in Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer also would have known about the concentration camp for more than 4,000 Japanese American men that was apparently impossible to avoid when traveling from Los Alamos to Santa Fe, the nearest city.
This is from one internet search! I know that this was an adaptation of a book, which I have not read, and storytelling is an act of editing; you can’t include everything. But this? It’s key context that Nolan seems to have not even thought to look into.
I know I know I know. I knew what I was getting into, but somehow I also did not. I brought the Haribo, after all. Naively, I went to see Oppenheimer for the usual reasons to visit a movie theater in summer: to sit beside someone I like in the air conditioned dark and pry my mind from its own knots. I had already gone to see Barbie and Joy Ride and Past Lives, and there was nothing else at the right times that I wanted to see. I admit that often, and especially under the weight of summer, I go to the movies to leave myself. I don’t know why I keep doing this, because it rarely works. Watching movies with my particular blended identities is frequently an experience that pushes me back into my own specificity, a specificity that often slips through Hollywood’s many cracks.
But also, I was actually interested in watching Oppenheimer. I wondered how Nolan, an incurious master of obfuscation through spectacle, would construct a movie about one man grappling with science’s complicity and agency in mass destruction while political winds changed, and I admit that I wanted to inform my already Nolan-averse opinion. And I am always pessimistically curious to see how pop culture handles the use of nuclear weapons and their impacts, including the psychological ones. I am a mixed race Japanese American, the child of a Japanese immigrant who just this year became an American citizen. I am proud of my dad. I also feel heartbreak that I’m not sure is mine to feel.
When the movie began discussing the justifications behind dropping the bombs on the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I felt my body tighten around some small core. I felt nauseous, really and truly nauseous, and it was a relief to see someone throw up on screen. But as the movie rolled on, my nausea continued. Not because of the deliberately un-graphic allusions to the Japanese deaths and mutilations and years of suffering caused by Truman’s go-ahead to drop the bombs, nor because of Nolan’s oddly telling artistic rendering of a white woman’s skin searing off before Oppenheimer’s guilt-addled eyes, but because of some gaping, disempowered rage, a vacuumed clarity that it wasn’t just the U.S. government’s justifications for perpetrating war crimes but also this movie’s own theoretical obsessions that felt so detached from human, bodily consequence — from my body, and from my father’s and the people who looked like him.
I remember chewing my way through Haribo bags to get through graduate school. The ginger lemon ones, with their real ginger sting, could settle a late-night, caffeine-embittered stomach and deliver a jolt of sugar to my sleep-deprived brain. They were equal part numbing agent and energy source when I was running on empty. They allowed me to dissociate from my body even as I could unleash my jaw-drawn tension on them. I could eat a lot of them without the queasiness that other gummies can cause, the gingery zing a corrective for the stomach ache that vast quantities of the candy would otherwise bring. Maybe I brought this candy to the movies because I knew I would need a palliative.
For so many reasons, I have had to practice embodiment as an adult, and I am aware of how self-destructive dissociative tendencies can be, especially around food. But I was glad for my candy. And I was glad to leave.
Introduction to Japanese American Incarceration During WWII (Densho Project)
Don’t Fence Me In: Coming of Age in America’s Concentration Camps is on view at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles through the beginning of October