Flasz On Film

Wondering why filmmakers choose to make the movies they make is probably one of my favourite pastimes, especially when the movie they settle on writing and/or directing doesn’t immediately look as though it fit in their recognizable modus operandi. Therefore, as I was watching Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, I began scratching my head as to what drove him to make this movie in the first place. After all, it’s rather difficult to find a discernible trend line connecting it to Tenet, Dunkirk or Interstellar, or an inner demon he’d be forced to come back to and confront or heed its demands. But there is always a reason. Even Insomnia, the go-to outlier in Nolan’s filmography whose existence is an eyesore for many fans, had its reasons to exist. 

Oppenheimer stands a bit removed from what anyone would ever expect Christopher Nolan to direct and the only obvious thread I could point to is the ambition of the undertaking, as Nolan has consistently displayed the outright refusal to settle for mediocrity and – even if unsuccessful – he would make sure he’d have left his mark on the world one way or another. And you might be curious if there’s a bit more to be found underneath the superficially ambitious idea to simply reinvent a biopic and show everyone around that had he had a chance, Nolan would have made The Imitation Game a nail-biting spectacle underpinned by a dark morality tale, too. Maybe this is it. Perhaps it was just as simple as picking up a book from the shelf, though I am told Nolan was gifted American Prometheus by Cillian Murphy, but even so – maybe the book spoke to him somehow and induced a sympathetic resonance within his loins which propelled him to adapt this book into what we know as Oppenheimer. And I think I got it. 

If you look at the movie the right way and forcibly suppress any attempt to engage with its dense and non-linear narrative on the primary level, you will be able to see that Oppenheimer as a story may also function on a metaphorical plane, where Christopher Nolan personally identifies with J. Robert Oppenheimer and where the entire story about the development of the atomic bomb is a metaphorical dressing for Nolan’s processing of his role in reinventing the comic book movie and essentially fathering the blockbuster landscape we exist in today. In this hypothetical scenario, what we are watching is the filmmaker’s own subjective account of what he feels about that time he landed the job of directing what we now remember as Batman Begins.  

Imagine young Oppenheimer as a stand-in for Nolan. He’s just about setting up shop somewhere in Hollywood where he intends to do stuff nobody in America is doing on the scale he’d like to do it. The ideas of transplanting New Wave concepts of toying with time and structure are firmly European and his dream is to bring these ideas across the pond where, with appropriate funding and help from application specialists, he’d be able to turn these artsy notions into spectacles like we’ve never seen before. And one day, out of nowhere, a big project lands in his lap. Colonel Groves aka a WB big wig shows up on Nolan’s doorstep and offers him the job of directing the next Batman movie. Having languished in development hell, failing to launch under Darren Aronofsky and the Wachowskis, and flipflopping between potential ways of how to handle the aftermath of Batman and Robin, this movie was ready for a new home. Oppenheimer/Nolan accepted. He knew perfectly well that other studios were already hard at work trying to get their comic book properties off the ground (Spider-Man, X-Men) and he was well aware that in order to stand out in what he already anticipated would become a highly competitive field of spandex-clad properties, his take on Batman would have to reinvent the way comic books are made.  

So, he assembled his team and got to work building a nuclear device aka Batman Begins, a test case for the mother of all blockbusters he intended on detonating safely away from the madding crowds. Just to see if it would work and to find out how much oomph he’d need to pack into the real charges Groves/WB wanted to drop over Japan/the Summer season. However, Oppenheimer/Nolan was being slowly consumed by creeping fears that what he was about to do would change the world forever. He wasn’t able to articulate how, but he felt that his experimental reinvention of the comic book genre could catalyze a chain reaction and set the world ablaze. He knew the risks and he did it anyway. Batman Begins was a modest success. He watched the box office receipts and knew that with a few tweaks, he’d make a billion dollars and leave a lasting imprint on the culture at large. So, he built two more bombs, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, the former of which – when detonated over the top of the box office – made the world take notice. It was like nothing anyone had ever seen.  

Oppenheimer/Nolan was a man of ambition, driven by relentless desire to change the world. Which he did. Now, if the movie is indeed autobiographical, and you’ll have to remember that I am effectively making stuff up and reading into things here for my own amusement, Nolan must have instinctively anticipated that the formula he reduced to practice with The Dark Knight Trilogy would forever cement the notion of a comic book movie as a safe and profitable blockbuster venture. What he also must have known while working on his movies was that The Soviets/Marvel were building up strength under everyone’s noses and that they would eventually have to be dealt with. Now, did he know that he would one day wake up in a blockbuster landscape held to ransom by an overabundance of factory-made (I)CBMs vying for supremacy within the confines of a Mexican standoff? Was he aware that in his own backyard others were planning the development of The Super (aka shared universes) and that eventually he’d end up supplanted by those willing to pursue the development of even more devastating, potentially world-ending blockbusters? 

To this end, Oppenheimer functions as Nolan’s attempt at wrestling with an internal demon, a way for him to apologize to the world for firing the starter gun in an arms race that has made us witness Ant-Man and the Wasp, The Flash and at least two attempts at Justice League in addition to a conveyor belt of other comic book movies nobody in fifty years will remember by name. However, thanks to Oppenheimer/Nolan, we will all remember that time we all lived under the Comic Book Movie gun. Just like the world judged Oppenheimer for his involvement in bringing the world to a brink, Nolan is probably anticipating his own judgment coming in the next few decades once we’ve gathered enough perspective to see where it all started. Sure, Sam Raimi and Bryan Singer made their movies first. Tim Burton also came way earlier. But Nolan’s work was instrumental to taking the genre of (I)CBMs into the new era. 

Burton discovered radioactivity. Raimi and Singer split the atom. Nolan developed the bomb. And Warner Brothers dropped it. The world has never been the same and somehow Oppenheimer can be metaphorically mapped as Christopher Nolan’s way of beating his chest and telling us he didn’t realize he’d set the world on fire, even though the calculations pointed to a non-zero probability of it happening. And Albert Einstein/Michael Mann probably warned him it would be his cross to bear.