Oppenheimer or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Movies)

I have seen at least three actors portray J. Robert Oppenheimer. Obviously, there’s Cillian Murphy and his eyes and his cheekbones (and his Oscar). He’s the Oppenheimer I saw in the theatre and the reason I am having a hard time searching who all has played him, because people just want to tell me about Cillian Murphy. But I also saw Dwight Schultz, TV’s Barclay, in Fat Man and Little Boy and David Strathairn in Day One. There doesn’t seem to have been an Oppenheimer in the movie where Matthew Broderick played Richard Feynman, but also there’s a movie where Matthew Broderick played Richard Feynman.

None of this is particularly surprising. There are few moments in human history that are more world-changing than the development of the atomic bomb, and we as a species tell stories about our important moments, be they for ourselves, our tribes, or our species. The way we tell stories these days include movies. It’s all logic for you. What’s interesting, though, is that movies about the historical events, be they documentary or narrative, are only part of the story. Another major aspect is movies that use the Bomb as a metaphor or a background.

Famously Godzilla, of course. Ignoring Broderick’s movie with everyone’s favourite kaiju (my actual favourite kaiju is Mothra), the movies almost universally show Godzilla to have been awakened, created, embiggened, or otherwise made kaiju by atomic bomb testing. Fear of the monster is fear of the Bomb. I went through the whole series with some online friends recently, and someone in our group hadn’t realized that and asked if it was deliberate or not. I think they’d missed the first one, where it’s just text, but it’s still not exactly as though the later ones were hiding it.

There are a lot of Japanese movies about the Bomb, unsurprisingly. The Bomb as metaphor. The Bomb as history. The Bomb as a lingering fear. Hell, the Japanese will also do you the Bomb as lingering public health crisis—Black Rain, for example, about a Hiroshima survivor whose family is trying to find her a husband. So sure, Grave of the Fireflies is not, contrary to what some people who haven’t seen it believe, about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (It’s about the firebombing of Tokyo, when it’s about bombs.) But Barefoot Gen sure is.

There’s also I Live in Fear, by another of Japan’s greatest filmmakers. It’s an Akira Kurosawa movie about a man who is so afraid of nuclear war that he looks things over and decides that South America is the safest place from bombs, fallout, and so forth. (One in the eye for On the Beach and its Australians, I suppose.) He decides to sell everything and move there. His family is convinced he’s doing this out of fear, and obviously he is. The question is how reasonable the fear is.

The Giant Bug Movies of the ‘50s and ‘60s are also tied to that fear, to Godzilla. They’re American versions, with the American determination that sure, we may have created, say, giant grasshoppers by accident. Those pesky bugs got into one of our fine atomic research centers, ate some irradiated crops, and grew to massive proportions fit to take out Chicago. But by-Gods we’ll be able to do something about ‘em with the same science that created them. The way the Americans handled their fear of the Bomb was different from any of the ways the Japanese film industry did, but our relationship with the realities was less visceral.

A lot of films through history have tried to make that fear visceral. The British gave us Threads and When the Wind Blows. Both are ways of telling about the aftermath of a fictional war. There’s The Day After, which actually aired on the Sci-Fi Channel of all things when I was in college but which apparently actually convinced a lot of people shaping US nuclear policy that actually nuclear war would be bad for the US. The aforementioned On the Beach with Gregory Peck being stoic over Ava Gardner.

Nothing makes an action film more tense than sending people chasing rogue nuclear bombs or trying to prevent nuclear war. George Clooney, Ben Affleck, and at least two different incarnations of James Bond have had to deal with it. Heck, Christopher Walken had to prevent Martin Sheen from becoming President—long term, he failed at that one—to prevent nuclear war in The Dead Zone. It’s clear that Stephen King—who has a thing or two to say about all this in Danse Macabre—knew that only nuclear war was a threat big enough to make a nice young teacher from Maine become a political assassin. At least, a good young teacher; maybe we’ll talk about “nice is different than good” another day.

It’s even a hell of a setting for a dark comedy. Dr. Strangelove is the obvious one, here, but I’m going to throw out some love for Matinee with John Goodman. It’s set in Key West during the Cuban Missile Crisis, with Goodman playing a William Castle figure opening his new film Mant at its theatre. Different people are reacting to the Cuban Missile Crisis in different ways, from Goodman as Lawrence Woolsey barely noticing to Robert Picardo as Howard the manager having a state-of-the-art bomb shelter in the theatre building and a transistor radio glued to his ear at all times.

There are romances and comedies, dramas and action films. I don’t know of any atomic musicals, but I’m certain their must be at least one. The Bomb is in the background of a ton of media from the last eighty years, and not just because it changes how we all had to process the world. Personally, I was afraid of nuclear war from an early age, because I grew up in the last days of the Cold War. I don’t know what the first movie I saw in any way involving nuclear war was. But of course people will keep making movies about the Bomb for many years to come.