GHOSTS OF THE FUTURE: WHY I THINK OPPENHEIMER IS A BRILLIANT HORROR FILM

By Ahona

At the twilight of her teenage years, Mary Shelley wrote what is widely considered to be the first, true science fiction story. This novel, Frankenstein, is both about the grand scale of academic ambition and scientific invention, and the horror of it. Victor Frankenstein, the novel's titular hero, creates a monstrous creature in his attempts to invent a lab-generated being. This creature, once freed from the lab, starts a bloody rampage. This is not a digression from Oppenheimer. This is its premise. Well, almost its premise. Unlike Victor Frankenstein, Oppenheimer didn't create a sentient being capable of making its own decisions. During the culmination of the Second World War, in a project that was apparently meant to effectively end the war, J. Robert Oppenheimer created something that was used by a nation for a devastation far greater than what Frankenstein's monster could ever imagine. Frankenstein's monster, despite being a living, breathing creature, was never named. Oppenheimer's monsters were named as though they were living creatures - Little Boy and Fat Man.And like living creatures that return from the dead, they haunt their creator. From the very opening frames of the film muted hues, raindrops, a constant sense of foreboding - Oppenheimer looks like he is staring into the eye of the monster that he is about to create, hypnotised. There is a lot to be said about Cillian Murphy's hold upon his character. It is not enough to state that he becomes Oppenheimer. Murphy becomes both the subject and the narrator of this story. Perhaps this is what happens when the actor is also a storyteller, in expressions not in words. He withholds Oppenheimer's thoughts where need be. In other frames, he unlcashes himself, exploding.The film is structured like an unrelenting spiral into the depths of Oppenheimer's mind. And in signature Nolan style, moments from different timelines blend and melt into each other. Ludwig Göransson's soundscape Oppenheimer's ferries fear, guilt and follies across the sequences of the film. You hear a certain score in a sequence echoing through corridors of Oppenheimer's mind. Sometime later, Nolan shows you the scene that score has originated in. This is about as much clarity that you can expect from a Nolan film in the first watch - he is telling you, again and again, the subject of his film is a haunted man. There are two characters in the film who are perhaps as aware of Oppenheimer's haunted-ness as the audience. Kitty, his wife, played by the fierce, strikingly intense Emily Blunt, understands what the guilt is doing to him to some extent. He sees through the future. She sees through him. She is a conflicted person herself - struggling with her own anger at her husband's choices, coping with motherhood and a nascent alcoholism at once. She might not understand Frankenstein's monster. But she understands Frankenstein, and speaks to him with such clarity that she makes it easier for you to understand him. The second character who understands his guilt - Albert Einstein, played by Tom Conti. He understands. He does not forgive. In many ways, I suppose, the film's central message is layered beneath the scenes he shares with Einstein and Kitty that despite our knowledge of Oppenheimer's own repentance, his complicity in the devastation of the atomic bomb can neither be ignored nor forgiven. It is difficult to fully explain this without giving out spoilers, so it is better to circle back - like the film does - to the visions of its protagonist. At various moments in the film, Oppenheimer sees flashes of the bomb's impact upon the world. The sharp sparkles of blazing light, the macabre dance of fire spreading across his mind remind you of the visions of a ghost in horror films. No, not a jump scare. I am talking about the everlasting, morbid fear that pulsates through a ghost story. Like ghosts return to haunt the sinner out of an otherworldly spite, the bomb returns to Oppenheimer constantly reminding him of what he did. In ghost stories, the haunting is an inevitable event.

The intermingling of the past and the present, the perpetual, inescapable visions of horror, the knowledge that he participated in a sin that cannot be resolved in this world (which is the basic principle in ghost stories, someone commits a sin so unforgivable, that something has to return from the dead to make it right, because this world isn't enough to punish such a great wrong) - likens Oppenheimer to a horror film. Not a supernatural one, not It is the kind of horror story where the horror is man-made. Like Frankenstein, like human beings whose ambition and intellect distracts them from seeing the impact of their work - Oppenheimer made his own ghost. Whether you feel anything for the man at the end of the story would be subjective. Whether you think he loved anyone more than his monomaniacal obsession with his Invention, whether he repented to punish himself or to seek redemption, whether the father of the atomic bomb coded his own violence into it or the atomic bomb ate its father up, devouring his life with guilt-shaped teeth - all of it, subjective. Literary debates today almost unanimously conclude that Frankenstein was the monster, or at least, the greater monster of the story. Let's see how Nolan's portrait of Oppenheimer, the American Prometheus, fares in a decade. I'll conclude on a side note and leave it to you see the implications of it - Mary Shelley gave Frankenstein a nickname, placed in the subtitle of the novel - The Modern Prometheus.