Oppenheimer: Cinematic Masterpiece or Warmongering Propaganda?

By George Dean, Third Year History and English

Having grossed over $890 million globally, Oppenheimer has been one of the most significant cinematic hits of 2023. Whilst the film has been widely heralded in the media, the dominant narrative has surrounded Cillian Murphy’s weight loss, and pitting it against the feminist commercial success of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, which eclipsed Oppenheimer’s success by surpassing $1 billion at the box-office.

Oppenheimer was able to ride the wave of Barbie’s marketing success, shown through the popular and ironic practice of seeing both films back-to-back, dubbed ‘Barbenheimer’, which produced some memorable memes on the internet.

Nolan characterises J. Robert Oppenheimer as an anti-hero, and an outsider, setting him up for the audience to empathise with. His psychological alienation and flirtations with leftist activism, highlight his McCarthy era persecution.

Despite this, there is a missing strand of the film which left me uncomfortable. Nolan completely disregards the experience of those who died, or lost family and friends, through the horrific attacks at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There was a point at which I was left questioning, is Nolan promoting US military interests through this erasure?

Nolan hints at the suffering caused by nuclear warfare through the lens of Oppenheimer’s inner mental struggles, acted superbly by Cillian Murphy, however he never departs from the perspective of the United States. Even if this is balanced by the fact that we know Oppenheimer went on to suffer at the hands of McCarthyism, Nolan neglects the population’s experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is not limited to the experiences of the Japanese, but also within the United States itself. Oppenheimer pays no attention to the Native Americans driven from their land in Los Alamos where the Manhattan Project was set up.

Nolan’s skill as a director is undeniable, and with Oppenheimer’s star-studded cast he creates a compelling dramatic narrative of the protagonist’s life. Yet this narrative is historically fraught; whilst not being jingoistic, Oppenheimer’s war propaganda operates on a more subtle level to whitewash the birth of the nuclear age, and the massacre of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

Nolan portrays the creation of the atom bomb as an inevitable evil, motivated by Oppenheimer’s anti-fascism, (downplaying that the Nazis were already beaten and Japan was on the road to surrender), whilst omitting the stories of Japanese communities devastated by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not only did the bombing kill up to 226,000 people, the vast majority of whom were civilians, but the regions suffered long-term increases in cancer rates and birth defects.

Oppenheimer also chooses to forget the histories of incarcerated Japanese Americans, imprisoned in internment camps between 1942 and 1945 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. The legacy of this policy is starkly present today, demonstrated by the 2021 Atlanta shootings, in which, amongst a national spike in hate crimes against Asian Americans, six Asian women were killed, sparking Stop Asian Hate protests.

Oppenheimer may justifiably be celebrated as the epitomising jewel of Nolan’s postmodernist, alternative-action cinematic style, as well as a demonstration of Cillian Murphy’s accomplished ability as an actor, but we should be perturbed by the reductive, imperialist historical narratives the film propels.