Article

Culture

25 July 2023

6 min read

Oppenheimer’s Tower of Babel

Overwhelmed by the cinematic experience of Oppenheimer, Daniel Kim reflects on director Christopher Nolan's powerful modern mythmaking.

Daniel Kim

Daniel is an advertising strategist turned vicar-in-training.

An actor looks on as a film director stands beside him staring with his hands raised.

The modern Prometheus and the mythmaker. Cillian Murphy playing Robert Oppenheimer, stands next to director Christopher Nolan.

Universal Pictures.

The opening weekend for Oppenheimer has come and gone and the response has been almost unanimously glowing, even gushing.

And truly, the film is a technical masterpiece, demonstrating director Christopher Nolan is working at the height of his power.

The pitch-perfect performances from Cillian Murphy and the impressively star-studded cast, the transcendent yet intimate cinematography, Ludwig Görranson’s hauntingly triumphant score, and the remarkable pacing despite its three-hour runtime make for perfectly dialled-in cinema.

Some may struggle with the dialogue-heavy time-skipping narrative flow of the film, made particularly difficult by the inexplicable voice-muddying sound mix that seems to plague many of Nolan’s recent films. Despite the flaws, however, Oppenheimer is certainly one of the key cinematic moments of 2023. I don’t think I can add anything profoundly new to the gallons of electronic ink already spilt reviewing this film.

Instead, what I can speak to is the most bizarre experience I had as the film came to a close. As the final shot of the biopic reached its climax and cut to black, I found myself suddenly and involuntarily dissolving into tears. I left the film feeling horrified yet inspired, sickened yet soaring, revelling in the triumph of an underdog technological victory as well as being confronted with the banal depravity of mankind. So much brilliance, yet so much brokenness. It invoked such a maximalist emotional response within me, that the only appropriate response my body could come up with was to weep. So… I am by no means an objective reviewer.

Nolan’s depiction of the first nuclear test... is more like a religious epiphany rather than a run-of-the-mill movie explosion.

To call Oppenheimer a ‘biopic’ would be like calling the book of Genesis a biography about Abraham. Nolan’s Oppenheimer takes more of the form of a Myth. ‘Myth’ not in the sense of fiction, but more in the sense that J.R.R. Tolkien or Carl Jung meant it - as a universal narrative that perfectly captures the spirit of the age. And in 2023, apocalyptic anxiety is very much in the air.

Both Nolan and the biography that the film is adapted from - American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer - don’t shy away from the mythical and religious texture inherent to the story of the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb.

Oppenheimer is Prometheus - who “stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity”. In fact, the film opens with this quote in white text over a slow-motion nuclear detonation, intertwining Oppenheimer’s life with that of the Greek Titan, Prometheus, who, having given technological fire to humankind, is chained to a tree by Zeus to have his guts eaten out by vultures for the rest of time.

Oppenheimer is also the Hindu God, Krishna, who originally said the now infamous line, “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” from the Bhagavad Gita. The phrase he utters at the first test of his invention.

He is the man who decided to name the first test after Triune Christian God - The Trinity Test. The irony is thick. The great creator God of Christianity is represented by the great destroyer of worlds - the atomic bomb. In fact, Nolan’s depiction of the first nuclear test is more like a religious epiphany rather than a run-of-the-mill movie explosion. Some viewers might be disappointed by the impressionistic and almost surreal way the Trinity test is depicted at the climax of the film. Yet, I found the moment almost mystical. The blinding light of atomic devastation is the blinding light of divine glory.

1940s New Mexico becomes the arena for the 21st Century’s struggle against itself and its fraught relationship with technology and morality.

The film doesn’t allow you to extricate the history from the myth, the science from the mystical, or the past from the present. The film explores the particular historical knots that you would expect from a film about Oppenheimer. The equal pride and guilt of the scientists who worked on the bomb post-Hiroshima; the banality of the American military industrial complex; the post-war Soviet nuclear threat; and the enigma of the man himself. There are some very powerful scenes that explore these themes with sickening and gut-wrenching effect. Yet, Nolan is fully aware that his film is in dialogue with the contemporary existential discussions about the dangers of AI, the fear of climate and political apocalypse, and the moral implications of technological progress at all costs.

The star-studded cast is not only hugely impressive but also has the strange effect of continually dragging the historical context of Oppenheimer right into 2023. Nolan has used his considerable clout to draw together a cast of some of the most recognisable and celebrated icons of the 21st century from Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr, and Emily Blunt to Gary Oldman, Rami Malek, and Matt Damon. Only Christopher Nolan could cast a leading man like Gary Oldman and give him 10 lines to say in a three-hour film.

This creates a movie where the most iconic faces of our time come together to play their part in this myth. 1940s New Mexico becomes the arena for the 21st Century’s struggle against itself and its fraught relationship with technology and morality.

In this way, Oppenheimer is more than just a cautionary tale from history. It becomes an icon of our time, in the religious sense. A manifestation of a universal story set in a particular context.

What is three-hundred years of so-called progress, technology, and political theory culminating to? We have no idea.

Many of us will be familiar with Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. A work of comparative mythology which describes the archetypical hero found in the world of myths - The Hero’s Journey. Campbell calls this the Monomyth - the one story which every story is about. A hero ventures forth from his common world, encounters adversity and his inner demons, wins a decisive victory against the forces of death, and returns from this adventure forever changed and with the power to bestow wisdom to his community. This is Luke Skywalker, Aladdin, and Harry Potter but it’s not Oppenheimer.

Christopher Nolan has seemed to have stumbled upon a different monomyth with his biopic. The story of a human community earnestly seeking technological knowledge of the heavenly powers, desiring to harness it, and ultimately unleashing it upon the earth only to discover its civilisation-destroying power. It’s the monomyth of the Tower of Babel. Technology reaching to the heavens resulting in the destruction of the city. But instead of a tower of brick and mortar, Oppenheimer’s tower is a pillar of fire and nuclear ash. Things might seem like grand progress in one moment, yet in the next, it’s annihilation.

Nolan’s decision to make Oppenheimer a biopic has the uneasy effect of intermingling the myths of The Hero’s Journey and the Tower of Babel. Oppenheimer is the protagonist who undergoes all the key beats of the Hero’s Journey. Yet it is precisely this aspirational adventure that culminates in The Tower of Babel. It’s as if the film is saying that those who have most embodied The Hero’s Journey in our Modern Age are those who have also destroyed the world. Oppenheimer is but one example in a retinue of such technological geniuses.

There is a haunting line in the film where one of Oppenheimer’s colleagues refuses to work with him on the bomb. He says:

“I don’t want the culmination of three-hundred years of physics to be a weapon of mass destruction.”

This is still the anxiety that typifies our technological and political moment today. The only difference is, we don’t know where we’re culminating to. Where is three-hundred years of so-called progress, technology, and political theory culminating to? We have no idea.

Maybe this is what struck such a deep primal chord with me as the credits rolled.

Review

Art

Culture

26 July 2024

5 min read

Paradise cottage: Milton reimagin’d

Artist Richard Kenton Webb converses with the blind poet in his former home.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A black and white illustration shows a man holding a walk stick standing among tomb-like structures.

The blind poet. Charcoal and white chalk on paper, 2022.

Richard Kenton Webb.

‘Waiting to Speak to Milton’ shows the artist Richard Kenton Webb on a rain-swept night waiting in a valley for a car whose headlights can just be seen at the crest of the hill. For this image he has imagined himself waiting for a lift from John Milton to discuss the poems Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes. As the opening image to Webb’s exhibition at Milton’s Cottage in Chalfont St Giles it is appropriately positioned in the porch by which visitors enter the cottage.

This image of light appearing in the dark night of the soul symbolises the beginning of Webb’s journey with Milton and his late poems Paradise Lost, Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes. This has been a 10-year journey that Webb began following a conversation with his son in front of John Martin’s mezzotints for Paradise Lost at the Tate. Following on from his son’s encouragement to begin work, over that period, Webb says Milton has been a companion like Virgil to Dante guiding him through the narrative of his own life including the dark nights of redundancy and lockdown. The result has been 128 drawings, 40 paintings and 12 relief prints forming A Conversation with Milton’s Paradise Lost, a commission of 12 drawings in response to Milton’s pastoral elegy, Lycidas, for the Milton Society of America, and the 13 drawings forming this exhibition, A Conversation with Paradise Regain’d & Samson Agonistes.

Milton proved an effective companion because he, too, had passed through his own dark night of the soul. He arrived in Chalfont St Giles to escape the Great Plague of 1665 after the Republican cause to which he had dedicated more than a decade of his life - being Oliver Cromwell’s unofficial spin doctor - had collapsed around him with the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660. He had been lucky to escape with his life following imprisonment and the banning of his books. In addition, he had lost his sight, his beloved second wife, much of his money and all of his influence.

Despite these traumas, Milton was able to express his love for his Creator wonderfully in Paradise Lost, which was completed at the cottage in Chalfont St Giles, and Paradise Regain’d, which was inspired whilst there. In both Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes Milton deploys his rich verses and visions of spirituality and the forces of good and evil to reflect on the Restoration of the Monarchy and the loss of the English republic, doing so by means of Biblical stories concerning Jesus and Samson.

Browse Webb's exhibition

A black and white illustration show a person crouching in the corner and lifting as it was a stage drape.

Modes of Apprehension by Richard Kenton Webb – charcoal and white chalk on paper, 2022.

Inside a history cottage, black and white illustrations hang on the wall.

Webb’s exhibition at Milton’s Cottage in Chalfont St Giles.

A black and white illustration shows a two people close together on a pinnacle.

The Pinnacle by Richard Kenton Webb - charcoal and white chalk on paper, 2022.

Webb’s exhibition at Milton’s Cottage in Chalfont St Giles.

In Webb’s view, “Paradise Regain’d is about overcoming impossible situations” while, in Samson Agonistes, Milton’s Redeemer shows “Samson, the blind and foolish man”, “that we can always find hope in our living God even when society does not”. These poems moved Webb out of despair to discover hope because he knew they were heading towards redemption. As a result, he sees Milton as “a great English poet who gives hope, which in itself is a creative act for these difficult times”.

Although the story of Samson pre-dates that of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness, Webb’s painting series begins with images inspired by Paradise Regain’d, just as Samson Agonistes followed Paradise Regain’d when both were jointly published in 1671, because Jesus’ resistance of temptation ultimately redeems those, like Samson and Adam and Eve, who were unable to resist.

These are images set against a dark background with the exception of the final Paradise Regain’d image with its white sky depicting a paradise within as Jesus has overcome temptation, is in full communion with God and is about to begin his ministry by calling his first disciples. The images move from the trauma and test of temptation – whether involving hunger, greed, lust, threat, pride or ambition – to a calmness of mind that is equipoise and liberation and which also enables the destruction of false temples.

They are images in which movement is arrested in still moments which form theatrical tableaux. These, like medieval and early Tudor morality plays, involve the viewer in an epic struggle between good and evil, involving temptation, fall and redemption. Webb’s use of charcoal and white chalk on paper emphasises the binary nature of this struggle. Being formed of charcoal and chalk, despite his use of contemporary equivalents for the temptations, the look and feel of Webb’s images also accords well with their exhibition setting, in rooms of low ceilings, uneven white walls, dark beams and furniture.

Webb’s works and exhibition also universalise Milton’s own experience of the dark night of the soul by merging that story with Webb’s own.

As Paradise Lost was the first illustrated poem in the English language, Milton’s poetry has, as Kelly O’Reilly, Director of Milton’s Cottage, has noted “inspired many of our greatest artists, from Blake to Turner, Dore to Dali”. Webb, who consciously works in the continuing tradition of Blake’s visionary art, is extending the tradition of illustrating Milton’s poems. It is appropriate, then, that, by exhibiting these drawings in Milton’s Cottage, they are placed alongside examples of illustrated editions of the poems, plus other paintings and prints relating to Milton.

Milton’s works are not only a repository of rich verse, which also gifted over 600 new words to the English language, but are also a conversation with scripture, its stories and their interpretation, plus the social and political ramifications of the Reformation in the British Isles. Webb’s works and exhibition also universalise Milton’s own experience of the dark night of the soul by merging that story with Webb’s own and linking those powerfully to the themes of Milton’s poems.

The key image, in this regard, is the first in the Paradise Regain’d series (‘Modes of Apprehension’), which sees Jesus in the wilderness turning up the corner of the wilderness backdrop, as in a theatre, to reveal another dimension or reality to existence and experience behind it. Hope is discovered in the midst of desolation, resilience found in the face of temptation. In these ways, Webb achieves his own hope for these works, that, “by responding to Milton’s universal themes of creation, destruction, temptation, love and loss”, he “can help new audiences find fresh ways to engage in Milton’s legacy”.

A Conversation with Paradise Regain’d & Samson Agonistes, Milton’s Cottage, 3 July – 8 September 2024.

Visit the exhibition web site.