Assessing the birth of atomic America, put on display as only Hollywood can, I watched Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. I walked away from the theater acknowledging the success of the film in portraying the protagonist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, as a fellow human traveler in this adventure known as life. As portrayed by Irish actor Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer was approachable by all who have toiled with the challenges of life, and our imperfect efforts to manage them. That Oppenheimer’s challenges were of a scope and scale unimaginable by most is irrelevant—the audience felt for the man, not the myth, and for this reason the movie is a great success.
I think the timing and release of this movie suggests it is nudge propaganda for the masses into the acceptance of the possibility of nuclear war. i.e. They may have to nuke Russia etc for the "greater good" and follow that up with the attempt at a world government run by the financial elite 3.0. If that doesn't work they're rolling out the alien psyop for the same purpose, or perhaps they'll try the alien psyop before resorting to WW3 to achieve these goals.
Good review but I just can’t care about another white wash of another white guy who only cared about white people when using his big white brain to decimate those Yalla people as Johnson used to call Asians. And why should I want to like him? Navajo’s and Hispanics were living in the proving grounds of his “dream” and everybody knew it and nobody cared, least of all these Baloney Merchants from Hollywood who refused a request by these cancer ridden peoples to have just a little mention of them included at the end of the movie. More over, there’s never been any significant monetary renumeration or health care afforded to these silent victims of Oppy’s grand crime. If he was so tormented, why didn’t he use his considerable influence to help these sufferers. It’s just one more nothin to see here folks, just lie back and love the propaganda. Yikes!
As an elementary school child we were instructed to hide under our desks in case of a nuclear attack. The utter foolishness of this resonated with me latter in life, yet the intent of such foolishness still resides in the continuing conditioning of American behavior concerning nuclear war. For present America to dismiss any potential for WW III, quickly terminating with the use of today's nuclear arsenal, is clinically insane.
I thought that the British film "Threads" was much more horrifying than "The Day After", although both were frightening enough. "Threads" was told from the perspective of ordinary citizens suddenly caught in a nuclear catastrophe. I'll never forget a scene as a bomb goes off of a woman in the street peeing in her pants. No dialogue necessary and I'll never forget it.
I also recommend the film "Atomic Soldiers" interviewing the men who were made to sit in trenches with no protection close to the atomic bomb explosion.
I watched two movies back-to-back. 'The Day After' is effective but it's the British 'Threads' that horrified me - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/ - I highly recommend it. I haven't seen 'Oppenheimer' yet but everything by director Christopher Nolan meets my mind.
My dear Scott, you vividly explain the depths of the shallowness of the Oppenheimer movie. Last January I read Kai Bird's book, American Prometheus, on which the film is based. Like the film, it too stressed the travails of the man and his "gadget" instead of emphasizing the travails facing mankind due to that gadget. That book was another reason why I traveled to DC in February for the Rage Against the War Machine rally in hopes that the "gadget" would take center stage. When I learned that you had been shamefully dumped from the speaker's list, I felt as disappointed as you did leaving the theatre after watching "Oppenheimer."
Holding in hand John Hersey’s 1946 novel, Hiroshima’s atomic horror begins like any story:
Factually unfolding, six lives carefully journalised : Each victim’s situation; Circumstances detailed before, during & after 8.15am August 6th 1945. Personal ... Particular : We hear who had what for breakfast; Plans ... Thoughts ... Habit’s of dress ... Acts of volition ... other’s omitted.
We learn provincial points of view prevailing in a country at war : Japanese Hiroshimite’s expect to be bombed in the orthodox manner [eventually]; Know their particular city is regarded as a strategic target by the USA.
But apparently not today.
This morning the distant drone of a single plane is of no concern ... Relief spreads : Thankfully no dread squad of B-52’s is seen or heard approaching;
Just the one upward thrum [most likely only a weather plane], so no sirens. No alarm. No adjustment to schedules. No sense of what is to be :In fact, a fairly normal morning with no warning of what would soon be falling. High above—innocuous ... invisible—Enola Gay’s belly pregnant with purpose, the A-bomb code-named ‘Little Boy’ about to be birthed trials a force beyond cognisance ... Live & lethal; High up in blue sky the very first nuclear delivery proceeds on time : For optimal effect set to explode at 1,800 feet : At 8.15am Little Boy does just that.
Perceiving the monster mushroom maelstrom 4000-degree 900 foot wide fireball flash set loose, co-pilot Robert Lewis makes a personal diary note inscribing, “My god, what have we done”.
On the ground sub-natural forces subsume the natural world ... Hot white light atomises everything: A city flattened in an instant : Solid heat : Silent ... Irrevocable ... Unstoppable, ‘Wee Laddie’s’ hyper-violence expands centrifugally at two miles per second; travelling at ten times the speed of sound Little Boy touches all without being heard. From epicentre to periphery 245,000 lives irradiated in one maleficent moment : Horrors shameful hammer duly noted ... Oppenheimer's invention deftly documented : 180,000 doomed to death. No time to cognise : Just a brilliant flash before every thing is smashed.
In the immediate aftermath dead-stop shock-panic enshrouds frantic seared survivors: There is no frame of reference: No brain here can explain what has happened: Derailed by absolutely unprecedented forces, several thousands nevertheless survive : Unimaginable hour’s pass : Sight. Sounds. Smell. Thirst. Loss. Injury. Broken cries for help : Pain. Then flames : Fire systematically incinerates all who are trapped alive beneath debris. Again some tortured few are saved, ferried away to lie in damaged piles beside familiar waterways. Night comes : Black aberrant fist-sized rain falls : Hell storm flooding drowns thousands: Beyond this nightmare other’s yet again survive : Whoever still lives now takes a very long time dying : Days...Months...Decades pass propagating a cacophony of symptoms: Trauma, of course : Tumours. Cancers. Infertility. Anaemia. Debilitating fatigue. Infections. Wounds that just won’t heal. Eventually special recognition is awarded : For those within the city limits on the day of the bombing; For those who within the first 14 days entered any area within two km’s of the hypocentre; For those who had physical contact with bomb victims; And for those who were mere embryos in women surviving any of the first 3 categories : For those so shattered by man’s inhumanity a strata of compassion is born : Little dispensations are given.
In 2020—75 years on—Hiroshima is a city transformed (almost a horror that never was):
It would seem one country simply won a war; The other deftly defeated : No apology needed: No code broken : No marble plaque resolve : No entreaty acknowledging & affirming
“An apocalyptic catastrophe brought deliberately on such a scale will always qualify both as a Crime Against The Biosphere & Against Humanity”
No: Proliferating ‘nuclear capacity’ continues to be the unconscionable norm: Maniacal missile games play on. ‘Never again’ recedes ever further away. And despite all that is known & has been written so far there is no definitive film : It appears Hollywood just won’t go there : Hersey’s visceral Hiroshima is just too shameful : Facing that script perhaps conscience indeed makes cowards of us all.
AMac September 2019
[‘conscience makes cowards of us all’, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet]
'Dr. Strangelove', 'On the Beach' and 'The Day After' were and still are the best films about The Bomb ever. I have no desire to waste my time with this Oppenheimer travesty.
Thanks for a cogent, thoughtful review, Scott. The film should have ended with a graphic that read, "When Gen. Eisenhower, who said before Hiroshima, 'It wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing,' became President, the U.S. only had a few hundred atomic bombs, when he left office in 1961, America had over 20,000 nuclear weapons including H-bombs dozens or hundreds of times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. Today America and Russia have over 5,000 nuclear weapons each, thousands still on hair trigger alert as the late U.S. nuclear missile launch officer, Dr. Bruce Blair, proved, despite long-term U.S. government denials of this fact. Experts fear that an accident, computer error, unintentional, or terrorist-generated means could kill billions unless we global citizenry demand the 9 Nuclear Club members reverse course, sign & ratify the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and immediately begin multilateral negotiations to phase out 99 percent of nuclear weapons by 2030 before J. Robert Oppenheimer's thought about our species suffering wholesale destruction becomes true." Join Us in NYC on August 6, 2023!
I look for what can make a massive change whereby we turn into a caring species. Don't say pie in the sky. It's too dangerous to be cynical. All brains on deck for the shift of consciousness that would come in time, where if the bomb doesn't get us our failure to unite to deal with what nature is throwing at us could devastate us. So what would make massive change now? That's the conversation to be having. It's what I talk about: https://suzannetaylor.substack.com/s/changemaking-now
"It was the best of times. It was the worst of times." Times change. We merrily row our lives down the stream, hurling headlong into an abyss. So if there is nothing new under the sun, what can one expect? I can hope to continue to receive Scott's irreverence, maybe even sardonic sass towards the forces that seek to dull our collective senses and keep us focused on the mundane, perhaps to even fear the unknown. No matter the time, see the gleam in her eye. NOW I HAVE BECOME DEATH. . .
Oppenheimer and the ABC’s of the Apocalypse in Alliterated Form
I think the timing and release of this movie suggests it is nudge propaganda for the masses into the acceptance of the possibility of nuclear war. i.e. They may have to nuke Russia etc for the "greater good" and follow that up with the attempt at a world government run by the financial elite 3.0. If that doesn't work they're rolling out the alien psyop for the same purpose, or perhaps they'll try the alien psyop before resorting to WW3 to achieve these goals.
Good review but I just can’t care about another white wash of another white guy who only cared about white people when using his big white brain to decimate those Yalla people as Johnson used to call Asians. And why should I want to like him? Navajo’s and Hispanics were living in the proving grounds of his “dream” and everybody knew it and nobody cared, least of all these Baloney Merchants from Hollywood who refused a request by these cancer ridden peoples to have just a little mention of them included at the end of the movie. More over, there’s never been any significant monetary renumeration or health care afforded to these silent victims of Oppy’s grand crime. If he was so tormented, why didn’t he use his considerable influence to help these sufferers. It’s just one more nothin to see here folks, just lie back and love the propaganda. Yikes!
As an elementary school child we were instructed to hide under our desks in case of a nuclear attack. The utter foolishness of this resonated with me latter in life, yet the intent of such foolishness still resides in the continuing conditioning of American behavior concerning nuclear war. For present America to dismiss any potential for WW III, quickly terminating with the use of today's nuclear arsenal, is clinically insane.
I thought that the British film "Threads" was much more horrifying than "The Day After", although both were frightening enough. "Threads" was told from the perspective of ordinary citizens suddenly caught in a nuclear catastrophe. I'll never forget a scene as a bomb goes off of a woman in the street peeing in her pants. No dialogue necessary and I'll never forget it.
I also recommend the film "Atomic Soldiers" interviewing the men who were made to sit in trenches with no protection close to the atomic bomb explosion.
God bless you Scott. Hero, warrior, and peacemaker. Great writing also my friend.
I watched two movies back-to-back. 'The Day After' is effective but it's the British 'Threads' that horrified me - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/ - I highly recommend it. I haven't seen 'Oppenheimer' yet but everything by director Christopher Nolan meets my mind.
Scott, is there any chance I can republish your posts on my blog at patriotrealm.com?
I would of course post links back to here and appropriate acknowledgments.
Cheers. Monty.
And thanks for your prescient review. Seems right on. He's a gifted filmmaker and blew his chance to make a real difference.
My dear Scott, you vividly explain the depths of the shallowness of the Oppenheimer movie. Last January I read Kai Bird's book, American Prometheus, on which the film is based. Like the film, it too stressed the travails of the man and his "gadget" instead of emphasizing the travails facing mankind due to that gadget. That book was another reason why I traveled to DC in February for the Rage Against the War Machine rally in hopes that the "gadget" would take center stage. When I learned that you had been shamefully dumped from the speaker's list, I felt as disappointed as you did leaving the theatre after watching "Oppenheimer."
Hiroshima : Lessons In Mass Destruction
Holding in hand John Hersey’s 1946 novel, Hiroshima’s atomic horror begins like any story:
Factually unfolding, six lives carefully journalised : Each victim’s situation; Circumstances detailed before, during & after 8.15am August 6th 1945. Personal ... Particular : We hear who had what for breakfast; Plans ... Thoughts ... Habit’s of dress ... Acts of volition ... other’s omitted.
We learn provincial points of view prevailing in a country at war : Japanese Hiroshimite’s expect to be bombed in the orthodox manner [eventually]; Know their particular city is regarded as a strategic target by the USA.
But apparently not today.
This morning the distant drone of a single plane is of no concern ... Relief spreads : Thankfully no dread squad of B-52’s is seen or heard approaching;
Just the one upward thrum [most likely only a weather plane], so no sirens. No alarm. No adjustment to schedules. No sense of what is to be :In fact, a fairly normal morning with no warning of what would soon be falling. High above—innocuous ... invisible—Enola Gay’s belly pregnant with purpose, the A-bomb code-named ‘Little Boy’ about to be birthed trials a force beyond cognisance ... Live & lethal; High up in blue sky the very first nuclear delivery proceeds on time : For optimal effect set to explode at 1,800 feet : At 8.15am Little Boy does just that.
Perceiving the monster mushroom maelstrom 4000-degree 900 foot wide fireball flash set loose, co-pilot Robert Lewis makes a personal diary note inscribing, “My god, what have we done”.
On the ground sub-natural forces subsume the natural world ... Hot white light atomises everything: A city flattened in an instant : Solid heat : Silent ... Irrevocable ... Unstoppable, ‘Wee Laddie’s’ hyper-violence expands centrifugally at two miles per second; travelling at ten times the speed of sound Little Boy touches all without being heard. From epicentre to periphery 245,000 lives irradiated in one maleficent moment : Horrors shameful hammer duly noted ... Oppenheimer's invention deftly documented : 180,000 doomed to death. No time to cognise : Just a brilliant flash before every thing is smashed.
In the immediate aftermath dead-stop shock-panic enshrouds frantic seared survivors: There is no frame of reference: No brain here can explain what has happened: Derailed by absolutely unprecedented forces, several thousands nevertheless survive : Unimaginable hour’s pass : Sight. Sounds. Smell. Thirst. Loss. Injury. Broken cries for help : Pain. Then flames : Fire systematically incinerates all who are trapped alive beneath debris. Again some tortured few are saved, ferried away to lie in damaged piles beside familiar waterways. Night comes : Black aberrant fist-sized rain falls : Hell storm flooding drowns thousands: Beyond this nightmare other’s yet again survive : Whoever still lives now takes a very long time dying : Days...Months...Decades pass propagating a cacophony of symptoms: Trauma, of course : Tumours. Cancers. Infertility. Anaemia. Debilitating fatigue. Infections. Wounds that just won’t heal. Eventually special recognition is awarded : For those within the city limits on the day of the bombing; For those who within the first 14 days entered any area within two km’s of the hypocentre; For those who had physical contact with bomb victims; And for those who were mere embryos in women surviving any of the first 3 categories : For those so shattered by man’s inhumanity a strata of compassion is born : Little dispensations are given.
In 2020—75 years on—Hiroshima is a city transformed (almost a horror that never was):
It would seem one country simply won a war; The other deftly defeated : No apology needed: No code broken : No marble plaque resolve : No entreaty acknowledging & affirming
“An apocalyptic catastrophe brought deliberately on such a scale will always qualify both as a Crime Against The Biosphere & Against Humanity”
No: Proliferating ‘nuclear capacity’ continues to be the unconscionable norm: Maniacal missile games play on. ‘Never again’ recedes ever further away. And despite all that is known & has been written so far there is no definitive film : It appears Hollywood just won’t go there : Hersey’s visceral Hiroshima is just too shameful : Facing that script perhaps conscience indeed makes cowards of us all.
AMac September 2019
[‘conscience makes cowards of us all’, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet]
Thank you. An important graphic via KimDotcom
https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/1674631599063969793?s=20
Stay well and safe, Scott -- you are US pride of a person.
'Dr. Strangelove', 'On the Beach' and 'The Day After' were and still are the best films about The Bomb ever. I have no desire to waste my time with this Oppenheimer travesty.
Thanks for a cogent, thoughtful review, Scott. The film should have ended with a graphic that read, "When Gen. Eisenhower, who said before Hiroshima, 'It wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing,' became President, the U.S. only had a few hundred atomic bombs, when he left office in 1961, America had over 20,000 nuclear weapons including H-bombs dozens or hundreds of times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. Today America and Russia have over 5,000 nuclear weapons each, thousands still on hair trigger alert as the late U.S. nuclear missile launch officer, Dr. Bruce Blair, proved, despite long-term U.S. government denials of this fact. Experts fear that an accident, computer error, unintentional, or terrorist-generated means could kill billions unless we global citizenry demand the 9 Nuclear Club members reverse course, sign & ratify the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and immediately begin multilateral negotiations to phase out 99 percent of nuclear weapons by 2030 before J. Robert Oppenheimer's thought about our species suffering wholesale destruction becomes true." Join Us in NYC on August 6, 2023!
It is very difficult to put the mushroom cloud back into the steel casing once it is released.
I look for what can make a massive change whereby we turn into a caring species. Don't say pie in the sky. It's too dangerous to be cynical. All brains on deck for the shift of consciousness that would come in time, where if the bomb doesn't get us our failure to unite to deal with what nature is throwing at us could devastate us. So what would make massive change now? That's the conversation to be having. It's what I talk about: https://suzannetaylor.substack.com/s/changemaking-now
"It was the best of times. It was the worst of times." Times change. We merrily row our lives down the stream, hurling headlong into an abyss. So if there is nothing new under the sun, what can one expect? I can hope to continue to receive Scott's irreverence, maybe even sardonic sass towards the forces that seek to dull our collective senses and keep us focused on the mundane, perhaps to even fear the unknown. No matter the time, see the gleam in her eye. NOW I HAVE BECOME DEATH. . .
Remember a day before today
A day when you were young
Free to play along with time
Evening never comes