Andy Kifer
Smithsonian Magazine, July 18, 2023
“I don’t know how he had acquired this facility for handling people. Those who knew him well were really surprised.”
Since the end of World War II, historians and artists alike have been fascinated by the brilliant, enigmatic J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan Project laboratory that developed the atomic bomb. Beginning as early as 1946, documentaries, television miniseries, plays, books, graphic novels, feature films and even an opera have explored the scientist’s life, work and legacy. In recent years, however, much of that complexity has been reduced to a single popular image: the broken genius, haunted by his own invention, reciting a line from the Bhagavad Gita in a 1965 NBC News documentary. “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” Oppenheimer intones.
But Oppenheimer’s life was about far more than regret. “[He] was interesting as the father of the bomb,” says Kai Bird, co-author of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. “But the real arc in the story is the tragedy.”
Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which opens in theaters on July 21, will be the first feature-length film to tackle the scientist’s life in its entirety, and it promises to be spectacular. Starring Cillian Murphy of “Peaky Blinders” fame in the title role alongside an ensemble A-list cast, the film (which uses American Prometheus as its main source material) will reintroduce the scientist and the top-secret bomb project he helmed to a new generation of Americans. Oppenheimer provides an opportunity to revisit this charismatic, contradictory man and reconsider how previous attempts to tell his story have succeeded—and failed—at fathoming one of the 20th century’s most fascinating public figures.
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