The following is about Christopher Nolan’s biopic Oppenheimer and contains spoilers which will impact how you see the film. I cannot recommend that everyone see the film as—unusual for Nolan’s work—there are extended scenes with nudity.
Court watchers can sometimes wonder if today’s verdict is meaningful or just a single step in a series of appeals. Today’s condemnation may get overturned in months, and potentially overturned again before all is said and done. Which verdicts matter? This question is at the heart of both Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer and Jewish apocalyptic literature. Oppenheimer follows the verdicts drawn on two main characters, Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy) and Lewis Strauss (played by Robert Downey Jr.). Biblical apocalypses reveal final verdicts for which there is no appeal.
An Ancient Genre: Apocalyptic
When teaching on the book of Revelation, I often remark that it is hard for us to understand the genre of Jewish apocalyptic because there are few modern examples. The old genre was mostly popular the centuries before and after Jesus’ life. Today, we have plenty of disaster stories, yes, and “post-apocalyptic” wasteland settings. The Bible’s apocalyptic is different from these at its core. It is not really about earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The word “apocalypse” means “revelation.” The ancient genre uses bold imagery to reveal reversals in honor and shame. A verdict of shame today can be overturned on the last day. As Oppenheimer shows, having your face on the cover of TIME magazine does not mean you can escape the verdict of your own conscience. The most important verdict any of us will hear remains hidden. Apocalypses give us a peek at those verdicts.
Why, then, do we think of apocalyptic books as stories filled with plagues, bloodshed, and cataclysm? Those first apocalypses were written to people suffering through the overturning of nations. Those first audiences were defeated and disempowered, the authority over them seemingly impossible to dislodge without cataclysm. Centuries before Jesus, Babylon had triumphed over Jerusalem, delivering a boasted final verdict as Zion was levelled. Divinely inspired prophets urged the Jews to obey and honor their new Babylonian rulers. The prophets encouraged believers that this was all temporary, that their plight would be reversed after fifty years. The prophets were right. Persia would conquer Babylon, and the Jews would rebuild Zion.
But imagine how to go about writing such encouragement during those five decades while Babylon was still strong. Literature openly describing the fall of Babylon could be seen as treasonous propaganda. This is part of why an apocalypse would be written almost in code. Apocalyptic writers did not seek to agitate Gentile rulers. Neither did they want to confuse exiles, as if their hope of freedom could be accomplished through their own political action. God alone would anoint Persia’s Cyrus; God alone would shake the nations; it was Israel’s faithful God who would save the humble.
After Jesus’ ascension, during Roman persecution, Christians were blessed by the book of Revelation’s apocalyptic encouragement. Christians did not turn to political action but submitted to Caesar. At the same time, they believed Jesus was seated on the highest throne, that He truly ruled over Caesar, that God’s people would be revealed triumphant at the end. Apocalyptic literature found the language to express this reversal in shame and honor without encouraging treason.
A Modern Apocalyptic: Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer gives us a modern example of apocalyptic. In Oppenheimer, quantum vision reveals unshakeable guilt. We watch the main characters reverse the honor and shame they receive. One verdict arrives thunderously, but does it have the final word? Cataclysmic imagery suggests that a higher power has the last word. Resonant images require either other Scripture or quantum science to interpret.
For example, the beginning of the film places the Genesis 3 image of forbidden fruit on the table. An apple on a teacher’s desk proves tempting to a young Robert Oppenheimer. Wanting vengeance for the shaming verdict the teacher placed on him, Oppenheimer turns the apple into a weapon. Every theme of Oppenheimer is introduced in these early scenes. Revenge for public shaming leads to hidden wrath. Intended targets are replaced by the innocent. Once a weapon is conceived, the desire for revenge rushes that weapon into existence. Only later does a shaking conscience reconsider.
Oppenheimer also uses quantum physics imagery to picture hidden and dual realities. An early scene explains how light, according to quantum understanding, sometimes acts like a wave and sometimes like a particle. Albert Einstein said, “God does not play dice with the universe,” expressing our desire to have the rules fixed, for one thing to be true and the other false. But this is not how Robert Oppenheimer sees the world. He sees open possibilities, that nuclear weapons could bring peace through deterrence and also that they could destroy the world. Similarly, he sees Russia as an ally that should have access to American science as well as seeing how the communists should not have access to nuclear secrets. At one point, a peer says to Oppenheimer, “No one knows where you stand.” Like much in quantum theory, Oppenheimer does not stand in any single place. He sees both possibilities simultaneously.
Oppenheimer’s director, Christopher Nolan, pictures this during a rally at Los Alamos after their project succeeds, leveling Hiroshima. For years, the people working under Oppenheimer had this singular goal of winning the atomic race. They stamp their feet on risers to cheer their leader, but the stamping is heard by the quantum scientist as a martial threat. While Oppenheimer joins the cheers of triumph, he is simultaneously seeing the destruction the bomb has wrought. He cannot help imagining the bomb being used against those in his audience. With political certainty, the crowd knows who is enemy and who is hero. Oppenheimer, on the other hand, holds two ideas at once: we won and the war will end, yet war will continue, with our weapon eventually used against us. At the rally, Oppenheimer crows, “I only wish we had built it fast enough to use against the Germans, too!” His dual vision suggests that what Germany was spared, someday America will not be spared. He simultaneously relishes success and feels moral judgment.
The Difference in Moral Knowledge
Oppenheimer pictures dual worlds and timelines, showing a story in color about scientific achievement and a parallel story in black and white about political vengeance. The world in color climaxes with technological honor. The world in black and white climaxes with political shame. Both worlds wade through uncertain dual visions. What grows in both cases, parallel to each other, is the moral numbness lurking among those playing political games and the moral certainty growing among the scientists Einstein and Oppenheimer.
So much of the film, therefore, is about the moral judgment that unravels our self-justifications. Oppenheimer’s sexual ethics followed his quantum worldview, holding what most would see as exclusive claims simultaneously. Oppenheimer believed he and his eventual wife, Kitty, could be together while he would also always be there for Jean, his first love. Even as he goes to break off his relationship with Jean, he beds her one more time. He hadn’t broken off the relationship out of love for Kitty but fear of the American government’s disapproval of his communist connections. Jean is dumped for her communist sympathies (foreshadowing again, yes). This betrayal leads to her suicide and to deep grief for Oppenheimer. When he confesses why he feels guilty to Kitty, she rages, “You don’t get to sin and be the victim at the same time.” Moral judgment rejects the quantum view.
Except, Kitty does seem to forgive Robert and becomes one of his fiercest defenders. The film has at least two endings (a dual vision?), and they crystallize the theme of justification. In one ending, Kitty asks why her husband did not fight for his reputation, if he thinks later generations will reconsider him positively. Quantum Oppenheimer says, “We’ll see.” There is theory and there is the real world, but at least with Kitty, he knows a woman who had once told him he didn’t get to be both a victim and the sinner at the same time has now come completely around to his side.
The other ending, however, is grim. We finally get to see what Oppenheimer and Einstein were talking about at the lake’s edge. They are talking about the vision of the world where unleashing atomic armament leads to the end of this world. An immediate atmospheric ignition did not occur, but someday, a world leader who is willing to stay quiet for years to get his vengeance will place the weapon in someone else’s hands and start the nuclear war.
Not a Choose-Your-Own-Ending
In a previous movie, Inception, Nolan had ended his movie without taking sides on a central question. Did a father get back to his kids for real or did he get trapped in a dream world? A spinning top will supposedly tell the tale, if it stays spinning (dream world) or finally falls (real world). As Inception closes, the top falters, then corrects, and appears to keep spinning, though Nolan shuts off the camera. We don’t get to know if the top falls. Nolan could have ended Oppenheimer similarly. We didn’t blow the world up after all, right? “We’ll see,” quantum Oppenheimer says. We won’t know if nuclear devastation has been avoided or only delayed until history’s final chapter is written. Except that in Oppenheimer, Nolan does end the movie with nuclear destruction. He takes a side in a way he did not in Inception.
Is Nolan predicting the end of the story or reflecting the growing moral certainty Oppenheimer had: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”? The historical Oppenheimer quoted this Hindu passage as what went through his mind when he saw the successful test at Los Alamos. Nolan first puts that quote on the table in a “love scene” with Jean, another explosive triumph with destructive consequences and moral doom. Tying Jean’s suicide to the image of the world on fire, cosmic suicide, is a classic apocalypse, a revelation of honor and shame. “We’ll see.” We do indeed. We see destruction and then nothing more.
Usually in an apocalypse, it is the defeated, exiled party who is revealed to be triumphant through their suffering by the light of the world’s end. But Robert Oppenheimer was on the cover of TIME magazine (as was Lewis Strauss), and America won the war, and they all got medals and cheering crowds. But the timeline in which nuclear war destroys the world ceases to be just one of several possible outcomes. Where everything else seems uncertain, personal guilt eclipses classroom theory.
While in one ending, with Kitty on her husband’s side, moral justification is possible among fickle people, the actual final ending takes our moral justification to a higher court. This is what the Scriptural apocalypses are saying. If a man who can see both timelines for every other category in life—science, politics, relationships—is finally prohibited by his conscience to play dice with the universe, then Einstein does turn out to have the last word, even if the rest of the scientific world thinks it has passed him by. Or rather, no single human being gets the last word; in Oppenheimer, the judgment by fire has the last word.
Hope after Cataclysm
For Jewish apocalyptic, however, the last word is not given to destruction. Yes, crowds may cheer, journalists may write rave reviews, politicians may present medals, and, yes, also, they will reverse themselves in time. But may the final judgment, the fiery end of this world, also turn out unable to have the last word? If there is a Creator who spoke the first word, from the silence of cataclysm, will He speak to us again? Not, “I am become death,” but “I am the light of the world,” and a new dawn?
Yes, thank God. Whether Revelation or Daniel, the Jewish prophets know hope. The God who justifies, ends the dichotomy of saint and sinner, raising up saints from whom sin and shame are forever stripped away. Revelation 21:1-4: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.’” Amen and amen; come, Lord Jesus.