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The logical reason that Christopher Nolan’s new movie Oppenheimer does not depict the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that were the fruit of title character J. Robert Oppenheimer’s secret operations at Los Alamos and elsewhere is that the movie sticks hard to its title character. A man who heard about the bombings on the radio just like everybody else in the United States did. Nolan’s movie gives the viewer the world through Oppenheimer’s eyes — while the movie does depart from the character’s perspective to move its frame story forward, it’s never directly about anything but the man and, more importantly, what he did.
For some this puts the movie at a disadvantage…but in terms of what? In terms of spectacle? If any filmmaker could get financing and summon the technical wherewithal to actually depict fiery carnage on a scale of Hiroshima’s, it’s certainly Nolan. And while the filmmaker himself hasn’t cited moral or ethical concerns when discussing his withholding of these sights from his movie, such issues are summoned and given a thorough albeit indirect airing out in two films by the French director Alain Resnais.
The first, and most obvious, is, well, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Resnais’s first feature, directed after he made a decade’s worth of innovative non-fiction short films. The 1959 fiction film was written by Marguerite Duras, the groundbreaking French writer whose experimental fictions were rife with philosophical and intellectual challenges. The subject of Hiroshima, Mon Amour is of trauma, historical and personal.
The movie, in black and white and Academy aspect ratio, opens with a negative image of a plant growing, perhaps, as we’ll infer later, a mutated, irradiated one. Then we see naked limbs and flanks, components of a couple in embrace. Sand pours on to their bodies. Soon it starts to glow; is it sand, or a form or radioactive dust. A man’s voice says “You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.” A woman’s voice insists that she has seen Hiroshima. She’s been to its hospital: “The hospital in Hiroshima exists. How could I not have seen it?”
She describes, and the camera echoes with physical evidence, what she’s seen: The Hiroshima museum, with its “bouquets of bottle caps” — objects fused together in the nuclear fire of the explosion — and the hair that fell out of the heads of those who weren’t killed in the vicinity that day, and the photos of actual burn victims. But the man insists: you saw nothing. She says “The reconstructions were as authentic as possible. The films were as authentic as possible.” And again, Resnais shows simulations of the survivors of the blast (a couple of briskly moving tracking shots of fake burn victims), and then puts in actual documentary footage of people with missing eyes, twisted limbs, and more.
“As authentic as possible?” Exactly. What, in these circumstances, does authentic even mean? To what extent does the information we are being given correspond to the reality of what happened? Hiroshima, mon amour strongly suggests that such films, however “accurate” or “authentic” (two entirely different categories of course), have nothing really to do with direct experience of trauma. And that such documents are perhaps the akin to the graven images that Mosaic law prohibits, in that there is the possibility that we might elevate them in a vain attempt to transcend or ameliorate trauma.
“The illusion is so perfect that tourists weep. What else can tourists do,” the woman says near the end of an over ten-minute sequence on the question. “What else was there to weep over,” the man asks, and eventually the movie tells us. The woman (Emmanuelle Riva) is French, the man (Eiji Okada) is Japanese, and neither is named in the film. Not naming your characters was a thing in arty postmodern literature and film at this time (the same thing happens in Resnais’ next film, Last Year At Marienbad, another study of reality, memory, and what can be known, albeit a much more abstracted treatment), but here it’s crucial to the movie’s final point, delivered in its last lines. In any event, their love story began with a bar pickup in a post-war Hiroshima, where she, an actress, is playing a nurse in a fictional movie about the bombing’s aftermath. “It’s about peace,” she shrugs when the man meets her on the set. “Here in Hiroshima we don’t make fun of films about peace,” he says. A few extras pass them, carrying signs bearing enlarged photos of burn victims. The couple is obscured but are laughing when they’re revealed again.
This feels insane — how can we behave as we do, with images of such suffering being paraded before us? In part it’s because those images cannot make us know suffering.
The movie’s larger question outside its historical context has to do with the possibility of love, and what love can achieve for both individuals and humankind, if anything at all. While it may seem so at first, the movie doesn’t abandon Hiroshima to tell the story of the female character and her own personal World War II trauma; it tells that story to demonstrate what she carries, and to demonstrate that what we all carry is inextricably tied up with our ability to empathize, as far as it goes, and the film insists that it can only go so far.
Throughout the film, we distinguish between recreations, acted drama, and footage of real events, and unconsciously assess the weight of each form as we’re also processing the narrative of the love story.
“The whole world rejoiced. And you rejoiced with it,” the man says to the woman about the bombings that did, after all, put an end to World War II. This was the world’s shame, and not just the West’s shame — do you think that China and Korea were sorry to see Japan’s days as a military power come to an end? The scholar and historian Paul Fussell shocked America’s more guilt-ridden intellectuals with his early ‘80s essay “Thank God for the Atom Bomb.” From the point of view of a U.S. soldier who was spared having to fight in the Pacific Theater, the atrocity was indeed a godsend. (Believe it or not, the British blues rock band The Groundhogs actually beat Fussell to articulating that sentiment with its song “Thank Christ For The Bomb,” from the 1970 album of the same name.)
To see suffering on the Hiroshima scale meticulously recreated through performance and special effects — would this help us, decades on, to resolve any of these contradictions? The answer to the question, according to Duras and Resnais, is that had Nolan chosen to somehow “recreate” the bombing of Hiroshima, we, the viewers, would really see nothing. I think they’re right. In any event, Oppenheimer finally is about something altogether different: the reality that men of science, completely rational beings supposedly, have enabled mankind’s potential instantaneous extinction. This is indeed unprecedented.
If we want to continue to think about the ethics of re-creation and depiction, though, It’s useful to think about it relative to another 20th century calamity. If the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while taking a staggering number of human lives, demonstrated the cataclysmic — indeed, apocalyptic — potential of nuclear weapons, the Holocaust, with its six million dead, demonstrated that the horror of man’s inhumanity to man is alas inexhaustible. In 1956, Resnais made Night and Fog, one of the first and most important Holocaust documentaries. The 32-minute film begins with color footage of death camps as they were 10 years or so after liberation — empty, overgrown with grass, still. Resnais’ camera dollies down a railroad track, following the path the trains packed with Jews marked for extermination did. Narrator Michel Bouquet says (the script is by Jean Cayrol, a poet): “we move slowly along…looking for what? Traces of corpses that fell out when the doors opened? Or of those herded at gunpoint to the camp’s gates amid barking dogs and glaring searchlights, the crematorium’s flames in the distance” — and here the camera gets to the very end of the tracks — “in a nocturnal spectacle the Nazis were so fond of.”
While the film uses horrific archival material, it also insists that in revealing the camps as they stand at the time of filming, “we can only show you the outer shell.” As, for instance, the fingernail scratches on the ceilings of the crematoria. The narration pauses to let the viewer consider how these came to be. The Nazis destroyed as much documentation on the death camps as they could once the war was lost and the Allies were on their way (and much documentation had been trashed even prior to that), but Night and Fog is also asking “How much do you need to see, anyway?” Because memory will recede. The gods of war are only pretending to be asleep. Looking at such images and relegating them to the past yields a comfort that is ultimately false. “We pretend to regain hope as the image recedes, as though we’ve been cured of that plague,” the narration states near the movie’s end. Resnais’ approach helps us understand why Claude Lanzmann included zero archival footage in his astonishing Holocaust film Shoah.
As for fictional treatments of the Holocaust, the genie of depiction got out of the bottle quite some time ago. For many, to orchestrate a simulation of such atrocities is itself an obscenity, although good luck convincing a Life Is Beautiful fan of this. Writing about Night and Fog in his 1995 book Flickers, the novelist and critic Gilbert Adair also turned his attention to Steven Spielberg’s 1993 Schindler’s List, and after saying the picture was “not at all the disgrace that one had every right to expect,” he nevertheless deemed it “a monstrosity.” After which he grimly mused on the performative recreation of death camp horrors: “[W]hat I see when I watch the film, what, hard as I try, I cannot prevent myself from seeing, is that cast being put through its paces on some foggy, nocturnal location, put through its paces by the boyishly handsome director himself in his snazzy windcheater, his red N.Y. Yankees baseball cap, his granny glasses and his beard. I see him blowing into his cupped hands and pointing a gloved finger as directors do. I see the bony, skeletal extras, in striped pajamas or else stark naked, laughing and joking and jostling one another (why not? It’s their right) while waiting for a new shot to be set up. I see the makeup artists…” and so on. Let us not allow Adair’s feverish projection (Spielberg doesn’t wear Yankees caps, for one thing) obscure his larger point: Some things, finally, just should not be acted out.
Did this notion inform Nolan’s decision? Maybe not as much as we’d like to think, given that the dramatic structure of the film doesn’t allow for an easy departure across the world to begin with. But in the end, incineration by nuclear blast is depicted as Oppenheimer’s nightmare vision of just one person. A Los Alamos worker played by Nolan’s own daughter, Flora. Who is a film student of college age, so chill.
Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.
