Oppenheimer and the objectification of genius

The film finds it difficult to identify a point of focus and so hits on the fission scientist’s genius as the solution

Cate Blanchett in Tár

In 2022, a film named ‘Tár’ starring Cate Blanchett made huge waves in the international film circuit. It is set in the esoteric world of western classical music and deals with the trials faced by a fictional woman orchestra conductor. What the film did was to suggest its protagonist’s genius by having her perform well-known pieces of music from Mozart to Mahler. Evidently it was recorded music from celebrity conductors being played but Cate Blanchett’s charisma in the role convinced audiences unfamiliar with such music to believe that they were actually being acquainted with “genius”. The charisma of a film personality was being passed off as artistic worth since there is nothing to indicate that artists or literary persons are charismatic like film stars.

In 2023, no individual film has made as big waves as Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’ and, by a strange coincidence, this film is not only set in a similarly esoteric realm — that of theoretical physics — but is also about a genius. Where the stereotype of the performing artiste is someone magnetic and dressed ceremonially, that of the physicist is of someone shy and retiring and Nolan’s film therefore casts a less-known actor Cillian Murphy in the role of the protagonist.

To those unfamiliar with the subject, J Robert Oppenheimer was a Jewish-American physicist who contributed to quantum physics in the earlier part of the last century but is better-known as the father of the A-bomb. A film about him will therefore have to deal not only with the A-bomb but with moral and political issues since — apart from the hundreds of thousands dead in Japan — nuclear weapons in America’s possession subsequently sparked off an arms race with the USSR. There is an indication that the USSR planted spies at Los Alamos where the work on the A-bomb project was underway and ‘treason’ becomes an issue where the
physicists are interrogated.

There are a large number of issues confronting ‘Oppenheimer’ and, as may be expected, it is impossible to deal with all of them cogently in three hours. To make matters worse, the protagonist was a known philanderer (according to the FBI) and the film therefore accommodates two women in the narrative. Quantum physics — for instance, the notion that a particle is both matter and a wave — is too difficult to explain to the public and the McCarthy era’s political witch-hunting has already been dealt with in many other films (Trumbo, 2015). With so much to deal with, the film finds it difficult to identify a point of focus and hits upon Oppenheimer’s “genius” as the solution.

In an essay titled ‘The brain of Einstein’, Roland Barthes (in his book ‘Mythologies’) writes about popular representations of Albert Einstein in front of a blackboard upon which is inscribed E=MC 2 implying an objectification of the physicist’s brain as something capable of producing incredible formulae; but there is no similar formula associated with ‘Oppenheimer’. It is also difficult to objectify genius in physics (without a formula) since it cannot also be done through the actor’s charisma as in ‘Tár’.

But “genius” is essentially a term that signifies the perceiver’s incomprehension of the human inputs in a stupendous mental achievement and implies incredible ideas coming out of god-knows-where. I initially found ‘Oppenheimer’ irritatingly incoherent but on careful reflection it would seem that the incoherence of the film is actually part of the design hit upon by Nolan. Since genius is not comprehensible to us, the film’s incoherence is perhaps a deliberate manifestation of that incomprehension. The actor Cillian Murphy is hence not required to portray an understandable human being and he simply stares — whether saying something profound, facing the military or the political establishment, or even in a romantic interlude. This is not ‘wooden acting’ but a performance devised to signify the ‘unfathomable’ in human capability. He is surrounded by a host of known Hollywood faces turned towards him, lit up by the light his genius exudes.

That brings us to the film’s reception in India where it has been lapped up for the quotation from the Bhagavad Gita that it contains. The screening I attended did not have a large audience but most of those present were students of the pre-university level and there was little doubt that theoretical physics would be lost on them. They could not also have knowledge of the McCarthy era and the anti-Communist witch-hunting that the period is notorious for. The sex in the film is non-existent and only a well-draped bedroom scene suggests sex at all. It would seem that the film’s Indian success owes to what is taken to be an acknowledgement of India’s genius. High-ups in the Indian scientific establishment have claimed that western science is only Indian science repackaged, and one wonders if many Indian viewers do not take the page of Sanskrit shown in the film to be a mark of India’s genius, its incomprehensibility an acknowledgement of what India once had but lost — and was usurped by someone else. It would be unfortunate if that segment — including a brief view of the Sanskrit lines — were excised from the film because someone found a reference to the Bhagavad Gita in a bedroom scene shameful.

(The author is a well-known film critic)