Express News Service
When asked about talks for curbing the spread of nuclear weapons, the father of the atom bomb, physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, famously stated that this thought had come two decades too late: “It should have been done the day after Trinity”. It’s this statement from which Jon H Else’s 1981 Academy Award-nominated documentary derives its title. The film is as much about the enigma that was Oppenheimer as it is about the moral and ethical questions he was confronted with after the Trinity Test, the detonation of the first nuclear weapon.
It’s a perfect accompaniment for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. It could also help find answers to some of the questions that the Nolan film might have left you with. Available to stream for free on The Criterion Channel, it pieces together the story of the creation of the first atom bomb through rare archival footage and candid anecdotes and testimonies from several scientists involved in the Manhattan Project—Hans Bethe, Robert Serber, Robert Wilson among others—as well as Oppenheimer’s physicist brother Frank, his writer friends Haakon Chevalier, and Francis Fergusson and some of the residents of New Mexico, the site of the great laboratory that produced something that, as the film puts it, was as much about life as destruction.
As opposed to Nolan’s astounding creative leaps and play with the narrative in the recent biopic, there’s something wholesomely comprehensive and methodical about Else’s approach to the subject. It’s all negotiated step by step, one aspect of the issue leading to another to give a rounded picture of a slice of history and its repercussions as Else sees it.
We begin with the genius himself who died much before the film was shot. Oppie to close friends and family, is described variously as gentle, reticent, and eloquent. A man of tremendous intellect with a razor-sharp, quick mind and as sharp a tongue, he had literary inclinations but, in his early days of youth, was also “ignorant of practical matters” and never read newspapers. What he did read was Marx and Lenin and the Bhagavad Gita. He was charmed by the Hindu text, we are told, without quite being religiously involved with it.
The personal details about him are telling—how he may have looked frail but was tough as nails, how for days he would go alone in the woods of New Mexico with his horse, how he was “dashing in an elegant way” and a darling of women.
Having established him as a larger-than-life figure in the garb of an ordinary man, the film then moves on to Oppenheimer’s Jewish background and anxieties about Hitler. Simultaneously, we see the larger anxiety in the world after the discovery of nuclear fission by the Germans, which could potentially mean that “the end of Western civilization” could well be very near. Oppenheimer led the effort to build something that was regarded then as “necessary to save the Western civilization”. Equally motivating was the patriotic fervor of the Americans.
The documentary also shows how the project brought together the finest of minds—Nobel laureates and young academicians, with an average age of 29—in the middle of nowhere, how young scientists kept disappearing from their respective institutes, how a tiny train station outside Santa Fe suddenly started seeing unprecedented traffic. Oppie was “the conductor of this opera” seen as the one for a good cause, something inevitable. It also marked a shift for the physicist, from an unworldly, unpolitical individual to emerge as a great administrator.
The dropping of the bomb itself, both at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a political act for which the scientists worked with eyes wide open but weren’t prepared for it to happen so fast. As the film moves to describe Trinity itself—the light that was ‘seen’ even by a blind woman, the sun rising from the wrong direction, the flashbulb on the face—it’s for Wilson to put the moral dimension of the “marvellous weapon” in context as a “Faustian bargain to sell the soul for knowledge and power”. An alliance in which there is no going back but only learning to live with it. Or as Oppie put it: “The physicists have known sin and it’s a knowledge they can’t lose”.
Cinema Without Borders
In this weekly column, the writer explores the non-Indian films that are making the right noises across the globe. This week, we talk about Jon H Else’s The Day After Trinity
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