A critique of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer was easily one of the most highly anticipated films of this year. It flaunts an A-list cast with a distinguished director and writer armed with a story that many would talk about for years to come. Personally, I was also very excited to see this film. I had been a fan of many of the actors, including Florence Pugh, Emily Blunt, and especially Cillian Murphy, ever since he played Thomas Shelby in Peaky Blinders. But the more I learnt about the film, the less enthused I became.
For starters, the cast is overwhelmingly white, with only a few people of colour, the most famous being Rami Malek. I’ve seen many come to the defense of the movie because the film centres on the perspective of Robert Oppenheimer, a white man. However, the lack of racialised characters and actors seems to be a deliberate choice by the filmmakers because there were people of colour who not only worked on the Manhattan Project and worked with Oppenheimer but also made great contributions to nuclear science as a whole.
One of them was Chien Shiung Wu. She was a Chinese- American scientist, and she was nicknamed “The First Lady of Physics.” She began working on the Manhattan Project in 1944, where she studied beta decay, the process in which “the nucleus of one element changes into another element”. A few years later, two other Asian scientists who were also a part of the Manhattan Project, Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, asked Wu for help on an experiment that would ultimately disprove the law of conservation of parity during beta decay. This law “states that all objects and their mirror images behave the same way, but with the left hand and right hand reversed”. Her experiment ultimately confirmed Tsung and Chen’s hypothesis, and the two men eventually won a Nobel Prize in Physics for their work.. But Chien Shiung Wu was not included in the prestigious award and her part in their success was never acknowledged.
Many Black scientists also contributed to the Manhattan Project. Ernest Wilkins, for example, was considered a “child prodigy,”as he completed his bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD degrees by the time he was 19. Unfortunately, he received no job offers afterwards. That is, until he was asked to join the Manhattan Project. During his time with the Project, “Wilkins researched neutron energy, reactor physics and engineering … [and] did groundbreaking work in the movement of subatomic particles.” He was eventually dismissed from working further with the Project because of his skin colour. Other figures include Edwin R. Russell, who had researched on the separation of plutonium-239 and uranium, and Lawrence and William Knox, who focused specifically on the consequences of using the atomic bomb, as well as the “separation of the uranium isotope” .
Despite all these accomplishments and contributions, none of these people were featured in the film.
The reality is that Hollywood is an institution, and it is one that consistently excludes marginalised groups from their prestigious and exclusive association. History told by Hollywood is simply a continuation of the white narrative that has been force-fed into our collective consciousness. Our past is not as white as Hollywood would like to portray it to be. Racialised people have always existed, yet mainstream media more often than not fails to represent that. Christopher Nolan had the chance to make a revolutionary historical film that could have showcased Black and Asian excellence in science, but there was a choice made not to pursue such a route.
I understand that this is a biopic specifically on Robert Oppenheimer, and not the Manhattan Project, but his own work was heavily influenced by people of colour. According to National Geographic, he had even attended a few of Chien Shiung Wu’s lectures, yet she had no part in the film. Acknowledging the contributions of marginalised individuals is the bare minimum. Wu was left out of the Nobel Prize and she was left out of Oppenheimer.
Without Chien Shiung Wu, Tsung Dao Lee, Chen Ning Yang, Ernest Wilkins, the Knox Brothers, and many other people of colour, there would be no Oppenheimer, and there most certainly would not be any prospective Oscars looming in the future.
I don’t mean for this piece to ruin the film for people who genuinely enjoyed it. I simply want to highlight that as audience members, we need to be more cognizant of the media that we are consuming. Does the media showcase the truth? Or the narrative that the powers-that-be want us to believe?
