Oppenheimer Whitewashes U.S. Capitalism’s Crimes Against Humanity
“I don’t care about [Oppenheimer’s sense of] guilt. Basically my whole family is dead because of him.” -Miya Sommers, Fifth Generation Japanese American, Oakland
As I sat watching the Hollywood blockbuster Oppenheimer all I could think of was Edward Said. In his famous essay “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims,” Said argued that there was no way to understand the ideology of Zionism—-the idea of Jewish racial supremacy—without examining the experience of those who suffered from it, namely Palestinians like himself.
In Oppenheimer, the British director Christopher Nolan tells us the story of the creation of the atomic bomb and its primary inventor J. Robert Oppenheimer without ever showing us the effects of the bomb on Japanese people when it was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Instead, he shows us the white male scientist Oppenheimer hallucinating of American flesh burning in order to illustrate his guilty conscience and hides any scenes of Japanese destruction. There is in fact not a single Japanese person in the film.
In this way Oppenheimer whitewashes the realities of American imperialism, capitalism, and war. The atomic bombs the U.S. dropped on Japan killed nearly 200,000 people, most of them civilians. Oppenheimer himself strongly argued against a community of U.S. scientists who opposed the use of the bombs in Japan—something the film skirts around. In fact, Oppenheimer pushed strongly for the bombs to be used. Instead of emphasizing that he was a mass murderer, the film repeatedly shows Oppenheimer as a victim of the same government he is working for because of his one-time Communist sympathies. This trick is meant to make audiences identify with Oppenheimer (and Americans) as victims rather than the Japanese that he and the U.S. state needlessly murdered.
The movie also whitewashes other victims of the U.S. atomic program: indigenous people, Mexican Americans, and Native New Mexicans whose land and lives were exploited and decimated by the bomb. Oppenheimer, the son of a wealthy businessman, encouraged the United States government to construct his laboratory to build the bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The movie Oppenheimer shows him arriving in a beautiful landscape where there are no people. But New Mexico was land stolen from Mexico by the U.S. in an imperial war. Tribal communities have inhabited New Mexico for thousands of years. The entire region has been a center of commerce between Pueblo communities of Northern New Mexico and Mexico.
At the time the atomic bomb was tested, 13,000 people lived within a 50-mile radius of the blast. In subsequent years, 41 people in the Gutierrez family who lived within the blast radius died of cancer. Farmers, ranchers, and railroad workers who lived nearby were directly affected.
Oppenheimer also erases the contributions of indigenous workers to the building of the government’s expansive testing site. As reported by Tina Cordova of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium:
They don’t talk about how New Mexicans did the dirtiest jobs, how we were part of building the roads and the bridges and the buildings. And then, when that was completed, they sent us into the dirtiest jobs inside of the labs handling radioactive waste…They also didn’t depict the women that they bused up there, Native women and the Hispanic women that literally cooked every meal, cleaned every house, changed every diaper, and made every baby bottle.
Finally, Oppenheimer erases the massive ecological crisis and threat to the planet that the atomic bomb is part of. The movie arrived in theaters during the hottest July in the history of the planet. Albuquerque New Mexico, not far from Los Alamos, set heat records for the month. The bomb explosion at Los Alamos in 1945 permanently altered the ecosystem of New Mexico. The blast was so hot it liquified sand into pieces of glass. Ashes fell from the sky in New Mexico for days. Fallout from the bomb reached into 46 U.S. states and into Canada and Mexico.
The only glimmer of recognition in Oppenheimer of the massive disaster of the atomic bomb on Native peoples comes when Oppenheimer himself tells U.S. President Harry Truman the government should give the land of New Mexico “back to the Indians.” But Oppenheimer the movie is about making money off of human disaster not righting the crimes of capitalism, settler-colonialism, and imperialism. In fact, Universal Pictures, the company responsible for the film, has not even released it in Japan, where ordinary people are already outraged about it. The film reproduces at the level of culture the erasure of Japanese people the bomb actually carried out in 1945.
It was this kind of violence that the radical German Marxist Walter Benjamin had in mind when he said: “There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” The barbaric atrocities committed against the Japanese and the barbaric conditions of indigenous and Mexican people who suffered at Los Alamos are as much a part of the movie Oppenheimer as its million-dollar actors and special effects. When he wrote his essay “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims” Edward Said began with another quote from Walter Benjamin: “All rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them. Hence, empathy with the victor invariably benefits the ruler.”
In the case of Oppenheimer, American audiences are invited to sympathize with the creator of the bomb and to marvel at the whiz-bang filmmaking achievements of a Hollywood movie. Christopher Nolan and Robert Oppenheimer are meant to be awesome avatars of the technosupremacy of Western capitalist society, Pinball Wizards of spectacular death and destruction as mass entertainment. In this way the movie Oppenheimer repeats a ritual of Western power and the might of U.S. cultural imperialism. Audience “empathy with the victor” benefits the rulers of the U.S. by distracting ordinary people from the real barbaric facts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the death and displacement of indigenous peoples, and the horrific truths about U.S. wars against other countries, from Mexico in the 19th century, to Japan in the 20th century.
Revolutionary socialists looking for alternatives to Oppenheimer should consider reading the novel Ceremony by Laguna Puebla Leslie Marmon Silko. The book is about a New Mexico Pueblo person named Tayo who returns from World War II with a special case of posttraumatic stress disorder caused by his experience of racism as an Indigenous person in the U.S. military, and by being ordered to murder non-white Japanese who remind him of himself. When he returns home, Tayo undergoes a Pueblo healing ceremony in which he recognizes that Pueblo land and culture has been poisoned by uranium mined from ancestral earth in the making of the atomic weapon. The ceremony also promises to bring an end to a long drought that has been decimating Pueblo land, farms, and food.
Ceremony is a novel that explicitly names and rejects the same U.S. imperialism, racism, ecocide, and military violence which the movie Oppenheimer tries to mask. It is a history of World War II and atomic bomb from the standpoint of its victims. It is a document with which we can begin to build a socialist alternative and a world of revolutionary love and healing.
Bill V. Mullen is a member of the Revolutionary Socialist Organizing Collective and of the organizing collective for the US Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.
