Despite its big night on the Oscars, “Oppenheimer” is a disappointment and a missed opportunity

With 13 Oscar nominations and 7 wins – including best picture – “Oppenheimer“was the star of the 96th Academy Awards.

Christopher Nolan's blockbuster, which told the story of the making of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was expanded this awards season to incorporate: five Golden Globes And seven BAFTA awards.

But as a historian whose research focused on survivors of the bombingsI can't help but be upset that the dominant narrative concerning the bombs continues once more.

This narrative has long shaped the way in which Hollywood and the US media take care of nuclear weapons. It portrays the creation of the bombs as a morally fraught but mandatory project – a unprecedented invention by extraordinary minds, a national project that was a matter of life or death for a rustic mired in global conflict. Using the bombs was a difficult decision at a difficult time. Still, it is crucial to do not forget that, above all, the bombs saved democracy.

There's something that strikes me as so introspective about this narrative – it focuses a lot on the stress of losing an arms race, on the fear of creating a mistake, on the fear of what would occur if at some point The US would drop bombs – that it will drown out what actually happened after the bombs were detonated.

A barren cultural landscape

When Nolan was pressed about why he had chosen not to point out images of Hiroshima, Nagasaki or the victims, he said“Less can be more” – that the subtext of what is just not shown is much more powerful because it forces the audience to make use of their imagination.

But which images from popular culture does the audience actually must draw from?

From the Fifties to the Nineteen Eighties, many Hollywood movies handled the fear of a nuclear apocalypse. Few showed mass deaths on the bottom – “The Day After” involves mind – but virtually none showed survivors who looked or seemed like real survivors.

Instead, movies like “Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb“only showed mushroom clouds and bird’s eye views of the bombs from above. As cameras in movies like “Panic in Year Zero!” And “testament“They showed that Americans were preparing for the bomb or panicking since it was thrown at them.

Watching these movies, it's easy to imagine that a nuclear attack, if it ever occurred, occurred in a US city.

This genealogy of movies also includes collective biopics by which a nuclear drama takes place between scientists, military officers and politicians.

In the book 2024 “Resisting Nuclear Power: Art and Activism Across the Pacific“, a chapter describes how Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein used the Trinity Test in “Nuclear power“, a 1946 film that celebrates the role of science in U.S. military power. They note that within the film's outtakes, Einstein appeared unfocused, while Oppenheimer appeared stilted.

Clearly, the 2 scientists were uncomfortable with their newly assigned role as promoters of an interesting, dangerous technology. As “Oppenheimer” delves into this personal discomfort, the film captures the disconnect between the perpetrators of the bombs and the destruction they caused.

The bombs didn’t discriminate

Ultimately, movies like “Oppenheimer” offer few, if any, latest insights into the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their impact.

More than 200,000 people diedThe fatalities included not only Japanese civilians, but in addition Koreans who had been in Japan as forced laborers or conscripts.

Actually, One in ten individuals who survived the bomb was Korean, however the US government never recognized them as survivors of American military attacks. To this present day, they’ve difficulty accessing medical treatment for his or her long-standing radiation illness.

In addition, about 3,000 to 4,000 of those affected by the bombs were Japanese-Americans, as I showed in my report Book about Asian American survivors of the bombings. Most were children who remained with their families or students who had enrolled in schools in Japan before the war because schools within the United States increasingly discriminated against Asian American students.

These non-Japanese survivors — lots of whom were U.S.-born residents — have been known to scholars and activists since a minimum of the Nineteen Nineties. So it feels surreal to see a movie that depicts the impact of the bombs solely within the context of the United States' war against its enemy, Japan. As my work shows, the bombs made no distinction between friend and foe.

It's not that Christopher Nolan ignores the destructive power of bombs.

He points to it as he portrays J. Robert Oppenheimer, the nuclear physicist played by Cillian Murphy, I imagine a nuclear holocaust when he gave a celebratory speech to his colleagues after the bombing of Hiroshima.

But what Oppenheimer sees on this hallucination is the face of a young white woman peeling herself off – played by Nolan's daughter Flora – not those of the Japanese, Koreans and Asian-Americans who actually experienced the bombs. Later within the film, Oppenheimer looks away from the pictures of Ground Zero in Hiroshima after they are shown to him and his colleagues from the Manhattan Project.

As I watched this scene, I wondered if this decision also encouraged the audience to look away.

Global reverberation

Even if this film is viewed purely from an entertainment perspective, Nolan could have chosen to acknowledge why the bombs are such a rousing subject to start with: they did much, rather more than frighten white middle-class Americans or to make you guilty.

Their explosions reverberated all over the world, tearing apart not only America's war opponents but in addition colonized peoples and ethnic minorities.

Cold War nuclear production disproportionately harmed Native Americans and indigenous Americans who worked in uranium mines and their residents The Pacific Islands have been chosen as the location for several dozen US nuclear tests.

For those on the receiving end, the results of nuclear explosions will not be a thing of the past. They are a each day reality.

And the results of radiation proceed to affect not only people, but in addition the environment. Scientists still don't know what to do with it highly radioactive nuclear wastebe it from nuclear power plants or former nuclear test sites, which remain taboo because they’re too contaminated to live there.

As global conflicts increase the potential of nuclear warIt is definitely vital to speak concerning the lasting legacy of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But to create a more balanced understanding of nuclear weapons, it will be helpful if talented filmmakers like Nolan made more effort to look beyond the narrow immediacy of a mushroom cloud.