Cubism at the Movies: Oppenheimer.
Modern art played a bigger role in the Oscar-bait biopic than you think.
Vincent van Gogh, First Steps (after Millet), 1889, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Oscars are coming up this weekend, so we take a break from our hard-hitting history of American art to look at the art in one of the front-runners for best picture, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Spoilers ahead!
It’s just there for a second—one flash among thousands in a three-hour thriller cut like a trailer: a woman drowns in the bathtub. First we see that she is holding her own head under water; then we see a black gloved hand—someone else’s—holding her down. Women in Nolan films are usually minor characters, and Oppenheimer breaks no new ground there, but the barrage of cuts the director devotes to Jean Tatlock’s death are interesting.1 Was it suicide? Was it murder? Dead is dead but how matters a lot to Tatlock, and at least a little to Oppenheimer—and only one of them knows for sure.
It’s not the scene that the whole movie turns on—that honor falls, curiously, on the convoluted cabinet confirmation hearings for another of Nolan’s cast of thousands—but the presentation of contradictory realities is central to Nolan’s oeuvre as a filmmaker.
This is a rule of the game in the Nolan-verse: characters can lie, but the camera can only present clues, fragments of a possible truth. This is part of Nolan’s famous love of theatrical releases, shooting on film, and his disdain for CGI: only the “real” can be filmed; the story that those clues build exists only in our heads. So it’s a very big deal for Nolan when he presents two contradictory “facts.”
When Nolan presents contradictory details, they are generally the contradictions of two different character’s perspectives. Oppenheimer does this explicitly, telling us that we are seeing through the eyes of Robert Downey, Jr.’s Salieri-like Strauss when the film is black-and-white,2 and in color for Cillian Murphy’s Robert J. Oppenheimer.
(It’s the same treatment at the end of The Dark Knight, when we see Bruce Wayne dining at a cafe: he died transporting a nuclear bomb in the previous scene, but we’re seeing him alive through Michael Caine’s imagination. Similarly, The Prestige shows us a whole litany of impossibilities by presenting the perspective of David Bowie’s Nikola Tesla. Nolan’s been developing this device for years.3)
But the drowning scene is not that. In Tatlock’s death scene, we are viewing contradictory facts in a single person’s perspective. That almost never happens in Nolan, but that mixed-certainty or doubt is central to his portrait of Oppenheimer, the man.
If you’re still with me on the eve of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’s 96th annual awards ceremony, it’s worth going deeper into a portrait central to Robert Oppenheimer, art collector.
II. Picasso and Contradiction.
It’s just there for a second: a few frames of film shown in montage beneath a voiceover as Oppenheimer describes his peripatetic youth: three modernist canvases at a museum, followed by a lingering shot of Pablo Picasso’s 1937 Femme assise aux bras croisés. Robert’s parents, Julius and Ella Oppenheimer collected Post-Impressionist paintings—van Gogh, Cézanne, and Blue Period Picasso—but their son, in this scene, is getting turned on by Cubism. Picasso’s painting is practically disfigured by perspectival contradiction: one eye is a few inches lower than the other, fingers extrude like half-made sausages—and this is Picasso at his lustiest, painting his lover and muse, Marie-Thérèse Walter. This is Cubism’s lasting innovation: the embrace, in a single canvas, of irreconcilable perspectives.
The simultaneous embrace of contradiction is often aligned with developments in theoretical physics that arose during the same time—as theorized by many of the ensemble of scientists presented in Oppenheimer: Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg. Their work touched on the impossibility of certainty in the subatomic world. There’s a limit to what we can say for certain—as Oppenheimer breezily demonstrates:
“Is light made up of particles or a wave? Quantum mechanics says it’s both. How can it be both? It can’t. But it is. It’s paradoxical, and yet . . . it works.”4
The Picasso summarizes that simultaneity: paradoxical, and yet it works. And within that embrace of paradox, we find room for Oppenheimer’s lover to be both a murder victim and a suicide—and for, as the film ultimately concludes, the bomb to both save the world and destroy it.
III. Visualizing Uncertainty.
The artist Neelon Crawford was working on a project5 at the particle accelerator at Fermilab when he asked the physicist Leon Lederman what a quark looks like, receiving the deflating answer only a Nobel Prize recipient can deliver:
“Physicists believe that visualization is counter-productive when applied to the microscopic world of atoms, nuclei and quarks . . . It can give you the wrong answers . . . We physicists prefer to think of these things in terms of mathematics.”6
To scientists, the data itself is the model, and our attempts to make an oil painting out of it are probably doomed, and a little childish.
Nolan’s project is more nuanced than “everybody has a different perspective,” but less nuanced than particle physics. I suspect that Nolan likes the topic for the same reason Picasso’s impossible women vibrate with us. The modern world is faceted with meaning refracted in each shard of its shattered face; we try to draw one coherent narrative out of all those competing perspectives, and in the face of that impossible feat, are often left in the uncomfortable, familiar position of embracing a contradictory self. It’s a fascinating core of humanity in a formally cold body of work—though I’m not sure it justifies the last hour of the film devoted to political hijinks of revoking Oppenheimer’s security clearance. Nor do I know if it merits an Oscar for best picture, but speaking from a place of comfortable uncertainty, Sunday will probably be Nolan’s day.
IV. Rosebud!
As for the Picasso, another reading is possible. Little Robert’s mother Ella, who helped assemble the post-impressionist collection that Robert grew up with, had a malformed hand from birth. She concealed a prosthetic thumb beneath elaborate gloves in public, but nonetheless succeeded in establishing herself as a painter, leading plein-air classes on the roof of her Upper West Side apartment building. Robert’s relationship with art and with his mother were exceptionally close, his biographers observing:
“As an adult, Robert gave his friend and former teacher Herbert Smith a handsome engraving of the scene in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus where the hero is unclasping his mother's hand and throwing her to the ground. Smith was sure that Robert was sending him a message, acknowledging how difficult it had been for him to separate from his own mother.”7
The unorthodox hands of Picasso’s 1937 canvas might have resonated with Oppenheimer; and by omission, Christopher Nolan signifies the importance of that other Picasso, the Blue Period canvas Ella hung in the family home: a 1901 canvas entitled Mother and Child. While that painting has not been definitively located,8 one of the three van Gogh’s in the Oppenheimer family collection underscores the same themes: van Gogh’s First Steps, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is just what it sounds like: a mother holds her baby as he takes his first steps toward the outstretched arms of his father. We are shown Robert and Kitty Oppenheimer’s struggle to be good parents in the film, but this touching view of Robert’s relationship with his parents, mediated through early Picasso, Shakespeare, and van Gogh is conspicuously offscreen. Ella died in 1931—somewhere in the midst of that montage with Robert throwing wine glasses at a wall, reading The Wasteland, and staring at Picassos. Nolan, for his part, loves to keep the center of gravity offscreen. There’s no footage of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it’s tempting to see the omission of his doting artist-collector mother in a similar light—Nolan’s version of a “rosebud” moment in his portrait of this enormous and conflicted man.
Thanks for reading. Enjoy the Oscars — I hope they all win!—and join us next week as we return to matters less tinsel, more canvas.
Jonathan
jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
A painting teacher corrected me when I talked about “minor characters” in a painting: “Supporting does not mean subordinate.” Certainly Nolan uses all his characters as subordinate to a bigger idea, and he usually gives women very meaningful deaths—but it’s not an especially generous thing to be be most meaningful, as a demographic, for the manner in which you die. For a palette cleanser, read our article on Barbie here.
I can’t remember where I read Strauss’s role dismissed as “Salieri-like,” but it nicely encapsulates how inappropriate it is that Strauss’s story takes up so much air in this hot air balloon. Anyway, Robert Downey, Jr. took his cues directly from Nolan, saying: “'Sometimes you're Mozart, usually you're Mozart, this time you're Salieri.'”
Ah, the obsession with nuclear bombs and feuding physicists has been there all along! And if you want more hot takes on old Nolan movies, see our ground-breaking appraisal of Tenet here.
Taken from the script, itself a fascinating document, available here.
The product of Crawford’s visit to Fermilab, along with other investigations, was his 2000-2001 exhibition at the National Academy of Sciences, Tools of Vision, with book by the same name.
As quoted in Tools of Vision, 2000, p. 54.
Excerpted from Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, available here.
Though the painting is recorded in the Bird & Sherwin biography, ArtNews notes that the painting matching that description is now in the collection of Harvard, which notes no ownership by the Oppenheimer family. Given the importance of the other works in the family collection, the authenticity of the Picasso Mother and Child is not in doubt—just, you know, a little uncertain about it’s whereabouts. We have its velocity but not its position, if you know what I mean.