The Marshall Foundation Talks “Oppenheimer”

Last week, Christopher Nolan’s latest film, Oppenheimer, was released in theaters to critical acclaim and commercial success. Featuring a brief but pivotal appearance from Gen. George Marshall, many of us on staff felt obligated to see the film opening day. Glen Carpenter, Director of Communications and Multimedia, spoke with Melissa Davis, Director of Library and Archives, and library intern Clare O’Brien, for an in-depth (and spoiler-free) discussion about actor Will Roberts’ portrayal of Marshall and the film as a whole.

Glen
What are your takeaways from the film’s depiction of Marshall?

Melissa
I loved Will Roberts’ depiction of Marshall. I’ve seen Marshall in other films–the scene from Saving Private Ryan comes to mind, where I feel like Marshall was portrayed as “any general.” It didn’t really have a Marshall feel to it in his mannerisms and his voice, his cadence of speech. When I saw Will in Oppenheimer as Marshall, I said “Oh, there’s Marshall.” I feel like he wasn’t acting as Marshall. He was being Marshall.

Clare
Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I haven’t been fortunate enough to listen to a lot of Marshall recordings, what he sounded like when he spoke. But from the way he was sitting, the way that he was kind of leaning back into the chair and taking it all in…the way that he’s holding his glasses. He seems a lot more put together and a little bit less harsh than some of the other Marshall depictions that I’ve seen before, where he’s just kind of attacking everything, because that doesn’t seem like something Marshall would have done. He would have been way more reserved. And I thought the way that he said the lines was also incredibly thoughtful. I was with my friend when that scene came up and I leaned over to her and was like, “Oh, there he is.”

 

Glen
I think it’s interesting we talk about Marshall’s physicality in Will Roberts’ depiction versus Harve Presnell [in Saving Private Ryan]. I always remember seeing a YouTube comment on a video of that speech where somebody wrote “George Marshall reminds me of Mufasa.” That’s exactly right for that depiction. This seems a lot less “arch” and a lot less caricatured than Presnell. It’s almost like in that film, Marshall was used as a non-controversial general to deliver lines that advance the plot–this seems a lot more true-to-life, even down to him discussing civilian casualties in the cabinet meeting. So even though there’s maybe thirty seconds of screen time for Marshall, I think it’s extremely impactful for the rest of the film.

Melissa
I think that Christopher Nolan did an excellent job at putting the words in Marshall’s mouth, because they are words that Marshall could have spoken. They were very much within his character and how he thought about things, how he wrote about things during the war. They’re the kind of things you find in his correspondence. He said that he was careful to deliver casualty figures to the president at least once a week so he would never lose sight of the cost of this war in individual lives. I really feel like Christopher Nolan hit it square on in terms of what he chose to express in this very pivotal scene.

Clare
Mm hmm. I definitely think that the cost of the war was something central to this film and the scene with Marshall. We see so many movies where it’s just very violent scenes and many people dying who aren’t the focus, just that the heroes made it out okay. But in this film, they really do take it very seriously. I think it was incredible the way they use Marshall to make cost of everything clear. It was very, very good.

Glen
Mm hmm. Do we have a sense–outside of the famous stories of unusual outbursts–of Marshall’s behavior during cabinet meetings like this? Do you think this is probably how he acted?

Melissa
I think so. One of his compatriots–I think there’s something that Hap Arnold wrote, I’m not sure, but it was one of his regular coworkers–said that in meetings, Marshall didn’t say very much, but when he spoke, everyone listened. I think Clare is exactly right. He takes it all in and he puts it together in his head, and then he delivers the information that people are waiting for and he doesn’t mess around. He was not a wordy person. He was very succinct in his descriptions, succinct in his communications. And so I think that having this scene be as short as it was and as direct as it was, was very much in keeping with Marshall’s character.

Clare
Melissa knows these things better than I do, so she says it perfectly. But you can really tell. And from what I’ve read about Marshall said and what I’ve learned from being here is that he was someone that people really did listen to everything he said. He didn’t just speak to say things, he said things that were very important. So when he was speaking, you knew you had to listen, and I think you could tell that in the movie as well. When he was speaking, the others were taking in and immediately building off of what he had to say. He was very much a central figure of leadership in that room.

Glen
Marshall’s impact on the rest of the film is interesting given his limited screen time. But, you know, Truman is only in the film for maybe two minutes, and I think that’s easily one of the best performances in the film. Maybe this is a good segue into talking about the film itself. It’s holistic and all-encompassing. It’s not a standard Hollywood biopic–it doesn’t follow the Ray formula, for example. It explores the influences in Oppenheimer’s life, and obviously science and politics, but also culture.

Clare
Actually, I was listening to an interview the other day and they were saying that Nolan specifically hates the word “biopic.” He doesn’t want it to be thought of as a biopic, which I think is very interesting. I think that definitely comes across, and that’s why you cast such incredible actors to stand next to Cillian Murphy playing Oppenheimer. He carries it, but then you also have Robert Downey, Jr., doing an incredible job. You see Gary Oldman for like five seconds playing Truman, so you really get a full depiction of what it was like in that moment. It’s not all about lauding or drawing down Oppenheimer, it’s just what happened.

Glen
The more I think about it, the closest analogy I can think of for other biographical films is probably The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford from maybe fifteen years ago. It’s technically a biography of those two figures, but it’s much more of a rumination about celebrity, the myth of the Old West, and how the early cultural depictions of those figures in the Western genre impact our understanding of the actual history of the actual American West. I think Nolan is kind of doing a similar thing because he’s not just focusing on the war–he’s exploring everything. There’s that really early scene where Oppenheimer looks at a Picasso, later he name drops Stravinsky. It situates the technical and scientific revolution that was happening in the early twentieth century alongside similar advancements in the arts, which is unexpected for what is ostensibly a biopic about a scientist–well, I don’t want to use that term if Nolan dislikes it.

 

Melissa
The way that Nolan decided to use color film versus black and white made the two different timelines–technically three different timelines–straight for the viewer. The use of black and white for the later Strauss parts and color for the earlier Oppenheimer-centered parts really helped me keep the storylines separate, but at the same time, it was a jarring difference.

I also have a lot of admiration for the restraint with which the characters were written, except for maybe one scene where General Groves kind of loses it, when he’s hollering about it being the most important thing in the twentieth century. I commend the care with which some of the actors took to become their characters, like Robert Downey, Jr., who in his depiction of Strauss is about as far from Iron Man as you could possibly get. They say Cillian Murphy was on a diet the entire time they were filming because he wanted to maintain that gaunt look from cigarettes and coffee and alcohol, hardly ever eating, hardly ever sleeping. I think that those choices really made the characters come to life. Rather than just being a story, you felt like you were watching the people in how carefully they copied their mannerisms and cadence, like Will did with Marshall.

Glen
Let’s talk about the visual language of the film, too. You mentioned the use of black and white. I think it’s interesting that a lot of films would use black and white to suggest events taking place earlier in the narrative, but here it’s flipped. Nolan chose to use black and white film in a situation where media was present, kind of how their footage would have looked.

Clare
That’s exactly what I was thinking. You feel like you could bring up a video of the confirmation on YouTube and that’s what it would look like. You might have to correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that Nolan had them film on black and white stock rather than just flipping it from color footage.

Melissa
I think you’re right. I also think he almost had to do it that way because if black and white were used to depict earlier events, the explosion would have been in black and white–Glen and I have seen pictures and video of the Trinity explosion in black and white. If you compare that footage to what we saw in Oppenheimer in living color, there’s just no comparison. It was incredible. So I think that he really had to do the past in color to get that visual effect of the explosion in so many ways, not just the shape of it, the breadth of it, the hugeness of it, but the brilliance of color.

Clare
You can see the fire. It’s like you can almost feel it coming out.

Melissa
At one point, it’s so hot that there really is no color, as though the heat is so magnificent and so heavy in that explosion that color gets drained from the surroundings. I also think that keeping those parts in color helped keep the focus on Oppenheimer’s story, rather than the denouement with Strauss.

Clare
A lot of the scenes at Los Alamos were outside but the scenes with Strauss were interiors. Look, you don’t need color to bring the indoors to life. But because a lot of it was shot on location in New Mexico, I think the color is immersive. We’ve all seen black and white pictures of everything, but if you want to make a movie about it, you want to be able to really be like “This is something you haven’t seen before.”

 

Glen
Mm hmm. I wasn’t expecting so much of an emphasis on Oppenheimer’s subjective experience through the more surreal or dreamlike visual elements of the film. You know, there were scenes during the security hearing where the room begins to shake or vibrate and Oppenheimer is stationary, there’s the scene after the Trinity test where the moral ramifications of the bomb begin to intrude on the celebratory mood after the successful test through imaginary charred bodies and abrupt changes in characters’ expressions.

I also thought it was interesting that there are these interludes with the film which depict chemical, physical, and astronomical processes, but are really just abstract footage of dust particles, flames, or forms.

I kept thinking about Twin Peaks: The Return. There’s an episode, about halfway through the series, where the main narrative set in 2017 abruptly stops and there’s this long, long, long, long, long scene of the Trinity detonation. The camera moves and moves and moves deeper into the heart of the explosion, and it’s maybe five minutes of just light, shadow, and particles. There’s no handle, no narrative, just these flickering images, drawing from mid-twentieth century avant-garde filmmakers like Stan Brakhage. It’s kind of interesting to me that both David Lynch and Nolan, who really are diametrically opposed in terms of the aesthetics of their films, both latched on to this one key event of the twentieth century and find almost this incomprehensible beauty in its appearance, beyond its morality or even utility.

Melissa
I think there is beauty in chemistry, but how do you depict that on the big screen? I mean, think about how infinitesimally tiny an electron is. How do you portray that in a way that shows its power and energy? There’s really no good way to do it. And so you have to find something to stand in for it. Movement and light represent, I think, the energy of the electron also.

I think it almost represents the leaps in thought it took to create the Manhattan Project, which were not linear. They also had to make assumptions. There were several times in the movie where we heard that theory can only take you so far. Those images were reflecting the chemistry, but also the thought development from taking what they knew and turning it into what they needed.

Glen
Mhm.

Melissa
I like that we got to see a little bit of what Fermi was doing at Chicago and, selfishly, I really enjoyed seeing the bars of Pile-1. We have one downstairs in collections. But I’m glad that they showed us not just the Manhattan Project, but what was going on in the world of chemistry and physics as a whole, we learn about some big names like Niels Bohr and the impact that they were having, even indirectly, on this project.

Clare
There’s also the motif of water and water droplets. In the meeting where Strauss confronts Oppenheimer about the test being done in Russia, saying that it was proof that there was a spy at Los Alamos, there was a layer of water on the table in some shots during that scene. Even Einstein skipping stones at the pond. I’m still trying to unravel exactly what that means. It could be about struggle, like the characters are drowning, like water is rushing in and causing them to lose control. But then, I watched so many interviews, and I saw something about how Cillian Murphy said that Nolan told him to think about Oppenheimer as having to weave in between the raindrops of morality and immorality.

Glen
That’s interesting. I took that motif this way. Obviously you have a visual connection between a raindrop and a ripple as kind of being ground zero and the radius of an atomic blast. It’s kind of like the wide reaching implications and impact on every aspect of life going forward from two atoms smashing into each other, this almost unimaginably small action having enormous consequences, certainly beyond Oppenheimer’s life. I mean, we can never go back to a pre-atomic existence because of Trinity.

Melissa
I also think that the drops of water represented the fact that this could not be the work of just one man or woman. It had to be a team, a group of people. Drip, drip, drip. You remember when they had those containers of marbles to compare what they were doing at Oak Ridge and what they were doing at Hanford, showing how much refined material they had developed so far, drop by drop by drop. It’s tied all together with the fact that there were so many pieces and so many people that it took to create this one big “drop,” and the ripples that you were talking about that affected the world.

Clare
Repetition was a big thing throughout, like the shots of feet stomping. And when they take the two bombs away from Los Alamos and the chains are clanking against the side, you can still hear the clanking a little in the next scene, almost like the reverberations are still going through Oppenheimer’s head. Like, “Yes, the Trinity test was a success. Yes, we’re happy about that. But now they’re taking it away, and what are they going to do with it? And they’re not really listening to me anymore.” But what you think should be done reverberates outside of your control, really.

Melissa
I also think that the scene with Marshall where Stimson takes Kyoto off the list of candidates for bombing almost shows how the scientists really had no input on the use of this weapon that they had designed. It was literally out of their hands and out of their control. And I think that’s the point at which Oppenheimer started deviating from how the US government envisioned nuclear science. When those two bombs drove away, that was the divergence of Oppenheimer with the government line that led to him losing his security clearance.

Glen
What do you make of the film’s handling of moral questions raised by Oppenheimer’s work? Characters accuse him of chasing celebrity and putting on a show of regret rather than actual remorse.

 

Melissa
I think there was real, actual regret. As we see from General Marshall’s writings and attitude, the prevailing thought during the war was to do whatever it takes to win this war. We have to defeat Hitler, we have to stop the Japanese. And so I think that people didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the actual morality of what it took to win that war until they had time to do so.

During the development of the bomb, there was no time to do so. Maybe fleeting, a little bit here, a little bit there, but it really wasn’t until the use of the bomb and the reality of what the government wanted to do with that technology that I think Oppenheimer had the chance to start really being reflective. I think that he had just had to “go forward, go forward, go forward, go forward” for so long. Once the reports started coming in, within a couple of weeks, we had information about the devastation that it did not only to the land and the buildings, but the people, the physical bodies and to the people who survived. We were already seeing radiation poisoning within a few weeks, and we had that knowledge that I think then the moral questions reared their heads.

I think those questions were real for him. I think it was very real. I think that he thought, honestly, “when they see how horrible this is, everyone will shy away from it and no one will ever want to do it again.” I think that he was giving moral credence to people who maybe didn’t have it. And when it didn’t turn out that way, he was horrified and started working against the hydrogen bombs and an arms race.
That divergence with the government line, it really ended his career. Do I think that he knew that it would end his career? I don’t know. I think he thought he was powerful enough and influential enough that he could go talk to the president. And when he was rebuffed, I think that was a shock to his celebrity.

Glen
The scene with Truman is probably the most important scene in the film because it asks that question. I mean, Truman literally says, “Do you think anybody cares who built the bomb? I dropped it.” So it goes back to the idea of this network of individual people with differing personal objectives all culminating in a single event. It’s not really a question of morality because there are so many different moving parts and so many different things that you can take from this one project, whether it’s scientific, whether it’s political, whether it has to do with armament or, as I said, broader implications within culture. You can’t really talk about what might be the most important event in human history without taking all of the different facets of that event into consideration. Ultimately, it’s almost saying that talking about the moral implications of the decision to drop the bomb is besides the point, because that’s just one aspect of that program in general.

Clare
Yeah. You see how the scientists working on the bomb in Oppenheimer got caught up in just the science of it, like this is something no one’s ever done before. I mean, yes, we’re in a race against Nazis, but wouldn’t it be so interesting? Wouldn’t we learn so much just by being able to do this? And then as it starts to come together and you see immediately after the Trinity test, that’s when he starts having some more reservations.

I think they really did get caught up in the science, discovery, and innovation of it, so that they were able to compartmentalize a little bit of the morality. And I mean, you kind of have to. You devoted two years of your life to do this. I don’t know if you could live for two years, thinking “am I making something that’s actually going to destroy the world” all the time, twenty-four seven. You have to be able to compartmentalize it, which they definitely did. And then the second half of the movie starts to deal a little bit more with the morals of it. I think that the movie does an incredible job of talking about it and taking it incredibly seriously, and making the audience take it incredibly seriously.

I mean, when the movie finished, when I was watching it, no one got up for a solid twenty seconds. Everyone just sat there and thought for a while, and it took a minute for everyone to stand up and be like, “Oh, what did I just see?”
Nolan doesn’t give you a definitive answer about what you should think about it. You have to do it, which is, I think, the mark of an incredible filmmaker that’s not trying to just push, push, push, push an idea on to you, but allows the audience the latitude to really make their own decision based off of the three hours that they just witnessed.

Glen
Yeah, that’s a really good point. I also think it’s extremely wise on Nolan’s part that the test is not the climax of the film. It basically happens at the halfway point and it’s the culmination of everything you’ve seen up to then. And the rest of it really is not–not to make a nuclear pun–but is the fallout of that test, decades into the future.

Melissa
I think you’re right. The test really is the point at which we see two different kinds of people, where before the test it was all, “we’re a team, we’re creating this science, we’re inventing this science, we’re discovering the science. And we’re part of the team that is the whole US Army, Navy, Army Air Forces, Marines, civilians, government winning this war.”

And then at the test we see a split not only of an atom, but of a people, because for the rest of the movie, there’s two camps. There are the ones who are having trouble with the morality of this. We see the young scientists after the scene where they’re celebrating that the bomb has successfully been dropped, and one is outside being sick.
We see Oppenheimer, who is struggling with what nuclear science should be used for and the morality of the bomb. And we see others who agree with him. And then on the other side, we see Lewis Strauss, President Truman, and those who are pushing for the hydrogen bomb.

It’s not “all for one, one for all.” It’s “whoa, hold it. What do we do with this now and the two different camps?”

Glen
What’s your overall takeaway from the film? Melissa, can you offer any homework or guideposts for people who, like me, lack a background in scientific history, but want to go in and keep track of who was who and who was responsible for what? It can be kind of hard to keep such an enormous cast of characters straight.

Melissa
It’s really important to know the ten or twelve faces that we see on the screen over and over and over. Of course, you need to know something about Oppenheimer. You need to know something about General Leslie Groves. You need to know something about Lewis Strauss. You need to know something about Edward Teller. You need to know something about Ernest Lawrence.

It’s just as simple as going to the Atomic Heritage website and searching their names or reading the blogs that we have on the Marshall Foundation website written about Trinity and some other topics having to do with this. It will help you understand who they were, what their life was before, how they got pulled into the Manhattan Project and what their jobs were in the Manhattan Project. I think that that helps keep people straight a lot.

You also have to go into this knowing that it reflects a different time and place. It’s twenty minutes into the movie before you hear a woman speak. There was great discussion over this one female scientist, and whether it was appropriate for her to be there working on the Manhattan Project. Understand what you’re going to see is really a reflection of the scientific world of the United States in the early 1940s. It changed greatly after the war. So I think doing your homework on how the world was different and its expectations of roles for men and women will also help in understanding the Manhattan Project. You know, Oppenheimer made the famous comment, “we won’t get the best out of the scientists, if we don’t let them bring their families.” But even these women who had been in Masters chemistry programs were being hired as secretaries and phone operators. Nolan is trying very hard to give you the opportunity to see and learn.

Clare
I definitely agree with that. I’m very glad that I read and listened to what I did, because if I had gone in not knowing about the three different timelines or even just the names of these people, I would have been a little bit lost. I felt like I had much more of an understanding of what was going on because I vaguely knew–I didn’t have like spoilers or anything, but I vaguely knew the plot. I knew a little bit of what he was trying to get out.

I knew what some of the actors had to say about it. So even listening to interviews with some of the actors, because they give really great insight onto what Christopher Nolan was telling them, and they give great insight into their characters and like what it was like to work on it in the film.

I even watched a video that just explained a little bit of the basics of how the bomb was going to work, because I don’t do anything with science. I’m the history major, so I don’t understand. So I’m very glad that I did the research going into it. And then I also think that it just gets you a little bit more excited for the movie as well. It definitely got me more invested into it, it just got me even more excited.

Glen
I completely agree. I’m seeing it again this weekend and I’m looking forward to watching it kind of as a regular audience member and not somebody watching for work. But I’m kind of hard pressed to think of a biographical film that touches on all of these different aspects of an individual in such a graceful, elegant way.
It’s also just great to see a movie that’s made for grown-ups, a movie largely dedicated to discussions about physics and math and politics, have such an enormous impact on the box office. I think that’s something really special, and hopefully we see a lot more of it going forward.

Clare
Yeah, I don’t think that it talks over your head. It doesn’t try to talk down or try to be smarter than you or anything. I think it does make it very understandable, which is good because Nolan loves to play with these really abstract ideas. But I think in this movie, even with quantum physics being the topic, he does a really, really good job of making one of the more understandable movies that he’s made.

Melissa
But he’s also not playing down to us. He is expecting his audience to be not only feeling, but thinking and knowledgeable or willing to become knowledgeable and not to take the movie at face value, but to really consider why he portrayed it that way. And so I think that he really is issuing a challenge to become very involved moviegoers. I really like that. I think that too much of what we see in the theater is pablum to be consumed by the masses without thought. And I think what he’s given us instead is a huge repast that we can spend time on.

 

Glen began working at the George C. Marshall Foundation in 2018. His background is in American studies (focusing on film, music, aesthetics and twentieth-century consumer culture) and video production. He lives in Roanoke, Virginia.

Before becoming director of library and archives at the George C. Marshall Foundation, Melissa was an academic librarian specializing in history. She and her husband, John, have three grown children, and live in Rockbridge County with three large rescue dogs. Melissa is known as the happiest librarian in the world! Keep up with her @MelissasLibrary.

Clare O’Brien is serving as a summer intern at the George C. Marshall Foundation. She is a rising senior at Washington & Lee University, majoring in history. Like Gen. Marshall, she comes from Pennsylvania.