I’ve Already Seen The Oppenheimer Movie. It Was About Leslie Groves

I’m not sure you can visit a gas pump or pay a water bill or dig a ditch or stop at a tollbooth or go to a cookout and avoid three topics at any of them. Everyone’s singing to the tune of John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt, only the words have morphed into Taylor Barbie Oppenheimer Swift! I’m giving all three a hard pass, no matter how hard a pass their press flacks make at me.

But the Oppenheimer movie intrigues me in one way. They already made an Oppenheimer movie, in 1989, and while it didn’t set the world on fire (sorry, too soon?), it was pretty good as entertainment, and not bad at explaining the power politics behind the making of the atom bomb. I’ve not seen one reference to that movie anywhere, including the gas pumps I mentioned, and I kinda wonder why. The movie had its problems, I’ll grant you that. They tried to drag romance kicking and screaming into the thing. The casting gorgon threw in John Cusack in an entirely fictional, borderline absurd role. But I suppose they can be forgiven for trying to gin up some female interest in a story that mostly revolved around arithmetic with a lot of letters mixed in on blackboards in the desert. Oppenheimer has some sexy time with a comely commie, which isn’t as thrilling as any of the assorted Helgas in low-cut Nazi outfits vamping around in any number of bad WWII movies, but it’s not nothing.

Everyone agrees that Paul Newman was miscast as Leslie Groves. Everyone but me, I mean. He’s an unusual choice, I’ll grant you, but he acts like a general. The screenwriter was smart enough to make it a weird kind of buddy picture between Groves and Oppenheimer.  And the fellow they hired to play Oppenheimer, Dwight Shultz, portrayed a robodweeb just fine. But the movie cost $30 million in 1989 bucks, and made $3.5 mil, so I guess my affection for it is particular, not general amongst the hoi polloi.

I gather Cillian Murphy plays Oppenheimer this time around, and he’s more popular than free samples at a bank, so that’s bound to help the war effort, so to speak. It’ll put more butts in the seats than Paul Newman with an AARP card could. Maybe someone can make a better movie, but can you tell the story better? I doubt it. Because the story of the atom bomb is as much about Leslie Groves as Oppenheimer, or Szilard, or Einstein, or any of the other eggheads Groves hired, like particularly effete plumbers, to unclog his Tokyo toilet in a big way.

The word genius gets thrown around a lot these days, generally by people who wouldn’t recognize one if they saw one, or would burn him at the stake if they did. Being able to do enough math to torture python scripts for a FAANG company doesn’t make you a genius, or a good judge of one, either. Everyone who worked on the Manhattan Project was about as bright as people get, but there was only one, bona fide genius there, if you ask me, and it wasn’t Oppenheimer. The smartest man at Los Alamos didn’t even live there. When they couldn’t make the thing work, Oppenheimer called in John Von Neumann, the smartest man to walk the earth since Imhotep.

“We are in what can only be described as a desperate need of your help. We have a good many theoretical people working here, but I think that if your usual shrewdness is a guide to you about the probable nature of our problems you will see why even this staff is in some respects critically inadequate…I would like you to come as a permanent, and let me assure you, honored member of our staff. A visit will give you a better idea of this somewhat Buck Rogers project than any amount of correspondence.”

All the other scientists lived in a boy scout camp in the desert for years, getting nearly nowhere, and then Von Neumann dropped by in his three-piece suit and figured out that implosion would work, and how it would work. The rest was plumbing. Simple as that. Hell, even Leslie Groves was an organizational superman compared to Oppenheimer. After all, Groves did something remarkable twice.

It’s telling that Fat Man and Little Boy never mentions Von Neumann. They show an un-named deus ex machina character drop in and straighten out Seth Neddermeyer, who was a real person who gets a credit in the movie, so it’s not like everyone else is anonymous or fictitious or anything. For some reason, probably because Von Neumann was a patriotic square, and not the least ambivalent about what they were doing, the glitterati don’t like him much. They like people who paste a veneer of indecision over their ambition, to seem more moral than they really are. But Like Paul Newman says, “…the death march of Bataan, was that moral?”

I don’t need movies to help me make up my mind over whether dropping bombs of any sort on Japan was moral. My father hung in a little glass ball underneath a B-24J Liberator in WWII and dropped plenty of bombs on Japanese soldiers, or their oil dumps, anyway. He was a profoundly moral man. One of the planes that sometimes flew in formation with my dad’s squadron got shot down by ground fire, but one crewman miraculously made it out alive, and parachuted down to the island of Koror. He was immediately beheaded with a sword, along with a few other fliers and a hearty handful of missionaries, right there on the beach. And all you backseat driving logicians on Twitter who think the Japanese didn’t need an atomic reason to quit fighting, maybe you should try understanding arithmetic before you take a crack at physics. They didn’t surrender after the first one, did they? They asked Yoshio Nishina, the head of their atomic bomb program, if the blast in Hiroshima was indeed atomic, and whether he could duplicate it within six months. It was a totalitarian government. It only understood total war.

Maybe that’s why I re-watch Fat Man and Little Boy from time to time. The Manhattan Project was durn interesting. The movie didn’t pussyfoot around the politics of it, and they showed both sides of the argument about using the gadget they’d made. The military wanted to make it, and use it. Lots of ex-European scientists were very enthusiastic about a fission mission over Berlin, but felt instantly ambivalent about doing the same to Japan after VE Day.

I’m sure the recent movie will make the scientists sound very ethical and righteous and sympathetic when they change their minds overnight about building and dropping a big bomb when the target shifts, but it reminds me of the old joke about a man offering a beautiful woman a million dollars to have sex with him. When she says, “Sure,” he says, “OK, will you do it for ten dollars?” She replies, “Hell no, what do you think I am?” The man answers, “We’ve established what you are, we’re just haggling over the price.”