The Problem of Empathy in Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer.”
There is a scene around the 2-hour mark in which the eponymous main character, Oppenheimer, addresses an audience. They’re soon muted, but a piercing scream cuts into the silence. Oppenheimer’s expressed pride is presented as subverted: the rumbling of a bomb, the shaking and blurred background, the audience’s thwarted applause — silenced by the reality of what he unleashed into the world — and the blinding flash of the bomb’s explosion are corralled to throw his dubious conviction into sharper relief. Sound is restored, and the people’s cheers are distorted and indistinguishable from the instruments we typically associate with horror. They screech. A woman’s skin disintegrates into films of paper. Oppenheimer retrieves his foot from the corpse of a victim abstracted by their charred remains. Another woman cries. And he walks among them, dazed, entrapped by the shadow of his own achievement.
Saidiya Hartman has a lot to say about the trouble of rerouting empathy from victims to their oppressors (in the scene described, the impact of the A-bomb is inscribed onto white bodies)…where the oppressor ends up just feeling for himself, rather than his victims. By choosing to make suffering pass through and be legible from the white audience members’ bodies, the scene becomes a commentary on Oppenheimer’s skewed perspective at the same time that it reproduces the violence done to Japanese people.
In Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Hartman shares the following pointed insight:
By making the suffering of others his own, has Rankin ameliorated indifference or only confirmed the difficulty of understanding the suffering of the enslaved? Can the white witness of the spectacle of suffering affirm the materiality of black sentience only by feeling for himself? Does this not only exacerbate the idea that black sentience is inconceivable and unimaginable but, in the very ease of possessing the enslaved body and slipping into the skin of the other, ultimately elide an understanding and acknowledgment of the slave’s pain?
Rankin must substitute himself and his wife and children for the black captive in order that this pain be perceived and experienced. So, in fact, Rankin becomes a proxy and the other’s pain is acknowledged to the degree that it can be imagined, yet by virtue of this substitution, the object of identification threatens to disappear. In order to convince the reader of the horrors of slavery, Rankin must volunteer himself and his family for abasement. The effort to counteract the habitual indifference to black suffering requires that the white body be positioned in the place of the black body in order to make this suffering visible and intelligible. Yet if this violence can become palpable and indignation fully aroused only through the masochistic fantasy, then it becomes clear that empathy is double-edged, for in making the other’s suffering one’s own, this suffering is occluded by the other’s obliteration. The slave remains an object to be animated by human feelings.
Scenes of Subjection, p. 25
In Nolan’s film, it is the white spectators in the audience, rather than Oppenheimer himself, who are made into vessels that dramatize, with artistic and euphemized flair, the suffering of the bomb’s victims. This substitution still inherits the problems Hartman critiques. Rather than a named and familiar individual figure like Rankin from Hartman’s text or Oppenheimer from Nolan’s, it positions whiteness as a political constituency and structure in a way that engenders a “facile intimacy,” that only succeeds in obliterating the Other once more.
“We ‘feel ourselves into those we imagine as ourselves.’ And as a result, empathy fails to expand the space of the other but merely places the self in its stead.”
This is a fraught racial tension that moves beyond the self to encompass an entire order of symbolic meaning. Racial injury is anticipated and made legible only through whiteness. Regardless of Nolan’s intent, the impact of this decision is certain: the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are reduced to victimhood. They are faceless and nameless (as a close reading of Oppenheimer who does not physically encounter the Japanese, it can’t be that kind of expansive film, one could reasonably argue), and this makes the violence of that scene all the more cutting.
Hartman also has a lot to say about the archive as an inherently violent grave, and that reprising its figures risks reinscribing its violent grammar. In other words, attempts to “recover” and “give voice” to those who suffered and depict their suffering risk reproducing violence:
“What are the protocols and limits that shape the narratives written as counter-history, an aspiration that isn’t a prophylactic against the risks posed by reiterating violent speech and depicting again rituals of torture? How does one revisit the scene of subjection without replicating the grammar of violence?”
“Venus in Two Acts” by Saidiya Hartman
So of course the film takes care not to show us the impact of the A-bomb on Japanese civilians directly, and instead shows us Oppenheimer uncomfortably turning away from the images of its effects, unable to face his work’s “success.”
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And perhaps this is the “nuanced” and “complicated” representation of the “tortured” main character that the film is aiming for. And yet, it is precisely the film’s considered and careful portrayal, the “brilliance” of its sound design, its “masterful” portrayal, that makes it immoral. This film shows how proficiency and mastery, or perhaps approximations of it, serve not only to deliver a film that’s “good,” even “great,” by film standards, but to inoculate itself against political indictment.
The film does not merely capably present violent hegemony as it was and is — thus carefully avoiding reducing itself to didactic and moral posturing. It is not so much a representation as an authorization of hegemony. It does not subtly subvert so much as ironically reinscribe it.
The proof not only resides in its own images, but in the film’s effects — in people’s responses to it as yet another Western cinematic triumph that centers the perpetrators of unspeakable violence. “Nolan’s best yet.” The Western auteur as homo narrans. The story turns on making the promethean origins of evil intelligible, understandable, even humane — a tour de force. “What a film!” This is the kind of reception that turns my stomach. The lives of the victims are hushed, their deaths off-screen, but the violent grammar of the archive is reinscribed anyway.
The West still does not see the US as comparable to genocidal, racist Nazis, or as even worse in some respects, and it shows in this film. All the film’s nuance and humanized discourse are distractions. Saidiya Hartman also wrote about how the conferral of humanity upon the formerly enslaved ironically served to make them liable to further punishment and unfreedom post-abolition. Here, humanity is similarly weaponized (whether intentionally or inadvertently) to protect the reputation of the US as morally superior to Nazi Germany, even as it vaporized Japanese, Chinese, and Korean civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and subjected the rest to slow death and psychological torture. The man who made this act possible felt bad about it, after all. And he had liberal sensibilities, for he was mindful of Native Americans and an adherent of integration. War is not black and white. And how incredibly was his pathos depicted! How intriguing the political machinations in the belly of US Empire!
And yet, perhaps the film anticipates and critiques its own triumph in the muted applause of the folks in that scene I describe above. Like the award that Einstein says is not for him, but for the people awarding it, Nolan might be trying to be self-reflexive about the problem of representation his film presents. It is similarly praised and awarded. But when has an object’s awareness of its own obscenity ever prevented it from indulging itself again and again?
In any case, I hope that if you’re ever in Japan, you’ll visit the peace memorial museums in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to bear witness for yourself.
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Notes
I purchased and read volume one of “Hadashi no Gen” or “Barefoot Gen” by Keiji Nakazawa during my trip to Hiroshima last year.
Here is an excerpt from the author’s note:
“In 1966, after seven years of illness, my mother died in the A-Bomb Victims Hospital in Hiroshima…I began drawing comics about the A-bomb as a way to avenge my mother.
…I named my new story Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen). The young protagonist’s name, Gen, has several meanings in Japanese. It can mean the ‘root’ or ‘origin’ of something, but also ‘elemental’ in the sense of an atomic element, as well as a ‘source’ of vitality and happiness.
I envisioned Gen as barefoot, standing firmly atop the burnt-out rubble of Hiroshima, raising his voice against war and nuclear weapons. Gen is my alter ego, and his family is just like my own. The episodes in Barefoot Gen are all based on what really happened to me or to other people in Hiroshima.”
