Lunch & Learn Goes Nuclear

It’s hard to look at an atomic explosion. 

In a recent Lunch & Learn presentation hosted by UB’s College of Science and Society, Assistant Professor Dr. Elizabeth Haas described the elaborate precautions taken by the witnesses of the Trinity test, as represented in Christopher Nolan’s 2023 film, Oppenheimer.  Assembled military personnel, scientists, and other people attending the atomic test are instructed to avert their eyes from the blast itself, and to only look at the resulting fireball through sheets of welder’s glass, or through thick tinted goggles, or, in Oppenheimer’s case, through a movie-camera-like protective eyepiece.

Dr. Haas identifies the mise-en-scene of this historical reenactment in symbolic terms, as a statement about the way the film itself – and culture generally – mediates its representations of nuclear bombs and the prospect of nuclear war through distortional lenses. 

Titled “Disowning Knowledge in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer,” Dr. Haas’s presentation explored the film’s sustained engagement with “disowning knowledge,” the epistemic challenge of inhabiting a world in which the Other must be recognized as fundamentally separate—and therefore never fully knowable—a difficulty that organizes the film’s narrative logic and visual economy of looking, or what Dr. Haas called its atomic gaze.

Considering the context invoked throughout Oppenheimer of quantum theory, Dr. Haas characterizes the atomic gaze as the experience of staring into the atom itself, where Heisenbergian uncertainty destabilizes the coordinates of knowledge in a way that redounds on the stability of the identity of the subject-perceiver.  The witness of quantum reality experiences a scrambling of their own identity, possibly even refracting into a multiverse of parallel selves.  Dr. Haas points out that this is basically a synopsis of the plot of Oppenheimer as a film, which shows how his participation in the Manhattan Project serves to disfigure and even diffract Oppenheimer’s identity out of a state of coherence, so that he can be both the mastermind of the A-Bomb while also trying to advocate for disarmament, an ardent supporter of the use of the bomb in Japan and a haunted guilt-ridden apocalypticist, a riddle to his wife, to history, and to himself.

A similar effect pervades the structure of the film itself, Dr. Haas argues, which, on the one hand, is an enormously successful film warning contemporary audiences about the chronic threat of nuclear war, while simultaneously being a film that, Dr. Haas argues, marginalizes the human impact of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that resulted from Oppenheimer’s work.  Dr. Haas critiques Oppenheimer as a film that, while it represents the uncanny mysteries of the quantum realm as cinematically depictable, seems to deliberately evade or deflect representations of the human consequences of the nuclear bombings of Japan.  Although the film seems to articulate a warning about nuclear war, Dr. Haas contends that the movie actually functions to deflect the audience’s attention away from a meaningful confrontation with the reality of nuclear war.  Dr. Haas compares this deflection to the way 1950s B-movies represented fears of nuclear war by transmogrifying nuclear weapons and nuclear catastrophe into absurd symbolic monsters like the blob in The Blob (1958) and the giant ants of Them (1954).  It is as if the atomic gaze always requires some distortional or oneiric symbolization.  To look at the bomb itself – to directly confront the possibility of global annihilation – would scorch the retinae, traumatize the psyche, and require human beings to make the kinds of difficult choices that they are happy to find any excuse to avoid making, even if it means willfully blinding themselves in a bad-faith disavowal of the acknowledgement that they are hurdling themselves toward their own fiery self-destruction.

Dr. Haas’s remarks were followed by a robust discussion among the Lunch & Learn attendees.  Dr. Tasha Belfiore agreed that Oppenheimer seemed to avoid representing the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but wondered if any cinematic images could properly convey the attack without devolving into exploitation or spectacle.  Dr. Randy Laist extended Dr. Belfiore’s statement, opining that the horror of “the bomb” is on such a scale that it is unimaginable and unspeakable, and that Nolan’s film attempts to confront the problem of how cinematic language can represent the unrepresentable.  Dr. Elise Fles pushed back against Dr. Laist’s position, insisting that, as a historical event, the effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings are epistemologically available.  Elena Cahill, UB's VP of Innovation, Strategy, and Advancement, suggested that, to her, the film depicts the borders of human knowledge and the existential condition of living in a cosmos grounded in uncertainty.  Fred Ferraro suggested other movies, such as Barefoot Gen (1983), that make an explicit attempt to represent the human toll of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.  Dr. Justin Caithaml encouraged attendees to think about other instances of cultural erasure, pointing out that the same kinds of epistemological structures that distort our ability to talk about nuclear weapons also affect our ability to talk directly about race, sexuality, disability, and other subjects.

Dr. Haas’s presentation provoked attendees to think critically and in sometimes troubling ways about history, technology, cinema, knowledge, and the whole scope of human reality, from its subatomic structure to the ultimate fate of the human species and of Earth itself.  And there was free pizza, so it was win-win.