Oppenheimer, Power, and AI
This review contains no spoilers. Except for one: this is a film about the power of human empathy.
Christopher Nolan’s new film Oppenheimer is a three-hour long meditation on physical, meta-physical, and institutional power—with no intermission. That’s my thesis statement, by the way. (More on this below.)
Very few people in the packed IMAX theatre where I saw Oppenheimer got up to leave the auditorium at any point. I (wisely) decided to forego popcorn and soda, so I could sit there glued to the massive screen without having to worry about leaving for any reason. No one in my general vicinity even checked their phones or made small talk with the people around them, at least not so far as I could tell; everyone was watching the movie (what a concept!). In addition to the somewhat remarkable fact that I haven’t seen a movie theatre this bustling with humanity since probably the mid-1990s (the opening weekend of Independence Day does come to mind), Oppenheimer met or exceeded my cinematic expectations on nearly every level. Some are calling it the best film of the 21st century. We shall see. But make no mistake: it is a very 21st century work of art.
Nolan has divided the film into three overlapping parts: 1. fission (splitting apart), 2. fusion (coming together), and 3. the unnamed final third in which the strands of the previous two hours coalesce into a final, devastating portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer (the man, historical figure) and the New World Order that he and his team of genius scientists ordained in the vast expanse of the New Mexico desert.
Starting with his time as a young man studying quantum physics in England and ending with the trumped-up kangaroo court Oppenheimer faced in the late 1950s, the film bobs and weaves its way through a fascinating and curiously overlooked period in the 20th century: the interwar period of the 1920s and 30s, when many ordinary Americans dallied with leftist ideals, earnestly seeking a more just and humane alternative to naked capitalism and the explosive inequalities that led to the Great Depression.
Many, like Oppenheimer himself, would later pay a steep price for even casual dalliance with Marxist and communist groups, and the film does a fine job dramatizing this in a punchy, almost breathless way, punctuated by a booming soundtrack that (at spots) could probably have used a more even-handed approach to audio mixing. There are moments where the crispness of the dialogue—and even the ability of the viewer to make out individual words—are drowned out by the glowering music and percussive booms of the score; in a film that is essentially dialogue-driven, this continues to strike me as an odd choice. But in those scenes where mind-bending sound and visual fury is precisely what the action calls for, it makes perfect sense.
My only other critique of Oppenheimer—and one that has been cited by other critics, including James Berardinelli of Reel Views—is that the female characters (and their romantic relationships with the titular character) are seriously underwritten. Anne Helen Peterson calls attention to this in her review, where she points out that the film not only fails the Bechdel Test (does a woman talk to another woman onscreen about something other than men?), but also evinces a “total disinterest in the interior life of women.”
The word for Oppenheimer is dense. The acting and the high-wattage star power is dense, the plot is dense and twisty and intricate, the interplay of sound and color (and at times the stunning absence of both) is dense and even macabre. The philosophical themes are dense and Frankenstein-ian. The film’s central question is as important for our moment as it was in 1945: What is the responsibility of the creator for the “Gadget” she has created once it has been loosed on the world? If we’ve learned anything about technology, it’s that you can never put the genie back in the bottle.
Oppenheimer is a throwback to the grand, movie-making spectacles of yesterday: Patton, Gandhi, Lawrence of Arabia, The Ten Commandments. This is why it needs to be seen on the largest screen possible. But it also represents new directions in filmmaking—it was shot on 70mm IMAX film, which is rare for a non-action movie, and much of it in was shot in stark black and white. The film uses no CGI (a breath of fresh air), and the script was written (by Nolan) in first-person perspective. Based on the 2005 book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and J. Martin Sherwin, considered Oppenheimer’s definitive biography, Nolan remains mostly faithful to the book’s version of events and the historical record about his life. (The scene in which Oppenheimer attempts to give his Cambridge tutor a cyanide-laced apple, only to have it nearly eaten by his scientific idol Niels Bohr, is based on actual events, though this is not really how the two scientists met.)
The acting is, as you would rightly expect from a film with this caliber of star power, perhaps the best of any movie in the last decade. As quite possibly the most revered director in Hollywood at the moment, Nolan is in the enviable position of being able to recruit anyone to be in his films; if he really wanted to, he could cast Kim Jong Un as an extra, and everybody involved would be just fine with that. (This would be an interesting casting choice, too, given that the film takes up the issue of mutually-assured mass destruction, among other juicy themes, and North Korea is a global bad actor with access to a nuclear arsenal.)
At a certain point, it becomes clear that every time a new character is introduced, the casting choice has been carefully calculated to bring an “ah!” to the audience: Robert Downey, Jr. (as Lewis Strauss) is transcendent in convincing age make-up (more on him below); Rami Malek even has a small part as David Hill, a character whose testimony in a later scene plays a pivotal role in the plot; Casey Affleck plays Boris Pash(kovsky), a communist-hating former Russian navy officer-turned-US military intelligence official; Matthew Modine (aka “Private Joker” in Full Metal Jacket) plays Vannevar Bush, the famous engineer, scientist, and inventor who envisioned, in 1945, many of the ethical and epistemological conundrums of the information age that face us today in living color. (He came up with the basic concept of hypertext on which the internet is built. In the 1940s. Decades before the technology existed to put this idea into practice.)
The parallels between the film’s dire warnings of Promethean ambition with respect to atomic weaponry and our own hubris regarding AI are obvious. Then as now, we are peering over the precipice of a new era for humanity. But, at the same time, we can’t even agree that vaccines prevent measles.
In an interview with PBS Newshour, when asked “Are you worried that history is repeating itself [with the potentially existential threats posed by generative AI]”, Nolan replied with the following statement:
I take some comfort in learning that the leading AI researchers literally refer to this moment right now as their “Oppenheimer moment.” They are looking to history for some kind of guidance about the role and responsibility of the creator of a piece of technology.
But of course, as a filmmaker, not as a documentary maker, and not as a politician, I am making a dramatic experience for the audience. I am trying to give them a thrill ride. It’s weird to use the term “entertainment” in relation to a story that’s so serious, but entertainment in cinema is about engagement with a story, and my job as a filmmaker is to pull the audience in for this very, very dramatic story. And I think it raises a lot of relevant and troubling questions, but it doesn’t provide any easy answers.
Astute critics have noted that the bulk of the film’s action is framed by an overarching scene that plays out in the most banal setting imaginable: a cramped, windowless conference room where Oppenheimer must defend his security clearance. (The room bears a remarkable resemblance to the English department conference room at the University of South Carolina where I defended my dissertation.) Shot in full color, it is in these tense and transfixing scenes that Oppenheimer’s reputation as the “father of the atomic bomb” unspools in the stuffy back-and-forth of bureaucratic maneuvering and legalese. The film demonstrates, in high dramatic fashion, how even the most world-changing scientific breakthroughs are, in time, beholden to the same earthbound procedures, egoic hang-ups, and petty squabbles that, like it or not, govern us all.
In my summer graduate seminar on misinformation, media, and mindfulness (ENG-W 600), we are currently reading two books that, somewhat surprisingly, have a great deal to say about our current moment with respect to AI: Paulo Freire’s classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. (At least, this is the argument I am sketching out in the book project.)
Both texts, in their own unique ways, are about the power of empathy in a late surveillance capitalist state. Freire famously blasts the ego-driven, life-denying tendencies of the modern educational apparatus, with its bogus metrics and standardized testing and “banking model” of education (i.e., teachers put information directly into the heads of students), in favor of what he calls “problem-posing education,” an authentic relationship with inquiry and others as co-inquirers that functions as a humanist and liberating praxis. Problem-posing education helps people overcome their false perceptions of reality and engage in the emancipatory struggle that is, as he says, humanity’s “ontological vocation,” our very reason for existing. Much of the pedagogical hullaballoo regarding generative AI like ChatGPT4 centers around its perceived potential to completely destroy whatever shreds of the teacher-student relationship are left, turning what should be the beating heart of education—inquiry into the real conditions of existence—into a dead husk.
Freire puts it this way:
In problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation. Although the dialectical relations of women and men with the world exist independently of how these relations are perceived (or whether they are perceived at all), it is also true that the form of action they adopt is to a large extent a function of how they perceive themselves in the world. Hence, the teacher-student and the students-teachers reflect simultaneously on themselves and the world without dichotomizing this reflection from action, and thus establish an authentic form of thought and action.
(Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, translated by Myra Bergman Ramos, Continuum, 1970, p. 83; original emphasis)
We’ve backed ourselves into a corner, educationally, by surrendering the awesome, liberating power of education to the techno-bureaucratic regime of metrics and standards and benchmarking. We’ve taken something that is supposed to be transformative (the Latin root of the word education, educare, means “to lead out of”) and turned it into yet another product for sale in the interest of individual advancement for those who can afford to take advantage. There is very little problem-posing going on in American education today, at any level.
Meanwhile, as Lanier argues, we have surrendered to the BUMMER1 logic of social media platforms, which are designed to strip us of our empathy and, in the process, our humanity. In his sixth argument, “Social Media Is Destroying Your Capacity for Empathy,” Lanier writes, “Empathy is the fuel that runs a decent society. Without it, only dry rules and competitions for power are left” (76). What’s really going on is that, because of the BUMMER mechanism at work behind social media, we are seeing less than ever before of what others are seeing. We don’t understand each other. We don’t have empathy for the perspectives of others, especially those who disagree with us, and so we have no common language—aside from, possibly, cinematic experiences like Oppenheimer—through which we can communicate our fears and anxieties.
AI, like the weapons of mass genocide that Oppenheimer dramatizes, poses serious threats to humanity. But we have dug an epistemological and, by extension, political hole for ourselves that will be difficult to get out of unless something big snaps back into place with the human animal.
Then again, maybe this is the way it’s supposed to end.
What Oppenheimer dramatizes, finally, is just how vital human empathy and connection are in a totalizing matrix of technology. Oppenheimer’s antics after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki may seem inscrutable to us, but what the film is trying to suggest, I think, is that the very real mix of human feelings that he felt in the wake of this mass genocide exceeds both the power of technology and of our bureaucratic assemblages to account for or to normalize. There is a human remainder leftover that these dominant frames—and our shared cultural languages—are helpless to answer to or for. So what we are left with is the familiar old information age urge to keep developing more stuff to deal with the stuff we’ve created that we don’t know how to deal with because we can’t talk to each other in a language that we can hear. Who knows? Maybe the super-intelligent AI we end up unleashing on the world will turn out to be a better listener.
I am reminded of a quote from Warren Sturgis McCulloch (1898-1969), one of the founders of cybernetics, who had this to say way back in the late 1960s about the possibility of human replacement by artificially intelligent machines:
Man to my mind is about the nastiest, most destructive of all the animals. I don’t see any reason, if he can evolve machines that can have more fun than he himself can, why they shouldn’t take over, enslave us, quite happily. They might have a lot more fun. Invent better games than we ever did.
(Qtd. in N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, University of Chicago Press, 1999, p. 283.)
Play on.
BUMMER is an acronym that Lanier uses throughout the book to refer to the algorithmically-fueled machine behind social media. It stands for “Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent” and consists of six moving parts that make social media what it is:
A is for Attention Acquisition leading to Asshole supremacy.
B is for Butting into everyone’s lives.
C is for Cramming content down people’s throats.
D is for Directing people’s behaviors in the sneakiest way possible.
E is for Earning money from letting the worst assholes secretly screw with everyone else.
F is for Fake mobs and Faker society.
Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Henry Holt, 2018, pp. 28-29.