2023-07-28 04:00:00
My God, how I pity people who have succumbed to the “Barbenheimer” tendency: going to the cinema to see first Barbie following that Oppenheimerit’s like eating a big fat and salty burger before enjoying a delicious Michelin-starred gourmet meal. As much as I found Barbie indigestibleas much Oppenheimer fuels reflection. As much Barbie left me on my hunger, as much Oppenheimer fed my mind.
SAVAGERY
I had never seen my 15-year-old son in such a state: when the film came out Oppenheimer, he was pale, dazed, and didn’t open his mouth for 15 minutes. He was still reeling from the film’s finale, appalled by the dangers of nuclear proliferation and the arms race. There’s a lot of talk regarding the eco-anxiety plaguing young people, but I guarantee it’s nothing compared to the “nucleo-anxiety” that can overwhelm you when you emerge from this movie that asks fundamental questions regarding the future of humanity.
The film Oppenheimer is a demanding masterpiece, which appeals to the viewers’ intelligence, which poses essential philosophical and moral questions, which asks them to follow three intertwined stories in parallel (the creation of the bomb at Los Alamos, the investigation of Oppenheimer for his security clearance and the accreditation of Lewis Strauss as Minister of Commerce).
The chance of life made me go to see Oppenheimer a few days following reading a biography of the writer Albert Camus, who always thought and wrote that “the end does not justify the means”.
Two days following Hiroshima, and even before Nagasaki, from August 8, 1945, in the newspaper Combatthe author of To Fish et The Stranger wrote all the bad things he thought regarding the use of the atomic bomb. “We’ll sum it up in one sentence: mechanical civilization has just reached its final degree of savagery.”
While the entire media and intellectual sphere applauded the use of the bomb, Camus went it alone and affirmed: “We will have to choose, in the more or less near future, between collective suicide and the intelligent use of scientific conquests […]. In the meantime, it is permissible to think that there is some indecency in celebrating in this way a discovery which first serves the most formidable rage for destruction that man has shown for centuries.
It is precisely this moral dilemma that is at the center of Christopher Nolan’s film. Is a mass shooting acceptable to prevent another mass shooting? Did 220,000 Japanese have to be killed to end the war and allow American soldiers to come home?
TO BOMBS O
You know what pleases me the most in view of the huge box office success that the film is experiencing Oppenheimer? That millions of people around the world are passionate regarding a film that lasts three hours, during which we see almost only people talking, in small, cramped rooms. One thing struck me when I saw the film in Paris, in an IMAX theater: the silence and the listening quality for three hours and nine seconds. And the stricken faces of the spectators who, like my son, felt the shock of this punchy film.
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