my dream girl is me but, at my full potential
Oppenheimer has a scene of a very beautiful naked woman fucking a very beautiful naked man and there is zero sexual energy displayed on screen. Zero. Said woman stops halfway through it and makes the man (Oppenheimer himself) read a poem in Sanskrit about death, which the audience is supposed to associate with the atomic bomb. There is a second attempt at romance: Oppenheimer flirts while explaining quantum mechanics. Looking into his future wife's eyes under his big eyelashes, he says that matter is mostly empty, negative space; it's the bond between atoms that creates the illusion of matter being solid. What we experience as touch, he says while holding her hand, is the repulsion of this bond that stops one body from going through the other. It was in fact appealing to me, but then by the end of the movie Oppenheimer has visions of carbonized bodies laid before him: his invention destroyed matter in such a brutal way that he steps not onto them but through them. So basically. All scenes about sex are not about sex; they are about death. What is about sex in fact, the climax, if you will, is death: the most erotic scene in the movie, the high point of tension that takes your breath away, is a scene of people watching an atomic bomb explode. And that really says all you need to know about how Nolan's mind operates
Love that Oppenheimer is a deeply disturbing horror movie about a man forced to accept that he is, in a person, the representative manifestation of mankind’s evil in committing one of the greatest horrors of human history - LITERALLY acting as the modern Prometheus, tormented by his sins for the remainder of time. Knowing that he will never be pitied and his actions will forever be utterly unforgivable because the blood of genocide and the potential of total human annihilation will eternally drip from his hands.
But also the simultaneous indictment by the film that to blame a single person for the Manhattan Project is to refuse to accept your own capacity for great evil if the ends ever seem to justify the means, and the culpability of every member of a species that lets itself create something so unspeakably terrible.
Hate that twitter’s take on such a nuanced and brilliantly handled examination of those issues is “movie bad because protagonist not evil enough.”
don’t think i can call it a hyperfixation anymore fam im afraid im just long term insane about this piece of media
“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
what the anti-ageing 30 step skincare preemptive botox girlies haven’t worked out yet is that youthfulness is an inner glow that comes from playing and laughing and losing yourself to the present moment
you can be in a perfectly preserved skin sack but if you don’t smile or play in the sunshine then you’re ageing yourself faster than any of us with our laugh lines and full lives