It's the long-awaited Oppenheimer episode! We explore the man, the myth, the movie: J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb." Our esteemed guests are Drs. Todd Timberlake (physics), Kirsten Taylor (international relations, and Clint Peters (literature and film). This episode offers an engaging blend of history, science, and ethics as we scrutinize Oppenheimer's moral dilemmas and understand his legacy as portrayed in the recent film.
We play the game "Oppenheimer or Stoppenheimer?" We explore the ethics of the atomic bomb and modern warfare. We discuss the United Methodist theological position on warfare. And in our "Leftovers" segment, we allow Clint to take a deep dive into his insights on Christopher Nolan's production of the Oppenheimer film.
It is a fun and insightful episode, so please join us at the table, come and get it, and dig in!
The views expressed on Church Potluck are solely those of the participants and do not represent any organization.
It's the long-awaited Oppenheimer episode! We explore the man, the myth, the movie: J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb." Our esteemed guests are Drs. Todd Timberlake (physics), Kirsten Taylor (international relations, and Clint Peters (literature and film). This episode offers an engaging blend of history, science, and ethics as we scrutinize Oppenheimer's moral dilemmas and understand his legacy as portrayed in the recent film.
We play the game "Oppenheimer or Stoppenheimer?" We explore the ethics of the atomic bomb and modern warfare. We discuss the United Methodist theological position on warfare. And in our "Leftovers" segment, we allow Clint to take a deep dive into his insights on Christopher Nolan's production of the Oppenheimer film.
It is a fun and insightful episode, so please join us at the table, come and get it, and dig in!
The views expressed on Church Potluck are solely those of the participants and do not represent any organization.
I felt like I was in jail today.
Speaker 2:Save it for the podcast. Save it for the podcast, alright, so tell that story, clint. So what have you been doing this afternoon?
Speaker 3:Well, hey, everybody, yeah, I went to jail today. Oh yeah, juvenile Detention Center, so I'm taking some of the creative ideas.
Speaker 3:You're no juvenile, no I know, just in my heart, I'm taking a writing and community class to the Juvenile Detention Center, which is not called the Detention Center. I'm so sorry. It's called the Rome Youth Development Center, just to be like progressive, I think, although most people call it the Bob because it's named after Bob Richards, so you can just call it the Bob. So I took the kids to the Bob today, the kids being college students, but I talked creative writing and I also hear that you were held up.
Speaker 3:Well, I mean there's just I mean there's so many locks and doors and like it's like such a Securitis route to go through the complex to get to the library We've retalked classes and then to get out of that, blah, blah, blah. You need to make sure all the pencils were counted. You know, one time I was there and they were about to do a strip search of everyone because they couldn't find a pencil. Some joker had it but he gave it up. So it was good yeah.
Speaker 2:Can you all beat that for what you've been doing this afternoon?
Speaker 1:I felt like I was in jail today. Alright, I got another one.
Speaker 2:Alright, welcome everyone to Church Potluck, where we are serving up a smorgasbord of Christian curiosity. I'm your host, dale McConkey, sociology professor and United Methodist pastor, and you know there are two keys to a good Church Potluck Plenty of variety and engaging conversation. And this is exactly what we are trying to do here on Church Potluck. We're sitting down with friends and we're sharing our ideas on a variety of topics from a variety of academic disciplines and a variety of Christian traditions. So let's set the table today. What are we going to be talking about?
Speaker 2:Everybody's worried about the atomic bomb, but nobody's worried about the day my lord will come, when he'll hit great gold and money like an atom bomb. When he comes, it's the Oppenheimer episode, and, I might add, the long-awaited Oppenheimer episode, jay Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, more recently the topic of a fantastic movie. So what about the atomic bomb in Christian faith? Why was the first atomic bomb called Trinity? Was creating and dropping the atomic bomb a morally sound choice? And what does it mean for us humans to be living in the nuclear age? What should Christians think about war in general and nuclear war in particular? Let's chew on these and many other questions. You might be asking yourselves, dale, who are the Church Potluck guests that you have assembled to chat today, and we have a star studded group of guests here to talk to us. First of all, we have Dr Todd Timberlake. Todd, you are no stranger to Church Potluck and we are very glad to have you here again. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think this is my third time on the podcast. I am a physics and astronomy professor at Berry College and I guess I'm here because Oppenheimer was actually a physicist, so I'm representing the physics contingent. Yes, you are.
Speaker 2:In fact, we are having this podcast at the absolutely perfect time and I say that with huge sarcasm, because it is not in too many theaters at the moment and you can't stream it till December. So it's not the wrong time to be having the op-ed, but it is the perfect time because you were not around later in the late summer to do this and everybody said we must have Todd.
Speaker 4:Timberlake and I hadn't seen the film either. I actually just saw it this past weekend. The timing works great for me.
Speaker 3:I will say for anyone who wants their Oppenheimer fix Dale, you're it right until December.
Speaker 2:That's right. That's right. Yeah, I wonder how many people are out there with an Oppenheimer. Is it Oppenheimer?
Speaker 4:or Oppenheimer? That's a good question. I've always heard it Oppenheimer, but we'll just go with whatever comes out of our mouth. I think they refer to him as Oppie Oppie rather than. Opie, I just don't feel that close to him, because OPie is somebody totally different.
Speaker 2:I like it, Todd. Again, thank you very much. And our next guest is a first timer. We have Dr Kirsten Taylor. Dr Taylor, tell us about yourself.
Speaker 1:I am a professor of political science and international affairs at Berry College, which makes perfect sense for what we're talking about today. It does, and I also teach an honors class on the atomic era.
Speaker 2:Awesome. We are very glad to have you both as a first timer and as a guest for this particular episode and, of course, you get a second applause for being first timer, thank you, and we might give this guy a second applause too, but we have Dr Clint Peters.
Speaker 3:Hello, good to see you guys. I'm a professor of creative writing, particularly creative nonfiction, also film lover. I read a bunch of essays about movies. I have a burgeoning, obsessive film collection. I think this is my third time on the podcast. I did one with Todd and then we did horror. Right, yeah, I'm on here just to let you talk about it.
Speaker 4:I'm glad they're so memorable for you.
Speaker 3:They were very memorable. I like that. No, it's my memory, it's shot. But yeah, I'm going to just talk about the film and the production, stuff like that.
Speaker 2:Fantastic, let's go ahead and happen. In the game show mood lately, let's do another game show. All right, today's game show Oppenheimer or Stoppenheimer, of course.
Speaker 3:Already Stoppenheimer, that's right.
Speaker 2:The title of the game show Oppenheimer or Stoppenheimer, stoppenheimer. All right, here we go. So just some questions for you and you tell us whether you are pro or against with these two titles here. The movie Oppenheimer was very good. Oppenheimer or Stoppenheimer, dr Todd Timberlake Oppenheimer, all the way.
Speaker 3:All the way. Oh yeah, like major OP Openheimer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, like Academy Award winner, that was a very easy one. Good job, everybody. They're going to get a little more difficult as we go along. Here, though, we should think of J Robert Oppenheimer as a hero. Oppenheimer, or Stoppenheimer, you're all thinking for this. Someone just jumped in. How about that? I don't like either of those.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You just remember the discomfort you're feeling right now when your students are having to take multiple choice.
Speaker 3:I would say he's more closely aligned to an antihero in like modern, contemporary understandings of the term antihero, like someone whose actions were following, whose goals are understandable but whose actions also precipitate disasters and other things. Unintended consequences, right, and it's almost a tragic figure. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So y'all are nodding your head in agreement with that. So does that mean you're not going to? You're not going to. I'm not going to be able to force you into this binary here.
Speaker 4:Nope Oppenheimer or something.
Speaker 3:Oh, dale, you're going to Dale, just call me baby, because you're not putting me in that corner. All right, there you go.
Speaker 2:Well done, baby, all right. Third question Given the context of World War II, building the bomb was a good thing to do. Oppenheimer or Stoppenheimer?
Speaker 1:That's another corner that I don't want to go into.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I have no expertise on which to judge that. Can you define good?
Speaker 2:This was for you to decide, and then?
Speaker 4:we were going to discuss the nuance. So what I will say is I think it's an understandable choice at the time. I understand people who made the decision to both build it and use it. I understand that choice In hindsight, knowing more information than maybe they knew at the time, whether it was at the right choice. I don't want to answer.
Speaker 2:Well, how about knowing that the Nazis were also working on this technology?
Speaker 4:But they actually weren't very. They had some major stumbling blocks and they found out about that, it seems. But that was late in the process that we found out that the Nazis actually were not doing a very good job of developing the bomb. Until that point it made a lot of sense. Was Japan also?
Speaker 3:working on it.
Speaker 4:Not that I know Okay.
Speaker 3:One thing I'll say is I definitely agree with Todd. I can understand Hiroshima. I definitely second guess Nagasaki. Did they need to drop it twice? You end on your goal.
Speaker 2:I know you have jumped ahead Because I try to be precise in saying building the bomb was a good thing to do. The next one, given the context of World War II, using the bomb was a good I'll even soften it was an understandable thing to do Oppenheimer or Stoppenheimer.
Speaker 1:With what we need today.
Speaker 2:Stoppenheimer Hindsight, you'd say Stoppenheimer, I would. We'll get more into that for sure. Any others?
Speaker 3:I would say Nagasaki Stoppenheimer. I don't know about Hiroshima enough.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I mean the film touches on the issue of the original goal was to beat the Nazis, to make the bomb, and by the time we use the bomb, the Nazis had already surrendered. So yeah, it's questionable. On the other hand, the invasion of Japan how many lives would that have cost? That seems to be the debate that people provide, and I don't know enough about that too.
Speaker 1:I think there's a lot of other reasons to think that Japan might have surrendered anyway, given the chance.
Speaker 4:And the film touches on that. I know very briefly but yeah, with I will defer to Kirsten's knowledge and say Stoppenheimer.
Speaker 2:But yeah, we all are quite wishy-washy but, I'm still going to give you the game show correct sound and thank you for playing Oppenheimer or Stoppenheimer.
Speaker 4:Even Alex Trebek doesn't give questions that hard.
Speaker 2:That's only going to get easier the rest of the day. Right, we are talking about a difficult subject, but let's start off with a fairly easy question. Ty, we're going to toss it over to you Just watching the movie. And, by the way, folks, we're going to just not worry about spoilers or anything, because they developed the bomb and they do use it.
Speaker 2:Spoilers as a physicist watching this movie, how well do they get? The closer you are to something, you see the mistakes and you see the flaws. But in terms of physicists doing their work together, theoretical and applied, what did you think about the way a physicist's job was portrayed?
Speaker 4:I mean it's interesting because you don't really see them doing much physics right.
Speaker 2:You see all the numbers on the board that number sorry letters, all the letters and all the symbols. It's all symbols.
Speaker 4:And I will want to watch the film again in part to study the blackboards a little more closely and see if they're the right things. But I mean, I feel like the portrayal of the physicist was accurate. But mostly what you're seeing is the kind of administrative side of all of that and the negotiations and power struggles.
Speaker 2:Well, as an administrator being chair of your department. How well was the portrayal?
Speaker 4:Yeah, exactly like the way my department functions. I mean, I think one of the things I found really interesting was the scenes of the visions in Oppenheimer's head, as he's thinking about quantum mechanics and the sound effects that went along with that, and I thought I wouldn't claim that's an accurate way of portraying what it's like to think about quantum mechanics, but I think it caught some essence of that Trying to capture visually what's going on in the mind.
Speaker 4:And so I think it wouldn't have played as well had they actually just worked through all the mathematics on screen Right. So that was a good choice.
Speaker 2:Or just saw Oppenheimer just sitting there staring at his face, thinking that that probably needs a little bit of visual activity there.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and one of the things that I, as I understand it is true about Oppenheimer the physicist is that he was more intuitive and less a rigorous mathematician than some physicist, and so that that sort of visualization as opposed to just watching him write a bunch of things on paper that may really capture Some of how he thought. So, yeah, I thought that was very well done. I don't have complaint there. There was one statement where they said something about Einstein's special relativity leading to quantum mechanics.
Speaker 4:that I was like yeah, not really yeah, but other than that, I was pretty happy with the way the physics was portrayed.
Speaker 3:I'm just I wanted to read a quote to you guys. This is from the editor of the film. Jennifer I mean, I guess it's her name is pronounced a lame instead of lame, jennifer Lame. She wrote that when she decided to work on it she got excited. Quote I got excited by how can cinema help you understand something not intellectually right, but emotionally right, and it's an impossible to visualize that in other ways.
Speaker 3:And I do have a quick question for you guys who do you think Nolan talked to first about this movie? You guys want to take a stab at that. Of all the people involved in the film, the answer is Andrew Jackson. Yes, the president of the United States. No, just kidding, he is the visual effects supervisor who has that unfortunate name because Nolan wanted to talk to him about.
Speaker 3:How could we make these like very intellectual things, emotional for viewers, right, let's face it, like in my I would admit this like I'm not gonna be able to Intellectually analyze the things going on, but I want to feel the headspace of what openheimer and his fellows are like going through. What is that? What does that feel like? So early on, the special effects supervisor would make these footages of like metallurgy, like metals, like dripping into water and like waveform plasma stuff. And the second person he talked to was his composer. He would show the composer these images and the composer would start thinking about the music because I think this movie is such a sonic experience. It was just one of the reasons I'm a little. I Do you guys feel this. I feel like there's gonna be this anti openheimer wave coming once it hits streaming, because people are gonna watch it on their phones and be like, oh, this is boring, how did y'all see it.
Speaker 3:I saw in the theater.
Speaker 1:I mean, but which, like I saw 70 millimeter I wish I could have, but you know.
Speaker 2:I was looking for an IMAX theater and couldn't find it, so I just saw it on a regular theater in Acworth. However, I was the only person in the theater, saved one other person and ha it was a small crowd, it was a small crowd in it and just the the sound was.
Speaker 2:It was intentionally loud, and lots obviously, but it was, but it was very loud for for one person in an empty theater. Let's get into the morality of the issues and Todd. One of the things that you said is is there certain knowledge that should be forbidden? And I'm just thinking what's going through your mind when you ask that kind of a question. It seems like that this is a very difficult thing to achieve, the idea of forbidding certain knowledge.
Speaker 4:So from a physicist's perspective. We tend to view the universe as something that is out there to be discovered, right, and there are no limits to what we might discover. There is no knowledge that's forbidden, and I think physicists tend to think that more knowledge is always better, because, I mean, that's that's what we, that's what we're there for is to try and accumulate that knowledge. But you could certainly argue that there is some knowledge that can certainly be used in dangerous and harmful ways, and it does raise the question of our would we actually be better off not knowing those things, not ever knowing those things, somehow being forbidden from knowing those things?
Speaker 2:this actually gets down to the root no pun intended of the tree of knowledge of good people.
Speaker 4:Right, it brings that story to mind. Right there, what are we casting ourselves out of the garden by meddling with this knowledge that really we ought not to meddle with and I will freely admit that I don't lean that way. I tend to be on the side of like it's better to know than to not know. But it does raise that question of, I guess, in my mind Are we capable of dealing with the knowledge that we find? And that that's really how I guess. How I would spin it is the knowledge in itself is neither good nor bad, but are we mature enough, are we wise enough to use that knowledge in an appropriate way, or are we gonna kill ourselves?
Speaker 2:with it. This is a theme that has come up in several of our episodes, whether we're talking about the internet or our Artificial intelligence, and now nuclear war.
Speaker 4:Oh yeah, AI is like very much the same thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that we have this, these powerful tools. I think that's what I think these as tools that can be used for tremendous good, but also this knowledge can be used for tremendous evil. And so your question goes to can we restrain ourselves from the evil side Right of these tools in order to use them for the good?
Speaker 4:and your answer is I hope that the answer is yes.
Speaker 2:I'm optimistic, so as a physicist saying you have faith and the answer is yes, I have well, I say, faith in humanity.
Speaker 4:There are certainly things that rock that faith on a regular basis. But yeah, I guess I hope that we are wise enough to not utterly destroy ourselves. But that doesn't mean there's not gonna be a lot of pain and suffering along the way. So Christian.
Speaker 2:Do you have a input on that?
Speaker 1:Oh, I want to also have that faith in humanity. I think we know the costs of using these weapons that we have, but I think sometimes, even as much as we may want some things, we are prone to behaviors that kind of lead to the worst outcomes. So I think it's not just a matter what we want really is what I'm getting at that. It's also a matter of our perceptions, our likelihood of misinterpreting things. And we've got these weapons, and not only do we have them, but we've got them on the ready to use, and so I'm not maybe so optimistic.
Speaker 2:I'm worried because I think that no matter how many Well-intentioned, good people are out there, that there is always someone trying to figure out a way to game the system or to get In advantage, and whether you're talking about new software technology or the artificial intelligence that we're talking about, but especially when you get up to the level of nuclear weapons, that just it just takes Just a handful of people, or not even a handful of people, to want it for ill purposes to really create literally destruction.
Speaker 1:And I mean we have a lot of controls for these things, but also different countries have different levels of controls too. So I mean that that is a real concern. I think very good.
Speaker 2:Todd, what else do we need to know from a physicist's perspective on these issues?
Speaker 4:Oh gosh, I have to confess that nuclear physics is not my area of expertise. So on the technical side I I know the theory of how you build a nuclear weapon and thankfully it turns out that Knowing that theory is not really the hard part of building a new it's actually getting your hands on the materials that you need to do.
Speaker 4:It is the really hard part and I do like how they touched on that issue in the film of actually the Development of the weapons grade uranium and plutonium that you don't see happening at Los Alamos right, but they have the glass bowls with it. That puts the marbles in the rubber.
Speaker 4:Going back to Clint's point coming up, the visual way to Portray what was happening and they don't have to take you to Oak Ridge to look at the gaseous diffusion plant. But but that in In some sense that was really the hard part of building the weapon. Right, there was the difficult theory part of just understanding what, was it even possible to do this? But then once you realize that okay, yeah, the physics checks out and you actually can do that, you can produce this runaway chain reaction of nuclear fission, then the hard part is actually stuff that happened elsewhere. But yeah, beyond that, I don't really know a lot of the details of the nuclear physics, so I don't know that I have any special wisdom.
Speaker 2:You have any particular insight, any of you, into Oppenheimer himself. Was he really that level of struggling that the movie portrayed over these issues? I guess later on he definitely would. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I mean, he's an interesting figure from what I know and I don't know a lot, but he had a very successful career before he got involved in the Manhattan Project and was primarily doing stellar astrophysics, something you could speak to. Well, a little bit, yeah, but he was involved in kind of understanding what happens when you have stars that are really massive and the formation of things like neutron stars and black holes. He contributed a lot to our understanding of that. Those are things that are very theoretical. I mean neutron stars and black holes we think are real things out there in the universe, but they're not things that impinge on our lives in any practical way. And so I think in some sense this shift to working on an atomic weapon was a radically different type of work for him and it involved a set of moral choices. You don't have to worry much about morality when you're doing the theory of stellar structure. You do when you're developing an atomic bomb.
Speaker 4:So yeah, I think I have the sense that his science led him in a certain direction that ended up sort of the human side of it was very different from anything he'd ever experienced before, and I think in a lot of ways he probably was not ready for that. Not surprising. I don't know who would have been, but yeah, he does come, this tragic figure, as we were saying before, that, I think, was trying to do the right things but was caught up in dealing with questions that he wasn't prepared for. Because it seems to be questions about physics at some point and became questions about behavior and choices that we as human beings make, and physicists are not. They are perhaps less expert at those than the ordinary, everyday citizen, which is certainly not more expert.
Speaker 2:Perfect segue into. Maybe some other folks such as experts in international relations might be. Yeah, and Kirsten, I want to hear a little bit about this whole project from your perspective in international relations. But also, you and I are both United Methodist members and you've got some context in terms of the Christian position on warfare that you can talk about as well, Just from the international relations perspective, the idea of nuclear weapons. What are the issues? What are some of the major themes that you address with your class Maybe it's a good place to start that are relevant to what we're talking about here?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean we do address a lot of the things, not specifically about Oppenheimer, but about the morality behind the bomb, about why we pursued it in the first place, should it have been dropped, and in the class I teach I mean we do deal with it a little bit historically and we eventually get into the IR side of things.
Speaker 2:But I would say, ir being international relations.
Speaker 1:Yes, I mean, there's just this is a huge area of research in international relations.
Speaker 1:So there's so much we could talk about In terms of some of the questions we have already opened up on the floor here today.
Speaker 1:I mean, there is the question of should we have pursued the bomb, and I think we did touch upon the fact that at the point in time when the US was starting up the Manhattan Project, aggressively working toward the bomb, we really did think that Germany was also working in the same direction, and so from a national security perspective, it did make sense.
Speaker 1:If our adversary is building potentially this big, massive weapon and not just an adversary, but someone we're actively at war with then of course we want such a weapon too, so that we either can preempt their use or otherwise dissuade them from using it. So there is that issue. But then there's a question about, like, as Todd mentioned, once the war had ended with Germany, why did we need to use the bomb? And so there's a lot to think about here, and it's not just a question of whether or not Japan was going to surrender. I mean, the conventional wisdom is we needed to use the bomb because it would save lives on the American side, and maybe even also on the Japanese side. It would prevent us from having to engage in another deadly invasion.
Speaker 2:And the thinking here was that Japan was so committed to not surrendering that they would just. This would be a war of attrition and lives would be lost over many months, maybe even more years, and the bomb would put a very rapid end to things.
Speaker 1:And so that has been for decades. Right, the conventional wisdom. But I think there's a lot of research to suggest that the war probably wasn't going to drag on that long. And there were. The Soviets had just entered the war and we were already bombing all of their other cities conventionally. I mean, hiroshima was picked because it was one of. I mean, it was set aside actually for this purpose, to be a demonstration for the bomb, but, like almost every other city had already been bombed conventionally there was no place left to bomb.
Speaker 3:I love the scene in the film where it's the secretary of wars don't bomb Kyoto, because I did my honeymoon there, and that's true, it is.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it is a beautiful city.
Speaker 3:I'm glad they didn't.
Speaker 1:And so there are so many moral issues to think about. So the question, then, is okay, so if we didn't need to use the bomb to end the war, why did we use it? And so there's a lot of reason to believe was geopolitics that we are allies with Russia but not friends with Russia, and so using the bomb would send a message for the post war era, or of a demonstration for other countries rather than for the people, exactly.
Speaker 2:And the movie definitely alludes to this multiple times.
Speaker 1:It does, and I think it's important to recognize that was not just really background consideration, but it probably was a significant factor contributing to that decision.
Speaker 2:Well, what would you say to the folks who would say this is so much second guessing 70 years after the fact that when you're in the throes of war, do we really have good enough insight into what was happening then and there that we can second guess the decisions that were made then? What would you say to that?
Speaker 1:I think that's a good question, but I think we can second guess. I think that there is logically some reason to doubt the likelihood that the war was just going to grind on and on. I think the US had, prior to dropping the bomb, as I understand it, had a very firm offer out there to Japan that are really a demand that they surrender unconditionally. That could have been loosened up and Japan could have been given more room to maybe to surrender in a way that was more amenable to them or they would be more amenable to, and there's just so many different paths that could have been taken.
Speaker 1:I guess it's the best answer I have that there's so many paths that could have been taken that there's no reason to think that we only had that one option to end the war. We cannot know for sure, of course, how they would have turned out had we taken those other paths.
Speaker 4:I'd like to ask a question about, because you mentioned, the conventional bombing of other cities. One thing that I've wondered about is obviously the dropping of the atomic bomb tremendous destruction, tremendous loss of life. Was it really, in that sense that, much worse than some of the conventional bombing?
Speaker 3:Yeah, like the Tokyo firebombing was crazy, or like Dresden in Germany.
Speaker 4:I mean there are other examples where I think you could say that was just as bad. So then, what is it about the use of the atomic bomb that somehow sets that apart from all these really awful things that had already been done by that point in the war?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean those other bombings that you mentioned Tokyo, dresden. They killed, I think, far more people, but over months or years, whereas the atomic bomb was like 70,000 people in the initial blast of Hiroshima and then, over the course of months, 35 or something.
Speaker 2:I thought it was interesting that the movie also makes it clear that the hydrogen bomb would have been, was it 10 or 100 times more destructive than those bombs, more than that yeah.
Speaker 1:So I mean, I think the difference in the atomic bomb is that it is truly a weapon of mass destruction that it does. A single bomb can actually cause so much death and destruction.
Speaker 2:So getting into the church part of church potluck. Now you said there were many paths that could have been taken. What were some of the more Christian options, or was there a Christian option? How should Christians look at warfare and international relations? What are some of the options and perspectives out there?
Speaker 1:I don't know that there is a Christian option to ending World War II necessarily.
Speaker 2:I meant war in general, because I don't think that there was a unified voice out there among Christendom saying here's how we end it. But I guess here let me put it this way In my Christian ethics class, when I was training to be a minister, the professor basically said there are two options within Christianity there's just war and there's pacifism, and there's really not a whole lot. Right, maybe there was holy war back in the day, but that is not an option among Christians today. It's either just war theory or this is obviously not an act of pacifism. What was or wasn't done according to just war? I don't mean to put you on the spot. No, you're not.
Speaker 1:I mean just war theory fundamentally says that there are limits to when it is right or moral to initiate a war. There are also limits to how war should be fought, and so, to be just, wars really need to be fought solely for defensive purposes. They should be limited in scope so that you have limited objectives and you use the weapons that are appropriate for accomplishing those limited objectives and no more. So limited objective might be gaining territory or gaining control of the population. Wars should not be unlimited without objective. You just pummel the adversary for the sake of killing them.
Speaker 2:And it sounds like another phrase from your initial nor should they be preemptive.
Speaker 1:That you have, although that gets really tricky.
Speaker 2:It gets really muddy in terms of what is preemptive and what isn't.
Speaker 1:Yeah because there are all sorts of theories that you can deter, sorry, you can use preemption defensively by some accounts, but anyway. And so nuclear weapons, by their very definition, are tools of unlimited war. They do not discriminate between soldiers and civilians, or combatants and noncombatants. Their destruction is massive. There's no way to use at least the nuclear weapons we currently have in our arsenal in a limited way, I think, tactical nuclear weapons may be raised different questions, but that's not what Oppenheimer was building.
Speaker 2:So you would suggest that, from just war theory perspective, nuclear weapons off the table then, because they breach the protocol of just war theory.
Speaker 4:Is it a matter of degree, because conventional large explosives also don't discriminate between combatants and noncombatants. But obviously the nuclear weapons are doing that on a much, much larger scale and, like you say, all at once, rather than the cumulative effect over time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean we have other weapons that we use regularly that also do not discriminate cluster munitions that are being used by Ukraine right now from the US. We have all sorts of conventional weapons that do cross the line if you're using a just war justification.
Speaker 2:We're trying to make clear. I'm not sure that that's US policy.
Speaker 1:It is not, it is not.
Speaker 2:It's a Christian theological position of when war would be appropriate, and many Christians disagree with that. Even just war theory and say no pacifism is the one and only alternative that we can have.
Speaker 1:But even just going back to something that Todd had said, there's also the question you ask about degrees. So what if your country is about to be defeated in such a way that it's very survival is at stake? Right, not just the government might fall, it might be defeated, but your people may, a large number of people may be killed, large portions of territory destroyed right, that's unlimited war. If you are under threat of unlimited war, like a nuclear attack, then does it become justified, through just war theory, to use a nuclear bomb?
Speaker 2:No gray areas, we want black and white. Just give us the answer here.
Speaker 1:So my, my, my standard line and all my classes to all my students is the world is not black and white, it is gray, it is so gray.
Speaker 3:You guys probably know more about this, but there's that scene at the near the end of the film where he goes and meets Truman right played awesomely by Gary Orton and his Winston Churchill makeup again and he calls openheimer, behind closed doors, a crybaby, and I read that was real. He did do that.
Speaker 1:I believe so.
Speaker 3:He really did want these getting openheimer to come here not to like, bond with him and be like, oh my God, we had to do this, but they basically to be like, ok, this is great, what's next? He seemed very interested and very keen on promoting nuclear warfare and didn't seem, at least in the film's portrayal, to be very bent out of shape about using the atom bomb. And he says this thing to open hymry is you didn't push the button, I did that. He wants ownership of that, which I think is evidenced to this. Isn't? This wasn't just to stop the war that you mentioned earlier?
Speaker 1:I think that's partly it. I think also we forget, so many decades away from the event, that even American leaders American society for sure, but even leaders were quite racist at the time, and so there was really no sympathy for the people that had been killed.
Speaker 3:What's that book? War Without Mercy, is it John Dow? Ok yeah, it's about the racist rhetoric in World War two. Yeah, gotcha.
Speaker 2:So what would you say to the folks that would look at what has happened over the past 70 years since World War two, that we built up all this arsenal of nuclear weapons. Russia built up a massive arsenal. We now have all other countries at our nuclear states and we have this mutually assured destruction out there and we haven't dropped any more nuclear bombs. That it seems to be working. What would you say to this?
Speaker 1:So I would say so soon as we realized how massively destructive nuclear weapons were, suddenly we, kind of a policy leader, decided they're not for use anymore except to prevent others from attacking us, namely the Soviet Union. Nuclear weapons today pretty much exist for deterrence, to deter other nuclear powers from attacking us, and we have put a lot of trust and even indeed faith in deterrence. There are a lot of people who argued at the end of the Cold War deterrence worked. We didn't fire single nuclear bomb at each other. Deterrence worked. But the problem is it's really hard to prove that it didn't work. You can demonstrate when it does work, which fortunately we've not had to observe yet after World War two, but you can't prove that the existence of nuclear weapons prevented nuclear war. And I think that over the decades we've come to put a lot of faith in that theory and policy.
Speaker 3:Oh really.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that a lot of people just assume that because we have great big nuclear weapons and now many thermonuclear weapons that are in fact, so much more powerful than the bomb that was dropped over Hiroshima, that was just a baby bomb in comparison to some of what we have today, which is frightening.
Speaker 4:It is very frightening, yeah, and as I understand it, there are times we came pretty close. We did, yeah, so that argues against the deterrence idea.
Speaker 1:And that goes back to a point I was making at the very start, which is, as much as we might not want war, mistakes happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's just three layers right, so mistakes happen and so even if you're completely well-intentioned, we could have some problems right. It also assumes that we're rational actors, that we are acting in our own self-interest and we're not always rational actors in the way, and also assumes some level of innate goodness, and I think I like the phrase that original sin is the only, or the doctrine of sin. Not original sin necessarily, but the doctrine of sin is the only theological doctrine that's been proven over thousands and thousands of human history that we often act in very Poor ways.
Speaker 1:And I mean even going back to the rational actor assumption that is assumed. I mean, deterrence is built upon the assumption that our leaders are all rational. They are not going to engage in the amount of harm that a nuclear weapon produces, knowing that especially if we're thinking about the Soviet Union or China they could fight back. We're not gonna take out their whole arsenal in one shot. But so that whole approach assumes that we all have the same goal, that we care about surviving more than winning. So there are people who would argue that we do in fact care about surviving more than winning. But there's also reason to think that maybe, even if not today, maybe someday, there will be leaders who think differently.
Speaker 4:And it raises that issue of are we mature enough as a species to handle this knowledge that we found? And I think one of the things that is problematic with that is, when you talk about a species, you're talking about billions of individuals, and it's the low end of the maturity spectrum that we have to worry about. Right, it's not our most mature and saintly individuals who are gonna determine this question of are we mature enough as a species? It's the worst case scenarios. Right, it's the extremist, it's those who are not behaving as rational actors that, if they have the power to use these weapons, are gonna make that decision for the species as a whole right, you just made a point that I tried to make earlier, but you made it so much more eloquently, so thank you, that's what I'm here for, dave.
Speaker 3:Here's a. In his interview with the New York Times about his film, Nolan says that Oppenheimer is the most important person who ever lived.
Speaker 2:That comes out in the movie too at that point.
Speaker 3:And this interviewer pushes back and it's a little bit of a hype and he's if my worst fears are true, he'll be the man who destroyed the world. What's more important than that right? He says? He's also the most important but hopelessly naive right, Because he had so many ideas about, like, how we can end the war with this thing.
Speaker 2:Well, that was the interesting thing and that I agree that does come out in the movie. The movie comes out that he thinks that this will end the war and war altogether.
Speaker 1:Yeah, end war. Yeah, I'm sorry as a thing, capital W and the other which does seem incredibly naive given.
Speaker 2:isn't that exactly what Alfred Noble thought of dynamite?
Speaker 3:Yes, yeah that's a good connection and dynamite it's incredibly destructive force.
Speaker 2:It's made bigger bombs.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly, yeah, both times.
Speaker 2:So for Oppenheimer to think that this development of destruction is somehow going to be the one that saves us, when we have a clear example with dynamite? That did not happen, even though people thought this was somehow going to be preventative.
Speaker 3:I have another Nolan quote Because he so that. Just let me give the back story real quick, right. So Nolan grew up in the UK during the height of nuclear anxiety, right and anti-nuke demonstrations and he remembers the little kid hearing the Sting song Russians, right when there's that line, how can I save my little boy from Oppenheimer's deadly toy? And as a kid that name stuck with him right. And then he reads later Robert Pattinson, the actor, gave him Oppenheimer's speeches on the set of Tenet as a rap gift.
Speaker 3:Hey, filming's done, here you go. And he started reading that and he says that you were not necessarily as he was reading. When you read the words of people speaking at that time, you see them wrestling with the implications and the consequences of what's happened and what they've done and he found that just really fascinating. And then he says you are not necessarily confronted with the strongest or worst elements of your action in the moment. And he thought that I think that move that comes out really clear for me. Do you remember the scene where they're in the auditorium after the bomb test is gone and he's like raw America, I think Mary depends, surrendered.
Speaker 3:And then there's that. Really it's awful, but it's that moment where the audio stops and for a moment you hear just a child screaming and then there's this look on his face Because so much of this movie is Silly and Murphy's face, his face, and violence. The composer, ludwig Gorsen, said that he had to speak for Oppenheimer, who I guess in the film is not I don't know how he was in real life, but in the film he's very reserved and doesn't talk a lot Because there's always violence playing. When you see them close up of his face and they can be like joyful, but they can also be very melancholic and horrific. And that moment with the scream, just that really got me, because you also see his face contorting. It's just now dawned on him what could happen, and it hadn't been in his naivete right, that hadn't been something.
Speaker 2:Do you want to know when? He said this quote? And there's an explosion afterwards. But here's the quote.
Speaker 4:Now I am become death the destroyer of worlds.
Speaker 3:That's the quote. That's a good mic drop. Thank you, I edited those together.
Speaker 2:I'm glad you enjoyed that, but that's actually from the Bhagavad Gita right. This is not Christian. This is a statement of I have now the power of destruction, and so at some level, he did understand what he had wrought on the world.
Speaker 1:Was that after Trinity?
Speaker 2:Yes, which was another question I wanted to ask. Do any of you have any sense on why that first bomb was called Trinity? I don't know, I don't know.
Speaker 1:I've read something somewhere about a reference to Trinity and God and I didn't understand.
Speaker 2:was that because it has this kind of God like power at our hands? I heard it was a reference to a John Dunne poem, but both Google and ChatGPT just failed me on this one. I never got a very clear, definitive answer on this.
Speaker 3:Why New Mexico is portrayed in the film accurately. As I understand right, it's just he used to go camping there when he was a kid with his brother. He just liked it. He said let's do New Mexico, let's drop a bomb. And they wanted a remote location. It was remote, yeah, in order to keep everything to be remote.
Speaker 4:I mean it's interesting that the Soviets, when they started developing their nuclear program, located them in Nova Subirsk, which is also very much in the middle of nowhere. I've actually attended a conference there, oh wow.
Speaker 2:And Harrison, I mentioned earlier that you and I, both United Methodists and United Methodists, often put out these statements. It's called the social principles, and they certainly have one about warfare. What does United Methodist Church say about warfare, as an example of a theological body or religious body making a statement?
Speaker 1:Essentially that war is incompatible with the teachings of Christ and that we should do everything in our power to obtain peace, to prevent wars from erupting. It encourages the use, the social principles, encourage the use of alliances, treaties, international law, all the sorts of things that governments use to try and overcome their differences and work toward more peaceful relations.
Speaker 2:So it doesn't go so far as to say pacifism, but it says every step possible of diplomacy before engaging in warfare.
Speaker 1:It does, but it also does say I believe that war is incompatible with the teachings of Christ. And so it does take it doesn't say pacifism, I don't think, but it does take a pretty strong stand that war is not a good thing.
Speaker 2:And, in your expert opinion, summarize all your research of the past. How many ever years? How has diplomacy worked? Where are we in the world right now in terms of warfare and where are we throughout nuclear war or just destroying ourselves at all? Yeah, we're doing great, we're doing great.
Speaker 1:So I think we're low point, we're not at a great point, because many reasons. I could think about one most of the countries that have nuclear weapons and there are not a lot of them, but some of us have lots of nuclear weapons and I think almost every, maybe every country that has nuclear weapons in their arsenal is trying to build more and better ones. Right now, Arms control is at an all time low and actually the United Methodist social principles would say engage in arms control, try to limit the arms that you have. And we've let a lot of agreements either expire or we've abrogated them, we've exited them, and it looks like the only big nuclear weapons agreement that is still in place is probably going to expire without being replaced.
Speaker 2:And with these expirations, have we immediately changed our behavior, or is it just that we had the possibility of changing our behavior now with those expiring?
Speaker 1:I would say we have not immediately changed our behavior, but some of those have been broken because behavior had already begun to shift, and so I think you're not going to see an abrupt change when the last agreement falls, but yet you're going to see, leading up to that, more and more transgressions and slowly changing behavior, creating greater insecurity. And so everybody's afraid then to negotiate a new agreement to limit arms buildups, because we don't trust each other.
Speaker 2:And on that cheery note, what hasn't been said that needs to be said?
Speaker 4:I guess my parting thought would be if we look at Oppenheimer in particular in the Manhattan Project, if the atomic bomb had not been developed then was it inevitable that it was going to be developed at some point later on? I mean, the knowledge in physics was progressing in a direction that was going to make it possible and if it didn't happen, then I think you could make a case that it was going to happen at some point later on. And at some point we've just got to live up to the knowledge that we're producing. We've got it Make ourselves mature enough to be able to deal with the things that we know. That's a very big ask.
Speaker 1:I agree. Yeah, I would agree with what Todd just said. I think we are very smart creatures. We are also security seeking creatures, and so I think that knowledge was bound to be discovered at some point by someone. Oppenheimer was just the first to get there. I do want to say too I know I've sounded like super pessimistic through this whole.
Speaker 2:Discussion and actually I would say you sounded very Reasonable in your assessment and it came over as I mean I didn't think you were like a doomsdayer, Just but a very good assessment of realistic, Realistic, yeah and yeah.
Speaker 1:I was just gonna close by saying that, while I do have some concerns and it doesn't help that, like nationalism is growing everywhere too but I also think they're really smart people trying to do good and trying to prevent bad things from happening.
Speaker 2:We're gonna stop right there while we have an optimistic moment so. Todd, I'm gonna nail you down right now. I want you to come back on. I want to talk about this JWST. I want to talk about okay the things that, the things that we're learning with the space telescope. That sounds great. I'm just flabbergasted, and it just seems like we are I guess that'll be much more fun Happier, happier conversation.
Speaker 4:That's right fun, but we'll be happier conversation, and I do.
Speaker 2:I think I'll be Kirsten for your first time. How did it?
Speaker 1:feel yeah, thank you.
Speaker 2:No, I want more detail than that During the assessment. Yeah so, and, clint, I know during the liftover section you're gonna have more for us. So just about the movie. Yeah, sir, techniques and this was fun yeah.
Speaker 2:I had a good time as well. Yeah Well, I want to thank our audience out there for for sitting around the table with us, and I hope that we have provided you with some food for thought and something to chew on. But we aren't done yet. Like I said, after we finish We'll always have some leftovers for you to enjoy, some additional thoughts we share with one another after we wrap up. So feel free to continue listening. You know, I ask, I appreciate your support, and then I always ask you to support us with Subscribing, rating, reviewing. Really haven't been doing that, so don't do that. I'm gonna use reverse psychology. Yeah, don't subscribe, don't rate us, don't review us, don't do any of that. Just sit and watch church potluck and that will be good enough. It's just just think of yourself as coming to church potluck without anything in your hand. That's all you.
Speaker 3:And we're all staring at you.
Speaker 2:That's right so Until we gather around the table next time. This has been church potluck. Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 3:Bye, bye.
Speaker 2:All right, so we're done with recording. Take off this your headphones, if you want, but we can keep on just chatting amongst ourselves, sweet.
Speaker 3:Can I talk about production?
Speaker 2:Thank you so much and especially, it was good. That was my assessment of your job. No, actually, for being first time, I thought that was awesome at that. Not even not even being first time, I just thought that I really enjoyed your perspective. I knew Todd stuff a little bit, but but that was all new to me so I really enjoyed. I really enjoyed that a lot.
Speaker 1:Thank you, yeah, yeah so.
Speaker 2:So what did we say, what? What didn't we say about the production? Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3:So I I love this movie so much. I just want to tell you guys that, like when I saw it in the theater, my friend Morgan was with me as a sous chef at Blossom Hill. When we left I was like yelling in the car. Cinema is back, baby. I mean, nolan gets it, he gets a Cinematic experience right, and that is different from, say, home movies or, you know, watching it on your phone, and I watch movies on my phone. I'm not like a snob. Like there are some movies that I don't know how much of a difference it makes where you see it and how, how you see it. Right, this one does make a difference. I think this one makes one it this I don't know if any other movie has made a bigger difference on me personally right, seen it in the theater, feeling the noises again, that sonic atmosphere.
Speaker 4:Right, hearing the violence Dunkirk.
Speaker 3:Dunkirk yeah, I've heard a lot of, I've heard a lot of people say that about Dunkirk. Yeah, and it's, you know, nolan, it's he really, he really gets it right.
Speaker 2:And I know that's like a cheesy sort of like film bro, anything it was so good it's an that it actually pulled me out of the movie once. Oh, that's a good. I wonder if they're gonna get an Academy Award for sound, because the scene you were talking about when they were in the theater, yeah, and just that, the just way too loud cheering, I mean too loud in a on purposeful purposefully too loud, settling yeah and then it goes silent and then you know it's coming back though right and then boom, you know, and it's just so much use of just the extremes of sound and silence.
Speaker 4:Just I thought were were very effective visuals were so great too, like, yeah, I love the fact that there's a basketball goal. Yeah, up in the background, yeah is it makes it feel so real? Like yeah, this is a space that like like yeah, this is, this was their recreation space multiple use.
Speaker 2:I know it's a two at the basketball, but it was a fire, little fire. This is their multi-use space. This is the community center. They had to build a community.
Speaker 1:They did all that and that really brought it, and it's in that spot where this this Ranch yeah yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I wanted to point out Nolan was an English major. Just throwing that out there. So that was pretty cool. City University liberal arts yeah, in London, and I was listening to you. If you ever get a chance, the blank check podcast is really excellent. So it's just a bunch of guys right up there with church potluck?
Speaker 1:Yes, that's right, no, no.
Speaker 2:It's like almost blank check.
Speaker 3:And then what's the Roman Mars podcast? Right there there, there's the Trinity. So they're just a bunch of guys that talk about like authors who have this success, and then studios will be like, well, here's just a bunch of money and Nolan is probably the blank checkiest director alive right now. Like, really, only Nolan probably could have made openheimer right, because it's a three-hour movie that's rated R. That's just a very slow. About the R-rated drama right, and it's, it's an R. It's definitely his most R rated I never even thought about that.
Speaker 2:A three-hour movie rated R and.
Speaker 3:I remember when the he started and I was like, oh Chris, wow, this is new for you, buddy. Like he's never done nudity. I've seen all of his films. I don't recall any nudity. He, I mean he just doesn't really go there, right, but he went there In this film and, yeah, three hours you can't even play it that often hundred million dollars. Like I don't know anyone else that could have done that right. So, and also, who else could have done that? After he Basically dunked on Warner Brothers for sending all their movies to HBO Max, like he was very publicly angry at them during the pandemic that they did that and he had broke a very long-standing and very profitable, successful relationship with them and Normally people can't come back from that. Right, if you bite the hand that feeds you, you get, you get sunk right. Just drank. Who directed the awful Incredibles movie, but before that did Chronicle. He had a lot of trouble after he tweeted something that he then deleted about the producers. What do you want?
Speaker 2:to say that's power when, when, when you can bite the hand and it'll still.
Speaker 3:He didn't just bite it, he like tore the hand off, like he went after him, but luckily he met up with somebody from Universal and I love this, the person from Universal. Let's see your mother try to find their name. They had the same vision that Nolan did, which is to bring cinemas back. They were like we want movies to go back to the cinema. We feel it that's like a place that is different from the home or from the car, from wherever people are watching films, where it's like it's almost kind of like going to church, like, as you know, there's, like you can see it, you're going there and you know the transcendent experience.
Speaker 3:Transen experience. Thank you, you know, roland Barth describes it as a dream state, right Like you're going there.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's a communal experience.
Speaker 2:Well, I didn't talk with the one other guy.
Speaker 3:You have your popcorn instead of your wafers. Right Drinking your coke instead of your wine.
Speaker 1:It is really communal this time with what barbenheimer right. Yeah, oh my god.
Speaker 2:Oh my god, that made me so happy, I was so happy that that was a fun phenomenon that I wanted to take part of, but I, but, I, but I didn't, but I think, I think that that is so. That is so cool, had my children been within.
Speaker 1:Closer I would have, I would have tried to do that. Sorry, go for it I just said we need to have another podcast to on Barbie and Chinese geopolitics, because the whole, you know, vietnam's not showing the movie because the nine dash line is depicted in the map behind Barbie. Oh my god.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there's great stuff here. Yeah, I saw barbys, I saw Barbie with my other guy friend who's also in his like like 30s, and we were just in a theater filled with 14 to 15 girls, and they all kind of give us looks and we're like, hey, we want to watch this too. Like why do I know?
Speaker 2:exactly that's right.
Speaker 3:And they also really seem to love Barbie, like it, like I, like that they were laughing back apparently, yeah, they were liking the right scenes, um, but so yeah, again. So the backstory you know he grew up during the nuclear anxiety, nolan, that is the Nka new demonstrations. You know the openheimer word from the sting song stayed in his brain. And then, if you guys saw a tenet which I will say is my least favorite of his, of his films, it seems to be the case.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it people just too, too convoluted to follow.
Speaker 3:I think it's kind of a mess right. And you know, one of the things I love about Nolan is that he is very temporally Experimentive and I think that's awesome. Yeah yeah, and Dunkirk. Oh, my god right, you got the like what is it? Three days, one day, one hour or something structure like, and just that he weaves back and forth and that is a viewer I never feel lost, and that they all sync up at one point like it's. It's really genius and takes a lot of foresight.
Speaker 3:My son was very excited to show me a memento with a memento is Mentos very fun If you ever see following his first film it really feels like a dry run for memento, like it's like a cool idea. There's some temporal exploration you know exploration, but memento feels like he like perfected it. It's like the net, the last draft of that idea.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you've mentioned tenant twice and in my mind, tenant was very recent 2020 so he had the idea for this in 2020 and it's in the theaters in 2023.
Speaker 3:So no, it's amazing. So Nolan is a one film at a guy, one film at a time guy, that's it.
Speaker 2:He also.
Speaker 3:Chris Nolan does not have email, he does not have a smartphone, so he takes all of those distractions which a part of me like really wishes, I could do that. And he knew. Again, robert Pattinson gave him the collected speeches of Oppenheimer and it was basically from that moment. So basically the rap of Tenet was when this movie started.
Speaker 2:So he had to get permission to do Oppenheimer before Tenet came out.
Speaker 3:Well, because, of the he might have yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, I was-.
Speaker 2:Well, he might have. I don't know, I'm 100% teasing, but the point that Tenet was not gonna be well received.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, he definitely did get. I haven't read the book. If you guys read the Oppenheimer American Prometheus book one that pulled surprise I hear it's amazing he didn't read that.
Speaker 2:No, let me interrupt there too, cause I meant to mention that in the first part of the podcast that I think that is the perfect title. Yeah, and I understand why it wasn't called that for the movie. Yeah, it is such a title, but just the image of Prometheus stealing the fire, and then what has been wrought on humanity because of that and his and also not understanding the consequences and I don't understand the consequences and his punishment the anguish that Oppenheimer felt the tragic hurt.
Speaker 2:He wrote I thought that that was just a wonderful analogy. It is.
Speaker 3:It's such a good image, right, so he does buy, he gets. Actually, the rights were already optioned. That book was optioned like almost immediately, right Cause it was a big hit when the Pulitzer, sam Mendes, who directed like American Beauty and Jarhead he had optioned it way back when it came out 2005. But it just sat in development hell until Nolan was like I wanna make an Oppenheimer movie, oh, sorry, oppenheimer. And then so he has this book and he loves the book and he's actually staring at this book and I think in the front cover there's a picture of Oppenheimer, right, it's like his face, and he just sees Sillien Murphy. He's like, well, that's, that's, that's, I got my guy. So almost immediately he knew Sillien Murphy was gonna be this guy and he flew to Ireland to ask him.
Speaker 3:One fun story I love is is that he made Robert Downey Jr fly to him to like sort of audition in front of him and then he offered him the part and Downey was like yeah, and then later in the never you. Downey was like yeah, it's really weird, Cause usually for me it need I need like 38 phone calls before I'll read it something, but it was to it's different Nolan. Oh, my God. A better story, though. A better story. It involves marriage counseling Matt Damon, and he's very public about this. This isn't like a secret.
Speaker 1:I've heard this story. Have you heard this story? I have too.
Speaker 3:Yeah, he was having marriage trouble and him and his wife were in counseling and so to like work through things, cause he was working a lot, he promised he would not work for I don't remember a year or two years or something, because you know his wife wanted to have him at home right. But he's like, okay, unless it's Christopher Nolan, and the phone rang. And then the phone rang and he's like, well, he was in the back, I think it was in writing and he was like, yeah, well.
Speaker 2:Football coaches do that too that I am your coach and you have to buy me out, unless often it's Notre Dame. Unless Notre Dame or my alma mater calls, and then I'm out of here, and so it's the same thing. So, unless, unless Nolan calls on, I'm yours. But so.
Speaker 3:So he got those guys pretty early on and then he really wanted all the faces to be very distinct, which is why we have such an amazing cast, right. Like oh my God, like how many big players are here and he wanted people that were very distinct, right. So you know, like Remy Malek is only in it for like three minutes, but he's like a very distinct looking person, right. I think Casey Affleck, too, like like his role as like this menacing figure, I think was like really on point and very memorable.
Speaker 2:But it's another time when I was pulled out of. That's another time when I was pulled out of the movie thinking, wow, these are big names with kind of cameos almost, and so this is, this is. And then it just shows you how big of a movie it was and they just kept coming and they just kept coming and people will be part of it.
Speaker 3:So Nolan is one of those directors, kind of like Clint Eastwood he allows his actors to have the way in terms of how they approach their characters. Silly Murphy said I think the quote I have here is quote I don't have the intellectual capacity for the quantum physics, so I focused on the humanity, right. So he didn't learn anything about quantum physics. He's just like I'm just gonna go with the character right Benny Sadfie, who's a director in his own right. He co-directed Uncut Gyms with his brother. If you ever saw that he plays Edward Teller, he actually had studied nuclear physics and undergrad and he went back to his notes and he talked to one of his old professors to prepare for this role, right. So learning learning more about the math and the science behind it as a way of understanding his character, right. So two completely different approaches, but Nolan does a great job of sort of allowing them to do that right.
Speaker 3:And reading about how Nolan directs, I saw a lot of writers compare him to Oppenheimer in the sense that, like you know, todd, you were saying earlier, like what made him so special? Right, and they were saying things like he was able to wrangle all of these personalities right and all of their different ideas and sort of like congel them right and sort of resummarize things that everyone was saying in a cogent way for everybody, that he was just like extremely good at that right and doing it quickly, right. So, yeah, this film came together extremely fast. Everyone was really impressed. You know, they were filming by let's see here, I think January, february of 2022, they were already filming, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, even then, they're filming in January of 2022 and it's out in theaters now that is still A year later. Yeah, I mean, I don't know anything about movie making, but that just seems like from idea.
Speaker 3:It seems incredible. It's really incredible.
Speaker 2:It's an idea to screen that just seems amazing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and like Kirsten mentioned, they had to build a town Like they built, because you know well, no one's all about the practical effects. They rebuilt this town. They couldn't use Los Alamos. Now, right, there's a big national lab there now.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like start with this, Except I thought it was interesting. You know that it was so barren, but now it is-.
Speaker 4:Yeah, there's a town that just built up around the national labs, right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, some more fun facts. Filming locations included Einstein's actual office as well as Oppenheimer's actual childhood home. They actually shot scenes there. It was the first film to use IMAX in black and white, which is interesting, and also another like playful thing he does, where Robert Downey Jr sort of sighed is always in the black and white. Yeah Right, I thought that was effective for- Right for time, yeah, and it was very good work. Yes, it was very good. Avoid confusion yeah, it was really helpful. But also like thematically, yes.
Speaker 4:And it's kind of interesting that the black and white part is actually the most recent part.
Speaker 3:Yes, oh, right, right, in terms of the filming, oh, chronologically, yes, yeah, that's true, that makes sense. Let's see here.
Speaker 4:Happens latest in time.
Speaker 3:Some of the reasons that filming went a bit quicker is Nolan lets again, lets his actors sort of play around. He doesn't put marks on the floor, he doesn't do that. Also, everything was very stripped down comparatively. There's a quote I have somewhere. Robert Downey Jr was on set and he was looking around for his chair and he realized there wasn't one. Like it wasn't a set where people had their own chairs with their names on it, like they're just what? Can I use this word? Is that okay? Yes, you Nolan doesn't have time for that bullshit. Like we need to make this and go and then let's move on, which is another sort of Clint Eastwood thing. Famously, clint Eastwood will just say we're going to rehearse and then he'll just film it.
Speaker 2:I am seeing a theme though. Robert Downey Jr, you come to me for the audition. Yeah, I know no chair for you, but the guy might get an.
Speaker 3:Oscar out of it, so I think it went.
Speaker 4:Iron man is Iron man.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think it went totally fine. His inspiration he noted Tarkovsky, the famous Russian director, his movie Mirror, which is also very nonlinear and is also meditation on war. Oh yeah, yeah, sorry, here's Robert Downey Jr quote. There was no chair with your name on it. It was focused in Spartan, almost a monastic approach. Right, here's Robert Downey Jr quote. Other notes dude, it grossed $891 million, which a movie that's three hours long about a scientist.
Speaker 2:That is shocking.
Speaker 3:Freakin' awesome.
Speaker 2:Freakin' awesome.
Speaker 3:You know what I'm gonna do. What are you gonna?
Speaker 2:do From all of this that you need your own podcast, yeah.
Speaker 3:No, thank you for letting me nerd out about this film. I sincerely love this film, so thank you for doing this.
Speaker 2:I need to see it. If only you had let that show in your voice, right. Thank y'all so much.
Speaker 1:Thank you thank you, that was dope. That was a lot of fun, for sure.