The Oppenheimer Movie: I have feelings about it
Posted on
Please note: This article contains spoilers about the film Oppenheimer
My husband and I recently took a day of leave, dropped the toddler off at daycare, and settled into some surprisingly comfortable seats at Hoyts for a day of Oppenbarbie (not Barbenheimer, which is only the correct order to watch these two movies if you want to feel sad).
I’ll save my review of Barbie for another day (spoiler: I loved it), because I have a lot more to say about Oppenheimer. Mainly, Director Christopher Nolan’s treatment of the female characters in it.
Christopher Nolan has never been celebrated for his well-rounded female characters. Mostly because the women in his movies rarely speak and, when they do, it is only to further serve their purpose as a prop for the men in the story.
However, Oppenheimer was going to be different. There wasn’t just one meaty role for a woman—there were two. Two whole roles for women? Consider feminism solved!
One of those two female roles is Kitty, Robert Oppenheimer’s wife, played by the always incredible Emily Blunt. The only other sort-of-important-but-not-really-in-Nolan’s-universe female character is Jean Tatlock (played by Florence Pugh), who is topless pretty much instantly and remains that way during most of her scenes.
Oh, and no female character is introduced for the first 20 minutes of the movie. Cool.
Neither Kitty nor Jean are particularly well-rounded (and no, highlighting Kitty’s alcoholism is not making her well-rounded if her only two defining features in the movie are ‘wife’ and ‘alcoholic’), in that they only speak so that Oppenheimer can then speak at them and further his storyline.
When I have complained to members of older generations about this, I am met with the same response: Well, it was the 1940s—they do have to be historically accurate.
Ah, I forgot about those decades where women didn’t exist. Silly me.
The trouble is that a quick Google search shows that there were several hundred female scientists, mathematicians, engineers and technicians working on the Manhattan Project (yay, feminism?).
Including Kitty, which you do not learn in the movie given that pretty much the only thing she says when they move to Los Alamos is ‘the house doesn’t have a kitchen’.
Kitty was actually a scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project for a year as a lab technician, and she was someone that Oppenheimer confided in, learned with and leaned on during their 26-year marriage. In the movie, the only time he confides in her is to tell her through the clever code of ‘take in the sheets’ that the bomb testing is done (women be washing).
So yeah, ‘historical accuracy’ is great and all, but who is recording the history? Who is choosing which parts of focus on? Who is deciding which stories matter and are worth telling? Nolan, that’s who, and all of the people saying the words ‘historically accurate’ like white men haven’t been in charge of what parts of history are deemed important.
I mean, c’mon, the longest speech Emily Blunt as Kitty gives is when she is telling Oppenheimer her relationship history.
Comments online assure me that the movie cannot be sexist because Kitty is tough in her defence of Oppenheimer in the latter part of the movie. That’s great and all, but that is a couple of minutes out of a three-hour-long movie. I would have liked to see the parts where Kitty worked as scientist, the isolation she felt at Los Alamos that led to her leaving to live with her parents for a few months in 1945, and how stifled she told people she felt in domestic life.
Not one of those things were mentioned in the movie.
I’m not writing this because I enjoy picking movies apart. It actually makes me pretty sad. I stopped seeing major blockbusters 10 years ago because I was tired of seeing the few female characters on screen either sexualized or sidelined (and no, making the president female or having one rude and definitely not the main character female scientist is not actually solving the problem).
I had hoped that things would change in a decade, but they haven’t. It’s all still the same old same old, and we all still either accept it or defend it.
Barbie is a feminist movie, where the Ken dolls’ only purpose for existing was to support and care about the Barbies, and even then, Kens had way more representation than women had in Oppenheimer.
The Kens got to speak. A lot. They got to be funny. At the end, they were given the opportunity to be their own people and were apologised to for being treated as side-characters to the Barbies’ stories.
They were also dolls in a made-up universe.
Kitty, Jean and the hundreds of women who weren’t mentioned in Oppenheimer were real people, who contributed real things to the world outside of boobs and bitchy comments.
And yes, I’m not a complete dolt, I do understand that the movie Oppenheimer was written to be about J. Robert Oppenheimer, not Kitty Oppenheimer. But the movie had plenty of male characters, and while they were there as background characters to Oppenheimer’s protagonist, they were also fully formed people and shown as such.
The women, as with other Nolan films, weren’t given that opportunity. They were there in the capacity of ‘woman’, sometimes ‘naked woman’, and the value that they added to the world as people was written out of the story.
In Nolan’s universe, men can change things while women just exist. And yes, sometimes these women fight and sometimes they refuse to acknowledge people they don’t like (empowerment!), but they could also be removed entirely from the story and it wouldn’t change a thing that happens.
I’m not the type to withhold credit where credit’s due: in regard to female representation in Nolan’s movies, Oppenheimer is a step forward. But it’s 2023—is a leap really that big of an ask?
