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“Prometheus gave fire to men secretly from Zeus”
and the highest of the gods punished him by having Hermes chain him to a rock on the summit of the Caucasus. Oppenheimer begins with this quotation from Apollodorus (Usa, 2023, 180′). But it is a so to speak truncated quotation. The gift of fire – that is, the theft of it from the forge of Hephaestus, the craftsman god – was decisive for the survival of human beings. Without claws and strong teeth, our very distant ancestors had been condemned by Zeus to extinction, to be replaced by a more suitable species to live. Only the intervention of Prometheus – only the artifice, of which Hephaestus’ fire is a symbol – allowed us and allows us to find a “place” in the infinite and never tamed power of the cosmos.
in which to establish our world, whose precariousness is linked to a rebellion that we hardly continue to repeat.
We call it technique
and science, this rebellion, enjoying the advantages and at the same time paying for the risks.
The ambiguity of our condition permeates the story that Christopher Nolan draws from a great (even in a material sense) book by the journalist Kai Bird and the historian Martin J. Sherwin (Oppenheimer. Triumph and fall of the inventor of the atomic bomb, Garzanti, 856 pages,
€20). In his memoirs of him – we read -, Max Born claims that he had few students as efficient and intelligent as Robert Oppenheimer, but that he would have preferred he had shown “less intelligence and more common sense”. Oppenheimer seems to have shared at least in part the opinion. Over the years, he confided in a letter, ‘I have noticed a certain disapproval on your part of much of the work I have done. This attitude seemed completely natural to me because it is a feeling I share».
Oppenheimer can discourage the viewer and the critic in search of narrative linearity and temporal coherence. Nolan tackles a question as radical as it is complex, and therefore irreducible to linearity and coherence. Rather, he represents it, stages it with images and sounds (not just with music). Already at the beginning, while on the screen and in the soundtrack explodes a fire that can well be described as Promethean, in the audience one has the feeling that matter – that same matter whose primary foundation modern and contemporary physics seeks in vain for – is nothing but nothing and emptiness (or, if you prefer, nothing but a magnificent illusion, to use the subtitle of a fine book by Guido Tonelli, Materia, Feltrinelli). The young Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is looking for the secret of this illusion, who in 1926 seems willing to poison one of his professors who prevents him from following a lesson by Niels Bohr. We find him thirty years later, in 1954, now the father of the Bomb – with a capital letter, as it was written then -, accused of communism and various other “betrayals” by Lewis Strauss, who towards the end of the war
had entrusted him with the task
to equip the US with
deadly power of atomic chain reaction.
Without worrying too much (and luckily) about the desire for linearity and coherence of spectators and critics, Nolan goes back in time, recounting Oppenheimer’s complex personal life and, above all, the “theft of the fire” he carried out at Los Alamos, with many other small and large Promethean beings. And here nothing is certain, apart from the illusion that seems to accompany and justify the construction of the bomb. There will be no more wars, Oppenheimer supposes. The destructive power of the brand new “artifice” is such that no one will use it. If this is the perspective, then we can well face a (little) calculated risk, i.e. that the first chain reaction unleashed at Los Alamos will trigger a total one, in whose emptiness and in which nothing is lost
our world.
As we know, American political leaders used that destructive power, despite Oppenheimer’s contrary opinion. That’s how humans are made. Without claws and strong teeth, they replace them with artifice, making themselves masters of their world. And yet – except for a few, mostly unheard of – they are incapable of making themselves lords of themselves, setting themselves the limits that the existence of their world would require. This is essentially what Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) confides to Oppenheimer in Nolan’s film. Nothingness and emptiness (perhaps) are already here. It should be remembered that Prometheus has a brother, Epimetheus, the one he cannot predict, the imprudent and stupid. We are the two mythical brothers added together, condemned to manipulate the world and stupid enough to risk destroying it.