1y ago

'Oppenheimer' draws debate over the absence of Japanese bombing victims in the film

www.nbcnews.com 'Oppenheimer' draws debate over the absence of Japanese bombing victims in the film

Viewers are divided over whether the film should have shown Japanese victims of the weapon created by physicist Robert Oppenheimer. Experts say it's complicated.

133 comments

Clickbait outrage. The movie showed what the bomb does to people without feeling like it was exploiting the suffering of innocent victims for the sake of a summer blockbuster.
The article even explains how: "In another scene, Oppenheimer gives a speech and, while looking into the crowd, visualizes some of the predominantly white audience as the victims of his bomb."
It's an effective scene. Sometimes what you don't show (negative space) is as powerful as what you do show.
- Yeah, there is a fucking burnt child on the movie.

The story is not about bombing Japan.
Yes, that was a war crime. Yes, that was terrible.
But if you know the story of Oppenheimer, or seen the movie, he did not decide anything. The military took over at that moment in time.
So if it was a movie about the military, this had to be shown. But it is about him. So a suggestion (as is clearly in the movie for about the last hour or so) is more than enough of you ask me.
- You're totally right and the discussion (as so many these days) is completely bollocks.
  Since when should the public have the right to demand what an artist ought to put in his work or must not omit. I don't get it...
- He decided to make the bomb. He knew what bombs are used for.
  
  Agreed, but that is not what the movie is about.
  He did say (no one knows what he believed) that just having the bomb would mean world peace…
  
  Yes, but part of the story of the film is that he's so caught up in the joy of science and discovery he isn't thinking that far ahead and it suddenly becomes real after he's in the meeting deciding on targets (note how that's one of the few scenes without a score). Then the distance he's kept at from the use of the weapons inspires his outlook in later scenes.
- Americans in general hate to acknowledge the war crimes they commit. I think it was more about a business decision than anything else.
  
  Show me a culture that likes to recognize the war crimes they commited as war crimes.
  The Japanese seem to do way more of sweeping their dirty laundry under the rug from WWII under the rug than Americans.
  And no, that's not trying to excuse Americans of acknowledging their own war crimes. Every culture should own their past and do their best to learn from their mistakes.

Being so far removed from the use of his discovery and put of the loop now the army was done with him is a crucial character moment in the film, and we as the audience are following his story. Having scenes of the bombing, the aftermath of the victims would have undermined that.
- I really don't think so. They literally had a scene where they were debriefing the scientists of the effect of the bomb and the types of wounds and deaths it caused. They could of just showed the slides they were going over there.
  Still think it's a good movie, and for me this is a minor critique, but still something they could have done.
- The US is in complete denial of the genocide they did dropping two nuclear bombs in two different cities with mostly just civilians. Everybody else in the world see the pictures of the Japanese aftermath when we study the second world war.
  
  Not at all actually. We learn about it. We discuss it. What's surprising to me is, you are harping on the atom bombs when the fire bombings caused way more death and destruction. It's not even a comparison.
  
  That's not remotely true. American students learn extensively about the dropping of the bombs and their aftermath.
  
  I saw those pictures in school. We know that Truman signed off on dropping the bomb on two civilian cities and it was a horror that had never been seen in the world before or since.
  Dude, we talk about our atrocities all the time. The current push to whitewash Native American genocide and slavery is actually getting a huge pushback, because we talk openly about this stuff in the US and it's only a minority that tries to silence it. We talk openly about the atrocities during the Vietnam War, and about the invasion of Iraq, and about prosecution for war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.
  You can say a LOT about the US, and even the amount of denial we have about our standing in the world, but you can't call us in denial about stuff like that. We're in conflict within ourselves about it, but it's a well known and well discussed thing in the US.
  And wait... are you from lemmygrad? The tankie server?
  
  That isn't a genocide.
  
  Well, the Japanese don't love to acknowledge their war crimes either, which btw also ranked pretty high on the Evil Fucked Up Shit scale.
  If we're to see Hiroshima aftermath, then we should also mention stuff like The Rape of Nanjing for context, which alone had an approximate number casualties similar to the two bombs.

I have not seen the film yet, but it seems like this is a biopic about Oppenheimer, not a WWII movie.
Also, do directors need to infantilize their audience by directly showing "this was bad. Here is why this was bad"? Like, obviously the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were devastating. If you have basic history knowledge you should already know that, and know that those bombings were a direct consequence from what was depicted in the movie with out it being spelled out for you.
- The movie is more about the political witchhunt after the fact than it is directly about the bomb itself

Film is told from Oppenheimer's perspective, I see no problem with it. Especially as it is shown that he had trouble with moral questions over creating a bomb and using it. And there is a really powerful scene with him being troubled with the Japan bombing and imagines bomb being detonated while he gives speech.

The movie doesn't show away from the affects of a nuclear explosion, but it does show the distance that the gadget creators had to the gadget's victims. There is no mistaking the destructive power of a nuclear weapon. It just happens to be that the destruction isn't a direct response that the inventor deals with.
- I think the movie did a pretty good job of showing that he wasn't the inventor of the atomic bomb. The moniker has always been "father" of the atomic bomb, since he was more of a supervisor and manager than a deep researcher at that point
  
  True. He was instrumental, but more in leading the effort of different researchers.

Heh, first it was criticism of the credits, now is what should and shouldn't be in the movie. If you know better, why don't you make your own movie that will put Nolan to shame?
- What was with the credits?
  
  That it didn't include all people responsible for VFX.
  The 70mm IMAX version basically hit the limit of the length the equipment can handle, and even treaties special extensions: https://youtu.be/d5XqqylBW7M?t=592
  Is quite cool to watch the whole video, which they show how the movie is prepared before it can be projected.

Sure show the Japanese victims, but then you need to show why they were victims in the first place. So you need to show Japanese Imperialism that committed atrocities in Nanking and the attack on Pearl Harbour.
Maybe we could go further and show that Japanese Imperialism was driven by the existential threat of Western Imperialism, which does not in any way lessen the horrors committed by Imperial Japan.
Sometimes the whole story can’t be told in a single film. Not all of it is important to the message or topic the author, director and producers wish to send or examine.
- The Japanese had decades of atrocities under their belt by the closing of world war II. There was the Bataan Death March, Siam, occupation of Manchuria, invasion of Singapore, Guam, Philippines, attack on Pearl harbor, and many many other Acts of War that the empire of Japan engaged in. Unlike others mentioned, unit 731 and the rape of Nanjing. They were utterly ruthless.
  Hell, there was that one Japanese imperial soldier who was still murdering foreigners like 30 years after the war freaking ended!
  So to say that Japan didn't deserve having atomic bombs dropped on it I believe is disingenuous. The people of Japan supported the war and were very militant, unlike the Japanese of today. They believe that they could conquer all of Asia and they try their hardest to do so. They were also prepared to fight to the death to defend their home island. During the preparation and bombing of Japan, the Russians were also preparing in amphibious invasion of Japan. This would have split the Japanese islands into Russian and American administered Islands, like what happened to Germany in the post-war.
  The two nuclear bombs dropped on Japan killed roughly 150,000 people. That is less people than died at the siege of Stalingrad in Russia. That is less people than died in a few weeks at the Battle of the Somme during world War I.
  The fact is that War sucks, and it's not just the soldiers who suffer and die - it's the civilians as well. We should never forget that, and that there's one thing that the Japanese will tell you today is that we should avoid war at all cost. Whether you agree with that or not, is for you to decide.
  
  Do you think that the pro meddling in the middle east voters in the world trade centre that day deserved to die like that?
  Genuinely, I don't. I don't think average citizens, even really fucking shitty and ignorant ones, deserve capital punishment for the crimes of those that claim dominion over them.
  
  One thing I would add is that the aftermath of the Japanese bombings have been extensively covered in various movies, anime and other media including the traveling Hiroshima atomic bomb museum. It is very important for people to understand what the tragedy that the bombings lead to. But that's an entire movie in and of itself.
  Go watch Grave of the Fireflies or Barefoot Gen if you would like to know more.
  Edit
  This is a great quote that I agree with:
  “I don’t think we should depend on Hollywood to tell our stories with the nuance and the depth and the care that they really deserve,” Nina Wallace
  Her point is that it's not Nolan's fault that he didn't make the movie about the victims, it's that he wasn't the right person for it. It's a systemic issue that Hollywood hires predominantly white male directors to make movies. They would need a different director who is conscientious about the subject matter to go make the movie about the victims. Of course, there are already movies about the victims that have been made in Japan...
- Exactly this. "Properly" covering the topic would require 18 movies covering several hundred years of history and containing both World Wars. Sometimes it's just out of scope for the project you're trying to make. It would be great for a podcast series or for a long series of documentaries, not so much for a single movie with a 180 minute runtime.
  
  I'm no expert but I enjoyed Dan Carlin's Supernova in the East podcast series on the background, lead up, and involvement of Japan in World War II - https://open.spotify.com/episode/2lqNevhLx08QPmvCLjhS4g

I agree with the experts. I mean ppl can have an opinion but I wasn't on the storyboard team so I have no clue whether that would even fit the storyline they were following and whether it would help the story in furtherance.
I get the opinion, I don't see why we need an article about it.

At the end of the day, humans don't need weapons to display cruelty. We have popped many eyes with our thumbs over the eons.
- https://time.com/after-the-bomb/

Well of course it's not, the us government wants to remind everyone that the bombings were a 'nessicary evil' that bs is still taught in schools. Not being a conspiracy guy but I cant imagine a high budget highly publicized movie would rock the boat like that. If you want to hear about sloughing go listen to the last podcast on the lefts 6 part magnum opus on the Manhattan project.
- Well of course it's not, the us government wants to
  The movie does a decent job portraying why nuclear bomb development was so much more complex than simply a necessary evil, a good, or an unnecessary evil. It's just not a simple topic with easy answers.
  The left is not in agreement about the usage or development of the bombs.
  
  Quite frankly if the U.S. didn't develop it, Germany would have. And they would have used it just like the United States did.
- So not to sound like I fully support the bombings, but they did touch in the movie about why it was a good thing. To save not only hundreds of thousands of American soldiers who would have invaded mainland Japan, but also the (potentially) greater amount of Japanese soldiers and citizens that would have died too. Millions to die because conventional war tactics weren't enough to scare the Japanese.
  They were hard-core. They took the fire bombings (which had killed many more than the nukes) in stride. They raped Nanking with unimaginable horrors. Countless human atrocities in the name of "science"
  The Japan of today in not the Japan on WW2. There's a good amount of people who would say the nukes were a merciful way to end the war. The US, in prep for the mainland assault, made the amount of purple hearts they thought they would need for just the wounded. Since the assault never happened, we still hand them out to this day
  
  This is a really common line that is patently false, the nukes had very little to do with triggering the Japanese surrender. The meeting to discuss surrender occured days after the first bombing, and started prior to the second bomb. I wasn't privy to the Council discussions, obviously, but it is exceedingly unlikely they would sit around for days after the first bombing before meeting to discuss surrender. What did happen immediately prior to the surrender meeting was the Soviet invasion.
  The nuking, of primarily non-military targets by the way, was largely a show of force demonstration to the soviets. It was not a "necessary evil" to save lives, and it was sure as hell not a mercy.
  
  Most of the current US naval command at the time later said the bombings were completely unnecessary. Your rhetoric is unsupported historical revisionism with the purpose of providing rhetorical cover for war crimes.

will Japanese directors show the camps of sex slaves they have in China or Korea? of course not
so there is your answer
- Whataboutism is not helpful.
  
  The entire premise of the article is literally whataboutism

They were victims. The nukes were war crimes. Show the victims.
Ultimately though a lot of Nolan's films are coded for a Conservative viewpoint going back to the Batman trilogy. There's still quite a bit of it here, even if this movie is intended to depict the honesty of nuclear weapons.
- Ultimately though a lot of Nolan's films are coded for a Conservative viewpoint
  Wat
  
  I'm not sure I would call Nolan an outright conservative, but there is a lot of state apologia and counter-revolutionary themes in The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises. There's multiple examples including the justification of surveillance for anti-terrorism purposes, stateless anarchy portrayed as monstrous via Bane and The Joker, Alfred justifying imperialist actions in Burma, the protagonist being a rich billionaire, a lot of dialogue that seems to suggest it's not the system that's evil, but the lack of regulation against corruption, so on and so forth.
  You might say that a lot of what he seems to advocate for seems to be firmly liberal, but Liberalism is a conservative ideology if you're looking outside America's shortsighted left/right spectrum. I like Nolan's work, but I constantly see suppression of revolutionary ideology in his work. I don't think he hates progressivism, but I do think he's riding the center, which in America, means right-wing.
- Literally half the point of the character development in the film is his realisation of the distance he has from the use and effects of his discovery. Showing them would undermine the whole thing.
  Also the given his second to last film was literally about the allies fighting Nazis in WW2 I don't know what you mean about conservative coding.

133 comments