About Those Oppenheimer Posters . . .

A little while ago I discussed here my views of Christopher Nolan's strengths and weaknesses that left me with low expectations for his highly touted new film Oppenheimer.

The poster did not allay those suspicions.

After all, Nolan has shown himself to be exceedingly "conventional" in his views--and where science and engineering are concerned that conventional perspective imagines science as wizardry, and scientists as summoners, or even gods--a false way of looking at the matter, the more in as it is usually reduced to a summoner or god rather than many. That the film is based on and presented as a "biography" (where, as A.J.P. Taylor wrote, instead of history's putting society first, the writer "builds up his individual subject until society is almost forgotten") makes me suspect this will be all the more the case here--reducing that extraordinary example of Big Science, the "Manhattan Project," to the doings of one man.

The poster in which Oppenheimer is seen standing amid the blast of an apparent nuclear explosion would seem to confirm this evil-creation-of-a-god image. The later poster, in which Cillian Murphy stands in front of what looks like a big bomb with an even more than usually creepy expression on his lean, vaguely otherworldly face, confirms it yet again, in its way more powerfully. And frankly this nonsense is the last thing we need right now as the problems raised by the deficiencies of public and even elite understanding of science and technology--of science as method, and of how things actually get invented and made--seem the more pressing by the day; and amid great power conflict, the threat of nuclear war resurges horribly.

That fashionable commentators ignore that as they gabble about the hyping of artificial intelligence only underlines the fact.