David Walsh on Christopher Nolan on Nuclear War

Recently writing again about Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer David Walsh reiterated his praises for the film, and especially what he thought most worthwhile in it--while paying special attention to both Nolan's address of the theme of nuclear war (drawing heavily on Nolan's surprising frankness, and boldness, about his views), and the media's comment about the force of the audience's response, especially the "astonishment" of "empty-headed commentators."

So far as Walsh is concerned the film "demonstrates once again there is a genuine, abiding, growing hunger for more substantial film work" that "appeal[s] to the viewer's mental powers," as against the "noisy, empty blockbusters that insult or benumb the intelligence," with the movie's themes precisely what drew the audience to it.

Alas, I have to admit that, in some degree, I remain among the astonished. I have long taken the view that when it comes to "the market," in contrast with the conventional wisdom about the consumer being king business generally decides what it is most profitable for it to have the consumer buy, presents them that take-it-or-leave-it , and they usually have little choice but to take it, be in the area housing, cars, consumer electronics, or anything else, because the alternative is to go without a practical necessity, even though they would prefer something else, and have that option if markets really worked the way the conventional wisdom insists they do (for instance, having the choice of cheaper, more durable goods rather than more expensive ones with features they find irrelevant or even destructive of value, as with so much of Silicon Valley's recent vile stupidities).

Yet I have tended to incline to the view that there is a good deal more congruence between what the consumer is offered in the world of pop culture and what they want. The consumer may take trash because they have been poorly educated, exhausted, stultified--enjoy a "pastime for helots" because they have been reduced to the condition of helots--but the point is that the unambitious, lowest common denominator character of the work meaningfully reflects what they can handle intellectually or emotionally. (As Steven Soderbergh put it a while back "There's a very good argument to be made that only somebody who has it really good would want to make a movie that makes you feel really bad," and fewer people have been having it "really good.") Indeed, I have been prone to accept that, if at times in the past challenging movies have more frequently been successes, there were special reasons for that, which did not last long--that, for example, a movie like Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up became a hit mainly because it promised a then-groundbreaking bit of nudity and sex (of the kind that an appreciable audience actually wanted to see), that if the New Hollywood's decline was a matter of many different factors audience's appetite for such material was also finite relative to its openness to the splashy high concept then in the ascendant and dominant ever since.

Still, Oppenheimer's American gross was not simply a matter of suckering in audiences on the opening weekend, but sustained success as it displayed remarkable legs, grossing four times its opening weekend take in a feat few movies accomplish, while the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is a truly fresh 91 percent. And of course the movie tripled its massive domestic gross globally, performing well in market after market. (Indeed Walsh, who rarely pays much attention to box office grosses, spends quite a bit of time parsing the numbers in demonstrating that, yes, people really did get interested, really did go for it.) As a result there is far, far too much evidence here of audiences responding to what they saw for one to blithely dismiss it as a matter of Midcult-devouring middlebrows claiming to like what they think they are supposed to say they like. And in fact it has me rethinking my position. I am far from convinced that we will see the multiplexes packed with serious adult dramas, even of more conventional character, anytime soon--but it may well be that there is a good deal more openness to such drama than those of us who pore over box office data have been given reason to suspect in a long time; and that, as Walsh also suggests, it may be a matter of the dark times the global public is living through forcing some hard rethinking about life, the universe, and everything.