The Great Locomotive Chase

Conductor William Fuller (JEffrey Hunter) flags down the locomotive Texas in The Great Locomotive Chase (1956). That’s Slim Pickens in the cab of the engine.

Last night for family movie night I got to share a movie with my kids that I had previously seen only once, probably thirty years ago, but wanted to rewatch ever since. It’s an action-packed Civil War story and, best of all, was shot in my home county in northeast Georgia. It’s Walt Disney’s 1956 spy thriller The Great Locomotive Chase, starring Fess Parker and Jeffrey Hunter.

The Great Locomotive Chase is a bit of a legend back home. For years the Clayton Cafe on Main Street had a photo of Disney himself, enjoying a post-breakfast cigarette in one of the booths, framed on the wall behind the register. It seemed like everyone I knew growing up had some connection to the film. A cousin of mine claimed a grandfather on his dad’s side was visible on the station platform in one scene. Others who didn’t appear as extras remembered the filming, or seeing Disney and his cast and crew around. There have been plenty of movies shot in Rabun County, but none remembered quite as fondly as this. It certainly doesn’t provoke the shame or hostility that Deliverance still does.

As for me, after years of hearing about it and having developed a powerful interest in the Civil War in elementary school, I finally got to watch it one afternoon when my dad rented a VHS from the now-defunct Movie Time Video next door to the now-defunct Bi-Lo. I watched it eagerly, and we returned it, and I never saw it again. Until this weekend.

I’d forgotten a lot about it. I mostly remembered the standard old Hollywood Confederate uniforms—gray with blue infantry collars, cuffs, and hatbands—that struck me even at the time as unrealistic. And I remembered a railroad tunnel and, at the end, the Yankee spies walking circles in a prison yard. But that was about it. When I ran across an unopened DVD at our local used book store I snapped it up.

I’m glad to say it was an enjoyable adventure, and much better than I even remembered.

The Great Locomotive Chase is based on the true story of the Andrews raid of April 1862, in which twenty Union saboteurs led by civilian spy James Andrews infiltrated north Georgia, boarded a train at Marietta north of Atlanta, and hijacked it. The plan was to steam northward to Chattanooga vandalizing the tracks, cutting telegraph wires, and burning bridges and causing as much destruction as possible to cripple a key link in the Confederacy’s flimsy rail network.

Unfortunately for Andrews and his men, they were held up several times by southbound freight trains. Worse, and fatally for them and their mission, they were doggedly pursued by employees of the railroad, who at first assumed the train had been stolen by deserters. One of the pursuers, a young conductor named William Fuller, chased them for 87 miles, starting on foot before working through three locomotives, the last of which he drove backwards up the tracks.

As for Andrews and his raiders, Fuller’s pursuit cost them the time needed to take on fuel and water. When they ran out of steam they abandoned the locomotive and were swept up by Confederate cavalry. Eventually, eight were executed as spies, including Andrews. But the raiders became the first recipients of the new Congressional Medal of Honor.

Disney’s film tells this story straightforwardly, framing it with the presentation of the Medal of Honor to some of the raid’s survivors. Among them is William Pittenger (John Lupton), who serves as narrator. Parts of the first act feel rushed, as Andrews (Fess Parker) is introduced quickly, briefs a Union general, requests a team, and instantly receives one. Only as the group travels south to infiltrate the Confederacy do the raiders get characterization. The most notable after Andrews and Pittenger, who mostly works as an observer for the audience, is Campbell (Jeff York), a nationalist hothead who becomes fed up with the “bowing and scraping” of his spy cover and wants nothing more than to murder Southerners. His temper and desire to fight present a constant danger to the secrecy of Andrews’s mission.

But once the raiders are aboard the train and put their plan into motion, the film is continuously propulsive, suspenseful, and well-paced. The train action, almost all practical, staged aboard real trains on the Tallulah Falls Railroad, is genuinely impressive. Andrews and Fuller (Jeffrey Hunter) engage in a stream-driven game of cat and mouse, with Andrews sabotaging the line ahead of Fuller in numerous creative ways and the tenacious Fuller using his expertise as a railroad man to counteract them and keep up the pursuit. Adding appreciably to the quality of the action, it appears that Hunter did most of his own stunts. The final leg of the chase, in which he shouts orders to the engineer from the back of a locomotive racing along in reverse, is especially exciting.

Based on some of what I’ve read online, people at the time and since have found the film’s final act anticlimactic or even too depressing. I thought it fit the structure of the story perfectly, allowing the action-heavy first parts of the film to conclude on character-driven notes of respect if not reconciliation.

The ending serves Parker especially well, as for most of the movie he is stoic, manly, and brave, but not much else. In this film he lacks the charisma that made him famous as Davy Crockett, and so—without giving too much away—a heartfelt speech in his final scene gives him a belated depth that was very moving. The rest of the cast ranges from mediocre to fine. One confrontation between Campbell and the more patient members of the raiders has some noticeably wooden acting, but I was pleased to see how many locals got bit parts in the film and how well they did. Among the rest of the professional cast, I especially liked seeing Slim Pickens in an early role as one of Fuller’s engineers.

But performance-wise, The Great Locomotive Chase belongs to two secondary characters—Campbell and Fuller. It’s easy to see why. York and Hunter are certainly excellent in their parts, especially Hunter, whose physicality and sympathetic performance make him a worthy adversary but not a bad guy, but the characters themselves are more compelling than the lofty and distant Andrews. Both Campbell and Fuller are tough, tenacious, and physically brave, both are driven by implacable hostility toward their enemies, and both reliably follow through in a crisis. Both also have full character arcs, with their intense aggression transformed into respect in the conclusion—which, again, I don’t want to give away.

Disney put a lot of effort into this movie, shooting it in Technicolor CinemaScope like the more special effects-heavy 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which had come out two years before, so it’s a shame it wasn’t as financially successful as he had hoped. More to the point for us nowadays, it’s a shame that Disney’s successors haven’t given this film a decent home media release. It’s currently available to rent in HD on Amazon Prime, but as far as I can tell the 20+ year old, non-anamorphic DVD I found a few weeks ago is the sole home video release since the VHS days. A restored Blu-ray would be nice, especially since this film meant as much to Disney—and the people of my county—as it did.

The Great Locomotive Chase is a simple, straightforward film, but a fine example of classic Hollywood filmmaking. If you haven’t seen it before or haven’t even heard of it, I hope you’ll check it out.

More if you’re interested

The Walt Disney Family Museum has a good “making of” article on The Great Locomotive Chase that gives good attention to Rabun County and the technical side of filming. For local resources and memories of the film, here’s a Rabun County Historical Society newsletter with behind the scenes photos and detailed captions, and here’s a Foxfire podcast interview with locals who appeared as extras.

If you’re interested in the true story of the Andrews Raiders, see the New Georgia Encyclopedia article above for a good overview. Here’s a short volume from Osprey’s Raid series on the Andrews Raid, and here’s the primary source behind the film: William Pittenger’s memoir Capturing a Locomotive: A History of Secret Service in the Late War, available for free at Project Gutenberg.

Woke Bond is boring Bond

Earlier this week I read a short piece by Niall Gooch at the Spectator called “The terribleness of a progressive Bond.” It’s a review of a new Bond novella by Charlie Higson, On His Majesty’s Secret Service, which was written to coincide with the coronation of Charles II. The story, insofar as it has one, involves Bond traveling to Hungary to infiltrate a nationalist plot to overthrow Charles and install a pretender claiming direct descent from Alfred the Great.

Gooch was not impressed. In addition to poor plotting and writing (“It makes Dan Brown look like a master of nuance, understatement and subtle characterisation”), Higson’s novella is overtly political, with a menagerie of baddies gathered from the most fevered imaginations of left-leaning Twitter types. The villains are cartoonishly anti-immigration, anti-EU, and vaccine-skeptical, and needless to say they’re all inarticulate white men who like guns and beer. Gooch:

None of them is a genuine character. Instead they are mere empty vessels, onto which he projects his bizarre fantasies about the motivations and beliefs of conservatives. People who are sceptical about mass immigration or transgenderism or the erosion of free speech are simply itching to engage in mass terror attacks in the heart of London, apparently.

But long before this becomes explicit, you’ll feel it. They’re interested in Anglo-Saxon history? They like Hungary? If you are left wondering why a London businessman calling himself Athelstan of Wessex would organize his plot in Hungary, you are not part of Higson’s political bubble, and On His Majesty’s Secret Service is not written for you. It is, Gooch writes, “clearly a work of propaganda.”

As it happens, I read On His Majesty’s Secret Service this summer, and there’s a reason you didn’t hear anything about it here. Gooch’s review is wholly accurate.

I thought it perhaps better written than Gooch did, but that’s damning with faint praise. My one thought through the entire first half of the story was “Okay, I see what you’re doing,” which was personally irritating and, artistically, meant that the second half held no surprises. And I agree entirely that the staid “Centrist Dad” Bond of this novella—a man who is in a carefully worked out and consensual open relationship; whose self-satisfied inner thoughts range across a litany of studiedly correct leftwing opinions on everything from English nationalism and Viktor Orban to sweatshops and gut health; and who is comfortable dropping terms like “toxic” and “far right”—is a diminished Bond. For Gooch, this is “cringeworthy.” My word was “annoying.”

It’s also boring.

Why? The key word comes in Gooch’s final paragraph:

It is perhaps some consolation that there must eventually be a reaction against the smug, complacent tone of of the contemporary cultural scene. Until then, it seems like we may be in for some very bad films, books and TV shows, praised not for any artistic merit but for their ideological conformity.

Complacent. You could never call the original Bond complacent. He was not a happy man. Despite his smarts, skills, strength, love of the high life, and success with women, Bond was always a bit out of step with the modern world, ever more so as time went on. When Judi Dench’s M calls Bond a “dinosaur” in GoldenEye it is meant as an insult but accurately captures a fundamental aspect of the original character. This is because Fleming’s Bond—and, to a lesser but still palpable extent, the Bond of the films—was a relic of the Empire. His fate all the way through Fleming’s series is to risk all and suffer much on behalf of something that was crumbling anyway, often preventably and therefore pointlessly.

And so Fleming’s Bond grows more bitter and the novels more poignant and reflective as the series goes on. By the time of You Only Live Twice, the penultimate original novel, Bond is so alienated, so disillusioned with his work and what Britain has become, that the only person left who can understand him is a former enemy, a Japanese kamikaze pilot. Both know not only what it means to lose, permanently, but to survive to no apparent purpose.

By contrast, a Bond who shares the views dominant in media and academia is comfortable, static, and smug in a way Fleming’s Bond never could be. The original Bond is fighting what Tolkien called a “long defeat,” a doomed but heroic defense of something that will perish but is worthwhile anyway. Higson’s Bond critiques everything he sees from the lofty height of his own detached correctness. He would be more likely to process his trauma with a therapist than find a friend in a past enemy. He has nothing to learn, nothing to lose, and nothing to die for. He is right where he—and, indeed, everyone else—should be.

Blame the author. Fleming put a lot of himself into Bond; hence not only the womanizing and love of scrambled eggs but the bitterness, weariness, and disillusionment. Fleming was a dinosaur, too, and he knew it. Higson, on the other hand, and his Bond belong. Gooch:

I admit to being somewhat surprised by quite how leaden and didactic this book was. Are there no editors left, I asked myself as I waded through the underpowered, hectoring prose. Perhaps, however, that is a function of how hegemonic Higson’s views are among the creative classes.

After all, goldfish do not know they are wet, and people who conform instinctively and wholeheartedly to contemporary pieties—about borders and gender and free speech and identity—find it very difficult to understand the extent of their epistemic bubbles. We seem to be entering an age when didactic pro-establishment propaganda with little merit is not only everywhere, but goes unremarked and uncriticised because the people with cultural power generally agree with each other about almost every issue of importance.

If a literary or even cinematic Bond is to retain any shred of his antiheroic character—or even to remain merely interesting—he’s going to have to become ever more an outsider in his behavior and opinions. He can do that simply by remaining himself. Whether the people at the levers of publishing and filmmaking will allow that is another question entirely.

Gooch’s entire review is worth reading, not only for its critique of Higson’s book but for its insight into the present cultural hegemony. I’ve written about Bond along similar lines several times before: here on the blog about the vein of melancholy running through Fleming’s stories as Bond watches the disintegration of the world he is defending, and at the University Bookman about Bond’s arc and Fleming’s craftsmanship. I’ve also speculated about what is to become of the film series and its Bond here.

JRR Tolkien, 50 years later

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the death of JRR Tolkien, an occasion for reflection and appreciation. A few impromptu thoughts on Tolkien’s work and what it—and Tolkien himself—have meant to me over the years:

Part of Tolkien’s legacy for me is purely philosophical. Writing at The Critic yesterday, Sebastian Milbank considers the unlikely success of Tolkien’s storytelling in a literary environment under the Sauron-like dominion of irony, cynicism, amorality, and the tortured solipsism of post-Freudian psychology. Milbank:

More than anything else Lord of the Rings communicates a sensibility utterly at odds with the spirit of the age in which it was written. It is one of profound, tragic loss, of the vulnerability of irretrievable, ancient beauty, that must desperately be conserved and defended. It is of the inherent heroism of standing against destructive change, of hope beyond all reason, amidst the logic of history, which Tolkien named “the long defeat”.

Further, there is no “authorial wink,” no signaling or messaging for fellow bien pensants of the kind typical of elitist, politically motivated modernist art. In its morality (not moralism), earnestness, and total commitment to the act of storytelling and the sub-creation of imaginary worlds, Tolkien’s legendarium has become perhaps the anti-modernist myth par excellence, and not by taking any conscious stance but simply by being utterly and sincerely itself.

And yet this philosophical and religious understanding of the drama of Tolkien’s stories came to me later, after long thought and even longer thoughtless basking in his world and words. And I do mean words quite literally.

During college I moved from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to some of Tolkien’s essays. This proved a fortuitous time to do so. I read “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” at about the same time I was taking British History I and British Literature I, a one-two punch of subjects that have become lifelong passions. Reading and rereading Beowulf, and learning about the Anglo-Saxons, and rereading The Lord of the Rings, and then giving intense nuts-and-bolts attention to language, style, tone, and technique in my Creative Writing minor classes, aided by the insights and example of John Gardner, revealed much that was at work beneath the surface of Tolkien’s stories. For the first time I perceived the purposeful deliberation behind his choice of words and the structure of his sentences and poems, and the careful use of allusion to expand the world in which a small story takes place.

This was heady stuff and, emboldened with the enthusiasm of discovery and youthful experiment, I plunged into my Novel Writing class in my final semester of college armed with new and exciting tools. The eventual result was No Snakes in Iceland. It may be that I belong to that class of “mediocre imitators,” as Milbank calls them in his piece, but my first published novel would not have come to be without Tolkien’s example.

And Tolkien’s example extends beyond the literary. Milbank does not delve far into Tolkien the man in his essay, but Tolkien’s actual life story stands as just as strong a rebuke to modernism as his novels. A child of hardship, orphaned at an early age, raised in a teeming industrial city, a soldier in some of the worst combat in history, here is a man who lived through all the blights that should have embittered and driven him to misery and indulgence nevertheless living quietly and faithfully with his wife and children and working just as happily in his professional field as on his private hobbies. He is not the tortured, arrogant literary scribbler of modern myth and his protagonists are neither whiners nor degenerates. Geniuses don’t have to be jerks. A man of faith, duty, family, close friendship, rigorous and honest scholarship, and devotion to the small and parochial and workaday, Tolkien was in every way a candidate for a saintly “hidden life.” And yet everyone knows who he was.

This is perhaps the starkest irony of Tolkien’s life: that a man so contented with his lot and so unambitious (in the way of the worlds of commerce, politics, or celebrity) should become the author of the twentieth century. The more I have studied his life the more I admire him and wish for the grace to emulate him.

All of these things matter to me—the philosophy, the aesthetic, the man himself—but at the root of Tolkien’s meaning for me lie the stories. As it should be.

I can actually date my love for Tolkien. I read The Hobbit in high school at a friend’s urgent insistence (thanks, Josh!) and—again, fortuitously—my county’s brand-new Walmart had the book in stock. On July 10, 2000, I was reading it while my family sat in Atlanta traffic on our way to Turner Field for the home run derby. I had reached a chapter called “Riddles in the Dark.” We drove through a tunnel, one of those places where the interstate runs under a major street like Jimmy Carter Boulevard, and I was hooked. I had enjoyed The Hobbit up to this point but now I loved it, and knew I would read the rest and move straight on to The Lord of the Rings as soon as I could. I’ve never looked back and that love and excitement has never flagged or diminished.

That’s the power of a good story told by a great artist. In Chesterton’s words, Tolkien became for me the “center” of a “flaming imagination.” That imagination has remained aflame for twenty-three years because Tolkien not only told a good story, which plenty of people can do, but because his work is rich and deep and loving and, most of all, true enough to return to again and again for more. No burglar can diminish this hoard by even a cup.

I’ve used the word “fortuitous” twice in this reflection despite knowing that Tolkien would not himself think of it that way. Rightly so. Tolkien believed in Providence and it is largely through his example that I can grasp and trust in that idea. So when I do think of those coincidences, the circumstances and strong confluences and old friendships that kindled and kept my love for Tolkien burning, I hear Gandalf’s closing admonition to Bilbo: “You don’t really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit?”

No, I don’t. Thank goodness.

JRR Tolkien, artist, scholar, elf-friend, and faithful servant of God, from whom all creativity descends, RIP.

More if you’re interested

Milbank’s essay at The Critic is excellent—one of the best recent pieces on Tolkien that I’ve read. Check out the whole thing here. For more on the religious and philosophical underpinnings of Tolkien’s world, all worked out organically through his storytelling rather than imposed as a moral, read Peter Kreeft’s The Philosophy of Tolkien. I’ve written about Tolkien here many times before—just click the Tolkien tag below for more—but in the early days of this blog I reviewed a delightful and beautifully illustrated children’s book called John Ronald’s Dragons that I want to recommend here again.

Chesterton on the arrogance of civilization

detail from The Course of Empire: Desolation, by Thomas COle

Last night I finally started reading The Napoleon of Notting Hill, an early Chesterton novel that I’ve just never gotten around to. The opening chapters are vintage Chesterton, and probably even a little more fresh and brisk than his later fiction. The novel is set in the London of far-distant 1984 (another underrecognized Chesterton-Orwell connection?), a sort of dystopia of efficiency where everything is regulated, everything is chugging along successfully, and everything is dull.

In the opening chapter, two bureaucratic functionaries, both dull men in black suits, are walking to work in the pre-dawn twilight when they run into the deposed President of Nicaragua. They are immediately drawn to the President not just because of his elaborate and brightly colored costume, but because of his magnetic air of regal authority. That he produces a pocket knife and soaks his handkerchief in his own blood, next pinning the bloody rag to his breast as a flag to commemorate the loss of Nicaragua, only cements their interest in him.

Nevertheless, the two fall into an argument with the President. Barker, the intellectual of the two (“He had a great amount of intellectual capacity, of that peculiar kind which raises a man from throne to throne and lets him die loaded with honours without having either amused or enlightened the mind of a single man”), condescendingly argues that the President’s overthrow and the absorption of a once-independent Nicaragua into a North American superstate is not a bad thing, because Progress. That absorption brought education, science, and progress even if it meant the decline of the things that made Nicaragua unique.

The President, understandably, assumes that Barker’s sympathies are with the unnamed larger nation that took Nicaragua over. “My sympathies are with no nation,” Barker replies. “We moderns believe in a great cosmopolitan civilisation, one which shall include all the talents of all the absorbed peoples.” Consumed, assimilated, brought up to some external standard, scientifically progressed into a deracinated copy of every other “absorbed people,” the Nicaraguans have lost even their once famous ability to capture and tame wild horses.

“‘I never catch a wild horse,’ replied Barker, with dignity.”

Such folk skills are, to him, “a mere barbarian dexterity.” But the President cannot help but feel “that something went from the world when Nicaragua was civilised.” 

“Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?”

“Something, perhaps,” replied Barker, “but that something a mere barbarian dexterity. I do not know that I could chip flints as well as a primeval man, but I know that civilisation can make these knives which are better, and I trust to civilisation.”

“You have good authority,” answered the Nicaraguan. “Many clever men like you have trusted to civilisation. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?”

It is not the point of Chesterton’s novel, but this is a striking preview of the globalist blender—well before it was set to puree by the internet—complete with the self-satisfied moral superiority of the big as they wield their bigness against the small. And the President’s final line is a good reminder of the fate of all civilizations, no matter how confident, successful, and progressive. At the very least it is a warning against the tyranny of the present.

As for the President, he departs the story with an even sharper and more evocative line, and possibly one to live by:

“Every man is dangerous,” said the old man without moving, “who cares only for one thing. I was once dangerous myself.”

And with a pleasant smile he finished his coffee and rose, bowing profoundly, passed out into the fog, which had again grown dense and sombre. Three days afterwards they heard that he had died quietly in lodgings in Soho.

For those of us who sense the going of “something” from the world with the advance of “civilization,” see this reflection on Paul Kingsnorth from back in January. For the “theological task” of the present age, that of making modern man have even “an inkling of what has been taken from him,” see this passage from Jünger’s The Forest Passage that I posted last year.

A quick personal update

Books and Bede—a favorite gift from my wife and kids

The hot but unhurried days of the summer gave way, right at the beginning of this month, to the haste and chaos of preparation for the fall semester. In my case, I am preparing for three fall semesters, as I have picked up adjunct classes at two other colleges in addition to my full-time teaching. Just keeping deadlines straight will be an adventure.

The reason for all of this is a happy one that I’m not sure I’ve directly addressed here—my wife and I are expecting twins, our fourth and fifth children. I’ve taken on this extra work for the time she will be out following their birth. These adjunct courses were mercifully easy to find. One was even offered to me sight unseen thanks to a recommendation from a colleague. How often now does someone need work and have it dropped into his lap like that? We are blessed and have had a lot of cause this summer to reflect on God’s provision—in time, in work, in material needs—for these babies and for us.

That said, when exactly the twins will arrive is up in the air. Were they to go full-term they would arrive three weeks into September, but my wife’s OB doesn’t let twins go past 38 weeks. So we were looking toward the second weekend in September. Now, though, the doctor may decide to induce around 37 weeks, bumping the twins’ arrival another week nearer. There is also the possibility—just a possibility, but a possibility that has a startling way of focusing one’s attention—that they may induced this week, depending on how my wife’s checkups go. She spent last night at the hospital under observation, a common enough occurrence for women at this stage of expecting twins but still a reminder of how near we are. Fortunately all signs were good and she’ll be released this morning.

And of course the babies could do their own thing and come at any time now, something we’ve been working to prepare for for the last couple weeks. We have a “go bag” in the back of the van, waiting.

All of which is to say that my writing here, already spotty since the end of the summer session, may be more sporadic in the coming weeks. I may not, for instance, have the time or stamina to complete a summer reading list. Then again, being able to work on something one paragraph at a time might be just the thing. There’s no way to tell at this point. But I hope y’all will keep checking in and stay in touch, and most of all that y’all will celebrate with us.

In the meantime, here’s a short reflection on birth and life inspired by an offhand metaphor in Beowulf that I wrote following the birth of our third child four years ago. Please check that out.

Further notes on Indy and Oppie

July was a big movie month here on the blog, with three reviews of movies ranging from “adequate compared to Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” to “great.” Two of them I’ve reflected on continually since seeing them and reviewing them here, especially as I’ve read, watched, and listened to more about them.

Here are a few extra thoughts on my summer’s movie highlights cobbled together over the last couple of weeks:

Indiana Jones and the Curse of Woke

When I reviewed Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny a month and a half ago, I didn’t dwell on the malign influence of woke ideology in its storytelling, only mentioning that I had justifiable suspicions of any Indiana Jones film produced by Disney. I wanted to acknowledge those doubts without going into detail, because after actually watching and, mostly, enjoying the movie, I found that the problems I had with Dial of Destiny weren’t political at all, but artistic. It isn’t woke, it’s just mediocre.

That didn’t stop a certain kind of critic from finding the spectral evidence of wokeness in the film and trumpeting their contempt for it. I’m thinking particularly of a caustic YouTube reviewer I usually enjoy, as well as this review for Law & Liberty, which comes out guns blazing and attacks Dial of Destiny explicitly and at length along political lines.

The problem with these reviews is that in their hypersensitivity and their mission to expose ideological propaganda they do violence to the object of their criticism, not just misinterpreting things but getting some thing completely wrong. Here’s a representative paragraph from that Law & Liberty review:

Next, we cut to 1969, the Moon Landing. Indy is an old tired man, sad, alone, miserable. The camera insists on his ugly, flabby naked body. His young neighbors wake him up with their rock music and despise him. His students don’t care about his anthropological course. His colleagues give him a retirement party and soon enough they’re murdered, by Nazis working secretly in the government, with the complicity of the CIA or some other deep state agency. We see the wife is divorcing him; we later learn, it’s because his son died in war, presumably Vietnam—Indy told the boy not to sign up.

What was remarkable about this paragraph to me is how much it simply gets wrong. Indy’s hippie neighbors wake him up by blasting the Beatles, yes, but they also treat him perfectly amiably. (In fact, it’s Indy who knocks on their door armed with a baseball bat.) It is never clear that Voller’s men have help from the CIA or any other “deep state agency;” I kept waiting for that connection but it never came. And Indy did not try to stop his son from joining the army, a point made so clear in the film—Indy’s one stated wish, were time travel possible, would be to tell him not to join—that it’s staggering to think a critic went to print with this.*

From later in the same review: “But turning from obvious metaphors to ideology, Indy is replaced by a young woman, Helen [sic—her name is Helena], daughter of his old archaeological friend Basil, but the film suggests you should think of her as a goddess to worship.” One of my chief complaints about Dial of Destiny was its failure to deal with Helena’s criminality, giving her a half-baked or even accidental redemptive arc that spares her a face-melting, as befitted all similar characters in Indy’s inscrutable but always moral universe. That bad writing again. But how one could watch her character in action and conclude that the audience is meant to “worship” her is beyond me. This is anti-woke Bulverism.

What these hostile reviewers describe is often the opposite of what is actually happening in the film. I’ve seen multiple critics assert that Helena has “replaced” Indy and “controls” and “belittles” him. The Law & Liberty reviewer describes Indy as just “along for the ride.” Helena certainly intends to use him—she’s a scam artist and he’s a mark. This is all made explicit in the film. But it is also made explicit that Indy does, in fact, keep taking charge and leading them from clue to clue and that he is much a tougher mark than Helena was counting on.

Dial of Destiny’s actual problems are all classic artistic failures—poor pacing, overlong action sequences, plodding exposition, weak or cliched characters,** slipshod writing, and a misapprehension of what matters in an Indiana Jones movie that becomes clearest in the ending, when Indy is reunited (for the third time) with Marion. Here the filmmakers make the same mistake as the team behind No Time to Die by giving Indy, like Bond, romantic continuity and attempting to trade on sentimentality when that is not what the character is about.

Again—these are artistic problems. Helena Shaw isn’t a girlboss or avenging avatar of wokeness; she’s a poorly written villain who doesn’t get her comeuppance. But I saw little such criticism among the fountains of indignation from the reviewers who pursued the “woke Disney” line of criticism.

Perhaps this is the greatest curse of wokeness: that it distorts even its critics’ minds. Once they’ve determined that a movie is woke, they’ll see what they want to see.

Call it woke derangement syndrome and add it to all the other derangement syndromes out there. Woke ideology is real, even if the ordinary person can’t define it with the precision demanded by a Studies professor or Twitter expert, and it is pernicious, and it produces—even demands—bad art. It is a kind of self-imposed blindness, as are all ideologies. But zeroing in on wokeness as the explanation for bad art can blind us to real artistic flaws, and if any good and beautiful art is to survive our age we need a keen, clear, unclouded vision of what makes art work. We need not just a sensitivity to the bad, but an understanding of the good.

Douthat on Oppenheimer

On to better criticism of a better movie. Ross Douthat, a New York Times op-ed columnist who writes film criticism for National Review, has been one of my favorite critics for the last decade. Douthat begins his review of Oppenheimer with an abashed confession that he feels guilty saying “anything especially negative about” it, but that as brilliantly executed as it is, he is “not so sure” that it is “actually a great film.”

Fair enough. What gives Douthat pause, then? For him, the problem is Oppenheimer’s final third, which he sees not as a satisfying denouement but simply a long decline from the height of the Trinity test, a decline complicated by thematic missteps:

There are two problems with this act in the movie. The first is that for much of its running time, Oppenheimer does a good job with the ambiguities of its protagonist’s relationship to the commonplace communism of his intellectual milieu—showing that he was absolutely the right man for the Manhattan Project job but also that he was deeply naïve about the implications of his various friendships and relationships and dismissive about what turned out to be entirely real Soviet infiltration of his project.

On this point I agree. As I wrote in my own review, I thought this was one of the film’s strengths. Douthat continues:

But the ending trades away some of this ambiguity for a more conventional anti-McCarthyite narrative, in which Oppenheimer was simply martyred by know-nothings rather than bringing his political troubles on himself. You can rescue a more ambiguous reading from the scenes of Oppenheimer’s security-clearance hearings alone, but the portions showing Strauss’s Senate-hearing comeuppance have the feeling of a dutiful liberal movie about the 1950s—all obvious heroes and right-wing villains, no political complexity allowed.

The second problem, as Douthat sees it, is that the drama surrounding Oppenheimer’s political destruction and Strauss’s comeuppance is unworthy of the high stakes and technical drama of the middle half of the movie concerning the Manhattan Project: “I care about the bomb and the atomic age; I don’t really care about Lewis Strauss’s confirmation, and ending a movie about the former with a dramatic reenactment of the latter seems like a pointless detour from what made Oppenheimer worth making in the first place.”

There is merit here, but I think Douthat is wrong.

I, too, got the “dutiful liberal” vibe from the final scenes, but strictly from the Alden Ehrenreich character. Ehrenreich is a fine actor unjustly burdened with the guilt of Solo, but his congressional aide character’s smug hostility to Strauss as Strauss is defeated in his confirmation hearing feels too pat, too easy. It’s Robert Downey Jr’s sympathetic and complicated portrayal of Strauss, not to mention the fact that the film demonstrates that, however Strauss acted upon them, his concerns about espionage and Oppenheimer’s naivete were justified, that saves the film from simply being standard anti-McCarthy grandstanding.***

Regarding the seemingly diminished stakes of the final act, I too wondered as I first watched Oppenheimer whether Nolan might have done better to begin in medias res, to limit himself strictly to the story of the bomb. But that story has already been told several times and Oppenheimer is very much a character study; this specific man’s rise and fall are the two necessary parts of a story that invokes Prometheus before it even begins.

The key, I think, is in the post-war scene with Oppenheimer and Einstein talking by the pond at Princeton. Nolan brings us back to this moment repeatedly—it’s therefore worth paying attention to. The final scene reveals Oppenheimer and Einstein’s conversation to us:

Oppenheimer: When I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world.

Einstein: I remember it well. What of it?

Oppenheimer: I believe we did.

Cue a vision of the earth engulfed in flames.

A technology that can destroy the entire world is not just the literal danger of Oppenheimer’s project, but a metaphorical one. The Trinity test proves fear of the literal destruction of the world unfounded, but the final act of the film—in which former colleagues tear each other apart over espionage and personal slights and former allies spy and steal and array their weapons against each other and the United States goes questing for yet more powerful bombs, a “chain reaction” all beginning with Oppenheimer’s “gadget”—shows us an unforeseen metaphorical destruction as it’s happening. The bomb doesn’t have to be dropped on anyone to annihilate.

This is a powerful and disturbing dimension of the film that you don’t get without that final act.

Finally, for a wholly positive appraisal of Oppenheimer as visual storytelling—that is, as a film—read this piece by SA Dance at First Things. Dance notes, in passing, the same importance of the film’s final act that I did: “The two threads are necessary to account for the political paradox of not just the a-bomb but of all technology.” A worthwhile read.

Addenda: About half an hour after I posted this, Sebastian Milbank’s review for The Critic went online. It’s insightful well-stated, especially with regard to Oppenheimer’s “refusal to be bound” by anyone or anything, a theme with intense religious significance.

And a couple hours after that, I ran across this excellent Substack review by Bethel McGrew, which includes this line, a better, more incisive critique of the framing narrative than Douthat’s: “This is a weakness of the film, which provides all the reasons why Oppenheimer should never have had security clearance, then demands we root against all the men who want to take it away.”

Tom Cruise does the impossible

The most purely enjoyable filmgoing experience I had this summer was Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning, Part I. To be sure, Oppenheimer was great art, the best film qua film of the summer, but this was great entertainment. I enjoyed it so much that, after reviewing it, I haven’t found anything else to say about it except that I liked it and can’t wait for Part II.

Leaving me with one short, clearly expressed opinion—a truly impossible mission, accomplished.

Endnotes

* In fairness, the review has one really interesting observation: in reference to the film’s titular Dial being Greek in origin, unlike the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail, “Jews are replaced by Greeks in the Indiana Jones mythology, since our elites are no longer Christian.” The insight here is only partially diminished by the fact that the elites who created Indiana Jones were not Christian, either. Steven Spielberg, Philip Kaufman, and Lawrence Kasdan—key parts of Raiders—are all Jewish.

** Here is where Dial of Destiny drifts closest to woke characterization. The agents working for Voller in the first half include a white guy in shirt and tie with a crew cut and a thick Southern accent and a black female with an afro and the flyest late 1960s fashion. Which do you think turns out to be a devious bad guy and which a principled good guy? But even here, I don’t think this is woke messaging so much as the laziness of cliché. Secondary characters with Southern accents have been doltish rubes or sweaty brutes for decades.

*** A useful point of comparison, also involving a black-and-white Robert Downey Jr, is George Clooney’s engaging but self-important Good Night, and Good Luck. Watch both films and tell me which is “all obvious heroes and right-wing villains.”

Poe on Progress

The capital P above is intentional. Here’s a passage by Poe that I’ve run across in excerpt several times, from an 1844 letter to fellow poet James Russell Lowell, who had requested “a sort of spiritual autobiography” from Poe. In the course of laying out his beliefs and opinions, Poe writes:

“I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active—not more happy—nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary—and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain—that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future—that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves—nor are we with our posterity.”

— Edgar Allan Poe, July 2, 1849

I’ve written often enough about the myth of Progress—whether applied to politics as Progressivism, to the study of history as Whig or Progressive history, or in the popular imagination as the constant general improvement of everything over time—but Poe captures both my beliefs and my mood just about perfectly. Not only does the myth of Progress blind us to our own potential for failure, it rubbishes and belittles our forebears. It is not only incorrect, but impious.

You can read Poe’s entire letter to Lowell, which is full of personal asides and opinions, here. It’s available as part of a great archive of Poe correspondence made available online by the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, an act of service that I deeply appreciate. You can peruse that here.

A thesis

The following started as only semi-serious off-the-cuff pontification in my Instagram “stories.” I’ve expanded on it and fixed a lot of autocorrect “help” along the way.

A favorite web cartoonist, Owen Cyclops, shared the following on Instagram this morning:

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A post shared by owen cyclops (@owenbroadcast)

If you’re unfamiliar with semiotics, which I discovered via Umberto Eco late in high school, here’s the first bit of Wikipedia’s intro:

Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the systematic study of sign processes (semiosis) and meaning making. Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something, usually called a meaning, to the sign's interpreter. The meaning can be intentional, such as a word uttered with a specific meaning; or unintentional, such as a symptom being a sign of a particular medical condition.

The phrase “usually called a meaning” should give you some sense of how arcane, abstract, and high-falutin’ this can get. Emphasis on abstract. But semiotics is not really my point, here. Owen’s cartoon brought Dr Johnson’s refutation of Berkeley to mind. Per Boswell:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, “I refute it thus.”

This is the “appeal to the stone.” Wikipedia classifies it as “an informal logical fallacy.” I don’t care. When confronted with academic disciplines that have descended to this level of abstraction, I join Dr Johnson’s stone-kicking camp.

At some point, something has to be real. Argument divorced from concrete reality simply turns into sophisticated dorm room bickering.* That’s what Owen’s cartoon captures so well—argue about the “meanings” of “signs” like carrot tops and foxholes all you want, the real carrot and the real fox are going to present an inarguable ultimate meaning to those rabbits. I refute it thus.

I was struck that Wikipedia’s article on Johnson’s stone-kicking compares this appeal to the reductio ad absurdum, which it also treats as a fallacy. Its full article on the reductio is more circumspect, classifying it as a legitimate line of argument, though I’ve always regarded the reductio more as a useful rhetorical device, a way of comically** setting the boundaries to an argument or of twisting the knife once the logic has worked itself out as impossible. But, tellingly, the article’s “see also” points us toward slippery slope. This is, of course, described not just as an informal fallacy but “a fallacious argument.” I contend that slippery slope is not a fallacy but, at this point, an ironclad empirical law of Western behavior.

And that’s what brought the late Kenneth Minogue to mind. In my Western Civ courses I use a line from his Politics: A Very Short Introduction, to impart to students that the Greeks and Romans were different from each other in a lot of fundamental ways. Chief among these differences was the Greek and Roman approach to ideas:

The Greek cities were a dazzling episode in Western history, but Rome had the solidity of a single city which grew until it became an empire, and which out of its own decline created a church that sought to encompass nothing less than the globe itself. Whereas the Greeks were brilliant and innovative theorists, the Romans were sober and cautious farmer-warriors, less likely than their predecessors to be carried away by an idea. We inherit our ideas from the Greeks, but our practices from the Romans.

Succinct, somewhat oversimplified, sure, but helpful to students who mostly assume the Greeks and Romans were the same, just with redundant sets of names for the same gods. It’s also correct. Minogue goes on to note that this mixed heritage manifests differently culture to culture, state to state, but that “Both the architecture*** and the terminology of American politics . . . are notably Roman.”

Were, I’d say.

So, a thesis I’ve kicked around in conversation:

Given Minogue’s two categories of classical influence, as the United States was founded along (partially but significantly) Roman lines by men who revered the Romans, a large part of our cultural upheaval has arisen as the country has drifted more Greek—becoming progressively more “likely . . . to be carried away by an idea.”

The emphasis has shifted from the Founders’ “Roman” belief in institutions governed by people striving for personal virtue to a “Greek” pattern of all-dissolving ideologies pursuing unachievable ends. This reflects both political and social changes. Like Athens, the US became more aggressive and more inclined to foreign intervention the more it embraced democracy not just as a system but as an end. And note the way that, when an ideal butts up against an institution in our culture, it’s the institution that’s got to go—as does anything that stands in the way of the fullest possible fulfilment of the implicit endpoint of the ideal. How dare you impede my slide down this slope, bigot.

And this is not a new problem. A whole history of the US could be written along these lines.

* During my senior year of college I once listened to two roommates argue over whether the Trix Rabbit was a “freak of nature.” This lasted at least an hour. Take away the humor and you’d have enough material for several volumes of an academic journal.

** Comically, because what’s the point of arguing if you can’t laugh the whole time? That’s not an argument, but a quarrel. See note above.

** Not always for the best, as I’ve argued before.

Price and Keegan on walking the ground

Yesterday on my commute I listened to the latest episode of The Rest is History, “Viking Sorcery,” in which Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook interview archaeologist Neil Price, author of Children of Ash and Elm, a massive archaeological and historical study of the Norse, which I read two summers ago.

Holland begins by reading a striking passage from Price’s earlier book The Viking Way. Having relocated from Britain to the University of Uppsala, Price realizes how the landscape of the Norse homeland is reshaping his understanding:

I was disturbed by the fact that the ancestral stories of the North should seem so much more intelligible when looking out over those Swedish trees than they had done while sitting in my office in England.

Price himself elaborates on this point not long into the interview:

“[W]hatever you’re studying about the past, it really does help to go to the places that you’re talking about to see the landscapes.”

I was conscious when I wrote The Viking Way—it came out in 2002 originally, so it’s twenty years old now—that sort of sentiment that you quoted about me being disturbed by the fact that those ancestral stories seem so much more intelligible when looking out over Swedish trees, there’s a risk that that’s a kind of romanticizing view. There’s me thinking, ‘Wow, I’m in touch with the Viking Age,’ and of course I’m not. So you have to guard against that as well. But I do think that, whatever you’re studying about the past, it really does help to go to the places that you’re talking about to see the landscapes, to experience what a Scandinavian winter is like. When you look at, say, reconstruction drawings, it’s always summer. They’re never sort of hunkered down in a snowed-in building, and yet that’s a very large part of the year. So to sort of try and get that kind of experiential aspect of things I think is quite important.

What Price calls the “experiential” dimension of historical understanding is what Chesterton called “the inside of history”—a recurring theme of my work as a historian, teacher, and novelist, and of my reflections on this blog. Getting at this dimension is not just a matter of trying to grasp alien minds or dressing up in a lost peoples’ clothing but in feeling and understanding the actual physical places where they lived and died.

Price’s discussion immediately reminded me of one of the passages that first brought this home to me as a grad student and reshaped how and why I study history. From Sir John Keegan’s great study The Face of Battle, first published in 1976:

Anecdote should certainly not be despised, let alone rejected by the historian. But it is only one of the stones to his hand. Others—reports, accounts, statistics, map-tracings, pictures and photographs and a mass of other impersonal material—will have to be coaxed to speak, and he ought also to get away from papers and walk about his subject wherever he can find traces of it on the ground. A great pioneer military historian, Hans Delbrück in Germany in the last century, demonstrated that it was possible to prove many traditional accounts of military operations pure nonsense by mere intelligent inspection of the terrain.

This passage took root in my mind as “walking the ground,” something I have few resources to do but which always, always helps when I can. My writing of Griswoldville was based closely not only on the specific locations around Macon where the battle takes place—which I walked in appropriate winter weather—but on the landscapes of north and central Georgia generally: the hills, farms, fields, orchards, pecan groves, and the weather. The land and what it is like is a fundamental part of that story. And, naturally, that understanding transferred to my historical narrative of the battle for the Western Theater of the Civil War Blog a few years ago. I work hard on everything I write, but my own best work always has walking the ground behind it.

A small but important point in Price’s chat with Holland and Sandbrook, but the entire interview is excellent. I strongly recommend it.

Oppenheimer

When I reviewed the new Mission: Impossible a few weeks ago, I rather lamely called it “a whole lot of movie.” I should have saved that description another week or so for Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer is an accurate title. Despite the big budget, world-historical sweep, and powerful story, it’s fundamentally a character study tightly focused on J Robert Oppenheimer. Fortunately, its subject, by virtue of his unique role in American history and the course and conduct of World War II, gives the film both scope and depth. And though the film’s marketing leaned heavily on the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos, and the Trinity test, the film encompasses a huge swath of its protagonist’s life.

The film is told through a pair of overlapping and interweaving flashbacks in the 1950s but begins, chronologically, with the American Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) studying at Oxford in the 1920s. He bounces around through the rarefied world of quantum physics, from Oxford to Germany and back to the US, where he introduces this strange new subject to American universities in California. Study of quantum theory grows rapidly. So does Oppenheimer’s noncommittal involvement with radical leftwing politics—supporters of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, labor organizers who want to unionize laboratory assistants, overt Communists. He develops an unstable, on-and-off sexual relationship with the Communist Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) but moves on and marries Kitty (Emily Blunt), a divorcee with an alcohol problem. He also butts heads with other scientists at his university, who object to his tolerance and occasional endorsement of Communist projects, especially when such projects intrude into the classroom and the lab.

The war comes, and Oppenheimer is approached to head the Manhattan Project. His contact with the military and government is General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), a bullheaded tough who gets Oppenheimer everything he wants, most specifically a brand new lab complex and supporting town in the remote New Mexico desert. This third of the film shouldn’t need much explanation—it is the literal centerpiece of the story and leads to the film’s most stunning, exhilarating, and terrifying sequence.

The final third covers Oppenheimer’s postwar life. Recruited by Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr) to work at Princeton and given a key role on the Atomic Energy Commission, Oppenheimer’s past threatens to ruin him when the US military detects the Soviets’ first atomic test. Every every former member of the Manhattan Project comes under scrutiny. This event, Oppenheimer’s caginess and seeming indifference to the security of the Manhattan Project, and personal conflict and callousness toward Strauss, a former admirer, cause Strauss to turn on him. After Oppenheimer is denounced as a probable Communist agent, an AEC tribunal unearths all of his former sins and picks them over minutely. Even former close associates like Groves and Edward Teller (Benny Safdie), who vigorously assert Oppenheimer’s loyalty to the United States, make damning concessions about his unreliability and strange behavior. Oppenheimer loses his security clearance and his job.

But Oppenheimer, indirectly, has his revenge. When Strauss is appointed to President Eisenhower’s cabinet and sits for senate confirmation hearings, his scapegoating of Oppenheimer and underhanded manipulation of the AEC costs him his cabinet position.

That’s the story of Oppenheimer in chronological order. But this being Christopher Nolan, it is not told so straightforwardly. It’s easy to get hung up on the structures of Nolan’s films, and in my original draft of this review I labored through how Oppenheimer works and why it works so well, but that’s spending too much time on how the story is told. The real strengths of Oppenheimer are its masterful technical execution and its performances, especially the central one by Cillian Murphy.

Oppenheimer looks brilliant. Much has been made, quite rightly, about the film’s IMAX cinematography.* Nolan and DP Hoyte van Hoytema use IMAX’s resolution and shallow depth of field to maximum effect, capturing everything from an atomic explosion to the irresolution and doubt on a man’s face with startling immediacy. Oppenheimer is also beautiful—New Mexico landscapes, the stately traditional architecture of old college campuses,** and the black and white of Strauss’s sequences are all stunning to look at. Additionally, the costumes, sets, and props are all excellent. If “immersion” in an “experience” is what brings you to the movies, Oppenheimer’s 1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s are as immersive as Hollywood gets.

I’ve seen a few people complain about the wall-to-wall score, especially in the first half, but I honestly didn’t notice that. Ludwig Göransson’s music, like the intercutting flashbacks, helps establish and sustain the film’s dramatic momentum early on. It’s also a good score, not nearly as punishing and concussive as previous Nolan film scores. And unlike, say, Tenet, I could hear all of the film’s dialogue, so no complaints with the sound design and sound editing here.

My one technical problem is with the editing, which reminded me of some of Nolan’s earlier films, especially Batman Begins. Conversations often play out in unimaginative shot-reverse shot style and it sometimes feels like all the pauses have been cut out of the dialogue. Some scenes barely have room to breathe. I noticed this especially clearly with the handful of jokes and one-liners in Nolan’s script, where timing is crucial. Fortunately this evens out by the middle portion of the film concerning Los Alamos, but it gave Oppenheimer an odd, rushed feel in the first third.

As for the performances, Oppenheimer rivals those crazy CinemaScope productions of the 1950s and 60s for its huge cast. Nolan, not unlike Oppenheimer himself, built a small army of amazing talent for this movie, with even small roles played by well-known actors. Perhaps my favorite is Gary Oldman as Harry Truman, who appears for one scene that can’t last more than three minutes. And Oldman is excellent, turning in a rich, complicated performance despite his limited screentime and Nolan’s understated writing.

The same is true of everyone else in the film. Robert Downey Jr is excellent as Strauss, playing him sympathetically but still as a clear antagonist. Downey has said that he understands where Strauss was coming from and so didn’t play him as a villain, and it shows. His performance is the perfect counterbalance to Murphy. Other standouts include Benny Safdie as H-bomb theorist and engineer Edward Teller and Matt Damon as Leslie Groves. Groves’s and Oppenheimer’s odd-couple working relationship is one of the highlights of the film. Emily Blunt makes the most of an underwritten role as Oppenheimer’s difficult, morose, alcoholic wife—who nevertheless comes through when it counts—and Josh Hartnett and David Krumholtz were especially good playing two different kinds of colleague to Oppenheimer. I also enjoyed the many, many historical cameos, including Werner Heisenberg (Matthias Schweighöfer), Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), and, in a slightly larger role, Tom Conti as Albert Einstein.

But as I hinted above, this is Murphy’s movie. He appears in almost every scene across all three hours and remains continuously interesting. He plays Oppenheimer as a cipher; as we watch, we feel we understand him from scene to scene, but—as becomes especially clear at the end—our impressions don’t add up in any satisfactory way. What we get is an unpleasant character full of flaws: a resentful outsider, an arrogant insider, an adulterer, a recklessly naïve and self-regarding political do-gooder, a man with astonishingly bad judgment and enormous blind spots, who can devote himself to a project that will inevitably result in mass murder and celebrate its completion only to reverse himself later, who chooses the wrong moments to stand on principle and whose one moment of keen self-awareness comes when he realizes he is being approached with an offer to spy for the Soviets and refuses—a good decision that he still manages to bungle. And yet he is undoubtedly brilliant at what he does, people as different as Einstein and Groves like him, and he sees a crucial project through to completion.

This tension is never resolved, and Oppenheimer only becomes more inscrutable as the film progresses. When Edward Teller wishes he could understand him better, he could be speaking for the audience. As one of Oppenheimer’s rivals in the race for the Bomb might have suggested, the more we see of him, the less we actually know. No wonder he rubbed people the wrong way.

The film opens with an epigraph explaining, in brief, the myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods as a gift for mortals and was punished by being chained to a rock where birds would peck out his liver all day, every day, for eternity. This myth is apropos—especially since Nolan’s source material was the Oppenheimer biography American Prometheus—and I found myself reflecting on Oppenheimer as a Greek tragedy. Oppenheimer is a hero who has achieved great things for a thankful citizenry but is undone by his own past sins. He has no one to blame but himself. In this way, Oppenheimer also becomes a human metaphor for the entire project to split the atom. The film’s final moments make this clear in a genuinely chilling way.

I’m struck that, of Christopher Nolan’s twelve films, three are Batman movies, three are contemporary thrillers, three are near-future sci-fi action adventures, and three are historical films. Of the latter, two concern World War II. After seeing and thinking a lot about Oppenheimer, I can see the attraction of the period for Nolan. What other modern event offers such a variety of combinations of the technical, theoretical, and personal—and with such high stakes? World War II is ideal Nolan country. I hope he’ll return soon.

In the meantime, Oppenheimer is a great film—excellently produced, powerfully acted, and thematically rich. I strongly recommend it.

*As of this writing I still haven’t had a chance to see Oppenheimer in IMAX, because the one screen near me has been jampacked during every showing except the one that gets out at 2:00 AM. I hope to see it as it was intended soon and will amend this review if seeing it in IMAX alters my judgment in any way.

**If Nolan wanted to make a spiritual sequel to Oppenheimer, another period film about amoral Communist-adjacent theorists and their world-destroying experiments, his next project could be Bauhaus.

Scope vs depth

Depth: Ralph Ineson and Kate Dickie as an outcast Puritan mother and father in The Witch (2015)

An insightful line from this good short video essay on The Witch and how writer-director Robert Eggers created such a beautiful, authentic film with such limited resources:

“Scope requires money. Depth only requires knowledge.”

This has been the peculiar pleasure of Eggers’s three films so far: whether narrowly focused on a single family or a pair of lighthouse keepers or having a sweep encompassing Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, Iceland, and Asgard, all three films go deep. Eggers has done the work. However little or however much he shows, you feel the reach and fullness of the worlds his films take place in.

A gloss for writers, whether for the screen or the page: Your story may or may not have scope—breadth, epic sweep, intricate complications, civilization-size conflict—but there is no reason it shouldn’t have depth. In an ideal world, every story could balance both. But if you can only have one, go deep. Learn everything you can. Let it inform, strengthen, and deepen the story. If your story has limitations, let it be because of conscious artistic choice to work within self-imposed boundaries rather than overreach, bad judgment, or unknowing error.

As the essayist puts it in another good line from that video, “Know your limits. Don’t show your limits.”

Robert Downey Jr on historical accuracy

In a recent video breakdown of his career for Vanity Fair, Robert Downey Jr, reflects on his experience preparing for and filming the 1992 biopic Chaplin, which was directed by Sir Richard Attenborough:

“[I]t’s hard to tell a story any more interestingly than the way it actually occurred.”

— Robert Downey Jr

When you’re twenty-five and you’re given the keys to the kingdom you’re probably going to come out of center, maybe out of fear, maybe out of confidence. And for me, I, at that point—not to boast, but I was as much of a Chaplin expert as anyone involved in the project, and I was making corrections to the things that were factually and historically inaccurate. To which Attenborough said, “But, poppet, we’re making a film. It’s not a documentary.” I did learn at that point, though, that it’s hard to tell a story any more interestingly than the way it actually occurred.

That closing observation is exactly right. I think a lot of people assume that those of us who complain about historical inaccuracy in film adaptations of true stories are just humorless scolds or nitpickers. Certainly those exist, but for a true lover of history or of a specific historical period inaccuracy rankles because whatever Hollywood comes up with can never be nearly as good or surprising as the real thing. Credit to Downey for recognizing that and acting upon it.

Filmmaking as a medium has limitations, of course. Information, in film, is best communicated visually. Adaptation is necessary and inevitable. But those limitations shouldn’t be an excuse for inventing things where the reality is much more interesting. The more so where “inventing things” means molding history to the shape of cliches.

A few years ago on this blog I complained about the film Tolkien in precisely these terms. You can read that review here. You can watch Downey’s Vanity Fair breakdown here. The whole thing is fun and informative but it’s worth watching just for his perfect Richard Attenborough impression.