Art, History, and Race

Criticisms of "Oppenheimer" demonstrate the folly of dogmatic head-counting

Christopher Nolan is a genius and Oppenheimer is a wonder. A movie that mostly consists of people talking somehow manages to feel like history so epic you should see it in a theatre with a screen bigger than your house and a sound system capable of vibrating your molars.

End of review.

You don’t read this newsletter for my opinions about movies, so I’ll get to the matter at hand: I want to discuss the widespread complaints about Oppenheimer’s lack of diversity when it opened in July.

“What’s with all the white men?” Stripped down, that was the complaint of countless people on social media. At least one major movie critic concluded the demographic skew was so bad it “puts white men at the center of the conversation and its fringes while making all others into distraction or collateral damage.”

If you take an extremely literal view of the movie, that’s indisputably true. Women are peripheral. The Hispanics and Native Americans living in the Los Alamos region are not seen at all. Black Americans are close to invisible. Most notably — this was the most widespread complaint on social media — the Japanese civilians who were incinerated by Robert Oppenheimer’s bombs are never seen. So in a very literal sense, white men really are “centred,” to use the fashionable language of our day. (I’m Canadian. We spell it “centre.” Consider it my little contribution to diversity.)

This may sound as if I am trivializing the complaints in order to mock and dismiss them. I’m really trying not to. In fact, I am presenting them as sympathetically as I can. I’ve read a great many, most in the form of tweets from academics. Some of the language was weirdly extreme and dogmatic. If my purpose were to mock and dismiss, I would simply show a few of those.

But I understand where concerns about representation come from. In the last quarter of the 20th century, researchers, particularly in the United States, looked intensively at who and what is depicted in mass media (to use the musty old term) and compared it with reality. They showed there were huge gaps. In an America where women mostly worked outside the home, and ethnic diversity was growing rapidly, movies and television still looked like the 1950s. White male stars. Women in secondary roles, at best. The few blacks were sidekicks, comic relief, or criminals. Other ethnic minorities were only a rumour.

This came to a boil in the last 15 years in the “Oscars so white” movement and others like it. As a result, there has been rapid change, as shown by statistical analyses such as this annual look at Hollywood movies.

That’s generally for the good. Representation really does matter. If the people you think of as “us” are always ignored or marginalized, it can have consequences in how you see your place in society and what you can accomplish. Greater diversity is also good for the arts. When a broader range of people and stories are brought in, art is informed by a broader range of human experience. Which makes it better art. We all benefit, even crusty old white men like me.

But — as always — an otherwise legitimate and mind-opening idea may become ridiculous and mind-closing if we treat it as the singular focus and push it to extremes. Which is exactly what happened in the criticism of Oppenheimer.

To conclude that Oppenheimer “centres” white men and marginalizes or excludes all others, you have to make head counting your sole tool of analysis. Forget art. Ignore history.

Do that and, yes, it looks pretty bad.

But add historical perspective to the analysis, along with a basic appreciation of art, and the complaints are exposed for what they are: nonsense fabricated by dogmatism.

Let’s start with the painfully obvious, because apparently we have to: America in the 1940s and 1950s was a far less diverse, tolerant, open society.

The military was rigorously segregated until after the Second World War. Top-tier women scientists scarcely existed because women who wanted to become scientists were discouraged from entering the field and discriminated against if they persisted.

See the photo above? It is a 1952 photograph of atomic scientists on the anniversary of the first chain reaction in 1942.

I think I see four women and two non-white men. By the standards of elite circles then, that’s a festival of diversity. For us today, it’s a monotonous ocean of white men.

But that was elite America in that era.

In making his movie, Christopher Nolan had three choices. He could “centre” characters drawn from outside the ocean of white men, and thereby create a false portrayal of the reality.

Or he could use colour-blind casting, hiring actors for their skills regardless of whether their appearance matched the history. Personally, I’m fine with colour-blind casting (see The Green Knight for a super example of how an actor’s skill can make skin colour vanish) but among diversity, equity, and inclusion activists, the party line on colour-blind anything is that it perpetuates racism. The very phrase “colour-blind” is often said to be racist. If Nolan had cast black actors as military officers, for example, you can be sure he would have been accused — not unreasonably — of whitewashing segregation.

Or he could have done what he did — hired a whole lot of white guys to portray the central historical figures, who were all white guys.

Still, even if you grant that, you could argue that Nolan could have included scenes of Hispanic farmers being evicted and, most importantly, shown the Japanese civilians who died in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Why was the movie so relentlessly focussed on white men?

The answer: Because this is not a movie about the Manhattan Project. It is a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

As writer and director, that was Nolan’s choice. As it should be. He’s an artist crafting his own vision. There are lots of movies and documentaries about the Manhattan Project. If you want another, make it yourself.

In pursuing his vision of a biography, Nolan made another choice: The whole movie, from beginning to end, follows the title character closely. Either Oppenheimer features in a scene, or it’s someone close to Oppenheimer and important to his life. That’s the whole movie.

Again, that is an artistic choice. Maybe you like it. Maybe you don’t. But that is the artist’s choice.

Having made these choices, it follows that the movie can’t simply jump around the globe and add scenes far removed from Oppenheimer’s life. It can’t show Hispanic farmers being evicted; Oppenheimer wasn’t doing the evicting. It can’t show Japanese victims of the atomic bombs; that was on the other side of the world from Oppenheimer.

For the same reason, it cannot show German Jews being massed into ghettoes or herded onto trains, even though awareness of those horrors constantly dogged Oppenheimer, who was Jewish, like many of the other top scientists. The complainers never mentioned this omission, however. That’s telling, for reasons I’ll get to below.

You may think this means Nolan’s conception is deeply flawed, that his tight focus forces him to omit essential elements of the larger story, including the terrible consequences of Oppenheimer’s success. Not so. We may not be shown Japanese victims of the bombing but that does not remotely mean they are ignored. Nolan shows us — vividly, searingly — that they are living and dying in Oppenheimer’s mind. The scientist knows exactly what his bomb did to them. It haunts him. Like a waking nightmare, he sees what he has done inflicted on those around him. The audience shares in all this because it is etched in the agonized face of Cillian Murphy, the brilliant actor who plays Oppenheimer.

Still, it is true that we only actually see white people, no Japanese. To the critics, that is conclusive proof the movie “centred” white men and dehumanized the Japanese victims. I think that is achingly literal and small-minded. In fact, I found Nolan’s treatment far more devastating — more humanizing of the victims, more agonizing for the man responsible — than any straightforward and familiar depiction of suffering Japanese civilians could have been.

It’s similar to how Mad Men treated race in the early 1960s world of New York ad executives: For the first two seasons of the show, black people were almost invisible, only appearing as elevator attendants and maids who never speak at length. Their absence is jarring to a modern viewer. And in the brief glimpses where we see black people, the actors do a masterful job of conveying alienation and wariness via pained expressions, clipped words, and stiffly formal address. All the while, the white characters are oblivious. I’ve never seen a more powerful condemnation of that era’s subtler racism, but if you only judge the show by the crude measure of head counts and who is “centred,” you would have to conclude that the show itself was racist — as some ludicrously complained when it first aired.

In any event, these are artistic choices. Maybe they don’t work for you as they did for me. That’s fine. But you still have to acknowledge the artist’s intent, which is humane and inclusive. To simply run head counts and condemn bad ratios is so crude it deserves to be labelled with a very old-fashioned word.

It is philistinism.

Cillian Murphy as Robert Oppenheimer

Then there’s history.

When modern head-counters do their counting, they treat “white” as a fixed and clear category. White includes everyone from Russian Jews to Swedes, Scots, Germans, Italians, Greeks, and Portugese. So when the head-counters looked at Oppenheimer, they saw a whole lot of white men.

Robert Oppenheimer. White man.

General Leslie Groves. White man.

And so on down the list.

So many white men. All part of the lucky dudes club, as the critics on Twitter would put it.

From an historical perspective, this is absurd. As Jews, Oppenheimer and many of the other scientists were most assuredly not members of the club.

There has always been anti-semitism in the United States but it drastically worsened after the First World War. In the era of the movie, there were caps on Jewish enrolment in universities. There was severe discrimination in hiring and promotion. And the lucky dudes club? Jews were routinely barred from joining fraternal orders and, yes, social clubs. The idea that there was no social distinction between Robert Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves — that they were both members of the same, privileged category — is laughable. Although I’m not sure a Jew living in that era would have laughed.

And of course the Manhattan Project unfolded against the backdrop of the Holocaust. Oppenheimer and others wouldn’t have known about the full extent of the mass-murder but Nazi persecution of Jews was notorious and in the movie it is painfully evident that it weighs heavily on Robert Oppenheimer’s mind. In fact, beating the Nazis to the bomb was the original motivation of the project and the personal goal of Oppenheimer and the other Jewish scientists. We never see the Nazis’ victims, however. We don’t have to. The audience knows about the Holocaust. And the reality is etched on Cillian Murphy’s painfully expressive face.

Yet this omission, as I mentioned, went uncriticized by the head counters who were so angered by the omission of Japanese victims. Why is that?

Because all the head-counters saw was white man, white man, white man…. What they didn’t see is that a large portion of the “white men” they were looking at were members of a group which was subject to severe discrimination worldwide. And in Europe, extermination.

To ignore that distinction is — let me be polite and understated — crude and foolish.

But the sorts of people who make such crude and foolish judgements, borne of plodding literalism, tend to have a signature response to criticism. They fall back on even dumber literalism. So I can imagine the next step.

“Fine. Jews were persecuted. These white men didn’t have all the privileges of their class. But still, they were white.”

This is precisely how Whoopi Goldberg got in trouble when she said, on TV, and in later print interviews, that the Holocaust wasn’t about racial hate because it was one group of white people, Nazis, murdering another group of white people, Jews. She apparently didn't understand that her conception of race is not a simple and unambiguous fact. It is instead an American social construct, a modern American construct, and the Nazis had quite a different social construct in mind.

The Nazi conception of race was heavily influenced by a “scientific” taxonomy popularized in the late 19th- and early 20th centuries. This taxonomy divided the ethnic populations of Europe into three groups — the Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean — that corresponded with latitude. Nordics were the most northerly, Mediterranean the most southerly. The three were ranked from superior to inferior in the same order. Only the peoples of north-Western Europe — the “Nordics” — scored top marks.

The Nazis took this division seriously, seeing it not as the social construction it was, but as hard, biological fact. So the Nazis didn’t see whites as superior to non-whites, to put it in modern terms. They saw Nordics as superior to all. That meant, to take a particularly important example, the Nazis saw the Slavic peoples — Poles, Czechs, Croatians, Serbians, Russians — as biologically separate and subordinate to Nordics. Hitler slated them for slave labour and extermination.

In modern American terms, Slavs and Germans are all one category — “white” — but if you view the Nazi era through this modern lens, your image will be grossly distorted and you will badly misunderstand what happened and why.

(You may be wondering how this division worked when Germany’s allies included Italians and Japanese. The answer is hypocrisy and rationalization: Nazi ideology was often enforced with pitiless obsession but the Nazis could be remarkably flexible when political self-interest was involved, going so far as to create a formal category of “honourary Aryan” for non-Nordics who made themselves useful to the Reich. Even mad zealots sometimes respond to incentives.)

Now, you may be thinking I’ve digressed. Nazi Germany is one thing. But Oppenheimer is a movie set mostly in the United States, and it’s about Robert Oppenheimer, a native America. Jews may have suffered discrimination. But surely, in the United States, they were unambiguously “white.”

But “white” has never been, and never will be, unambiguous. As a concept, it’s a cloud, with uncertain boundaries and a constantly evolving shape. Even today, the US census, for example, defines “white” as “a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.” I suspect many Arab-Americans would be surprised to discover they are “white.” As would the KKK.

But set that aside. You know that taxonomy the Nazis were obsessed with? They didn’t invent it.

In large part, Americans did.

Men like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard were promoting Nordicism before the National Socialist German Workers Party even existed. Their books were translated and sold well in Germany, where they were deeply influential in Nazi thinking. The chilling term “untermenschen,” which so perfectly captures the essence of the Nazi worldview, was coined by Stoddard. In English.

And please note that Grant and Stoddard were not obscure intellectuals who had unfortunate success overseas, like genocidal David Hasselhoffs.

Grant was an influential lawyer and conservationist who came from New York aristocracy. Stoddard had a Harvard doctorate and was a best-selling writer cited by, among others, President Warren G. Harding. In the early 1920s, the US Congress effectively banned immigration from southern and eastern Europe quite explicitly on the grounds that those peoples were not up to the Nordic standard. One person who helped draft and pass that legislation was Madison Grant.

So it’s not only Nazi Germany you won’t understand if you look at it through the modern lens of “white.” It’s America in the first half of the twentieth century.

As the critics of Oppenheimer so amply demonstrated.

Again, I’m not dismissing the validity and importance of increasing diversity in media. But it’s not all that matters.

Art matters. So does history.

And the single-minded application of head-counting does a disservice to both.