Resentment’s Destructive Power: Watching Oppenheimer while Reading René Girard

I watched Oppenheimer twice.

By now, whether you’ve seen the film or not, you’ve at at least heard that this year’s Oscar winning Best Picture is beautiful, mesmerizing and thought provoking, with incredible performances at every level of its cast.

The glittering, destructive power of the atomic bomb, the intensity of American concern that Nazi scientists would be first to crack the atomic code and the overweening pride displayed in Cillian Murphey’s brilliant portrayal of the American Prometheus are completely absorbing.

Historians of hindsight sometimes simplify the moral dilemma America faced in the moment when German military advances precipitated the American development of the atomic bomb.

Oppenheimer unveils the complex layers at play.

Hitler might get the bomb first. Russia, our uncertain ally, might as well. Lives are at stake one way or another. (Spoilers ahead.)

But then came the spring of 1945, when the Nazis surrendered to the Allied Forces and Oppenheimer’s project was still incomplete. The Japanese, however, had not surrendered.

And they did not have nuclear weapons.

A common argument for dropping the bomb was that it would save American lives. Oppenheimer argued differently. The film shows the scientist convincing his team to continue their work in hopes that dropping the bomb on Japan would end all war. In a new era of peace, the United Nations would control nuclear weapons, preventing their future use.

“The idea that the deaths of innocent Japanese civilians by atomic fire can rightly be willed as a means to the end of world government is, simply put, morally reprehensible,” comments Professor Kody W. Cooper. After the destruction of the two Japanese cities, Oppenheimer would come to see this.

Initially sharing in the elation of his colleagues and nation as they hear the news of Japan’s surrender, Oppenheimer begins to feel he has blood on his hands, an admission that enrages the man bearing ultimate responsibility for the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, President Harry Truman (played by Gary Oldman).

The film’s midpoint is a postwar roundtable discussion about whether the Americans should pursue development of the even more destructive hydrogen bomb. Atomic Energy Commission chair Lewis Strauss vigorously pushes for development of the weapon, believing it will deter nuclear war with the Soviets. Oppenheimer, barely disguising his impatience with Strauss, argues for international control of nuclear energy.

Oppenheimer’s disdain for Strauss has been established in a scene depicting the two’s first meeting in which Oppenheimer calls Strauss a “lowly shoe salesman.” Later we see Strauss’ concern about the export of medical radioisotopes publicly demolished by Oppenheimer’s cocky wit.

Watching Strauss seethe, I felt I was seeing the theories of the French thinker René Girard played out before me.

René Girard (1923-2015), “a critic and social theorist who has become eerily relevant in recent years” has been on my radar for nearly a decade, thanks to the work of Bishop Robert Barron, but it was slow going for a while.

Then I picked up Luke Burgis’ book Wanting: the Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life (one of my favorite reads of 2023) and was delighted to find Burgis rendering Girard quite accessible and exciting to anyone concerned about the political, cultural and consumeristic landscape today. (See Ted Gioia’s 12 Things I learned from René Girard.)

Girard’s insights on mimetic desire and scapegoating unmask human nature so well that once you see them, you see them everywhere: in literature in politics, in advertising, in family dynamics, in high school cliques and athletic competitions, and yes, at the movies. Including Oppenheimer.

If you have a mimetic rivalry, your vanity is involved and you want to win at all costs.

René Girard

Oppenheimer pits Strauss, a conservative, practicing Jew who, as a young man, lacked the means to formally study physics, against the wealthy, leftist atheist who could afford a Harvard education and who all but eschewed his Jewish identity. (Nolan focuses on the political division between the two, but you can read about their religious differences here.)

Strauss (portrayed in an Oscar winning performance by Robert Downey, Jr.) is a self-made man of considerable accomplishment. “A Wall Street financier who skipped college to sell shoes,” writes historian Christopher Klein, “Lewis Strauss became one of America’s most important atomic-energy advisers during the Cold War.” In 1946 Harry Truman appointed Strauss one of five commissioners of the original Atomic Energy Commission. He was the only non-scientist on the newly-formed commission and he went on to become its chair.

Strauss’ inability to master his resentment against Oppenheimer leads to his own demise when he orchestrates a move to have the physicist’s security clearance revoked.

At the security clearance hearing, U.S. attorney Robert Robb (Jason Clark) interrogates Oppenheimer about his ties to communist friends and his rash and risky behavior regarding national security. Fair enough. But Robb also hungrily zeroes in on Oppenheimer’s affair with psychiatrist Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), an active communist.

As director, Christopher Nolan chose to emphasize the puerile nature of the questions by showing Oppenheimer stripped, helplessly exposed as he answers intimate questions while his wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) sits just a few feet behind him. It is a little crucifixion.

In the end the panel finds Oppenheimer to be a “loyal citizen,” yet they deny his security clearance. It appears that Strauss has clandestinely defeated his rival.

Kitty is furious that her husband doesn’t fight back. “Did you think that if you let them tar and feather you that the world would forgive you?” she asks her husband after the decision. “It won’t.”

“We’ll see,” the scientist replies.

I was reading Girard’s I See Satan Fall Like Lightning at the time of my second viewing. Girard asserts in this book that in ancient times mimetic contagion ended in the death of the scapegoat.

Today, it seems, we kill by character assassination. Oppenheimer’s security clearance hearing is but one small example.

And it’s not the end of the story. Five years later Oppenheimer’s scientific colleagues contribute evidence that hands Strauss “the greatest humiliation of [his] career” when the Senate rejects his nomination to serve in President Eisenhower’s cabinet.

In a brilliant illustration of the rivalry, the film shows each man’s moment on the cover of TIME magazine: one, lauding “Physicist Oppenheimer” in 1948; the other, headlining “The Strauss Affair” of 1959, in which Strauss was denied his nomination to become Commerce Secretary.

Oppenheimer then brings us forward to the moment 43 years after the scientist’s death, when the US government overturns the security clearance hearing decision and he is named an American patriot.

Ancient cultures deified their scapegoats once the mimetic frenzy has died down, Girard says.

In American culture, there is perhaps no greater sign of reverence than to be made the subject of a blockbuster movie.

Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) predicts in a flashback at the film’s conclusion, “When they’ve punished you enough, they’ll serve you salmon and potato salad, make speeches, give you a medal, and pat you in the back, telling you all is forgiven.

Just remember, it won’t be for you…it would be for them.

Though Oppenheimer takes the physicist’s side, neither he nor Strauss comes off very well.

Then again, neither do I when I examine my own conscience. “It’s no accident that the Mass begins with the Penitential Rite…,” Heather King reflects in an essay on scapegoating posted in the violent summer of 2020. It’s only through Christ that “ideology and accusations recede.”

Girard’s extensive research into history, psychology and literature enabled him to notice that the mimetic contagion in the story of Christ’s Passion uniquely exposes the scapegoating fallacy by unmasking our role in it. The stripped and brutalized Christ, absorbing the mob’s anger by forgiving his enemies, renders all our justifications mute. Girard concludes that the Gospels have made possible the modern concern for victims, a thing unheard of outside the Judeo-Christian story, even though Christians are rightly condemned by secularists for their failure to live according to the beautiful truth exposed on the Cross.

Finally, the film leaves us to ponder the “chain reaction” Oppenheimer’s science put into play.

Girard is instructive here as well. “The knowledge we have acquired about our violence, thanks to [the Gospels] does not put an end to scapegoating but weakens it enough to reduce its effectiveness more and more,” he writes.

This is the true reason why apocalyptic destruction threatens us, and this threat is not irrational at all.

The possibilities are ominous when we fail to face our own contribution to the contagion.

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You might also enjoy Galileo’s Daughter Meets God and the Astronomers: When Faith and Science Meet Absolute Mystery and Tracking the Transcendent: Four Physicists Open to its Possibilities.

Reading right now: Cynthia Haven’s Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard. What a beautifully written biography that steeps us in the writer’s Avignon roots, experience of World War II, development as an academic in America, and wide-ranging original intellect. I am hooked!

But I’m glad I read Luke Burgis’ Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life first. Do yourself a favor and dive in! Once you get a taste of Girard’s theories, you will see the world (and yourself) differently. Have you connected with Girard’s thought? I’d love to hear from you.

Photo by Antek on Unsplash.