“However unexpected his colleagues found his appointment at Los Alamos, its spectacular accomplishments came to stand for the Manhattan Project at large,” Carson wrote in an introduction to the centennial volume. “Then his postwar apotheosis epitomized the physicists’ entry into positions of power, just as the McCarthy-era stripping of his security clearance defined their political bounds.”
The movie is based on American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a book published in 2005 that won the Pulitzer Prize for authors Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. That book and numerous others have contributed to what Else refers to as the “mythologizing” of Oppenheimer, not only for his incredible accomplishment at Los Alamos, but for his tragic fall from grace. Oppenheimer died from throat cancer in 1967. Only last year did the U.S. government vacate the decision to strip him of security clearance.
In the movie, the intense, chain-smoking Oppenheimer is portrayed by Irish actor Cillian Murphy. Other UC Berkeley luminaries are also portrayed: Ernest O. Lawrence (played by Josh Hartnett); physicist and future Nobel laureate Luis Alvarez (played by Alex Wolff); Frank Oppenheimer (played by Dylan Arnold), a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory physicist who later founded the Exploratorium in San Francisco; and Haakon Chevalier (played by Jefferson Hall), the professor of French literature whose Communist sympathies entangled Oppenheimer in a web of suspicions about the physicist’s own ties to the Communist Party of the United States of America.
Other key protagonists are Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty (played by Emily Blunt), who was a biologist and mother of their two children; and Oppenheimer’s ex-lover, Jean Tatlock, the daughter of a UC Berkeley literature professor (played by Florence Pugh).
RELATED INFORMATION
- The Day After Trinity, available on the Criterion Channel
- Bancroft Library online exhibit about Oppenheimer at UC Berkeley
- Official movie website
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