Public Domain

J. Robert Oppenheimer

My kids and I drove up to the Irvine Spectrum in order to see *Oppenheimer* in the full 70mm IMAX format. I had previously encountered J. Robert Oppenheimer in the opera *Doctor Atomic* by John Adams. A few years ago I spent a good week or so listening to the opera and reading up on Oppehneimer’s life.

My encounter with the opera and the life of Oppenheimer added greatly to my understanding of the movie. In fact, I would say that foreknowledge of Oppenheimer is almost a requirement in order to follow the narrative created by filmmaker Christoper Nolan.

One thing that the opera gets right is an emphasis on Oppenheimer’s mysticism. In addition to a chorus based on the *Bhagavad Gita*, the first act of the opera concludes with Oppenheimer’s character singing an aria with the text from *Batter my heart, three-personed God” a holy sonnet by John Donne. 

The poem was introduced to Oppenheimer by Jean Tatlock. Jean Tatlock was in an intimate yet volatile relationship with Oppenheimer in the 1930s. She committed suicide 1944 a few months before Oppenheimer chose the site for the first nuclear weapon test and named it *Trinity*. He later said that the name came from the Donne sonnet. 

The sonnet proposes that being defeated by God is the only path to victory. 

“Batter my heart, three person'd God;

That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend

Your force, to break, blow, break, blow, break, blow

burn and make me new.”

There is a rich vein of psychological speculation we could indulge ourselves in here but armchair psychologist, I am not. John Adams includes the entire text of the sonnet in the opera not for psychological reasons but because it develops the metaphysical characteristics of Oppenheimer.

In the movie, the *Bhagavad Gita* is briefly mentioned in a scene with Oppenheimer’s lover, Jean Tatlock. When General Leslie Groves asks for a code name for the site of the test, Oppenheimer says, “Batter my heart, three-personed God. Trinity.” That’s it.

I enjoyed the movie, a lot, but Oppenheimer’s mysticism was missing. Why the movie chose to include the *Gita* instead of John Donne in the scene with Jean Tatlock is a head-scratcher. The sonnet is the perfect device to tie that relationship together. Of course, Christopher Nolan is not known for the emotional content of his movies but rather for the technical brilliance and imagination of his movies.

The opera got it right by emphasizing the Donne text as a dramatic conclusion to the first act.

I read the Donne sonnet to my kids after the movie and we discussed it a bit. As I read it, I was struck by the value of participating in broad swaths of artistic culture. When we come into contact with the arts we are unaware of when and where they will manifest their influence upon us in the future.