While I appreciated the audio of the cheers ending in a woman’s shriek, as a person of color, I was dismayed when it was a white person’s visage being depicted as melting away. Couldn’t the director easily have had Oppenheimer start to imagine his celebrants slowly being replaced by the actual Japanese victims of his bomb? And if this was Nolan’s obscure intention to portray and criticize Oppenheimer’s sole concern that the bomb might one day be used on his own fellow citizenry, all it did for me was to once again stress and reinforce the perniciously persistent tendency in film to center events on the white view. I was bummed to the point of shaking my head at the conclusion of the scene.
Thank you for this and all of your scholarship, Greg. The pounding the bleachers scene really bothered me. I certainly didn't see what the script portrayed, and I totally missed the charred corpse thing. Thanks for pointing out that just one white woman died.
While I appreciated the audio of the cheers ending in a woman’s shriek, as a person of color, I was dismayed when it was a white person’s visage being depicted as melting away. Couldn’t the director easily have had Oppenheimer start to imagine his celebrants slowly being replaced by the actual Japanese victims of his bomb? And if this was Nolan’s obscure intention to portray and criticize Oppenheimer’s sole concern that the bomb might one day be used on his own fellow citizenry, all it did for me was to once again stress and reinforce the perniciously persistent tendency in film to center events on the white view. I was bummed to the point of shaking my head at the conclusion of the scene.
Thank you for this and all of your scholarship, Greg. The pounding the bleachers scene really bothered me. I certainly didn't see what the script portrayed, and I totally missed the charred corpse thing. Thanks for pointing out that just one white woman died.