"Oppenheimer" and Sound – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This Monday, I went to see the new Christopher Nolan film about the life and work of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the team that invented the atomic bomb. —— Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane

This Monday, I went to see the new Christopher Nolan film about the life and work of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the team that invented the atomic bomb.

I have grown up in the shadow of the twentieth century; I was born near the beginning of its last decade and to a degree always knew much of the broad strokes of the century’s history in the United States. The first decade of my life was a time of optimism and hope, the Cold War had just ended a year before I arrived, life seemed to be good, and to me everything was a wonder to behold. I knew the story of how we got to that point, the broad strokes of American history more broadly and of the history of my home city of Chicago more particularly from as far back as I can remember thinking of such things. I knew a world where the threat of nuclear war was a thing in the past, a nightmare that never came to pass now that the Soviet Union had fallen, and America & the rest of humanity had survived the long nightmare of the Cold War.

In many ways, Christopher Nolan’s new film Oppenheimer tells that story that I grew up knowing, of American determination to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles with a can-do attitude that won this country its independence, the good guys our Civil War, and a transcontinental union of states that promised liberty, democracy, and peace to all who lived within it. In the years since of course I’ve learned the hard truths of this country’s history, all the people whose lives, hopes, and dreams were thrown by the wayside in the name of our national progress. I still believe in the dream of that progress, ever the optimist, yet that optimism is tempered by the realism that life in this country has never been fair or equitable for all of us. 

For all of the tropes of the great man that the film Oppenheimer plays with, it still tells a story of one man and his colleagues, his fellow theoreticians, engineers, and scientists working in a moment pushed along by the uniformed protectors of that progress to use their brilliance to craft something that could harness the pure energy of the Cosmos to be the ultimate weapon to end what was then the ultimate war imaginable.

Christopher Nolan is famous for his use of sound to tell his stories. Of all his films, the one that before Oppenheimer which touched me the most was Interstellar, which used the minimalist score composed by Hans Zimmer to describe what it might be like for humans to soar past our solar system and to far distant stars at sub-light speeds with little chance yet an enduring hope of returning home to the ones they loved ever again. I watched Interstellar on a transatlantic flight in January 2016 on the way back to London where I was then living from Chicago-O’Hare. That flight was entirely at night, thanks to the long winter nights in the Northern Hemisphere, and so for a few hours before we landed just before dawn at Heathrow, my entire world was Interstellar, which left my jet lagged mind far more confused than usual the rest of the day in my flat.

Zimmer’s score for Interstellar, in particular the great theme “No Time for Caution” pulses with the clockwork rhythm of time itself, a telling motif for a film all about the complexities of spacetime that a non-expert such as myself can hope to understand yet often fall short of grasping. In Oppenheimer there are rhythmic, chronic beats, there is a great pulse that underscores the most pivotal moments of the film, yet where Nolan uses sound itself, less so music, contributes to a compelling, and all-consuming story of the beginning of something with great promises of both wonders and terrors alike.

I watched Oppenheimer in IMAX, though not on 70 mm film as no such cinemas within a 400 mile radius of Kansas City are showing it on anything but digital prints. Sitting where I was on the right-hand aisle, I perhaps got more of the sound from that side than the left, or the perfect sound that one would find in the center of the room; and in my humble opinion, most cinemas have their sound far too loud in general nowadays anyway. Yet I still felt awed by the way that the sound consumed everything else that I could feel, see, and yes hear when it fitted the story. This matched the great silences, not lead-ins to a horror jump scare, but meditations on the numinous echoes of something approaching the divine in the power wielded by that American Prometheus as Dr. Oppenheimer has been called.

In the Summer of 2016, a few months after that flight into the world of Interstellar, I traveled to Vienna, one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever visited, and the first stop I made after arriving in the Innere Stadt was at the Haus der Musik, the second music museum I’d visited during my time in Europe after the Finnish Sibeliusmuseum in Turku. Yet unlike the Finns, this Viennese institution included an entire floor dedicated just to sound, the Klangsmuseum, where sound was visualized using colors on the walls. I began to connect ripples I’d seen all my life in water with the sounds I heard that day, which has proven useful. As I’ve gotten older, and my love for music to concentrate during the day has led me to use in-ear headphones more and more, my hearing has probably taken a slight dampening, leading to me not necessarily hearing less overall but instead noticing the vibrations of sound more and actually feeling sound in my body while I’m hearing it.

So, for me sound is not just something I experience with one sense, my hearing, but with my sense of touch as well. It’s one of the things that a live concert can give the listener that a recording can’t always provide. Whenever I hear a familiar opera in a theatre, I am usually struck a little unexpecting at the physical sound the timpani makes during the overture, and the way the sets creak and reflect sound back towards the singers and out to us the audience. I have learned how to judge without particular precision how far away a lightning strike is by listening for the gap before the thunderclap and the length that thunder echoes about the world around me as well as within me when it’s a particularly close one.

The world that Dr. Oppenheimer created felt removed for much of my life, for the man who said of himself “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” created a means of mass destruction which after 1945 has never been used in war. For much of my life, the threat of nuclear weapons seemed to be something consigned to a past when our ideologies kept us apart, spurred our distinct methods of innovation, and made enemies out of onetime uneasy allies. Yet today, as other powers rise to a level of strength and aggression that they could challenge the record of nuclear weapons, I’ve found myself worried about it in recent years for the first time in my life. I’ve found in my professional experience that it takes several attempts for a lesson to settle into the learner’s mind, it took me three tries to learn both Latin and Irish to really understand both languages and how they work. All this made Oppenheimer less a film about an event firmly in the past, something perfect to borrow a grammatical term for things that have happened and are in the past, but more something which tells an imperfect story of events with continuing resonances in the soundscape of our world today.

I may have grown up in the shadow of the twentieth century, yet I and my generation will have a great effect on the events of the twenty-first. I hope that we can learn the lessons of the century that came before us, and use Dr. Oppenheimer’s achievements not to create deterrents through the threat of mutually assured destruction but to establish human cooperation out of our mutual interest in surviving to live in a future to come.