STUDY THAT FACE. WHAT is cinema for if not to scan the crags and prairies of a face with the same hunger we probe a scoured battlefield, or a far planet’s unknowable peaks. Study that face, and what does it tell you? It’s a moviestar’s mug, no doubt. It’s George Clooney. But it’s a palled and pallid Clooney. Slightly puffy, bag-eyed, Kentucky tan gone cold. Grey-lit, barely there, tired in the bones. He is playing Michael Clayton, in the final frames of the 2007 film of the same name, a patcher and mender of a sickly order. We saw him, just now, a few moments ago, use his skill and status as a middle-rank bagman to ensnare a murderess. The grubbier tools of his trade have been put to better use, for once. But here he’s sunk in the back of a yellow taxi and the notes of his theme run sombre downward. These are not the scales of victory. Something approaching grief. And still the shot lingers. Nothing but the face. What passes over? A wince perhaps, a shade of embarrassment. Then a half-smile which is the outward mark of a memory briefly cherished. We keep holding. Futility, maybe. Lip-curl of disgust. Might be emptiness, after all. Marrow-emptiness: the kind that trails the slow release of long-held breath, or when an adrenaline high retreats like the tide, and all that’s left is a parched shore.

Where would Michael Clayton be without its ending? A fine thriller, sure. Sleekly plotted. Written well. An actor’s showcase. A reverent tribute, minor-key and soft-pedalled, to earlier noirs (Klute, The Big Sleep). But its end is its making, its consummation. That end lofts Michael Clayton from greatness toward immortality, toward necessity, the sense we would be worse off if it weren’t around. That bonanza, boomtime year, and the Oscars that followed in the winter, had the film squaring off against big, mean, serious, American Epics: There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men, The Assassination of Jesse James… They will all endure for their ambition, their baritone recitations of history. Each are united in the theme of human weakness for lucre, joined in suspicion that the hunt for enrichment will turn your heart gangrenous and cruel. In the West, at the frontier, humanity spoils on the sand. Tony Gilroy’s picture – his first as director – is on the other hand lean and mucky and present-day. The soul has soured, riches piled up in its place. It is the end-point of that history, its termination, the starkness of everyday life shorn of myth – most especially those myths birthed by the cinema. The film isn’t in defiance of genre, like those others, but its ultimate expression: the perfect legal thriller, the essential detective story. Perhaps it is appropriate then, with our distance in time – time which is the only true clarifier and worthy judge – that Michael Clayton is nearly two decades old, the age of maturity. And we find, in that age, that it might outlive and exceed its bombastic siblings.

“I’m Shiva the god of death.” This was Michael Clayton’s ending, originally. Gilroy’s shooting script closed on the showdown, our hero triumphant in vengeance. Clayton’s foe trapped and deflated, collapsing to the carpet. A flock of cops closing in. The system holds. Something like justice might, past the credits, be done. He was supposed to walk out with a soliloquy circling his brain, and ours. We get instead a resounding, circling ambivalence. Triumph deflates. Uncertainty comes in, like a fog. Because Clayton is played by George Clooney, he has to wear the ammo-belts and beret of charisma: a charisma made an instrument, tuned to the goal of manipulation and advantage, the confidence that comes twinned in someone who always knows the angle of human weakness, who knows how to prise the sin in others, and wields the wedge to drive it open.

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Yet it was a mask always at risk of slipping. It hangs on him heavy, black and wide, like his enormous overcoat. If the film had ended there, as it was intended, the mask would never fully crack and fall. Some part of it would remain, obscuring. Except we get the final flash of inspiration: charisma left on the sidewalk of Sixth Avenue, coughing in the day-waste of traffic. Clayton, bare at last and pooled on the taxi leather, letting reality crowd in and flow over. Just out there, through the sliver of cab window and unfocused rear-view, is a New York already primed to collapse. In those offices – endless, upwards – the subprimes are defaulting. Those with the nose and drive to sniff the implosion are placing their bets. The gash has been made. The treasuries are bleeding. Soon foreclosure notices will start to slip off police department presses. Michael Clayton debuted in the world in October 2007. The disaster had already begun. “You’re so fucked,” Clayton says. Didn’t he warn us?

BENT CONGRESSMEN, BENT COPS, bent executives, bent lawyers. Thalidomide babies. Syphilitic sharecroppers. Teflon runoff in the ponds. Chromium 6 coming out the taps. Plutonium on the wind. Wisconsin well-water laced with weedkiller. This is your world, and it cries out to be soothed.

The firm of Kenner, Bach & Ledeen is here to stifle that cry – one of those enormous semi-anonymous houses whose purpose is to bulk widely in the door to any kind of remedy for the afflicted, the bereaved, the lonely. It keeps a stocked arsenal, bottomless coffers, vast battalions at its disposal. Michael Clayton (Clooney) is one of those troopers. Once a bright-spark litigator, he’s been shuffled sideways by his boss Marty Bach (the great Sydney Pollack) and acts as a blurred man, one foot either side the line of legality. His piecework is tax dodges, press gags, shoplifting housewives, motivated strippers. Greying handsomeness and a thick wad of cash are his weapons. There are limits to his powers, regions where he cannot venture, encounters in which his charm, his calming gifts, turn impotent. Here is one –  

For six years KB&L has been defending an agricultural giant called U/North, makers of a toxic defoliant – “tasteless, colourless…does not precipitate.” The death toll stands at 468. Survivors are pushing a class-action suit against U/North. Their only representative, in the film, is Anna (Merritt Weaver): breathtakingly young, shrinking yet brave, skin like butter. “A miracle,” says Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), KB&L’s attack dog on the case, “God’s perfect creature.” It looks like Arthur has gone deranged for Anna. There is video proof: an ageing maverick pathetically stripping his clothes off in a deposition room, confessing his love. But the love comes second. What looks like derangement has a reason. Arthur has found a document that’s turned all his efforts meaningless. Worse than meaningless: callous, conniving, evil. He has been made, against his will, the agent of coverup and conspiracy. It’s caused a clack in the brain, an outpouring of contrition. Arthur’s brilliant monologue – his plea, his remonstrance – runs channels through the film like magma on cold earth.

Ever the dutiful janitor, Michael is called in to whip Arthur’s reins. He’s been here before – Nurse Michael – but the stakes are higher, careers and livelihoods and reputations at threat. U/North’s in-house counsel Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton) feels the threat most keenly. The usual operations of justice – gum up the process, stall, drown the plaintiffs in discovery – no longer seem viable. Arthur has spun out into the world, uncontrolled, uncontrollable. She makes a call.

Bombs in cars, wiretaps, hushed meetings, cheques grubby from greased palms: Michael Clayton has the usual thriller-fodder. Tony Gilroy directs it with a crisp eye and a calm grip. He also found a way to pluck the two-note chord of tension and diversion. All dialogue should have meaning, and Gilroy’s more than most, yet his ace is the minor detail appended to a scene that casts a conversation in revelatory light. Buildup, feint, punchline. He plays a scene for its payoff. The trick’s there disguised, in the first moments, as we’re hustled into the film on the rip of Arthur’s ascending, cresting patter: static shots of law firm hallways, halogen overheads, stationery basket trundles, becoming more peopled as the sequence goes on, filling up with busier subordinates until it’s a zoo of a room, and the final extra hits their mark, slips stage right to slide-reveal Marty being passed a phone with a reporter on the line who somebody has already called a cunt.

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Or when Michael steals a few hours at the family home – lawn, leaves, dad with his nasal cannula – and we’re too snared in his whimpers of neglect to notice his brother Gene (Sean Cullen) getting dressed and only at the last, taking a gun from a safe, do we clock that he’s a plainclothes cop. “Human tissue damage” announces the memo Arthur has found, the memo that will screw Karen’s career, screw everyone. So on that snowed-in Milwaukee late-night she has her stilted, too-formal introduction to the assassin Verne (Robert Prescott). But it’s just as we lean in to better hear the scrambler garbling his voice that Karen’s fingers, until now hidden, rise from under the table wearing a plastic bag, as much to avoid planting prints as to protect herself from hazardous goods. 

There’s a circular neatness in this. No trash-sack or hazmat or firewall will hold all the poison forever. It leaks, spills, finds its way to your spine. And it might be too trite to say, too obvious, that Michael and Karen are each Janus heads stuck on a single neck. But here they are, reflected, inverse: middle-top and middle-bottom, servants both to the smooth functioning of an unholy gorgon. He fixes super-suavely, with a teenager’s grin and the warm flutter of thickened brown envelopes. She arrives as a squall of panic-sweats and flubbed lines, and tries to solve a problem by killing the problem. Twice. Gilroy has good intuition. Michael Clayton does not glide through gilt boardrooms, looking at the upper strata in cut glass, or probe the velveted chambers of the god-emperors. We glimpse these places, but do not go there. Gilroy suspects, and suspects rightly, that the operations of our superb system are lubricated hourly by minor armies of alternates and underlings, sub-lieutenants and auxiliaries. Real power dwells higher, with their captains: with Marty, with Karen’s superior Don (Ken Howard) and their hushed pressures, their unspoken wishes. The head does the choosing; the hands hold the tools.

And it is their angle to power that governs their choices, sets the limit on their options. Neither Karen nor Michael are secure, fast and immune at the summit of the ladder. The bottom can fall out, the trapdoor giving way. There is always somewhere further to sink. “I’m scrambling,” Michael says, and he is. The restaurant that was supposed to be his one-way passage out from this world has gone bust. A loan shark in gold chain is setting the thumbscrews. Pay up, or lose more. His brother Timmy (David Lansbury) is at fault, one of those helpless saps who only realises they’re an addict when they’re sober, the type to steal tyres and plead in driveways, then disappear. In corner offices, over marble countertops, Michael is told he is essential, vital, necessary: “a miracle worker.” But it never feels like it. The coin he gives away on poker is proof of that. And how much can you trust a lawyer’s word when it’s not signed on paper? He is too low-born, too caught by his skill and by charisma to ever ascend a workman’s station. Michael is someone you have to know, but not someone you should know. Karen doesn’t. “I never heard of him,” she says. “Who is this guy?” It’s a smart prompt for the biographical data we get – Bronx childhood, Fordham Law, Queens ADA. It’s also a question asked incredulously. Michael Clayton isn’t pinging the radar of her ambition, not someone she has to clamber over, or milk for influence.

If Karen were anyone else, you might say she was tragic. A striver hollowing her soul to climb the mountain. Except that mountain is made of human skulls and her high heels are slipping in the eyeholes. And it’s a long way down. Painting on a thick veneer of competence consumes her hours. “Balance?” she quips in her trained, forced chuckle. “I think that’s something you search for your whole life.” Vulnerability makes her damp with nervousness, not an innate evil. Precarity, rather than bloodlust, has her dialling the hitman’s number. Swinton plays her on the near fringe of pathetic, always straining to fit the job that feels so large, so important, so male. Such effort has turned Karen into a true believer. Every other character can see the grubbiness of their task, the dirt on their paws. It turns them either mad, or sane, or cynical. As Marty says blithely to Michael: “This case reeked from day one.” But not Karen. Her brain is dropsical, logged with stock response, business cliché, with the fear of being found out. That her smarts were not natural but rehearsed. That she doesn’t really know how this system works after all. Just listen to the perfect smallness of her final line, when Michael is snapping a mouth-open picture on the concourse, the entrapment complete. An alien tongue, baffled: “You don’t want the money?” As if the money could straighten all chicanes, as if it were the only currency of their world, as if the lone product this tender is always guaranteed to buy is silence – the silence of complicity, or the grave.

FORGET ALL THE GRISHAMS, A Few Good Men, or even twelve angry ones. Michael Clayton is that most subversive thing: the legal thriller in which no laws are obeyed. Their world – this world – is an interior zone unbound by the thing it enforces. Hit-and-runs, class-actions, murder charges: that’s for the schmucks and losers, the dupes dumb enough to get caught, or caught out. You’re either in the circle, guarded behind the closed door, where a janitor is on call to show up in your square-acre kitchen at midnight and mop the spilled blood, or you’re out there, a victim, somewhere in the wastes of America, or wherever, doing your dying uncompensated. On the inside, everyone scratches everyone’s hind. Even Gene, who pleads with Michael to spend more time with the family, who sure looks like a good-cop, hands over a crime scene seal and warns not to be told what it’s for. Serve your function: look the other way. Then there’s Karen, thinking she’s cleared the floor of all threats, pitching the settlement to U/North’s thick wad of shareholders. She does so not for the inherent fairness of the claim, for the righteousness of the plaintiffs’ case, for Anna’s sake. No, what she’s after is the tax write-off. $600million. A deal would (she sneers) “pay for itself.”

Why shouldn’t you go mad, faced with all that? The daily bucketing-out of conscience, the soul encased and compromised, every shared handshake a trade of favour to the injury of someone else. Wearing the extraordinary guise of the late Tom Wilkinson, Arthur introduces the element of insanity to Michael Clayton – the question of who in all this smooth, too-easy seediness is really off their rocker. Arthur, poor Arthur. We’re told he’s mad. Signs of it everywhere. An episode a few years back; the pills set it right. There was a wife, apparently, and a kid, and a more conventional home – one perhaps more recognisable to the gaudy-baroque palette of his partners than the crumbling bohemian studio where he lives and where he will die. Tearing his clothes in a deposition room, shouting wild love for a milkmaid. He has all the obvious marks of mania: the Mach 5 pace of his turmoil, the franticness, the bizzarro behaviour. He inflates everything. Size, scale, crescendo – seventeen baguettes in his bundle – a thousand printed copies of Summons to Conquest – stripping himself to zero – “six years…four hundred depositions, a hundred motions, five changes of venue, eighty-five thousand documents in discovery…thirty-thousand billable hours…and the numbers are making me dizzy…”

The numbers are making all of us dizzy. That doesn’t make him mad. It doesn’t make us mad, either. Doesn’t he keep saying so? insisting? “It’s not just madness…it’s not just madness…It’s not an episode, relapse, fuck-up.” He has breached the chrysalis and happened upon “the most stunning moment of clarity.” Arthur’s pleading, keening, ecstatic rant is one of the finest pieces of monologue writing since Paddy Chayefsky penned Network, and even though it comes clothed in the rags of the unhinged and off-balance, it is by far the soundest and sanest thing said by anyone in Michael Clayton. Most others spend their time backing away from the kind of religious realisation Arthur feels, double-dealing and calling in the goons to protect their position inside the zone. If anyone ever tells you they were made an accomplice against their will, they weren’t aware, that they were following orders, just remember the wilful effort required to keep that place in the pecking order. Truth and lucidity sets Arthur to abandon any feeling of self-preservation. Run headlong at the thing and try to find the off-switch. Arthur is our modern Yossarian: caught in a logical irrationality, he turns to an irrational logic for escape.

But he doesn’t. He can’t. Won’t be allowed. The swift taser in the open door, the quick pill popped in the mouth to paralyse, one-two-three-up carried (single take) to the dying place. The clean, rapid, business-like assassination. The pros at work. It is a peculiarity that Michael Clayton should appear in the same year as another film with an equally plausible – equally terrifying – method of neutralisation. Shooter was a silly movie, though its intent was not far apart from Gilroy’s, and its starring performance was a wire-steel-leather contraption to simulate a self-administered gunshot to the head. Compare that device to the means of Arthur’s murder: Yes, that would be how they’d do it. And Arthur’s paranoia? What’s paranoia when They (Pynchon, reporting) already know what you’re thinking; when a friend can corner you in an alley and naïvely relate what you said on the phone the night before. “He’s a killer,” Michael pleads to Karen early in the film, before he’s realised how wrong he is, before he gets the irony: she’s the only one so diseased as to commission double homicide.

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Or maybe Michael knew all along. It was in there, this knowledge, the Arthur-sized seed of doubt. During that scene – one of only two shared between these central characters – Michael has his workwear on, and a brave face, pleading for Arthur’s soundness. Don’t panic he says to a Karen already panicking. Get Arthur his meds and he’ll be back in the saddle. Then Michael lets it slip: you hired him, he says, “because he’s crazy enough to grind away on a case like this for six years without a break.” Crazy enough to be a willing helper to the dangerous organism that is U/North. Crazy enough not to see the damage done by his own hand. Crazy enough to get yourself coated in the shit-patina in the first place.

Michael breaches the same chrysalis, eventually, reborn in the guttering wreck of his exploded Mercedes. He arrives at realisation by a slightly different route than Arthur does. Arthur emerges from madness in a heartbeat – the shock of imminent death before the onrushing traffic that is the setting of his gorgeous, racing oration. Michael approaches slowly, from his own experience, way down in the hierarchy, at risk of losing everything, expendable. Those cursed with the knowledge of how the system functions – those who oil the gears – are blessed in turn with an innate suspicion that the system is up to no good. Yet with this knowledge comes the sobering, daunting thought: the system can’t fix itself, even when the evidence is there, underlined, in bold print, and the case is open-and-shut. Clayton’s just a lawyer, after all. Where are you supposed to turn?

ADVOCACY MOVIES, STIR-THE-heart and to-the-barricades movies, wrap-your-kid-in-cotton-wool movies. There had been a few before. Erin Brockovich comes to mind. After: a flood. Margin Call, The Big Short, 99 Homes. Dark Waters arrived later on. They took the corrosive spill of the Great Recession as their target and subject, poking a long stick in the aftermath. Because of their period, they all had the genetic data of Tony Gilroy’s masterpiece swimming in their cells, the nod of reverence to their betters. But Michael Clayton doesn’t sit so easily alongside its progeny. It’s too slick for that, too knowing. And each of these later films are curtailed by a single fact: they are, to a greater or lesser degree, true stories.

For a true story to get made, it must satisfy in its audience a need for justice, retribution, revenge, transcendence. Their emotional span will always therefore be limited, fated to draw their audience to the trap of believing that the good lawyer, or the far-seeing trader, or the smartarse math-whizz will emerge out the other end on our side, fighting our corner – or at least aware and contrite to the part they played in bringing down the building on our heads. Gilroy ducked that trap. He got the best of all possible worlds. Michael Clayton isn’t a true story, though it feels like it could be, bitten through the skin by real life. And it got there first. Everyone else was scrambling to respond, rushing to note down the feelings and impressions and folktales of the epoch. And there was Our Cleanser of the Hidden Sins, already fully-formed and far-seeing and wise to whatever sense we’d try and make of this collective mess. It has the gift of prophecy.

The film has its own history, of course. Gilroy the journeyman, scribbling his way through dreck, dross, and pulp. He spent years scheming Michael Clayton’s script. There were the usual trials of money, cast, production. Its characters and flow and mood were all born from the 2000s. Had it been made by less talented people, it might appear to us as a relic of the before-time. And it was certainly a coincidence that the film arrived when it did, in the same month when the weather turned and ash began to fall from the sky. But it caught, like a flake stolen from the wind, the temper and timbre of cynicism, of weariness, the hint that all this bright light and polished glass, the mock-grandeur and self-assuredness was opaque, transient, and doomed. The cracks were already starting to show. The well-water really was poisoned, foaming, bubbling over.

And that ending. That exhausted, frightening ending. In style it references The Graduate and The Long Good Friday. But it looks a lot to our eyes like augury, presage. The moment Michael thumps shut the taxi door and orders his fifty buck ride to nowhere: that is the cusp, the hinge, the needle-tip on which our era shifted its weight. Back there, on the sidewalk, it is still October 2007, and will be forever. Inside that taxi, time trundled forward in the Manhattan canyons, skirting the gutters, juddering in the potholes. We’ve been shotgun in the passenger seat ever since, looking rearwards, trying to not flinch, as Michael Clayton passes through the stages of his grief.   

The excerpts from Arthur’s monologue are taken from Tony Gilroy’s original shooting script, dated February 2006. Incredibly, the speech is longer, heftier, and even more fluent.

NOT LONG INTO Joker: Folie à Deux – things are already going downhill and I’m honking mournfully in the pews – our sap of a hero meets his amour. He’s a manic headcase called Arthur Fleck, manacled in an asylum for sextuple murder; she’s called Lee and has a bad case of regrowth. “You know,” she says, “I must’ve watched that TV movie they made about you…

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BEHOLD THE GODHEAD’S ERUPTING madness: more fluid than fire, pulsing and bellowing like the soft underside of a shore-bound wave – a surf’s curling, enveloping thunder heaved sidewards and shot vertical; tinted terracotta and rich carmine, melting to melon and sanguine rose, fissured to its heaven-breaching height by matte-black seams of irradiated dust. The heat – immediate, intense, immolating – recedes and meets halfway returning the hurried gust of the blast-wave’s advancing diameter. One hundred seconds pass. The sick breath of a new age sweeps the sunglassed, sunscreened face of Edward Teller, awing upwards to the ionised cloud hung unearthly and lavender in July’s dawn. And he smiles.

Teller’s smile is not the smile of simple satisfaction, thrilling to a well done job. Nor is it the glee of a hard task – a near-impossible task – finished and cradling a definitive glimpse of victory after four years of war. These cheers of delight come later in Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer, when the staff of the Los Alamos laboratory bear-hug and back-slap and beat bongo-drums in the desert and loft Oppenheimer himself on their shoulders to hail his wisdom, when even he – yes, he – can allow a rare beam of success to trouble that spare and skullish face. They are cordoned off, in the film, these celebrations, once the stunned silences have passed. Teller and his smile get their own moment, immediate in the aftershock and afterglow of Trinity, a special attention.

For that smile represents possibility rather than finality; not the end of a project but the beginning of a larger one; a consciousness debuting in the world at the precise moment of the atom bomb’s ignition as an instant and illicit byproduct of fission – a consciousness that does not in horror recoil but rushes closer, wooed by that infernal heat, turned on by it, lusting for it. An arrogance is born too with the first Bomb, an ego unleashed to warm itself by nuclear fire as if it were a small blaze in a domestic hearth to be stoked and nurtured rather than a force which, by its fundamental equation (1.132 × 10²¹ atoms per pound of U-235 multiplied by the speed of light squared) will always and inevitably escape the restraint of those defective enough to believe they are its masters.

Nolan’s movie is flecked with moments like these, small but fathoms-deep ruptures in the fast-running fabric of its narrative, teasing glimpses beyond its slick surface into a forbidden strata of disease and desire too terrifying to contemplate. Oppenheimer is a film constantly invaded by the shadow of a plutonium-stained black-gloved hand, a hand which stills its own tremble the closer it gets to the launch button, or to the neck of a man daring to defy the authority derived from it. Like the balled flash of Trinity, creased and veined with the particulate of invisible death, this otherwise regular story of a monumental figure is riven with a sickness neither potassium iodide nor Prussian blue can cure: the sickness of power, and what that power is prepared to do to a single life – what that power is prepared to do to all life. What Stanley Kubrick distilled in its absurd and comic mode in Dr Strangelove, Nolan is attempting to grasp in a serious manner in Oppenheimer. And in that attempt, in the strain of his effort, we see Nolan butting up against the limits of his own creativity, his own inclination for rationality and scientific rigour in his work, the often extreme literalness of his art. Rationality, after all, was the first thing betrayed in the world Oppenheimer helped to birth.   

“They won’t fear it until they understand it,” Oppenheimer says to a midnight forum of scientists worried about ‘The Impact of the Gadget on Civilization’, “and they won’t understand it until they’ve used it.” Perhaps more than any other, “understand” is the most common and important word in the film. In his earliest work on the rules divining the structure of the universe, Neils Bohr is trying to “understand reality.” A lack of “understanding” is what non-scientists plead when they encounter Oppenheimer’s totemic mind and the eccentricity of the New Physics. It sums up the impasse and strife of a relationship, and acts as a bid for humility before a hostile interrogator. Ernest Lawrence understands “completely” the rule of secrecy he is expected to follow, then immediately breaks; it is what Lewis Strauss says whenever he is lying, what Teller utters as he leans forward and delivers the Judas kiss.

Understanding is the subconscious joke made by a director to his audience in a film about physicists but which contains almost no physics. Understanding is also the motive for Oppenheimer’s making: my generation is the first generation not to have learned duck-and-cover drills alongside basic grammar and multiplication, who did not help out on the weekends building backyard shelters, and the film’s audience – for the most part and mercifully – do not remember the daily Damocles of the Cold War, and must be reminded how dire things were then, and how dire things remain for so long as the invention remains invented. Understanding is also the antonym of naiveté. For all his erudition and brilliance, his intuitive gift for spasms of genius, naïve is decidedly what Oppenheimer was – a curse of foolishness which delivered him and all his achievements into the claws of a caste of people he could not comprehend and whose passions Oppenheimer could never quite translate; a passion for extermination, the ultimate extermination.

Trinity may have been beautiful in its own perverse, deformed way: the strange ecstasy of a thirty-thousand-foot tall buttercup and mandarin-tinged firestorm; Nolan would like us to wonder at its biblical majesty and at his own technical talent. But every subsequent drop of the Bomb, every successive test was shaded deeper, richer, and redder, for it contained, as Martin Amis observed, “a kiloton of human blood.”

ON READING THAT A FORMER colonial potato farmer had described the deepest known sanctum of the atomic world, Vassily Kandinsky’s brain cracked open. “The discovery hit me with frightful force, as if the end of the world had come. All things become transparent, without strength or certainty.” Until 1911, the structure of an atom was sketched as a seasonal confection – a plum pudding, in fact: dense and immobile, dotted with occasional raisins of electrons. What Ernest Rutherford found in that year, in describing a dense nucleus enveloped by particles pinballing in a vast emptiness, was the essential energy of the subatomic world. Everything was energy, not just in the sense of potential but of velocity: hurtling, limitless, frenzied energy, a constant clashing and bombardment prefiguring, in its own minute way, the defiled earth of the coming war. There was nothing still in the world; the fundamental state of existence was motion.

Six years earlier Albert Einstein had liberated human life from the fetters of its own perception. The genius of Special Relativity was its creativity. Einstein, with his love of Mozart, had to bypass the observable rules of the universe, had to give in to the seductions of abstract thought to grasp what was otherwise unthinkable. The nature of space and time – a nature once thought fixed and unchanging, like the plum pudding atom – was split apart. Kandinsky threw aside the hazy Impressionism then in vogue – the mushy hymnals to the concord of the natural world – and began a long trek into the wilds. Within a decade the artist pared back his style so radically that his canvases became explosions of pure geometry: the closest any painter has ever come to grasping the essential weirdness of science. Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, the founders of Cubism, both denied the linkage in their own work with the thrilling science of their time, but they were lying. Simultaneity, it came to be called: the blending of Henri Poincaré’s theories about four dimensions with photography’s ability to show something in action and at rest in the same moment. Marcel Duchamp described his pioneering 1912 Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 as an attempt to condense “time and space through the abstract presentation of motion.” On the wall of Neils Bohr’s study in Copenhagen, hung proudly as an essential font of inspiration, was Jean Metzinger’s La Femme au Cheval – a prismatic vision of collapsing angles and interrupted arcs. It was from Cubism’s experiments in simultaneity that Bohr developed, in part, the idea of Complementarity: that an electron, for example, might be a wave as well as a particle – two qualities at the same instant and dependent on the point in space of the observer.

On the hunt for order and explanation, the physicists discovered little but mysteries and disorder, a disorder and confusion the artists reflected in their shivered mirror: a reality of speed and shifts and momentum, a single object seen from an infinity of possible angles. We are habituated today to the strict demarcation of science and the humanities – in the modern academy they are pitched against each other for money and prestige while a wretched habit divides people into personality types with an aptitude for the hard or the soft, and never shall they merge. On one side rigour, discipline, rules, falsifiability; on the other creativity, inspiration, arguments, ephemerality. Yet from the years immediately before the First World War until the mid-1920s – when a bright and rich American son of German-Jewish immigrants stormed into Göttingen – science and art shared in the glories of the avant-garde and developed its own politics of rebellion against the known values of harmony, order, and coherence – the virtues of a gorgeous, complacent, doomed world the Victorians bequeathed them.

This period had already augured what technology, conjured by the alchemies of science, could do to the human soul. Thomas Edison promised in 1890 that his new electric current was the most merciful method for taking a life – less grotesque, certainly, than the guillotine and the noose. But when William Kemmler, condemned to die for the twenty-six axe-blows delivered to the skull of his lover, was given the fatal jolt the execution chamber rapidly filled with the bitter smell of seared flesh. Only a second, doubled shock killed Kemmler. His fingernails were found embedded in the palms of his hands. An instrument created for a quick end caused only torrid suffering. And what began as a marvel and novelty – Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery in 1896 of the X-ray – soon took on a morbid symbolism. “In making every living body appear skeletal,” Philipp Blom wrote in The Vertigo Years, the X-ray photograph “became a technological memento mori, a high-tech injunction whispering through the dark: Remember you will die.” (A half-century later, entire divisions of men were compelled to watch the detonations of the first hydrogen bombs. What did they see, these lab rats, when they held their arms to the pure-white field of the blast? Their own blood vessels pulsing under invisible skin, their own bones backlit against the glow).

These were the years of J Robert Oppenheimer’s forming. And what Oppenheimer found, like Einstein and Bohr before him, was beauty in abstraction – an abstraction Christopher Nolan illustrates with flashed images of arcing tensile rays, blurred hailstorms of striped rupturing particles, sunspot luminescence ringing the iris of a thermite-bright core. In swift montage, between the visions, we see Oppenheimer hurling crystal into a corner, hypnotised by the shattering structure of their breakage, TS Eliot’s The Waste Land at his side, the jagged horn-blares and rhythmic staggers of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring haring away on the gramophone and shuddering the walls, then stalking gallery halls hungrily consuming the Cubists of his period. More than just a generational genius preternaturally attuned to the momentous movements of the universe, what Oppenheimer’s visions reveal is a figure lashed by the tenor and timbre of his time, moved and inspired by art and science to the same degree they moved and inspired each other. The breathless thrills of modernity and modernism, Nolan suggests, brought Oppenheimer inevitably to the Bomb, and the Bomb inevitably brought his downfall. In fact, as Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin’s American Prometheus makes vivid, it was not just The Waste Land but Fitzgerald, Claudel, Zweig, Gide, Hemingway, and Yeats; the intellectual hothouse of Göttingen didn’t haul him out from his juvenile depression – it was Proust, devoured during a Corsican holiday. He was omnivorous, and could reach for John Donne in naming the Trinity test just as easily as he could later quote (infamously) from the Bhagavad Gita.

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But dwell a while on that brief flash of Oppenheimer prowling the gallery. Look closer, and we find Nolan has placed there the most obvious examples possible. A lot of Nolan is like this: the literal impersonating the profound – and this in a moment supposed to express the thick, double-binding artistic and scientific lash in which Oppenheimer was caught. To the left: Roger de la Fresnaye’s Married Life (1912), a charcoal-clad thicket-haired man smoking voluminously, clutched on the arm by a nude woman, hemmed in by a bohemian shamble; a stack of books, an empty glass. To the right is Still Life with Pipe (1918) by Juan Gris, and who could that represent? In a separate emphasis shot we get Picasso’s Femme assise aux bras croisés – but that won’t be painted for another ten years, and lives in a different school.

In the middle we find Ivan Kliun’s 1914 work The Clockmaker – a mad-scientist figure of terse deco teeth and half-moon spectacles hassled by fragmented watch-faces. The reference is not to Oppenheimer but to Nolan himself who, even before Interstellar, thought like a pure Einsteinian – indeed, still does (not for nothing did Guillermo de Toro once call him an “emotional mathematician”). As a director he knows that light is the only constant. Time is a plaything by contrast, to be warped and dilated. The malleability of time unifies his work. Nolan’s colours and feelings are moved by time: the alienation of being suspended in it, the longing it can provoke, the pressure of having so little left. Memento was about rediscovered time; Inception slowed it to a stumble, then levered it back on itself; before the mighty forces of a black hole (which Oppenheimer predicted in the fated year 1939), Interstellar sped minutes in aeons; Tenet begins and ends at the same point in time and space. Dunkirk almost – almost – approached the simultaneity of the Cubists, depicting the same event in three angles over a contracting span of week, day, and hour. His characters (though really they are just functionaries) bow and swirl on a parabolic path around the arrow of plot, and at the moment when actions and emotions threaten to swing out from the narrative’s controlling orbit, they interlock again neatly and without friction – the peroration of planetary alignment, a finished mechanism sounding its final totemic click.  

However much Nolan treats time like clay to be moulded and reformed, it is still an immutable law he cannot totally transgress, the rule of order which, when violated, leads to chaos. But faced with a figure as singular as Oppenheimer, with his own singular place in history’s tempest, Nolan has to strain against the caged formulas of his own making. Though Oppenheimer is split between its ‘Fission’ and ‘Fusion’ streams, and each contain their own nested flashbacks and recollections, and though it is strung together with the same self-assured pace of his other work and functions like a puzzle box, it is still the story of a single life adapted from a single non-fiction source: something Nolan has never attempted. And in his attempt you can see him finally encountering the outer bounds of his own creativity, the artistic impulse usually kept smothered.

Nolan doesn’t do symbol, metaphor, gesture. Yet here they are. Some are silly: he signals vulnerability – baring one’s soul before the beloved – by having his characters face each other bracingly naked. Some are obvious: the radium-green luminous apple on Patrick Blackett’s desk supposes an illusion of choice to leave the Eden of the pre-atomic world (“Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee”). Some are subtler still: the allusive hand forcing Jean Tatlock’s neck below her shallow bathwater, murderous for a second, then vanishing (“a faint trace of chloral hydrate,” said the coroner). And in the gentle tap-drips which disturb the surface of that water, mirrored again in the opening glimpse of a Cambridge puddle shelled by rain, linked in turn to the torrent of uranium marbles clunking into the core’s goldfish bowl at Los Alamos, repeated on the Princeton pond where Einstein betrays his hidden despair for Oppenheimer, superimposed on a map during the conference room debate, and magnified finally in the mantle of the earth plashed and rippled by a thousand megaton, megadeath events. Twelve thousand, actually: that is how many warheads still taint our existence, tucked in their dank warehouses, shuddering in their silos. For here is the opposite of the creative abstraction which can comprehend the inner turmoil of an atom – its dark twin, its inverse, a Janus face clean on one side, the other smeared red with radiation burns: a mind that would abstract and accept a billion lives – then a billion more, a billion more after that – as the proper “price” of “survivability.”

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And catch that hastening thump as the warheads fall, a sound which recurs in Oppenheimer at points of high crisis, like a locomotive cranking over or the massed canter that begins a cavalry charge. It is not the metallic spooling of a ballistic missile’s rocket motor (though it could be), nor a purely aesthetic effect (though it might have been), but the triumphant rumble of eager feet on the bleachers of Fuller Lodge – the moral and spiritual centre of the film, by far its most impressive and important sequence, more essential even than the stunner of Trinity. Having heard the news of Hiroshima’s levelling from that satanic hick Harry Truman, Oppenheimer goes before a drunk and feral audience seedily dressed in the colours of vomit and plasma, beaming and needy for someone to indulge them. And Oppenheimer does, with hollow words. But the walls shake. A woman laughs ecstatic, then collapses in confounded tears. Kids fondle each other under the stands. A man curls stricken and inconsolable in the corner. Another woman – Nolan’s eldest daughter Flora, in case anyone doubted the director’s opinion on the atomic question – reaches towards an imaginary fire as the flesh of her face flays away. They all go to dust. It is their shoes on the floor Oppenheimer hears as a haunting evocation of the nightmare he, by his naiveté, has created; their spastic American flags which twirl in his dreams; and that single scream piercing the shudders… that stranded cry which is the only thing humanity will hear when the time comes, panicked and alone before a “terrible revelation of divine power.”

It is telling that Nolan thought the sequence “experimental and spontaneous.” And amusing, too, because it is about as deep into metaphor and symbol he can imagine himself being, about as far as he will dare stray from the common rules and comforts of his craft. But if this is what happens when a technician like him finally eases their nervous grip on the diamond-cut laws undergirding their work? The result is appropriate: horrifying, vengeful, and, surprisingly for Nolan, nasty. It mocks the glee with which the western world greeted the evisceration of foreign cities, and scours their horrid luxuriations in the neutron-glow of the new American power. In Dunkirk, Nolan recast Churchill’s famous oratory as a gentle, mournful refrain of rescue rather than a balled fist of defiance; here he goes further, transmuting the joy of victory into a grotesque bacchanal of bloodlust and heavy-petting – Eros and Thanatos, sex and death, never more comfortably entwined in scorn of all Oppenheimer’s doubts, of all our anxieties. Staggered on the bleachers in Fuller Lodge, a hundred haunting faces, all wearing Edward Teller’s sick smile.

The only journalist present at Trinity was William L Laurence of the New York Times, and he described the gadget’s eruption (or irruption) as “the Great Flash – the first cry of a new-born world.” What it augured was not a new weapon, Neils Bohr says in the film, but “a new world.” “The world is pivoting in some new direction,” Kitty Oppenheimer worries. “Reforming.” It is apt – morbidly apt – that Dr Sasaki in John Hersey’s seminal Hiroshima described the detonation of Little Boy as a “gigantic photographic flash.”

BECAUSE HOLLYWOOD WAS ONCE the primary target of its wrath, there has always been a good and brave tradition in American filmmaking of defiance in the face of McCarthyism. It runs through Storm Center and Inherit the Wind, Woody Allen’s The Front and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, the very bad 2015 biopic about Dalton Trumbo and George Clooney’s minor but excellent Good Night and Good Luck. Perhaps we might even include Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (“Better dead than Red, Ethel,” says Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s pitbull, in that play. And how did Ethel Rosenberg die, condemned for leaking atomic secrets? The electric chair). These films are the debt the writers who never had to face McCarthy paid to those who came before, who were destroyed by the junior senator from Wisconsin’s drunken raging; blacklisted, never resurrected.  

At their best, these works are American liberalism at its most precocious and indignant. By their nature they are committee room movies, courtroom movies – forums for the sending-up of persecutors and paranoids, witness-boxes for grandstanding and grandiloquence. The truth will always out, these pictures teach us. Speak loud enough, speak well enough, stick by your principles, and the tide might turn, justice might be done. The hero always gets his or her revenge, and the restoration of all that was once right. Howard in The Front even gets to tell them to “Go fuck yourselves.” It is possible, at last, for a good person with good ideas to stand against the bullies and win.

Oppenheimer is proof of the opposite. Forbidding, terrifying proof. Speech alone makes nothing happen. Lone defiance is suicide. Oppenheimer speaks – what lovely smoke-softened speech – and his enemies grow larger; his syllables sound on the battlements and give no echo. Nolan’s courtroom scenes are not even courtroom scenes: they are an invigilation, a hosing down, a drip-drip water torture, a ritual humiliation. True, we get Kitty’s little moment of sangfroid rebellion; we also get (elsewhere and meanwhile) David Hill’s exposé, yet they cannot ease the conclusive and complete defeat of the hero. Robbed of his fist-thumps-table moment, meekly and wide-eyed Oppenheimer accepts his professional annihilation. Between the film and its source, American Prometheus, it is impossible to really know what ushered Oppenheimer so pathetically into the arena with the lions. Maybe it was his own naiveté, trusting to the last that truth – in politics as in science – was the only quality of consequence, the quality that would exonerate him. Or perhaps he went willingly to his own execution as a form of self-punishment for the sin of creating The Bomb, becoming a flagellant before the Gray Board: four weeks in a cupboard, bleeding the stripes of his atonement.

Christopher Nolan is not so interested in the answer, because in an important sense the answer does not matter. What matters is the fact of Oppenheimer’s humiliation: the same power which in a few short years made his reputation could so easily, in a few short years more, completely unmake it. Oppenheimer does not gesture inwards, as other anti-McCarthy films do, towards the drive for purer principles and unsullied consciences, but outwards: to that fizzing critical mass behind the curtain, to that impulse which moved Edward Teller to smile warmly at the mushroom cloud – a twinned cynicism and nihilism which overtook the furthest corners of the American state in those crucial years. Dissenting critics and unhappy viewers moaned at Oppenheimer’s final third, annoyed by so much big talk in a small room (such people probably think that Jaws was also a movie about a shark). But that final third represents something – something larger than the mere ‘trial’ it depicts. For underneath its procedure thuds the demon-heart in the chest of the United States, motoring and moving a gangrenous blood through the system, expunging all dissident bodies, cleansing at the cellular level all qualities thought parasitic, alien, and traitorous, weeding out the conspiracy, as Jack D Ripper in Dr Strangelove growls, “to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.”

What to call this heart, this spectre? The System, the Machine, the Deep State, the National Security Apparatus? Thomas Pynchon’s Raketenstaat, or Don DeLillo’s infinite and incomprehensible secret archive? Or perhaps, by way of a Henry James story Oppenheimer once read, The Beast in the Jungle? Gary Wills called it Bomb Power: the ulcerous attitude of a corrupted administration built to protect atomic weapons and defend the possibility of their use, a regime trained to guard against precisely the sort of challenge Oppenheimer hoped to make in the final years of his potency. And in the inner room of the inner room sits the nuclear priesthood: a covert and entirely irresponsible elite which believes that it knows better than every other man and woman in the street, and is prepared to annihilate every man and woman in the street – is happy to annihilate all of them, wants to annihilate all of them. The Bomb (to quote Erik Baker) demands secrecy, secrecy demands lying, and lying breeds lawlessness. Lawlessness, we might add, breeds murder. This is what Oppenheimer saw behind the curtain, what Oppenheimer gestures towards, what we see at last in Teller’s smile.

The lie which birthed this new power is also the mother of all modern lying: that Japan had to be A-Bombed. Through the summer of 1945, intercepted cable traffic spoke of panic in the Japanese leadership, talk of capitulation before the Soviets declared against them, whispers of surrender on one condition: they keep their emperor. Truman knew this; Eisenhower knew this. They dropped anyway. And the surrender terms – two eviscerated cities later – were not much different than what had been possible three months and a hundred thousand lives earlier. Patrick Blackett, Oppenheimer’s former tutor, intuited early that “the two bombs – the only two existing – were whisked across the Pacific to be dropped” not because it was conclusive that their detonation would end the war, but that it might be “the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia…” General Leslie Groves agreed, in his testimony under oath to the Gray Board. “There was never,” Groves said, “from about two weeks from the time I took charge of this project, any illusion on my part but that Russia was our enemy and that the project was conducted on that basis.” Why bomb? First, to impress Joe Stalin. Second, because they could.

From such lying, lawlessness naturally follows. Like all McCarthyite tactics, what Lewis Strauss arranged was entirely illegal – and entirely ironic. In fear and in defence against the “Commies”, they invented their own Moscow-style show trial, a star chamber backed by wiretaps, bugging, blackmail, pre-selected evidence, and loyalty oaths. For Oppenheimer’s twin-stream structure to function, to set him up as a friendly betrayer, Nolan has to soften Strauss’ loathing of Oppenheimer, colouring it in part as an accumulation of personal slights and a dispute over political style. But there is more than enough of Strauss’ true nature in the film to identify him as a willing agent of that demon heart, of Bomb Power. “Survival in Washington,” Strauss says, demurely, “is about knowing how to get things done.” Getting things done means doing everyone in, when the time comes. More than Oppenheimer’s socialism, more than his indiscretions during the Manhattan Project, what Strauss, Kenneth Nichols, and William Borden (who really does look in the film like a certain failed Austrian painter) objected to was his opposition to Edward Teller’s “baby”: the Hydrogen Bomb. The Atomic Energy Commission’s charges, engineered by Strauss, contained the definitive accusation: Oppenheimer was “instrumental in persuading other outstanding scientists not to work on the hydrogen bomb project,” and as a result “definitely slowed down its development.”

“A prophet,” Isidor Rabi calls Oppenheimer. He wasn’t, not really. But having borne witness to the first conclave of the nuclear priesthood, he was its first heretic and dissident. And for this, he had to be ruined – the coup de grâce which cleared the field for lesser men with fewer scruples. Indeed, after Oppenheimer the radical scientist working inside the system became an endangered creature, lately an extinct one. Judged, branded, then excommunicated, Oppenheimer was the last of the Enlightenment men: the polymaths who accumulated to themselves all the treasures of rational learning and artistic temperament and were never shy of identifying the evil in their own discoveries. In 1944, when it became obvious that the Nazis could not develop their own Bomb and could be defeated by conventional means, the Polish-Jewish physicist Joseph Rotblat downed tools and walked out the front gate of Los Alamos, devoting the rest of his life to the curtailment of atomic weapons; because of him we know what nuclear fallout does to our bodies, what it does to the earth. No more Oppenheimers; no more Rotblats. Science was subdued by the Gray Board, straitjacketed and made an accomplice to Bomb Power.  

Rabi was more correct when he called Edward Teller an “enemy of humanity,” and it is reassuring that Teller, to the day he went to his welcome grave, hated knowing he was one part of the model and inspiration for Dr Strangelove. Kitty Oppenheimer was right, in the film as in life, not to shake his hand. If there is a critical fault in Oppenheimer, it is Nolan’s gentleness with this monstrous man. Because it was Teller who first volunteered to the FBI, in 1951, an accusation-by-innuendo that Oppenheimer was blocking the H-Bomb and promised to “do anything possible” to have him removed from government service. Thus, less than a week before his slick testimony to the Gray Board (“I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better”), he met late at night with an AEC officer and begged Strauss to “deepen the charges” against Oppenheimer so as to “unfrock him in his own church.” From his crepuscular corner of the security state he never stopped repeating his catchphrase “A little radiation is good for you.” Teller never met a Bomb he didn’t like and couldn’t swoon for, never witnessed a test he was not enraptured by, and never tasted the invisible metal on his tongue: the flavour of guilt at the possibility of a nuclear holocaust wrought by his own hand.  

There are few works of fiction, you’ll notice, that begin before the missiles start spooling in their silos; most take place as the final curtain comes down, or after the eternal winter has already set its dark pattern. Of these, the best is not The Road or On the Beach, but the distinctly low-budget, distinctly British 1984 film Threads – one of those rare pieces of art which makes me feel sick, clinically sick. Despite the obvious ketchup smeared on its actors’ faces and the bouncy camera poorly imitating the blast, Threads grasps the innate terror – like the scream in Oppenheimer’s Fuller Lodge sequence – of the siren sound separating then from now. How quickly humanity would lose all resemblance to itself, Threads says: the only possible form of government would be instant fascism, and the first generation birthed into hell would be deformed beyond comprehension. Their language would consist of no more than a few dozen words, for who has need of anything but the crops expelled by a poisoned earth? In Threads, art imagines its own end, via The Bomb.

But no artist has yet apprehended the nature of Bomb Power, seized its scruff and spat in its face. Stanley Kubrick came close in Dr Strangelove – a kind of cackle on the gallows with the blade going up. Christopher Nolan gets closer still in his impressions and gestures, his nodding beyond the curtain, in that huff of arrogant impatience when Strauss bursts his Southern gentleman disguise and insists Oppenheimer “should be thanking me.” That is Bomb Power, in a way: it wants to murder you and be praised for it. Perhaps, much like the Holocaust, its corrupting effects can never be distilled as a whole. No single picture, no single novel can possibly contain all of it. Perhaps each of them might contribute their individual fragments to the collage of our own making, might at last assemble the fuller picture of those who, in the spring of 1954, assassinated one man and might yet assassinate you. 

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