![]() ![]() ![]() American Prometheus describes Tatlock as “a free-spirited woman with a hungry, poetic mind … always the one person in the room, whatever the circumstances, who remained unforgettable.” She was also an official member of the Party, though she admitted to Oppenheimer that she “found it impossible to be an ardent Communist.” It was this relationship, as much as the Depression and the Spanish Civil War, that pushed him to embrace left-wing social causes.Īlthough Oppenheimer’s friends later described Tatlock as his true love, their romance was as stormy as depicted in the film the running bit about her hatred of flowers comes directly from the book. How tumultuous was Oppenheimer’s romance with Jean Tatlock?Īs in the film, Oppenheimer met a med student named Jean Tatlock at a Communist party (with a lowercase P) hosted by his landlady. “Having made the initial creative leap … quickly moved on to another new topic.” A footnote adds that, when approached about the subject decades later, Robert “expressed no interest in what was rapidly becoming the hottest topic in physics.” “Oppenheimer never took the time to develop anything so elegant as a theory of the phenomenon, leaving this achievement to others later,” American Prometheus states. While brilliant, Oppenheimer’s intellectual temperament often prevented him from embracing all the possibilities of his discoveries. But Oppenheimer the film makes a slightly bigger deal of this than Oppenheimer the man did. Oppenheimer and his student Hartland Snyder really did publish such a paper, and that paper really did come out the same day Hitler invaded Poland. In the film, one of Oppenheimer’s first scientific breakthroughs is his theorizing about the potential of dead stars collapsing inward with such gravity that even light could not escape - what we now know of as black holes. Was Oppenheimer one of the first people to theorize about the existence of black holes? When you’re also the father of black holes. Noting that instead of being tried for attempted murder, Oppenheimer got off with a relatively lax punishment, Bird and Sherwin conclude it was more likely he “had laced the apple with something that merely would have made Blackett sick.” There are disparate opinions on whether the apple was truly poisoned with cyanide, however. Oppenheimer’s parents intervened to prevent him from being expelled, and the young scientist was put on probation and sentenced to mandatory psychiatric counseling. As American Prometheus notes, “Robert liked Blackett and eagerly sought his approval.” The attempted poisoning appears to have been a case of misdirected “feelings of inadequacy and intense jealousy.” Luckily, Blackett never consumed the offending fruit, though in real life the university found out about the incident. No one, not even Oppenheimer himself, seemed to know why he did this. Indeed, it did happen: In the fall of 1925, Oppenheimer really did inject chemicals from the school lab into Blackett’s apple. The early scene of Oppenheimer poisoning an apple belonging to Patrick Blackett, his Cambridge tutor, is so bizarre that it seems unlikely to have been a screenwriter’s invention. With American Prometheus as our guide, here’s a rundown of what’s fact and what’s fiction.ĭid Oppenheimer poison his Cambridge tutor’s apple? Nevertheless, Oppenheimer is still a movie, which means that even this most rigorous of biopics must at times employ shortcuts and shorthand. As Matt Zoller Seitz notes in his review, this method recalls the experience of getting through a book like American Prometheus: It “paradoxically captures the mental process of reading a text and responding to it emotionally and viscerally as well as intellectually.” Nolan also frequently cuts to fantastical imagery that attempts to dramatize what it was like inside Oppenheimer’s head. While American Prometheus is told in rough chronological order, Oppenheimer skips around the timeline thanks to a pair of nesting framing devices built around a pair of 1950s hearings. In fact, Nolan’s chief creative license comes not in the film’s content but its form. Seemingly no bit of dialogue, nor stray anecdote, about the life of J. Sherwin’s biography, American Prometheus, manages the astonishing feat of distilling almost every single one of the book’s 591 pages onto celluloid. Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Kai Bird and Martin J. ![]() ![]() Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Picturesįew films have ever been more based on a book than Oppenheimer. Was Lewis Strauss’s confirmation hearing derailed by a scientist who looked a bit like a Bond villain? ![]()
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