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October/november 1981 | Volume 32, Issue 6
History And The Imagination
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
As three recent films show—one on the atomic bomb, one on women defense workers during the Second World War, one on the government arts projects of the thirties —this history of our times offers film makers arresting opportunities. Footage shot on the spot supplies a measure of raw actuality, and survivors are still available for interview. The real problem is to give abundant but diffuse materials a shape and structure. This is not, however, a problem that automatically solves itself.
In The Day After Trinity , Jon Else, the producer, director, and co-author, discloses his unifying principle in the subtitle: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb . Obviously this theme does not “force” the material. Oppenheimer and the bomb represent one of those connections that unite historical fact with artistic felicity. He was a scientific genius of rare moral and intellectual sensitivity. His rise and fall provide the story of the bomb’s birth with legitimate dramatic focus.
Recently declassified film gives the Los Alamos sequences freshness and immediacy. Interviews with veterans of the Manhattan Project supply a fascinating retrospective. But what matters is the film maker’s attitude toward his material. Jon Else, I am glad to say, argues no thesis, except that the perplexities involved had no easy answer—an attitude that permits the men who wrestled with those perplexities at the time to retain their dignity. For, though the planet would be far safer today if there never had been an atomic bomb, the motives of military urgency and scientific passion that produced it were not, even with hindsight, contemptible.
The decision not to play tricks with the material also recognizes the limitations of the medium. Film is simply not a vehicle for the rigorous analysis of complex questions such as Were Hiroshima and Nagasaki absolutely necessary to bring about the quick surrender of the Japanese? or, Did the failure to share the secret with the Russians have much to do with the Cold War? By renouncing the temptations of glib judgment, The Day After Trinity gains historical as well as cinematic force.
“Trinity” was the name Oppenheimer gave to the site in the New Mexico desert where the first detonation took place on July 16, 1945. We see the scientists working feverishly to assemble the bomb, as electronic music sounds in the background. The camera pans almost lyrically across the desert, and the explosion takes place in all its ghastly beauty. A Los Alamos woman remembers her husband calling to her, “Come look—the sun’s coming up in the wrong direction.” But the images of Oppenheimer linger almost as powerfully in memory as the bomb itself—the dashing, elegant young scientist in his jaunty porkpie hat, turning, after what Freeman Dyson calls his “Faustian bargain,” into a lonely man with a harrowed, haunted face. If I were to quibble, I would suggest that Jon Else is a little uncritical in his use of Haakon Chevalier against Oppenheimer. But this