Header image by Matthew Petroff, shared under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license
I liked Oppenheimer, and a lot of other people did, too, to the extent that we can even say we “liked” or “enjoyed” such an intense movie. It’s all but guaranteed to win a truckload of Oscars and end up on just about every major film critic’s “Best of 2023” list. There were, I thought, many ways in which it succeeds. But as an exploration of the ethics of bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it falls short, to put it generously. There are a handful of lines (such as Oppenheimer’s retrospective assessment that Japan was “essentially defeated” by the time of the bombings) that keep it from being a complete failure, but the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are never shown. To my recollection, there are no Japanese people in the movie at all. Though it does show what a nuclear weapon actually does to a human being, these depictions are limited to Oppenheimer’s waking nightmares of his friends and colleagues being blown up.
Does this mean that Oppenheimer, taken as a whole, is a failure? It’s a legitimate question to ask, and thoughtful critics have responded to it in a variety of ways. I, personally, don’t think it’s a failure as a whole, but a deep discussion of its merits and flaws is not my goal here.1 Neither do I intend to discuss why certain stories are told more often and more publicly than others; while this is a perennially important topic, doing it any real justice would require an exploration of ideology and market forces that would take me too far from my main concern here. What I do intend to discuss is how a reader might respond to the inevitable limitations of any individual text. (For the sake of concision, I’ll be using “text” to include all works of art, even if they aren’t actually text-based, and “reader” to refer to the person encountering the work.)
By saying things like “inevitable limitations,” I’m starting to reveal some of my basic assumptions, so I might as well state them up front. First, all texts—yes, all of them—are incomplete in one way or another.2 Second, there is no such thing as an objective judgment of a text, whether on aesthetic grounds or otherwise. Our preferences are, to an extent, deliberately cultivated, but they’re also the product of social and cultural conditioning and personal idiosyncrasies. Since no two people have identical personal histories or idiosyncrasies, the things I look for in a text will never perfectly overlap with what you look for. Your dealbreakers (for the lack of a better word) will never perfectly overlap with mine. What you tolerate or even celebrate may be, to me, intolerable, or vice versa.
Consequently, I don’t believe we can ever definitively know if a given text’s failures make that text a failure as a whole. But gaps, inconsistencies, incompleteness, and omissions are unavoidable. We run into trouble when we assume that the mere existence of gaps means the text is a failure. More importantly, we run into even bigger trouble when we treat an individual text as the final word. In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s words, it’s the danger of a single story in action.3
How, then, should readers respond to a text’s inevitable gaps? Refusing to read them is simultaneously not enough and too much: if you start boycotting texts that are incomplete and inconsistent, pretty soon you won’t have anything left to read. Incompleteness in general shouldn’t be an automatic dealbreaker. (Having specific kinds of incompleteness as automatic dealbreakers is completely defensible.) A moderately more workable piece of advice would be to remain mindful of incompleteness and inconsistency, but it can only go so far. If I find a text particularly impressive, it may be difficult for me to notice its omissions or its moments of incompleteness. I may mistake it for the story, rather than a single story. Consequently, I have always found it worthwhile to read thoughtful critiques, particularly of texts that I find impressive.4
In the long run, reading critique has made me a more attentive reader; in the short run, specific critiques often motivate me to find other texts that compensate for the original text’s gaps. Oppenheimer is a case study. After reading critiques of the film’s treatment of Japan and of the Japanese people, I borrowed a copy of John Hersey’s Hiroshima from my local library. If Oppenheimer is all about one scientist’s private agonies, most of Hiroshima is about real human beings’ extraordinarily public agonies. Here is a brief sample (please skip to the next paragraph if you are sensitive to descriptions of violence):
Dr. Sasaki had not looked outside the hospital all day; the scene inside was so terrible and so compelling that it had not occurred to him to ask any questions about what had happened beyond the windows and doors. Ceilings and partitions had fallen; plaster, dust, blood, and vomit were everywhere. Patients were dying by the hundreds, but there was nobody to carry away the corpses. Some of the hospital staff distributed biscuits and rice balls, but the charnel-house smell was so strong that few were hungry.5
Hiroshima, too, is incomplete. Neither Oppenheimer nor Hiroshima tell us anything about the people who lived downwind from Los Alamos, who have suffered from significant health problems as a result of the Trinity test, as have their descendants. Neither text tells us anything about the struggles faced by the people who mined uranium for the Manhattan Project without any safety gear.6 And apart from a few scattered sentences, Hiroshima tells us nothing about the bombing of Nagasaki.
But more stories are the solution to these problems in both the short term and the long term. In the short term, read more than one book; in the long term, share the lesser-known stories that fill in the incompleteness of the better-known ones. Reading more is always a good idea; telling more stories is always better than telling one story.
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For more about Oppenheimer and its representations of Japan and Japanese people, I recommend Ryu Spaeth’s recent essay in New York.
See Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan-Paul, 1978), especially chapter 13: “Rather than that sufficiency, that ideal consistency, we must stress that determinate insufficiency, that incompleteness which actually shapes the work. The work must be incomplete in itself […] It must be emphasised that this incompleteness, betokened by the confrontation of separate meanings, is the true reason for its composition” (p. 79).
The phrase comes from her TED Talk of the same name. I’ve linked to a transcript; the original video can be found here.
Another good piece of advice would be to spend some time thinking about what the text’s incompleteness tells us about the context in which it was written. If you’re wondering what this looks like in practice, I highly recommend Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993).
I am grateful to Tina Cordova of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium for bringing these issues to my attention through her recent New York Times op-ed. See: Tina Cordova, “What ‘Oppenheimer’ Doesn’t Tell You About the Trinity Test,” New York Times, July 30, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/30/opinion/international-world/oppenheimer-nuclear-bomb-cancer.html