“Oppenheimer” by K. Nolan. Poetics and rhetoric of action

Abstract

K. Nolan’s Oppenheimer subdues the biographical film to the poetics of the graphic novel: the rhetorical construction of the frame composition and the acceleration of the action are combined with the conventional roles of the characters. The film is framed by a double consequence: black-and-white shots of the official process include a public dispute (agora) and construct a simple protagonist, while imitating old film color shots of a biased conversation between professionals reconstruct him as a complex one and block cross-examination. Such ambiguity is also supported by the graphic novel-inspired unambiguity of the roles of his older colleagues: the brooding Einstein and the extroverted Niels Bohr. The erotic economy of the Los Alamos desert development allows us to organize most of the film’s scenes theatrically, in a stage box, thus postponing the resolution of the question of the fate of the Oppenheimer dossier. In doing so, often archaic mediums of information, subordinate to the medium of the railroad, prove key to understanding the protagonist’s actions. These mediums transform the rhetoric of the deed into the poetics of the deed.