A scientific look at Oppenheimer in Japan

Editor’s note: When Christopher Nolan will win the Oscar for Best Picture Oppenheimer began its global rollout last summer, a question mark hung over whether it would ever see the inside of a cinema in Japan, given the sensitive subject matter. Ultimately, the film was released eight months later, quickly becoming the highest-grossing Hollywood title of the year and continuing to hold that position (now at $11.6 million). Nine weeks later, the film is still showing on more than half of the market’s Imax screens, and in local currency (1.774 billion yen), it is Nolan’s fourth highest-grossing film ever.

USC School of Cinematic Arts Vice Dean of Faculty Akira Mizuta Lippit shared with Deadline his thoughts on the reactions before and after the film’s market release. Lippit – who is Japanese on his mother’s side and Jewish on his father’s side – says the issues of Oppenheimer and its reception could not have been better since the film establishes a point of contact between these two cultures and ethnicities.

Here’s Lippit’s take:

On a recent trip to Tokyo, a taxi driver overheard this author talking about the Japanese reception at Oppenheimer. When he arrived at his destination, he turned around and said, “I saw Oppenheimer three times in Imax. I love Christopher Nolan.

This taxi driver is not the only one in Japan to be “maniakku” (maniac), a term often used to refer to Japanese movie buffs. In fact, many flocked to Imax screenings of the film, and some traveled overseas to see screenings of Nolan’s preferred format, 70mm. According to film scholar Wakae Nakane, a new term, “Moppenheimer”, has entered circulation, referring to those who see the film multiple times.

Among the various retorts of “Barbenheimer” was uncertainty as to when, if ever, Oppenheimer could be released in Japan. Unlike any other foreign market, Japan was after all already written into the film as its destination, its epilogue. barbie was released in Japanese theaters on August 11, but no release date has been announced for Oppenheimer until January 2024.

August would not have been the time to go out Oppenheimer in Japan. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima, then Nagasaki, on August 6 and 9, 1945 respectively, followed by the end of the war after Japan’s surrender on August 15 of the same year, would have seemed callous to say the least and could have been seen by some. as provocative. But the delay in planning and announcing a release date for Oppenheimer in Japan, and the possibility of the film never being released in Japan, became its own story.

Previous films about Japan, good and bad, some offensive or ignorant, have nonetheless enjoyed success at the Japanese box office. Michael Bay Pearl Harbor (2001), billed as a love story, was embraced by Japanese audiences, as was the speculative fiction of Edward Zwick, The last Samourai (2004), among many others. That of Rob Marshall Memoirs of a geisha (2005), a little less, but for different reasons. Japan, it seems, is accustomed to being misrepresented and understands that the Japan reflected in Hollywood films is often an imagined, even imaginary, Japan.

Unlike these examples, which take great liberties with the subject and the story, Oppenheimer claimed historical accuracy. It was a serious film, and as such it belonged in a different category from many of the orientalist fantasies that marked Hollywood’s foray into Asia in general, and Japan in particular.

Yet the very question of a theatrical release took on symbolic value in its absence, exacerbating the question of whether Oppenheimer has done enough to address the consequences of the development and deployment of atomic weapons. The same Barbenheimer campaign, depicting Margot Robbie and Cillian Murphy facing a mushroom cloud didn’t help matters.

The delay and uncertainty regarding the release of Oppenheimer ultimately became inseparable from the content of the film itself. Oppenheimer the film became a story about its delayed release; the film had become radioactive. When the film’s release date was finally announced, it was as if the film itself had become its own sequel.

For the Japanese release of Oppenheimer, Universal has partnered with Bitters End with whom it works on more specialized titles. The film opened with a disclaimer warning viewers of the atomic testing scenes.

Responses have been mixed. Activist groups had mobilized in advance to denounce the elision of Japan and the effects of the atomic bombings. Former Hiroshima Mayor Takashi Hiraoka criticized the film’s omission of the depiction of the bombings.

Still, others hailed the film as a step forward: the United States, and Hollywood in particular, was finally willing to depict the moral struggles and conflicts of conscience of the man known as the “father of the bomb atomic”. Some viewers forgave the film for the omission of Japan, noting that it was about the man and not a story of atomic weapons and their use on civilian populations in Japan.

Nolan himself was active in Oppenheimer, participating in various forums to discuss the film, its objectives, its scope and the justifications for any exclusions. He approved the idea proposed by Godzilla minus one director Takashi Yamazaki, to which Japan should respond Oppenheimer with a film of his own about the creation and use of the atomic bomb from his perspective.

Strangely, and contrary to the widely reported political outcry in the United States, Oppenheimer did very well in Japan and its box office propelled Nolan’s film to the position of the biggest success ever overseas.

Still, the central question of the film remains whether it excludes Japan, that is to say, whether Japan is missing in the place where it should be present. Oppenheimer. And how to determine this? After all, the epilogue or postscript to the Manhattan Project is that the atomic bomb was promptly deployed on August 6 and 9, 1945. How could Japan not be part of history?

Film scholar Ryan Williams presented a brilliant analysis of a scene in the film in which Robert Oppenheimer is unable to watch a documentary film about the effects of atomic radiation on human bodies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The camera rests on Oppenheimer as he looks away from the screen. The audience hears the film’s narrator describe these horrific effects off-screen. The public never sees the documentary and Oppenheimer is not able to bear these scenes of human devastation either. Instead, we see Oppenheimer’s reaction, his revulsion perhaps, his feelings of guilt and shame. We see Oppenheimer’s incapacity or refusal to see what the consequences of his creation were.

Where is Japan right now, Williams asks. Off-camera, elsewhere, framed both within and outside the diegesis of the film. Is this an excision of Japan from the film? Is the character of Robert Oppenheimer here synonymous with the eponymous film? This is where the film reaches its moral or political climax. What if the film excluded Japan like Oppenheimer himself? And what about the inclusion of a scene in which Oppenheimer is unable to deal with the effects of his creation, the very inclusion of the annihilation of Japan?

What’s missing in this scene is the image. This film, Oppenheimer, who imagines so much, who puts so much into images, is incapable, at this moment, of imagining Japan. Imagine the hellish landscape of hell. Despite Nolan’s directorial majesty, Hoyte Van Hoytema’s exceptional cinematography, and the world’s most advanced visual effects, the destruction of Japan by atomic weapons remains in the film and elsewhere. unimaginable.

There is perhaps no possible image of this destruction. And perhaps the absence of images, as opposed to the endless fantasies of an imaginary Japan, is the only possible response to the atomic age imagined by J. Robert Oppenheimer and Christopher Nolan. Oppenheimer reveal. Such a revelation reveals nothing, because there is nothing to see. This blinding flash – revealing not only nothing, but nothingness itself – is ultimately the atomic apocalypse.