9 Hidden Messages In Oppenheimer We Have To Talk About

Let’s talk about 9 hidden messages in Oppenheimer.

They’re all based on visual and verbal cues, such as ripples, the garden of eden, eyes, compartmentalization, alcohol and glass bottles, trains, snow and ashes, flashes of light, and screaming.

There will be spoilers in this article, so consider yourself warned.

Also, if you want to watch the video version of this article, click here.

Let’s start with ripples.

Ripples

Oppenheimer starts with Robert looking down at rain droplets creating ripples on the ground. Ripples are a big motif we’ll see throughout this movie. When Oppenheimer speaks with Einstein at the pond, Albert throws a rock into the water, creating a ripple. Later we see rain falling into the pond, creating an array of ripples as well.

At one moment in the film Oppenheimer looks at a map of Japan and imagines a pool of water sitting overtop of it.

If you look closely, you’ll see rain drops falling into this pool, too. Clearly something that Robert is imagining.

And in of the more terrifying moments of Oppenheimer, we see a shot of planet earth from space with various nuclear bombs going off, creating ripples of fire across the surface. The fire spreads and spreads until the entire planet is engulfed in flames.

Ripples are interesting for a variety of reasons. For one, that’s what a nuclear bomb looks like from above. Second, it’s kind of what happens in a fission reaction, right? Starting from one center point, an enormous amount of energy is released that ripples outwards for miles.

Third, and most importantly, ripples are meant to show the consequences of creating this bomb. The ripple effects, as it were. Effects that not everyone could’ve anticipated—both physically and intellectually.

The entire world did change—like the shot of planet earth getting engulfed in flames. These are the ripple effects of creating a power this profound. We now have the power to destroy ourselves.

Also, isn’t it telling that it was raining before they dropped the bomb? There’s so many close-up shots of rain in this movie—particularly in the beginning—that makes me belief this motif was put here for a reason.

The Garden of Eden

Oppenheimer was based on the book American Prometheus, which details the achievements of Robert J Oppenheimer.

At the beginning of the film, we get a quote saying “Prometheus stole from the gods and gave it to man.” And that’s exactly what happened. He stole fire from the hearth of the gods on Mount Olympus and gave it to us mere mortals. It’s kind of what Oppenheimer did here, too, with the atomic bomb.

There’s many references to God in this movie, which we’ll get to, but let’s first focus on some of the references to the Garden of Eden.

First off, the apple. There’s an apple someone gives to Robert’s professor in college which he poisons with cyanide. He eventually throws it in the garbage.

The apple, in the Garden of Eden story, is from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. If you ate the forbidden fruit, you’d introduce death into the world. Hmm. That puts the “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” line into a different light for me.

Not only that, but we see Oppenheimer naked with Jean a bunch in this movie. In one part, when he’s getting questioned, he imagines that he’s naked in front of the whole room.

After Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, they realized their nakedness and tried to hide it with some fig leaves.

And finally, I think Einstein was the one who said “You can’t lift the stone without waiting for the snake underneath.”

The snake. Kind of like the devil, who disguised himself into a talking snake to convince Adam and Eve to eat the fruit.

There’s so many other God references I could name, like the Trinity Test, the fact that Oppenheimer describes the bomb as having a “divine power,” or how Kitty tells Robert that he doesn’t get to commit sin and refuse to pay the consequences.

It’s all right here for you to see.

Compartmentalization

Compartmentalization is a delicious theme in this movie. It’s used in the context of Los Alamos a ton, when Leslie Groves urges everyone to “compartmentalize” in order to maintain security.

I thought I knew what compartmentalize meant, but I looked it up just in case.

On one hand, it means to separate something into parts and not allow those parts to mix together. But there’s another, darker meaning that I think Chris Nolan intended as well.

Compartmentalization is a defense mechanism in which people mentally separate conflicting thoughts, emotions, or experiences to avoid the discomfort of contradiction.

In terms of security, Leslie perhaps wanted people to section off this project in their mind and not speak of it to anybody. To compartmentalize it.

In terms of it being a defense mechanism, this is precisely what Oppenheimer and the rest of the scientists were doing. They separated conflicting thoughts to avoid the discomfort of contradiction.

Oppenheimer knew full well the destructive capabilities of this weapon from the very beginning, but he compartmentalized that thought from the other one saying if they didn’t make this bomb first, then the Nazis would.

And this becomes even more delicious when we think about what fission actually is. It’s separating atoms, just like how in compartmentalization, you separate two contradictory ideas in your head.

In the case of Oppenheimer, separating the thought that this bomb would do way more harm than good in his brain ultimately, like nuclear fission, created an incomprehensible amount of damage.

And it’s something that, perhaps, American citizens do to this day. We compartmentalize the tragedy of dropping two atomic bombs on Japan from the fact that the bomb ended the war, and many American soldiers got to come home in one piece.

Unfortunately, we can’t separate the good from the bad here. We have blood on our hands as a nation, no matter how much we try to ignore it.

Eyes

Christopher Nolan famously cast Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer because as he read American Prometheus, the eyes of Robert Oppenheimer on the cover stared up at him the entire time. He thought of Cillian Murphy as a perfect casting.

Eyes, in my opinion, are a motif in Oppenheimer.

Even when I watched the trailer for this movie, there’s a moment in it where people take a few photos of him with the flash on, and his cold, dead eyes stood out to me immediately. It was bone chilling.

In the beginning of the film, Oppenheimer looks at a weird piece of art hanging in a museum. It may be famous—forgive me if I don’t know it—but it’s a picture of a man with one eye in its normal place, and another eye drooped down the side of his face.

It’s weird-looking. But I think Nolan put this here for a reason.

Strauss, speaking about Oppenheimer, says that “How could one man who saw so much be so blind?”

Do you remember what the camera focused on after they detonated the bomb? We got super close up images of Oppenheimer’s eyes. And as a side note, I’m pretty sure they played the famous recording of Robert saying “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” overtop of the footage at detonation.

Also, remember how, at the Trinity test, the scientists were given these special rectangular glass things to look through so they wouldn’t damage their eyes?

Albert Einstein tells Oppenheimer that he “sees beyond the world we live in,” in one scene. And later, when shown images of the fallout from Nagasaki, Oppenheimer can’t look at them. He literally can’t look.

And finally, don’t worry this is the last one, Robert tells a committee that Japan needs to see this destructive power for themselves to be properly afraid of it to surrender.

I think this gets back to compartmentalizing. It’s the irony of Robert seeing what he wanted to see a lot of times. Despite being brilliant enough to come up with the atom bomb, he couldn’t see the effects it would have on our world until much later. Or perhaps he just decided to be blind to it.

Alcohol

Oppenheimer is chock-full of wine glasses, drinking, bottles, and characters straight up throwing glass at walls.

Remember the clever visual metaphor for the bombs that Robert used? The ones he put marbles into throughout the movie? A fish bowl and a wine glass.

We see Robert make drinks, give people drinks, take drinks, and throw wine glasses at a wall at the beginning of the film. Later we see Kitty throw a bottle at a wall in a fit of rage, angry that her husband won’t fight back.

For a split second, when Oppenheimer gives his speech at a local high school gym, we see a bottle of alcohol being passed around in the stands.

One of the first things Kitty said when they arrived in Los Alamos was “All it needs is a saloon.”

Not only do we have a lot of alcohol references, but we have a few bottle references, too.

Like when Strauss refers to the atomic bomb as a genie in the bottle that’s already been let out. Or when Oppenheimer refers to the USA and Russia as two scorpions fighting in a bottle.

Why all the alcohol references? Why does so much glass get broken in this film?

Let’s look at alcohol through the lens of poison. Scorpions are a funny representation of the USA and Russia. They each got poison. And what does Oppenheimer do to the apple at the start of the film? He poisons it.

Alcohol, in small doses, isn’t going to poison you to death, but drink enough of it and you can get something called alcohol poisoning.

There’s something called radiation poisoning which is a condition many people in Japan had after we dropped the atomic bombs.

We, as a country, created that poison. We let the genie out of that proverbial bottle and armed both ourselves with that poison and the enemy with it, too. And in the process we poisoned ourselves and the whole planet.

Perhaps that’s what this movie is trying to say here. We broke the world just like Kitty and Robert broke their glasses by throwing it at a wall.

We broke the glass to get to the poison inside, and we’re all worse for it.

4 Quick Hidden Messages

I wanted to end this article with 5 quick hidden messages in rapid succession.

Trains

A few times in Oppenheimer, we hear the stamping of feet in a high school gymnasium that builds and builds to a rousing crescendo. It sounds like a train. There’s also a couple actual scenes inside a train, along with a throwaway line about how one of the scientists at Los Alamos went on to lay railways afterwards.

I thought this meant that this whole process, the building of the A bomb and subsequent detonation in Japan put humanity on a path—a path which we can no longer escape from. Our destination is set.

We will eventually destroy ourselves.

Snow

In certain moments in Los Alamos, we saw flurries of snow falling in the desert. When Oppenheimer gives his speech at a local high school, he has visions of ashes falling from the sky, a common scene after the detonation of a nuclear bomb. Snow and ashes falling from the sky look so similar, no?

I thought this contrast was interesting and showed how the same punishment we’ll deal to opposing nations will come back to effect us as well in a world where all nations have nuclear weapons.

Flashes of Light

Flashes of light come up time and time again in Oppenheimer. Before they detonate the bomb, a lightning storm happens in the distance, foreshadowing the massive flash of light that’d occur when they pressed the button.

I think that also showed how a power that was once reserved for the heavens—lightning and powerful flashes of light—are now within the hands of mere mortals.

The camera flashes of reporters that we see, too, connect to this them, I think. And as Oppenheimer sits in a dark room watching a projector full of images from the destruction of Heroshima, we get this same visual motif again.

Flashes of light holding the truth of this new power.

Screaming

There’s a lot of screaming in this film. Robert comes home to see Kitty drinking in one part because the baby won’t stop screaming. When Oppenheimer calls Kitty later on to tell her the detonation was a success, the babies are screaming in the background, too.

And in one small moment as Oppenheimer gives his speech to a crowded gymnasium, the cheers of the audience are muted and we hear the solitary scream of a baby.

They made a worse world for their children to come into.

Isn’t it weird, too, how screaming and cheering sound so similar?

Anyway, that’s all I got on Oppenheimer for today.

What did you think of this movie? I’d love to hear from you down below.