“You don’t get to commit the sin, then have us all feel sorry for you that it had consequences,” Kitty Oppenheimer reprimands her husband Robert midway through 2023’s Oppenheimer. For most of the film, J. Robert Oppenheimer leads the Manhattan Project without reserve, arguing the necessity of creating an atomic bomb but never quite taking responsibility for the prospective ramifications. It’s only once he sees the Trinity test, the detonation of the first atomic bomb, that he begins to realize the danger in what he’s unleashed. We get his infamous quote at this moment (“I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”), pointing to his sudden understanding of what the audience has already known – there are vast repercussions to the creation of such a weapon.
Our omniscient view of these past historical events may make us feel a sense of superiority – surely we know better than these characters? But from humanity’s first moments on earth we’ve sinned, seeking knowledge and power that we shouldn’t, blind to the consequences until it’s too late. Adam and Eve disobeyed God and ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, only to hide from Him once they realized their sin. Adam even goes on to blame Eve for their shared mistake, much as we see the U.S. government single out and vilify Oppenheimer in the film following the bomb’s creation.
Reflecting on building this weapon, Oppenheimer tells Einstein, “We were worried that we’d start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world…I believe we did.” Sin, much like the atomic bomb, was a chain reaction for our species. Genesis 5:3 says that Adam “became the father of a son in his own likeness, according to his image.” Adam’s son was made in Adam’s image, and so he began as a sinful, selfish creation. And even though we all still bear the image of God, since Adam’s sin, we now bear that sinful image as well. And so Oppenheimer leaves us to grapple with humanity’s sin and recklessness, a reminder of our need for a Savior to stop the “chain reaction” of sin, and to hope for a future in which that sin will be forever gone. — Christian Jessup (2023); A Cloudy Picture
Arts & Faith Lists:
2023 Arts & Faith Ecumenical Jury — #1