MARTA KOCHANEK
JANUARY 2024 | EDITED BY BETH WEBB
“AND NOW I am become death,” says Cillian Murphy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer, sizing up the apocalypse he has put in motion, gazing into the nuclear fire. “The destroyer of worlds.” And the blast takes hold.
“He was the most important man who ever lived,” director Christopher Nolan told Empire a couple of months before Oppenheimer’s release. “Whether you like it or not.” Nolan knows how to promote a film, but there’s a good case here: by developing the atomic bomb and, albeit indirectly, the hydrogen bomb, the theoretical physicist was responsible for potential planetary destruction. multiplexes, and it’s not alone. Destruction is in the air: as awards season kicks in, a slew of brilliant films about true stories are wrestling with monumental devastation, grappling with genocide, weighing up cultural carnage and posing difficult questions. With all of them expected to pick up multiple Oscar nominations, next March’s ceremony will see Hollywood reckoning with sins of the past.
Alongside Oppenheimer’s doom-laden dramatisation of the lead-up to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there is Martin Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon, about white America’s massacre of many members of the Osage Nation; Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone Of Interest, which contrasts Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss’ domestic idyll with the deathly sounds of the concentration camp over his garden wall; and J.A. Bayona’s Society Of The Snow, chronicling the 1972 Andes plane crash which saw a group of people from Uruguay starving for months in the mountains, resorting to cannibalism.
These are ferocious films, burning with intent, fuelled by desires to deal with impossible circumstances, examining ongoing, generational ripple effects. Each dives into murky moral waters without hesitation, the directors wanting us to ponder what we might do in each situation. Would we stand by in the face of atrocity, of corruption, of murder? How do we process these events, how do we square them up? How do we cope? It is estimated that hundreds of Osage people were killed by white Americans in 1920s Oklahoma. As Scorsese illustrates in Killers Of The Flower Moon, having struck oil, the Osage were extraordinarily wealthy, and seemingly everybody — doctors, businessmen, coroners — in town was in on the plot to steal their oil rights, to the extent that they barely clocked their own misdeeds. Such was their disregard for the Osage as they exploited them, extorted them and quietly massacred them, insidiously contributing to the Native American genocide.
Scorsese lays bare the indifference. Glazer does the same with The Zone Of Interest, in which Höss and his wife, living it up in their wonderful new house which backs directly onto Auschwitz, gas-chamber chimneys in full view, the sounds of death never ending, bicker over business as Jews are incinerated. At the press conference after the Cannes premiere, Glazer commented that the house had been “built on the bones of the victims”. Yet the Höss family live there comfortably because, again, they don’t register those victims as people at all. And it’s significant that neither Glazer nor Nolan directly portray what is wrought, choosing to not show us the bombings of Japan, or what’s actually happening over the Höss’ garden wall. Glazer, who is Jewish, has said that he would not and could not do that.