Florence Pugh and Cillian Murphy, who are the leads in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, are experiencing ecstasy just twenty-three minutes into the film. After meeting Pugh’s Jean Tatlock at a Communist party mixer, Murphy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer and Tatlock engage in heated, steamy conversation that intensifies when Oppenheimr interprets Sanskrit for Tatlock.
It is revealed that the asexual relationship between the mismatched academics continues when Oppenheimer marries Kitty (Emily Blunt) and begins working on creating the atomic weapon at Los Alamos. She is in danger because of Tatlock’s politics and his access to Oppenheimer’s most private and secret self.
Now available on Peacock, Oppenheimer purposefully omits details on whether mentally ill Tatlock committed suicide or was, as some have theorized, executed to protect
Tatlock and Openheimer are either having sex or are fully nude in the majority of their moments together. During a secret security hearing, Kitty is once again plagued by visions of a nude Tatlock snatching at her husband while he verifies facts of the extramarital affair.
The film’s detractors have said that Pugh’s nudity is unnecessary, some countries have even covered her nude body with a CGI clothing, and a woman went viral this summer after claiming that certain scenes caused “betrayal trauma” for her spouse.
I guess it is understandable that there was an excessive outcry when Florence Pugh’s sensual nipples appeared in a movie about the development of the atomic bomb and its moral ramifications. Our culture is dominated by prudes who are more ashamed of their natural desires than the reality that our country once dropped hellfire on two crowded cities to close a war.
The three-hour epic Openheimer by Christopher Nolan tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man who invented the nuclear era. The film jumps around in time, portraying the life of the physicist in his own words before a kangaroo court and chronicling the ascent and decline of Openheimer’s greatest adversary, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.). Although Jean Tatlock’s contribution to this opus is minimal, it is essential to our comprehension of Oppenheimer’s essence.
Tatlock stops in the middle of their first kiss to look at the scientist’s bookcase. It does not take long to see that the two are intellectually as well as physically drawn to one another. He claims to have researched her area of expertise because he attempted to poison his Cambridge tutor, Jean is a psychiatrist.
Jean is able to diagnose his problems with brevity and empathy when he says, “You just needed to be laid.” She continues by informing Oppenheimer that he has persuaded everyone that he is more complex than he actually is.
Oppenheimer comments that we are all simple souls.
Tatlock denies it and compels him to read the renowned quote during their intimate encounter.
The significance of the sex in this sequence is that it conveys to the viewer that, despite being revered as a brilliant and great guy (enough so that a three-hour film about him is dedicated to him), Oppenheimer was simply a man. Like many men, all he wanted was to get laid. In addition to demystifying Oppenheimer, this scenario highlights a crucial tension in his continuing affair with Tatlock: whereas he was content to get laid, she was more “complex” and required more from their relationship.
We later hear that Oppenheimer saw Jean Tatlock in a San Francisco hotel during the height of his exhausting job managing the Los Alamos Project. We cut between his post-coital, essentially stripped-down talk with Tatlock and his wife Kitty’s horror at the thought of them together, once more, in the middle of the interrogation room, as he carefully tries to rationalize meeting with a known communist at this time. The picture deftly interweaves the termination of Oppenheimer’s liaison with Tatlock, her eventual demise, Kitty’s personal suffering, and the merciless actions of the government.
Why then was Nolan in need of the nudity? to convey varying degrees of intimacy. Observe how Oppenheimer deftly sidesteps Jean’s questions regarding his work while keeping her legs crossed and hiding herself, while she is entirely exposed in her nudity as she seeks true emotional intimacy. Moreover, Kitty’s uncomfortable vision is meant to show how offensive this line of inquiry is to Oppenheimer in addition to her emotional state. The sake of national security is exposing his deepest personal interests.
Maybe instead of asking if Florence Pugh’s Oppenheimer nude scenes were required, we might ask if those questions were necessary. Was it worth ruining a woman’s life, love, and honor in the unlikely event that she was a spy?
Naturally, Oppenheimer’s personal life has absolutely nothing to do with the actual fury that is being expressed against him. Sex is sex, bodies are bodies, and J. Robert Oppenheimer may have unwittingly prepared humanity for a nuclear holocaust that would wipe out life as we know it. Nolan keeps this fact in mind at all times. In fact, Oppenheimer’s own fear at his invention occupies a significant portion of the movie.
Bombs should worry Oppenheimer’s audience more than boobs.