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At the 96th Academy Awards,Oppenheimerwon seven Oscars,including Best Picture.
Seemingly no bit of dialogue, nor stray anecdote, about the life ofJ.
In fact, Nolans chief creative license comes not in thefilms contentbut its form.
Nolan also frequently cuts to fantastical imagery that attempts to dramatize what it was like inside Oppenheimers head.
WithAmerican Prometheusas our guide, heres a rundown of whats fact and whats fiction.
Did Oppenheimer poison his Cambridge tutors apple?
No one, not even Oppenheimer himself, seemed to know why he did this.
AsAmerican Prometheusnotes, Robert liked Blackett and eagerly sought his approval.
The attempted poisoning appears to have been a case of misdirected feelings of inadequacy and intense jealousy.
There are disparate opinions on whether the apple was truly poisoned with cyanide, however.
Was Oppenheimer one of the first people to theorize about the existence of black holes?
ButOppenheimerthe film makes a slightly bigger deal of this than Oppenheimer the man did.
While brilliant, Oppenheimers intellectual temperament often prevented him from embracing all the possibilities of his discoveries.
Having made the initial creative leap … [he] quickly moved on to another new topic.
How tumultuous was Oppenheimers romance with Jean Tatlock?
(Well never know whether she ever interrupted coitus to make him read from the Bhagavad Gita.)
What this says about Nolans filmmaking vis-a-vis female agency, Ill leave you to debate.
They never saw each other again.
How did Jean Tatlock die?
On January 4, 1944, Tatlock was found dead in her bathtub by her father.
She had taken sleeping pills and left an unsigned note.
Her death was ruled suicide, motive unknown.
Bird and Sherwin agree that much of the evidence aligns with the accepted story.
Still, the authors leave room for a seed of doubt.
As a nod to the uncertainty around Tatlocks death,Oppenheimerdepicts both the official version and the conspiracy theory.
Was Kitty Oppenheimer an alcoholic?
And what the film doesnt spotlight is that Robert was hardly a teetotaler himself.
Did Oppenheimer venture to give away his child to a friend?
No one would award the Oppenheimers the Nobel Prize of parenting.
(She likely suffered from what we today would call postpartum depression.)
Baby Katherine was left with Kittys friend Pat Sherr; Robert visited twice a week.
Did Chevalier really ask Oppenheimer about passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union?
Oppenheimer called the proposal treason, and that was that.
Whether the conversation was cut short by Kitty bursting in and saying, The brats down wheres my martini?
is unknown, as is whether Eltenton was an official Soviet spy or merely an enthusiastic amateur.
(Bird and Sherwin lead toward the latter.)
Oppenheimers first mistake was in waiting months to disclose the conversation to security officers.
His second mistake was not telling them the whole truth.
For his postwar enemies, this was irrefutable proof that Oppenheimer could not be trusted.
Was Los Alamos uninhabited before the scientists moved in?
Was there 11th-hour drama before the Trinity test?
During the event, the testwasdelayed but only by 90 minutes, from 4 to 5:30 a.m.
The drama over the failed implosion test was less intense.
The previous day, the team had pinpointed the culprit: blown circuits in the tests wiring.
The actual gadget would be fine.
Were the scientists worried they might accidentally ignite the Earths atmosphere?
How complicit was Oppenheimer in the decision to target Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Oppenheimer played an ambiguous role in this critical discussion, Bird and Sherwin write.
He had won nothing and acquiesced to everything.
Much of this scene is taken directly from the official record of the meeting.
And youre suddenly seeing a human face to these negotiations,Nolan told Vulture.
Did Oppenheimer tell Harry Truman he felt he had blood on his hands?
Oppenheimers infamous meeting with Truman took place in October 1945.
Getting nowhere, Oppenheimer really did confess his guilt over the Manhattan Project, which turned Trumans stomach.
What was Oppenheimers relationship with Albert Einstein like?
The films portrait of Einstein and Oppenheimers relationship is largely accurate.
ThusAmerican Prometheuscalls their relationship always tentative, though Einstein eventually acquired a grudging respect for the younger scientist.
Was Klaus Fuchs the reason the Soviets got the bomb?
(Funnily enough, actor Christopher Denham also played a spy at Los Alamos in the showManhattan.)
While the most famous, Fuchs was not the only spy at Los Alamos.
According to theNew YorkTimes, His knowledge most likely surpassed that of the three previously known Soviet spies.
Why did Lewis Strauss hate Oppenheimer?
Who gave Oppenheimers security file to William Borden?
Was David Hills testimony the thing that turned the Senate against Strauss?
AsSlashfilmnotes, Los Alamos scientist David Inglis had previously delivered his own scathing words about Strausss personal vindictiveness.
Furthermore, the scientists werent the only ones against him.
Like Oppenheimer, Strauss also had made a powerful enemy: New Mexico senator Clinton Anderson.
Rather than a stirring congressional speech, it was intense backroom lobbying from Anderson that truly doomed Strausss confirmation.
But the bit about John F. Kennedy voting against him is real.
