Oppen season on the Gita in the bedroom

A whale or a lion or an earthworm is less inclined to go off in their heads than a human. No animal other than man suffers from congenital or acquired mental disorders such as depression or multiple personalities. We may hazard an explanation for this in the extremely complex and fragile wiring of our brains. Naturally, our default mode is insanity.

There is no reason why J Robert Oppenheimer, one of the most intellectually gifted, successful, and born-rich men of the 20th century, would suffer from bouts of depression till he died—of throat cancer in 1967.

Christopher Nolan’s eponymous movie, much debated, does everything right except bring alive the man’s torment, either before or after the bomb that Oppenheimer fathered and President Truman dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—killing, according to one estimate, 2,20,000 people, most of them civilians.

Truman may not have been clinically mad, but he and his country had been fighting a war that cannot be said to be the finest expression of human reason. It must rub off in ways we are not equipped to tell because we are inside the matrix.

If those melted by the bomb, even one of them, were brought back to life by Nolan and confronted Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer’s remorse and guilt would have had an emotional punch the movie now lacks. Because when the dead come back, they always do so with more questions than the living can ever hope to answer.

In his essay on Gunter Grass, with special reference to the post-World War II novel, Crabwalk, J M Coetzee says: ‘Grass presents his apology for not having written and, sadly, for no longer having it in his power to write the great German novel in which the multitude of Germans (italics mine) who perished in the death throes of the Third Reich are brought back to life so that they can be buried and mourned fittingly … and a new page in history can at last be turned.’

Because of Oppenheimer’s connections at the time with the Communist Party of the US, he went through a sustained period of trauma, facing allegations of sedition and leaking sensitive information to the Soviet Union. Only as late as last December was he wholly rehabilitated, and the process by which his security clearance was cancelled (by the US Atomic Energy Commission in 1954) was declared ‘flawed’.

That a man who mastered nuclear forces and invented the atomic bomb for his country could be seen as an enemy explains how one’s fate is at the mercy of the careers of other men/women. If Hitler had remained a corporal as he was in World War I, content with the Iron Crosses he earned for his bravery and his soldier’s pension, and did not cherish a career in politics ending in his becoming the Fuhrer, millions might have had their lives spared. The role of an individual’s career in the destiny of civilisation yet awaits an author.

Indeed, had Oppenheimer’s ambition and drive for power not been so aggressive, he would not have accepted the post of director at Los Alamos Laboratory, which birthed the bomb.

In the movie, one of Oppenheimer’s lovers (Jean Tatlock, a communist party member, played with disturbing neurotic indeterminacy by Florence Pugh), in the course of a bedroom scene, picks out the Bhagavad Gita from the shelf, opens it conveniently at chapter 11, and makes Oppenheimer read the lines: ‘I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’

The words are from Bheeshma Parva, in which Arjuna suffers from the ‘atomic’ equivalent of a nervous breakdown and would rather not take up arms against his elders and cousins; in short, he would rather not wage war. What good can come off such epic slaughter? But in the movie, the way it is played out, Oppenheimer never really has any great misgivings on his mission. They mildly assail him only after the bomb has been dropped.

The words come from one of the most egotistic chapters in all literature. Krishna annihilates the idea of Free Will for humanity. He is everything. Everything has been done. By Him. In Him, death happens. So does life. And all of it has happened once. All of it will happen again. There is no human agency. Arjuna just must carry out his dharma. In the great lines following, which Oppenheimer must have understood with keener insight than an average Indian, Krishna virtually licenses the dropping, thousands of years later, of the bomb: I have already killed Dronacharya, Bheeshma, Jayadratha, Karna, and other brave warriors. Therefore, worry not; slay them without a second thought. Do your duty, Arjuna.

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Except for the appeal of Freudian association (Eros, love, and Thanatos, death, are virtually bedmates), it is not clear why coitus is interrupted for a short course on the Gita in the movie. Perhaps it augurs the destruction of Tatlot herself, who later commits suicide as Oppenheimer is reluctant to continue with the affair.

Despite the massive implication that we can all do great harm in the name of God, that if we are detached enough—having surrendered to the divine will—we are free to detonate a bomb, the nature of Oppenheimer’s career is markedly Faustian. He was ready to trade in death and make good in life. The US exploited Oppenheimer as much as Oppenheimer exploited the US. The amorality of either party does not find sufficient dramatic expression in Nolan.

ALSO READ | ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’: Oppenheimer

Despite a boycott call by the right-wing Save Culture, Save India Foundation trending on social media, the movie has collected close to ₹100 crore at the Box Office. I suppose we have arrived at a stage in India where particle physics has become a matinee attraction. And at the same time, feel the need to save the Gita from Hollywood bedrooms. As I said, insane.

C P Surendran

Poet, novelist, and screenplay writer. His latest novel is One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B

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