This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “(Rhy)pistemologies”, edited by Erin Graff Zivin.
Oppenheimer’s Arrhythmia – Between the Cinematic Image and the Atomic Bomb
Eyal Peretz
Clip 1. Opening of Christopher Nolan’s Memento.
Christopher Nolan’s breakout film, Memento, opens with one of the paradigmatic images of Nolan’s cinema, namely one of those primal images embodying his obsessive conception of the image as such, around which everything else revolves. A decontextualized hand is holding a photograph showing a room, its walls splashed with blood, likely belonging to a man lying on the floor, his face unseen.
We have been given no context, so we cannot say when or where the event depicted in the photograph happened, what its place in a temporal and spatial order is, or whether it is the inauguration of a chain reaction that will now begin or whether it is already the result of a chain of events hidden from us. Most importantly, perhaps, we cannot say who is responsible for, or guilty of, this stain of blood on the wall, which we can designate as enigmatic, that is a stain that does not yet have a meaningful place in some contextual order.
Read allegorically, and doubtless too quickly due to our time constraints, we can say that the photograph itself, a technological product — namely something that emerges not in relation to any natural given order but out of something we can call a cut in existence, or perhaps existence as a cut out of any given order — here shows, in the stain deprived of recognizable meaning, something that haunts the very being of the photographic image as such: the fact of being cut out of any meaningful order. This stain, I suggest, can thus be understood as the inscription of the technological cut as such.
We can think of the photographic medium which is film, when understood as an artistic or poetic medium, as that which revolves around the creation of images that are fascinated by the technological cut, that is, images that — as opposed to regular images, which are interested mainly in the content given in the image rather than in the being of the medium — revolve around the exploration of the very fact that what is seen on screen always emerges first and foremost as a cutting out of a slice of the world from any spatial and temporal continuity and order. The cinematic-photographic medium as projection emerging out of technological cutting is, in this sense, when used poetically, that which is both the activation of, as well as the fascination by, what we can call a withdrawal from any specific temporal and spatial order and context, that is, fascination by mediality as such as something which is beyond any specific time/place and meaningful context, and thus beyond any determinate content (which is always in a specific time and place), a beyond out of which all possible contents emerge, and which is thus itself withdrawn from all content.
We can thus say that when used poetically film can be understood as the withdrawn (namely that which is grounded in a cut and that as such is in excess of any order and thus meaning) that is dedicated to exploring the very dimension of withdrawal, and the enigmatic stain itself — namely something distinguishable from a figure, that which has a meaningful place in a context — can thus be understood as a paradoxical content, the coming to appearance, indeed the memento, of the medium as the non-meaningful withdrawn in excess of all determinate content.
As the withdrawal from any specific temporal order, the medium as such can also be understood to carry with it the mystery of an excessive time, or something we might perhaps call pure time, a time out of joint and out of order, a time in excess of any recognizable and determined temporal organization. In this sense the stain, as the coming to paradoxical appearance of the withdrawn medium, is also the inscription of excessive time.
Since the enigmatic stain in this opening image is a bloodstain, it immediately connects us to the question of the wound — both bodily and psychic — and that of violence, which is to be thought of as the decontextualizing excessive event of disturbance to an ordered or organized formation. Such violent disturbance manifesting itself in the stain can be understood as the bringing about of an exposure — i.e., that to which one is subjected unwillingly — to the dimension of the medium as such, understood as pure excessive time.
The wound, then, in its most fundamental, call it psychic or mental aspect can be understood as the suffering of a violent exposure to pure time as such in excess of any specific temporal organization. What speaks most powerfully in the wound in Nolan’s cinema, the wound inflicted from its psychic aspect, is guilt. Guilt is the affect belonging to the wound-memento of the withdrawn medium, the excessive dimension of pure time that one suffers an exposure to.
This pure time of the medium expressing itself in guilt can be regarded as a fundamental, uncanny foreignness that haunts existence from outside, so to speak, precisely to the degree that, as in the case of the ghost (a prominent question in Nolan’s Interstellar), it cannot be placed or located in it, even as it is somehow present. This is the case since the medium, by definition, is foreign, or Other to, or outside of, any content emerging from it. The placeless enigmatic stain can be understood, then, as the inscription of this ghostly foreignness. The time that is out of joint, the pure time of the medium as such, is that which haunts existence as a fundamental foreignness, manifesting itself as guilt inscribed in the enigmatic stain.
We can say that this pure time, the foreign time of the withdrawn medium, a ghostly time in excess of any determined temporal ordering, is the condition for the possibility of the emergence of an infinite multiplicity of different temporal orderings, some of which will be actualized by coming to characterize the content that emerges out of the pure medium and that will populate the screen. From Inception onwards, Nolan’s cinema has increasingly been fascinated with the exploration of the co-inhabiting of a single cinematic work by a multiplicity of different temporalities. Perhaps the term to use for this multiplicity of temporalities is Bergson’s famous durée, in the sense that such temporalities are to be thought of in relation to an excessive openness that each expresses differently rather than according to a homogenized temporality in which all of them are ordered equally. These durées — for example the differentiation in Nolan’s Dunkirk among the time of the foot soldiers, the time of boats, and the time of planes — do not stand in a hierarchical relation to one another, precisely because their emergence out of pure time, out of the cut, expresses the very fact that there is no originary ordering.
If pure time, the medium as such, is to be transformed into different temporal organizations that will characterize the actual content emerging out of the medium and populate the screen, it will require a mediating agent that possesses, so to speak, two faces: one inscribing the ghostly outside of pure time as such, the other becoming that which a singular organization begins to gather itself around. We can call such a mediator a sovereign beat. The sovereign beat can be understood as a representative or messenger of pure time or as an inscriber of the openness of the medium — hence the epithet “sovereign,” since the medium is the background power upon which the emergence of anything depends — that becomes an axis around which a singular ordering of time, thus a specific way of expressing the medium, is called to gather, and to gather in such a way that each singular ordering can be said to be a specific activation of time. This singular organization around the sovereign beat is what we usually call rhythm. As representative of pure time, the time of the pure cut to which we are unwillingly exposed, the sovereign beat is a foreign agent (namely the agent of the foreign medium) in excess of our will and to which we are unwillingly exposed, and thus subjected. Possessed of two faces — one directed toward pure time, the other toward a singular organization of time as rhythm — each beat, as in the paradigmatic case of the heartbeat, is always under the pressure of the foreign excess of pure time which threatens it with arrhythmia and an attack, exposing it to a fundamental guilt.[1]
Since each rhythm is a singular organization emerging out of pure time that is also always under internal threat of foreign arrhythmia (or perhaps of a syncope, the missing of a beat, to allude to Nolan’s production company, Syncopy, a name that plays on this term), we can say that, always, a rhythm testifies to there being no ultimate One, in the sense both of one guiding hierarchical order, one sovereign beat, that will be the whole’s grounding medium, and of an occupant of the medium, one of the durées or rhythms emerging from the pure cut, which can be considered a fundamental unity, an atom, fully itself and thus not subject or exposed to the cut. Strictly speaking there is no fundamental atom, nothing that, as the word’s etymology suggests, cannot be subject to the cut. Every atom is subject to a cut and a split, every atom is subject to fission, exposing it to an explosion (the ex-, as in exposure, marking the presence of an ex-cessive outside that is pure time as the force of dissolution of any order) that has inscribed within it a fundamental guilt.
Clip 2. Opening of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. This clip is not yet fully available online. This particular clip unfortunately covers over the soundtrack with Nolan’s narration.
We might say that Nolan’s Oppenheimer revolves around three interrelated questions: 1) What is the atomic bomb and how are we to think of its historical and philosophical significance?; 2) What exactly is the nature of the guilt inscribed in Oppenheimer’s biographical adventure — a question that dominates the film’s final part, consisting of Oppenheimer’s hearing before the security committee, presenting in many ways the film’s central enigma, namely Oppenheimer’s voluntary agreement to these proceedings; and 3) What is the cinematic medium’s relation to these questions?
The opening scene immediately brings these three interrelated questions to the fore, orchestrated in relation to all the issues mentioned above. We cannot delve fully into the complexity of this scene, but there are a few things I would like to highlight, starting with the visual component of these images.
In what is undoubtedly an echo of the opening of Tarkovsky’s Solaris, the film begins with a vision of a decontextualized surface of water on which raindrops are falling. The lack of context means that everything that strikes the surface, every drop, arrives enigmatically, that is, as inscribing within itself the mystery of the withdrawn medium. As such, each drop already contains something of the nature of what we have called a stain and is therefore not experienced as a fully meaningful figure within a particular context. In this sense each drop is already a source of what we have called fascination, acting as a messenger of the withdrawn, the medium, which we have also associated with pure time. Because each drop carries the withdrawn and is not a figure in a context or in a unified whole, it also immediately acts as a singular member of a multiplicity or plurality that cannot be brought under an organizing One. Thus, much like the organized soldiers on Nolan’s decontextualized Dunkirk beach, who, upon the arrival of a plane from beyond the screen, from an empty sky without orientation and thus from the direction of the withdrawn, start to disperse and fragment, no longer part of their formations, here each drop, arriving from a sky not experienced as orientation, expresses the fragmentation of the forming One. We can see that as singularities without the One, each inscribing, indeed we might say expressing the withdrawn medium or pure time differently, each drop striking the surface of the water can also be said to be characterized, at least to a degree, by its own singular rhythm, its own durée expressed in the manner of its expansion into differing circles upon hitting the surface. Thus one aspect of rhythm that this scene in particular, as well as Nolan’s cinema in general, will be interested in is what we can call (very inadequately) material consistency. Even though each drop of water possesses its own distinct rhythm, we can nevertheless talk perhaps about the rhythms of the rain, and later of fire, gas, or, elsewhere in the film, wind, earth, dust, etc. Such a differentiation of rhythmic consistencies increasingly fascinates Nolan and is evident in his cinematic experimentations with relative temporalities.
Having opened with the question of the multiplicity of temporalities and singular rhythms implied in the dissolution of the One brought about by the technological cut and its decontextualized surface, the movie continues to explore the question of rhythm and temporal organization through its bringing the question of the cut to the forefront, most importantly via the question of the way that the cut, most essentially here as an editing cut (though a cut between the visual and the auditory as well, something we won’t be able to explore), implies the emergence of a series, a series of cuts.
I have started to suggest that the question of the pure time of the cut is related to what I have called a sovereign beat, that representative of pure time around which singular organizations of time start to emerge. At the heart of a sovereign beat is the activation of the cut, thus of pure time, but if it is to become rhythm the cut must be part of a series. Only when becoming part of a series do the editing cuts start to function as sovereign beats, namely as inscriptions of the pure medium — that which cuts out of any order — the forming of the relations between which establishes a specific way for a temporal organization to emerge out of pure time.
However, the dimension of the poetic, we saw, involves the fascinated exposure not to this or that rhythm, or not only, but also, and most essentially, to the dimension of the medium as such, its being as pure cut in excess of every specific rhythm emerging out of it, even as it is the beating source at the heart of all these rhythms. We might thus say that the medium as such can only be opened to via the tension of the differences between singular rhythms, the tension in between the singular drops, so to speak. As such the poetic dimension will always have to activate the double side of the sovereign beat, that of the excessive medium beyond any specific rhythm, and that of the series that is the source of characterization of everything that emerges in relation to the pure medium. This means that the poetic dimension always needs to circulate around an a-rhythmia, or a syncope, namely around the tension between the emergence of rhythms and the excess of the pure medium, a tension also internal to every rhythm insofar as it is exposed to pure time. The dimension of the poetic is always on the verge of a heart attack or a fainting spell due to a missed beat.
Thus, following the opening image and its singularly differentiated raindrops, we experience an editing cut, the film’s first, indicating an exposure to the medium emerging out of the differences between singularities. Out of this first cut Oppenheimer is born, so to speak, into the world, his eyes opened to it, causing him to be fascinated by what he sees: the decontextualized, singularly differentiated raindrops. Oppenheimer is a fascinated watcher to the degree that, being sensitive to the fragmentation of the One into the differences of incommensurable singularities, he is exposed to the cut, the pure medium as such. This fascination, of course, immediately echoes our own fascinated look, namely the look of those in whom a poetic cinematic watching opens due to the cutting exposure to the medium.
This fascinated look, born of the first cut, will also be characterized by the exposure to a series of beats that immediately follow this cut, as if these beats were marking the opening of the world according to the question of rhythm. Yet this series of cuts/beats that follows, which rhythmically characterizes Oppenheimer and us as well, is irregular, since each segment’s length and breath is different. Thus exposed to a series of irregular beats — an irregularity at the heart of his vision, characterized by sensitivity to the differences between singularities and to the excessive pure medium, due to the collapse of the regulating One — Oppenheimer’s existence, and our own existence as cinematic watchers, opens under the sign of an a-rhythmia, a syncopated fainting, even a heart attack. We might mention that later in the film, at the moment of the Bomb’s explosion during the Trinity test scene (with “Trinity” already announcing the mystery of the split in the one), as the rhythm of the music keeps increasing in intensity and changing, Oppenheimer says that these things are hard on your heart. We might also mention that Emily Blunt, one of the film’s stars, has described the film as a three-hour heart attack.
If the dimension of the One implies the dimension of a Whole, the encompassing of existence in its entirety and its placement under the sign of what has been called a cosmic order or rhythm, then we can think of this opening scene, which exposes us to a thinking beyond the logic of the One, as introducing a cosmic a-rhythmia, an entropic decomposition, to be distinguished from the harmonious and proportionate music of the spheres. We can also think of the film, and the irregular series of its cuts that expose us to a cosmic arrhythmia beyond the logic of the One, as itself being the activation of a fission, in the sense that every dimension of unity — including the most basic, the atom — is split. The film itself can, in this sense, also be understood as an ex-plosion (the activation of a pure outside, the ex, that decomposes and fragments the whole), which at its extreme limit we can characterize as atomic.
In such a cinematic-atomic explosion, as this opening scene already demonstrates, each fragment, each segment emerging in between the irregular cuts becomes decontextualized. We do not know how one segment refers to the next, and all become enigmatic stains filled with wounds and guilt — hence our scene ending with the question of judgment — in an a-rhythmatic cosmos bereft of all unity and order, a cosmos where God plays dice.
In this explosive, a-rhythmic, and polyrhythmic cosmos we are increasingly exposed to the pure cut, the medium, in such a way that time is fully out of joint and out of order: nothing is in its place and no thing has a given place, not even a clearly marked before and after, there is a constitutional non-linearity. It is therefore unclear whether this fragmentary vision, this cinematic ex-plosion following Oppenheimer’s introduction is something that has already happened or is something that will happen, or perhaps it might only be a hallucination of someone collapsing amid a heart attack, as seemingly suggested by the view of Oppenheimer’s face almost sinking into the enigma of the watery surface. It is the atomic bomb itself, which this scene in a way already is, that expresses in this sense the extreme limit of this out-of-jointness and rhythmic decomposition. In splitting the cosmos into decontextualized fragments, sub-atomic particles in a way, it is no longer clear whether the Bomb has happened, will happen, or has always already happened in a time out of time, in a Big Bang.
This temporal out-of-jointness is most powerfully expressed in this opening scene in the auditory dimension, which I do not have time to elaborate upon, especially in the accelerating beats that toward its end arrive seemingly out of nowhere and interrupt any formation of regulated rhythm. Only much later on, in a logic of aprés-coup that structures much of the film, in a scene following the Hiroshima bombing, will we, in a way, understand these accelerated beats. They arrive almost as if they were attacking Oppenheimer at the moment of his utmost guilt, where he seems to realize, in a hallucinatory moment on the verge of collapse, the significance of the Bomb he brought into the world. The accelerating beats, as if they were leading up to a heart attack, thus mark both Oppenheimer’s explosive guilt and, through the first scene’s highlighting of their decontextualized nature, the non-place and non-time of the guilt associated with the Bomb, an existential guilt that has always already happened, way before its actual explosion, and that perhaps is what is responsible for bringing it about.
Yet here is precisely where we can start to glimpse the difference between the Bomb’s explosion and the cinematic medium, itself developed by Nolan, as we saw, according to the a-rhythmatic logic of the explosion, the bringing to its limit the logic of the One, a logic we can call also metaphysic-theological. For if film as Nolan develops it marks the explosion of the logic of the One this does not mean that it is without some mysterious new unity that allows the whole to cohere, a unity that has to do with our never losing sight of the withdrawn, the medium, in excess of all the fragments and all the singular durées emerging from it. The film achieves its unity by being guided by the medium in excess of all the explosive fragments. It is the excess that unites, in that, though not consisting in any ordering or completion, it nevertheless functions as that which allows all the fragments to communicate, to share in existence by being exposed to one another through the irregularity of their beats, in a new way[2].
We can call such communication through excess, and indeed of excess and thus of the medium itself beyond any specific rhythmic order and contextual meaning, music, perhaps atonal music, which, as we heard, opens the film before we encounter any visual image and in many ways holds it together. Music as a poetic medium — which is not limited to any specific sensory modality since it is the activation of a fundamental aspect of a general logic of temporality — is the communication of non-meaningful excess achieved through the exposure of multiple rhythms to one another at their a-rythmatic limits. In the film’s second scene, in an essential encounter with Niels Bohr — the pacifist physicist who will refuse to join the project to develop the Bomb, opting instead to try to keep the post-Bomb world together so that it does not annihilate itself – Bohr tells Oppenheimer: “Algebra’s like sheet music, the important thing isn’t can you read the music, it’s can you hear it? Can you hear the music, Robert?” Oppenheimer responds: “Yes I can.” Yet there are reasons to suspect that the Oppenheimer we encountered in the first scene, subjected to explosive a-rhythmia and fragmentary vision, cannot fully hear the music, since he is too much under the sign of stain and guilt, if we understand guilt not only as the affect of the exposure to the excessive dimension of the withdrawn medium or pure time, but as the desire to bring the fragmentation of existence entailed by such exposure back into the fold of the logic of the One, in the manner of Hamlet’s desire to restore the Father. In this sense, the development of the Bomb is not simply the expression of the insight into the new a-rhythmatic cosmos but the attempt to restore the theologico-metaphysical One at the moment of its radical annihilation or nihilism. The Bomb is the ultimate extension of nihilism’s logic and attendant will to power, its desire to restore a lost One through the will, and this perhaps accounts for Oppenheimer famously naming the first bomb test Trinity, unconsciously sensing the relation between the Bomb and the desire for the theology of the One. If we do not want the Bomb to be the ultimate result of the discovery of the a-rhythmatic cosmos, the film suggests (and thus do not want, as in the opening of Tenet, for the concert to be replaced by destruction), we need to go beyond guilt and move toward the condition of music (as the musical therapy recommended to Vertigo’s Scottie, haunted by his guilt, seems to point to). Rather than succumbing to nihilistic destruction, it is in attempting to be such a polyrhythmic, a-rhythmatic, and atonal musical communication that this explosive movie relates itself to, as well as distinguishes itself from, the atomic bomb.
Notes
[1] https://suddencardiacarrestuk.org/2023/09/cardiac-arrest-guilt/
[2] Gilles Deleuze has famously characterized such logic connecting in a new way unity and dispersal as a disjunctive synthesis.