Magic

This inaugural Chestertober continues with a brief dramatic interlude. The rest of this month I’m looking at Chesterton’s novels, but this week the subject is his first play, written at the behest of Chesterton’s old friend and philosophical sparring mate George Bernard Shaw, 1913’s Magic.

Magic takes place in the drawing room and grounds of a wealthy Duke but begins in a remote part of his garden on a cool drizzly evening. An Irish girl named Patricia, the Duke’s niece and ward, is searching the woods for fairies when she encounters a cloaked and hooded man. She takes him to be a giant fairy and reacts with awe but he is, in fact, the Conjurer, a magician arriving to perform for the Duke and his guests.

The Duke is an eccentric of the type familiar from Chesterton’s stories. He speaks in barely connected, allusive fragments and, though friendly, remains aloof through sheer inscrutability. He donates generously to rival causes—to both a vegetarian activist group and a group trying to stop vegetarianism, for example—and is meeting two men with petitions for support. One is Dr Grimthorpe, a skeptical doctor who used to know Patricia’s family in Ireland and believes her to be crazy but harmless, and the other is the Rev Smith, a broadminded Church of England clergyman more interested in social causes than religion. The Duke asks them to join him for the Conjurer’s performance, which will begin once Patricia’s brother Morris arrives.

Morris has been living in the United States for years and returns very “practical,” which is to say: materialistic, pragmatic, and aggressively skeptical. He scoffs at Patricia’s story of having met a fairy in the woods and, when the Conjurer arrives and reveals himself to be a mere magician, humiliates her. Patricia’s embarrassment turns to resentment. Morris looks over the Conjurer’s props and declares that he knows the secret to all of them. What he would really love to know, he says, are the secrets behind the tricks great religious leaders used to fool people:

Morris: Well, sir, I just want that old apparatus that turned rods into snakes. I want those smart appliances, sir, that brought water out of a rock when old man Moses chose to hit it. I guess it's a pity we've lost the machinery. I would like to have those old conjurers here that called themselves Patriarchs and Prophets in your precious Bible…

Patricia: Morris, you mustn't talk like that.

Morris: Well, I don't believe in religion…

Doctor: [Aside.] Hush, hush. Nobody but women believe in religion.

At this point, an already frustrated and embarrassed Patricia declares that she will perform “another ancient conjuring trick . . . The Vanishing Lady!” and leaves.

Morris becomes belligerent with the Conjurer, especially once the Conjurer moves a painting and knocks over a chair, apparently by magic. “Do you reckon that will take us in?” Morris asks. “You can do all that with wires.” The Conjurer concedes the point and Morris, in a sweeping rant against superstition, asserts that Joshua could no more stop the sun than a priest or magician could change the color of the red lamp shining at the end of the garden. As soon as he says this, the lamp turns blue.

Morris goes mad, working himself into a frenzy trying to determine how the Conjurer did it. When pressed, the Conjurer, with no satisfaction at having bested a critic but rather a spirit of deep sadness, reveals his secret: it was magic. He commanded devils to do it for him and they did.

The third and final act begins with Morris insane and confined to bed and the other characters attempting, one by one, to persuade the Conjurer to help him. The Duke offers to pay for the real secret behind the lamp trick. The doctor tries to get him to reveal the trick, assuming it must be so simple that it will make Morris laugh and break the hold of the madness that has taken him. Smith, the clergyman, attempts to reason sympathetically with the Conjurer. Only Patricia, to whom the Conjurer confesses that he fell in love with her the moment he saw her in the garden, is able to change his mind.

I’ll leave the details of precisely how Magic concludes for you to discover. Brisk, surprising, lighthearted but earnest, and steadily escalating in tension, this is a wonderful short play and was critically praised—including by Shaw—when it premiered in the fall of 1913, 111 years ago next month.

It’s easy to see why. Magic excels at the one thing Chesterton always used his stories for: pitting worldviews against each other. The whimsical, half-serious folk-spirituality of Patricia; the sentimental, largely political do-gooder formal religion of the Rev Smith; the liberal-minded but shapeless and ineffectual humanitarianism of the wealthy Duke; and the scientific materialism of the Doctor and, more aggressively, Morris all run up against something that they don’t believe in and are forced to confront its reality. Just as each character disbelieves in magic for different reasons, each reckons with its use by the Conjurer in different ways.

Perhaps the most sympathetic character besides the Conjurer is the Rev Smith. A Christian socialist and establishment figure, Smith is nevertheless not an object of mockery—Chesterton’s stage directions make it clear that Smith is “an honest man, not an ass.” (By contrast the Duke “though an ass, is a gentleman.”) In one of the play’s most dramatic scenes, the Conjurer furiously dresses Smith down for enjoying a position based on the supernatural when he is too urbane to believe in spirits:

Conjurer: . . . I say these things are supernatural. I say this was done by a spirit. The Doctor does not believe me. He is an agnostic; and he knows everything. The Duke does not believe me; he cannot believe anything so plain as a miracle. But what the devil are you for, if you don't believe in a miracle? What does your coat mean, if it doesn't mean that there is such a thing as the supernatural? What does your cursed collar mean if it doesn't mean that there is such a thing as a spirit? [Exasperated.] Why the devil do you dress up like that if you don't believe in it? [With violence.] Or perhaps you don't believe in devils?

Smith: I believe… [After a pause.] I wish I could believe.

Conjurer: Yes. I wish I could disbelieve.

Smith, chastened, confronted his his own lack of faith despite his position, is transformed—one might say converted. This is a subtle but powerful character arc, and a clear counterpart to Morris’s absolute refusal to believe in what he has seen. One, confessing himself unable but willing to believe, is saved; the other goes mad.

Madness is, of course, a major theme of Chesterton’s writings throughout his career but especially early on, and in Magic he suggests that madness is ultimately the only alternative to faith.

This is not to say that Magic is a sermon. Far from it. The balance of art and ideas which I’ve been exploring since we began the month with The Napoleon of Notting Hill is perfectly struck in Magic. Chesterton creates and sustains a mood of wonderful ambiguity from the first scene and maintains it throughout, and each character is permitted his or her own say. The result is a play that dramatizes exceptionally well the humility needed to face reality, especially those realities we often ignore or exclude, and the arrogance that leads to damnation.

Further notes on aliens and the gothic

A few weeks ago when I mulled over the taxonomy of UFO believers as laid out in a recent New Atlantis essay, I mentioned my pet theory that aliens had worked their way into a cranny in the cultural imagination formerly occupied by the gothic. I wrote:

Where the Romantics, when in search of a tingly spine, went to windswept moors under the light of the full moon, relict beasts of bygone ages, decaying houses full of dark family secrets, and the inexplicable power of the supernatural—to the otherworldly of the past—if we want the same sensations in the present we go to the strange lights in the night sky, the disappearance, the abduction, cold intelligences from the future, decaying governments full of secrets, and the inexplicable power of interstellar technology.

(I first propounded this theory a few months ago when I volunteered, very early one morning, to help my wife prepare bottles and medicine for the twins. She had not had her coffee yet and is grateful for your readership.)

I’m speaking very generally, of course, but a few of the specific, superficial things that suggest a parallel between the stories emerging from the gothic and the UFO phenomenon include:

• Remote, lonely locations

• Nighttime—ghosts, werewolves, vampires, and greys all apparently being nocturnal

• Individuals or, perhaps, a small, intimate group being targeted

• A sense that the otherworldly is fixated on or preying upon specific people

• A psychological arc that grows from uneasiness to dread and often ends in paralyzing terror

• Inexplicable phenomena and occult powers (occult in the sense of hidden or unknown)

• Relatedly, unpredictable comings and goings

• Ambiguous and minimal physical evidence

I could probably come up with a longer list, but these immediately suggest themselves. Again, all of the above are superficial general parallels and there are plenty of exceptions—about which more below—but if you were to construct either a gothic or alien story, it would probably have most or all of those traits. But there are deeper and more important qualities that both have in common:

• Their intrusive quality, the way the uncanny or extraterrestrial is perceived as breaking in upon normal life from somewhere else

• Their subsequent disruptive effect upon the normal

• The dense secrecy surrounding them

This gets us really close to the semi-religious dimensions of both, the mysterious, scary, and disruptive being neighbors to awe.

To summarize, the alien story was able to supplant the gothic because both scratch the same itch: otherworldly, slightly or overtly scary, and with religious overtones.

Two caveats:

• UFO stories sometimes originate in heavily populated areas, the two most famous examples probably being Phoenix and Mexico City.

• UFOs don’t always appear at night. In fact, some of the most perplexing unexplained incidents occurred in broad daylight.

I think the rest of my superficial observations hold true, though: the widely-reported “Phoenix lights” were seen at night and Lonnie Zamora and Kenneth Arnold, to pick two daytime incidents, were individuals in out-of-the-way places. All three of the deeper similarities remain. I’d even say that the superficial things—individuals alone in remote places at night—are probably best explained as setting the necessary mood for the intrusion of the mysterious.

Note that I’m treating all of the UFO stuff as fictional, just like the gothic. Remember that I’m mostly a “disinformation non-enjoyer,” though I do enjoy the aesthetic, atmospheric side of all of it. I think the overwhelming majority of UFO sightings are sufficiently explained by terrestrial factors or simple fraud, though some—with unimpeachably honest people seeing something inexplicable, like Zamora and the others in the video linked above—remain tantalizingly unexplained.

I’m also interested in what UFOs say about culture, symptomatically. Why do these stories appeal? I think my “scratching the same itch” theory explains some of it, and yet this is where the most significant difference between the gothic and UFOs comes in:

• The gothic is historically-oriented. When intrusion and disruption occurs, it is the forgotten past intruding on the present. Hence the roles of old houses, family secrets, and medieval monsters.

• The UFO phenomenon is future-oriented. The intrusion and disruption are those of the future breaking into a less advanced past—our present. Hence the roles of laboratories and military facilities, government secrets, and monsters from outer space.

The shift from a delight in the spooky rooted in the past to a delight in the spooky giving us hints about the future is a significant one, and not easily summarized here. Food for thought.

The Kraken Wakes

One of my favorite discoveries last year was John Wyndham, an English author of sci-fi thrillers and an uncommonly skillful writer. Back around Christmas I read two of his most famous novels, The Day of the Triffids, in which a worldwide medical disaster turns into an apocalypse thanks to man-eating plants, and The Midwich Cuckoos, in which a small English village slowly figures out that it is the incubator of an otherworldly species’ young. I found these so brilliantly constructed, so subtle, and so absorbing that I got several more of Wyndham’s books with a Christmas gift card or two. I finally got to one of these last month: The Kraken Wakes.

This novel begins, like the other two, with an odd minor incident that the characters only realize later is the first forewarning of catastrophe. Mike and Phyllis Watson, young newlyweds and both reporters for the EBC, an upstart rival to the BBC, are honeymooning on an Atlantic cruise when they sight strange red dots in the sky. The brightly glowing vessels, which can’t be described in any particular detail by any witness and seem to radiate heat, draw closer to both the ship and the ocean before plunging into the water and disappearing. Mike and Phyllis report it as a curiosity, a brief notice to round out the evening news.

Then more of the lights appear. And more. They come out of the sky, dive under the ocean, and no witness ever sees one come back up.

By dint of having been there for one of the first sightings, Mike accidentally becomes a sought-after commentator on the flying red lights. A friend from the Admiralty shows Mike a chart of recorded sightings, which cluster over the deepest parts of the world’s oceans. Whatever this is, it’s not random. Scientists weigh in—and argue, and attack each other. Despite the controversy, no one knows what the lights are but after sightings all over the world, they stop. With their novelty and even their utility as the object of worry used up, the red lights become old news and the public moves on.

Then strange things start happening to the ocean. Vast clouds of mud from the ocean floor—specifically from the abyssal deeps where the glowing red lights had disappeared—cloud the major currents and disrupt fishing. Submarines and bathyspheres lowered to take a look are lost with their crews. Naval vessels explode and sink, and soon cargo ships and passenger liners start sinking. Most disturbingly, small settlements on out-of-the-way islands are found abandoned, their populations never to be seen again.

Mike and Phyllis, through the ups and downs of their journalistic careers and personal lives, witness much of this. And after joining the research team of a controversial scientist whose theories about the origins and goals of the undersea invaders are widely mocked but turn out to be correct more and more often, they become the first people to see and survive whatever is causing coastal populations to disappear. This scene—vividly rendered for the cover of the old Penguin paperback edition (see below)—is one of the most chilling and horrific in any of Wyndham’s books.

Finally, and seemingly too late, the world’s governments fight back. The coastal attacks stop. And the ice caps start melting.

While we haven’t lost our appetite for imagined apocalypse since Wyndham wrote in the 1950s and 60s, some threats have become passé. The large-scale alien invasion seems to be one. If any vision of the end of the world is bound to a former period of our culture, that one—with its fleets of flying saucers, desperate human armies, scientists fretting in labs, generals sweating in bunkers, and “Take me to your leader”—seems utterly inseparable from the early Cold War.

With The Kraken Wakes, which was published in 1953, Wyndham seems to have already sensed this emerging cliché and dodged it. His aliens are never seen and never once communicate with mankind. Their objectives can be inferred only after the fact, based on what they’ve already done, and don’t align with any understandable human goals. They remain alien throughout.

All of which keeps The Kraken Wakes surprising and original. These aliens prove canny and unpredictable and seem to have the upper hand until the very end.

But what keeps the novel’s story engaging, and is one of the most unusual things about it, is Mike’s narration. Wyndham presents the novel as Mike’s account, written down for a readership he may never know, of the catastrophes of the last several years and how and why society has collapsed into isolated bands hiding among islands that used to be hills. Technically, the overwhelming majority of The Kraken Wakes is told through exposition. But Wyndham structures these lengthy histories with crucial scenes of Mike and Phyllis’s work, travels, and personal life, and all of it is plausibly imagined and vividly written. The Watsons’ voyage from a flooded London to the Cotswolds by motor boat, finding their way using half-submerged steeples as landmarks and sleeping in the dry upper stories of abandoned houses, is an outstanding piece of post-apocalyptic writing all by itself. It’s a brilliant miniature of what Wyndham does at novel length in The Day of the Triffids.

My Modern Library paperback describes The Kraken Wakes as “an ingenious early example of climate fiction,” which is a modish thing to say but exactly wrong. The real, pervasive concern throughout the novel, as exemplified by Mike and Phyllis’s work for the EBC, is not climate change but journalism and public opinion. Reporters and governments live in a constant struggle not only with the submarine aliens but with a distracted public whose attention can only be attracted for more than a few minutes by novelty, outrage, or crisis.

Alexandra Kleeman, in a passage of her introduction blurbed on the back cover, is more perceptive. Focusing on a side character named Petunia, who has her own insistently held opinions about the aliens (it’s a Russian ploy), Kleeman suggests that Wyndham offers prescient insight into “anti-vaxxer disinformation and QAnon conspiracists.” Sure, maybe. But if so, Wyndham also correctly shows that this distrust cuts both ways. The government and military repeatedly attempt to control the flow of upsetting information and manipulate—some might say nudge—the public into compliance and approved opinions. But public opinion proves fickle, unpredictable, and intractable. Efforts to control it and save face for embarrassed governments and overconfident scientists don’t go well, something that will come as no surprise after the last few years.

There’s much more to The Kraken Wakes than its excellent writing and thematic insight. I haven’t even mentioned its humor, which is both wryly ironic and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. Wyndham has great fun poking at Soviet pomposity, anti-capitalist paranoia, and Lysenkoism, among many other targets. And Wyndham, a master of the slow burn, uses his skill in building dread and foreboding to maximum effect.

But what is most important about The Kraken Wakes is that it is vividly imagined, thrilling, and surprising. Tastes in apocalypse—aliens, zombies, viruses, climate change—will shift and the literary establishment will politicize old books, but a good story well told will outlast both trends and politics. And the survival of storytelling beyond these and the apocalypse, as Mike’s narrative survives the floods, is a real reason for hope.

Suspicious Minds

Rob Brotherton’s book Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories had been sitting on my shelf, waiting to be read, for just over four years when I ran across an Instagram reel in which a smirking mom wrote about how proud she was of her homeschooled child questioning the reality of the moon landing “and other dubious historical events.” When people in the comments asked, as I had wondered the moment I saw this video, whether this was really the kind of result homeschoolers would want to advertise, she and a posse of supporters aggressively doubled down, lobbing buzzwords like grenades. I think the very first reply included the loathsome term “critical thinking.”

Silly, but unsurprising for the internet—especially the world of women mugging silently into phone cameras while text appears onscreen—right? But I had not seen this video at random. Several trusted friends, people whose intellects and character I respect, had shared it on multiple social media platforms. I started reading Suspicious Minds that afternoon.

Brotherton is a psychologist, and in Suspicious Minds he sets out not to debunk or disprove any particular conspiracy theory—though he uses many as examples—but to explain how and why people come to believe and even take pride in believing such theories in the first place. He undertakes this with an explicit desire not to stigmatize or demean conspiracy theorists and criticizes authors whose books on conspiracism have used titles like Voodoo Histories and How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World. He also, crucially, dispels many common assumptions surrounding conspiracist thinking.

First among the misconceptions is the idea that conspiracy theories are a symptom of “paranoid” thinking. The term paranoid, which became strongly associated with conspiracism thanks to Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” is inappropriate as a descriptor because of its hint of mental imbalance and indiscriminate fear. Most conspiracy theorists, Brotherton points out, believe in one or a small number of mundane theories that are untrue but not especially consequential, much less worthy of anxiety. A second, related misconception—and by far the more important one—is that conspiracy theories are a phenomenon of the “fringe” of society: of basement dwellers, militia types, and street preachers in sandwich signs. In a word, obsessives. As Eric Ambler puts it in A Coffin for Dimitrios, “‘Obsession’ was an ugly word. It conjured up visions of bright stupid eyes and proofs that the world was flat.”

The idea of conspiracy theories as fringe is not only false, Brotherton argues, it is the exact opposite of the truth. In terms of pure numbers, repeated polls have found that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe in at least one major conspiracy theory—the most common by far being the belief that JFK was killed by someone other than or in addition to Lee Harvey Oswald—and often more than one. Conspiracist thinking is mainstream. It is the norm. This cannot be emphasized enough.

But why is this? Is it, as I must confess I used to think, that those numbers just provide evidence for how stupid the majority of people are? Brotherton argues that this conclusion is incorrect, too. There is no meaningful difference in how often or how much educated and uneducated people (which is not the same thing as smart and dumb people) adhere to conspiracy theories. Conspiracism is rooted deeper, not in a kernel of paranoia and fear but in the natural and normal way we see and think about the world.

Conspiracy theories, Brotherton argues, originate in the human mind’s own truth-detecting processes. They are a feature, not a bug. The bulk of Suspicious Minds book examines, in detail, how both the conscious and unconscious workings of the mind not only make conspiracist beliefs possible, but strengthen them. In addition to obvious problems like confirmation bias, which distorts thinking by overemphasizing information we already believe and agree with, and the Dunning–Kruger Effect, which causes us to overestimate our expertise and understanding of how things work, there are subtler ways our own thinking trips us up.

Proportionality bias, for example, causes disbelief that something significant could happen for insignificant reasons. As an example, Brotherton describes the freakish luck of Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian assassin who thought he had missed his target, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, until the Archduke’s car pulled up a few feet in front of him and stalled out as the driver changed gears. This farcical murder of an unpopular royal by an inept assassin caused a war that killed over twenty million people. That people after the war—on both the winning and losing sides—sought an explanation more commensurate with the effect of the war is only natural. And the classic example is JFK himself, as many of the conspiracy theories surrounding him inevitably circle back to disbelief that a loser like Oswald could have killed the leader of the free world.

Similarly, intentionality bias suggests to us that everything that happens was intended by someone—they did it on purpose— especially bad things, so that famines, epidemics, stock market crashes, and wars become not tragedies native to our fallen condition but the fruit of sinister plots. Further, our many pattern-finding and simplifying instincts, heuristics that help us quickly grasp complex information, will also incline us to find cause and effect relationships in random events. We’re wired to disbelieve in accident or happenstance, so much so that we stubbornly connect dots when there is no design to be revealed.

That’s because we’re storytelling creatures. In perhaps the most important and crucial chapter in the book, “(Official) Stories,” Brotherton examines the way our built-in need for narrative affects our perceptions and understanding. Coincidence, accident, and simply not knowing are narratively unsatisfying, as any internet neckbeard complaining about “plot holes” will make sure you understand. So when outrageous Fortune, with her slings and arrows, throws catastrophe at us, it is natural to seek an explanation that makes sense of the story—an explanation with clear cause and effect, an identifiable antagonist, and understandable, often personal, motives.

Why does any of this matter? As I heard it put once, in an excellent video essay about the technical reasons the moon landing couldn’t have been faked, what is at stake is “the ultimate fate of knowing.” The same mental tools that help us understand and make quick decisions in a chaotic world can just as easily mislead and prejudice us.

This is why Brotherton’s insistence that conspiracy theories are, strictly speaking, rational is so important. As Chesterton put it in a line I’ve quoted many times, “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” Merely thinking is not enough to lead us to the truth. Brotherton’s book is a much-needed reminder that finding the truth requires discipline, hard work, and no small measure of humility.

Oppenheimer

When I reviewed the new Mission: Impossible a few weeks ago, I rather lamely called it “a whole lot of movie.” I should have saved that description another week or so for Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer is an accurate title. Despite the big budget, world-historical sweep, and powerful story, it’s fundamentally a character study tightly focused on J Robert Oppenheimer. Fortunately, its subject, by virtue of his unique role in American history and the course and conduct of World War II, gives the film both scope and depth. And though the film’s marketing leaned heavily on the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos, and the Trinity test, the film encompasses a huge swath of its protagonist’s life.

The film is told through a pair of overlapping and interweaving flashbacks in the 1950s but begins, chronologically, with the American Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) studying at Oxford in the 1920s. He bounces around through the rarefied world of quantum physics, from Oxford to Germany and back to the US, where he introduces this strange new subject to American universities in California. Study of quantum theory grows rapidly. So does Oppenheimer’s noncommittal involvement with radical leftwing politics—supporters of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, labor organizers who want to unionize laboratory assistants, overt Communists. He develops an unstable, on-and-off sexual relationship with the Communist Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) but moves on and marries Kitty (Emily Blunt), a divorcee with an alcohol problem. He also butts heads with other scientists at his university, who object to his tolerance and occasional endorsement of Communist projects, especially when such projects intrude into the classroom and the lab.

The war comes, and Oppenheimer is approached to head the Manhattan Project. His contact with the military and government is General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), a bullheaded tough who gets Oppenheimer everything he wants, most specifically a brand new lab complex and supporting town in the remote New Mexico desert. This third of the film shouldn’t need much explanation—it is the literal centerpiece of the story and leads to the film’s most stunning, exhilarating, and terrifying sequence.

The final third covers Oppenheimer’s postwar life. Recruited by Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr) to work at Princeton and given a key role on the Atomic Energy Commission, Oppenheimer’s past threatens to ruin him when the US military detects the Soviets’ first atomic test. Every every former member of the Manhattan Project comes under scrutiny. This event, Oppenheimer’s caginess and seeming indifference to the security of the Manhattan Project, and personal conflict and callousness toward Strauss, a former admirer, cause Strauss to turn on him. After Oppenheimer is denounced as a probable Communist agent, an AEC tribunal unearths all of his former sins and picks them over minutely. Even former close associates like Groves and Edward Teller (Benny Safdie), who vigorously assert Oppenheimer’s loyalty to the United States, make damning concessions about his unreliability and strange behavior. Oppenheimer loses his security clearance and his job.

But Oppenheimer, indirectly, has his revenge. When Strauss is appointed to President Eisenhower’s cabinet and sits for senate confirmation hearings, his scapegoating of Oppenheimer and underhanded manipulation of the AEC costs him his cabinet position.

That’s the story of Oppenheimer in chronological order. But this being Christopher Nolan, it is not told so straightforwardly. It’s easy to get hung up on the structures of Nolan’s films, and in my original draft of this review I labored through how Oppenheimer works and why it works so well, but that’s spending too much time on how the story is told. The real strengths of Oppenheimer are its masterful technical execution and its performances, especially the central one by Cillian Murphy.

Oppenheimer looks brilliant. Much has been made, quite rightly, about the film’s IMAX cinematography.* Nolan and DP Hoyte van Hoytema use IMAX’s resolution and shallow depth of field to maximum effect, capturing everything from an atomic explosion to the irresolution and doubt on a man’s face with startling immediacy. Oppenheimer is also beautiful—New Mexico landscapes, the stately traditional architecture of old college campuses,** and the black and white of Strauss’s sequences are all stunning to look at. Additionally, the costumes, sets, and props are all excellent. If “immersion” in an “experience” is what brings you to the movies, Oppenheimer’s 1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s are as immersive as Hollywood gets.

I’ve seen a few people complain about the wall-to-wall score, especially in the first half, but I honestly didn’t notice that. Ludwig Göransson’s music, like the intercutting flashbacks, helps establish and sustain the film’s dramatic momentum early on. It’s also a good score, not nearly as punishing and concussive as previous Nolan film scores. And unlike, say, Tenet, I could hear all of the film’s dialogue, so no complaints with the sound design and sound editing here.

My one technical problem is with the editing, which reminded me of some of Nolan’s earlier films, especially Batman Begins. Conversations often play out in unimaginative shot-reverse shot style and it sometimes feels like all the pauses have been cut out of the dialogue. Some scenes barely have room to breathe. I noticed this especially clearly with the handful of jokes and one-liners in Nolan’s script, where timing is crucial. Fortunately this evens out by the middle portion of the film concerning Los Alamos, but it gave Oppenheimer an odd, rushed feel in the first third.

As for the performances, Oppenheimer rivals those crazy CinemaScope productions of the 1950s and 60s for its huge cast. Nolan, not unlike Oppenheimer himself, built a small army of amazing talent for this movie, with even small roles played by well-known actors. Perhaps my favorite is Gary Oldman as Harry Truman, who appears for one scene that can’t last more than three minutes. And Oldman is excellent, turning in a rich, complicated performance despite his limited screentime and Nolan’s understated writing.

The same is true of everyone else in the film. Robert Downey Jr is excellent as Strauss, playing him sympathetically but still as a clear antagonist. Downey has said that he understands where Strauss was coming from and so didn’t play him as a villain, and it shows. His performance is the perfect counterbalance to Murphy. Other standouts include Benny Safdie as H-bomb theorist and engineer Edward Teller and Matt Damon as Leslie Groves. Groves’s and Oppenheimer’s odd-couple working relationship is one of the highlights of the film. Emily Blunt makes the most of an underwritten role as Oppenheimer’s difficult, morose, alcoholic wife—who nevertheless comes through when it counts—and Josh Hartnett and David Krumholtz were especially good playing two different kinds of colleague to Oppenheimer. I also enjoyed the many, many historical cameos, including Werner Heisenberg (Matthias Schweighöfer), Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), and, in a slightly larger role, Tom Conti as Albert Einstein.

But as I hinted above, this is Murphy’s movie. He appears in almost every scene across all three hours and remains continuously interesting. He plays Oppenheimer as a cipher; as we watch, we feel we understand him from scene to scene, but—as becomes especially clear at the end—our impressions don’t add up in any satisfactory way. What we get is an unpleasant character full of flaws: a resentful outsider, an arrogant insider, an adulterer, a recklessly naïve and self-regarding political do-gooder, a man with astonishingly bad judgment and enormous blind spots, who can devote himself to a project that will inevitably result in mass murder and celebrate its completion only to reverse himself later, who chooses the wrong moments to stand on principle and whose one moment of keen self-awareness comes when he realizes he is being approached with an offer to spy for the Soviets and refuses—a good decision that he still manages to bungle. And yet he is undoubtedly brilliant at what he does, people as different as Einstein and Groves like him, and he sees a crucial project through to completion.

This tension is never resolved, and Oppenheimer only becomes more inscrutable as the film progresses. When Edward Teller wishes he could understand him better, he could be speaking for the audience. As one of Oppenheimer’s rivals in the race for the Bomb might have suggested, the more we see of him, the less we actually know. No wonder he rubbed people the wrong way.

The film opens with an epigraph explaining, in brief, the myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods as a gift for mortals and was punished by being chained to a rock where birds would peck out his liver all day, every day, for eternity. This myth is apropos—especially since Nolan’s source material was the Oppenheimer biography American Prometheus—and I found myself reflecting on Oppenheimer as a Greek tragedy. Oppenheimer is a hero who has achieved great things for a thankful citizenry but is undone by his own past sins. He has no one to blame but himself. In this way, Oppenheimer also becomes a human metaphor for the entire project to split the atom. The film’s final moments make this clear in a genuinely chilling way.

I’m struck that, of Christopher Nolan’s twelve films, three are Batman movies, three are contemporary thrillers, three are near-future sci-fi action adventures, and three are historical films. Of the latter, two concern World War II. After seeing and thinking a lot about Oppenheimer, I can see the attraction of the period for Nolan. What other modern event offers such a variety of combinations of the technical, theoretical, and personal—and with such high stakes? World War II is ideal Nolan country. I hope he’ll return soon.

In the meantime, Oppenheimer is a great film—excellently produced, powerfully acted, and thematically rich. I strongly recommend it.

*As of this writing I still haven’t had a chance to see Oppenheimer in IMAX, because the one screen near me has been jampacked during every showing except the one that gets out at 2:00 AM. I hope to see it as it was intended soon and will amend this review if seeing it in IMAX alters my judgment in any way.

**If Nolan wanted to make a spiritual sequel to Oppenheimer, another period film about amoral Communist-adjacent theorists and their world-destroying experiments, his next project could be Bauhaus.

The Gap in the Curtain

We begin the final week of John Buchan June with one of Buchan’s strangest and most surprising novels. In the introduction to the Authorised Edition I read, journalist Stuart Kelly aptly describes it as “an odd novel—a hybrid of social satire, political intrigue and science-fiction thriller, as if H. G. Wells, P. G. Wodehouse and the Anthony Trollope of the Palliser novels had attempted a collaboration.” And yet, despite this, it is also “the most quintessentially Buchan-esque of his novels.” The book is Sir Edward Leithen’s fourth adventure, The Gap in the Curtain.

The novel begins during Leithen’s visit to the country house of Lady Flambard, an enthusiastic hostess who has gathered a bewildering assortment of people for a Whitsuntide holiday in the Cotswolds. Leithen would rather go riding in the hills than be trapped in her engineered salons, but during dinner one night he notes that the guests, for all their differences in background, profession, age, and political persuasions, fall into two types—untroubled souls who can unthinkingly relax as part of Lady Flambard’s collection of conversationalists, and the melancholy, the preoccupied, the withdrawn. He will have cause to think more deeply about this division with the arrival of one final guest.

The guest is Professor August Moe, a European physicist and mathematician and one of the few on the same intellectual plane as Einstein. Moe, an enormous and cadaverous old man, requests that Leithen attend a private meeting with a few other hand-selected guests. Once all have assembled for Moe’s talk, Leithen realizes that the professor has somehow picked exactly the half of Lady Flambard’s guests he had marked as the somber and pensive. Something is up.

Moe describes a theory of time as a system of coexisting coils, with past, future, and present not separate but overlapping, and reveals that he has discovered a method of peering into the future—scientifically, objectively. Through his method, which is something like remote viewing, the properly trained mind can look across time’s structure and see short glimpses of the future. He wishes them to join him in his first test. With a few days of preparation, including a vegetarian diet, abstention from alcohol, a mild dose of an unnamed drug, and, most importantly, dedicated study and concentration upon a familiar object, a copy of The Times, they will be ready to receive a glimpse of the same object exactly one year on. They will be able to read next year’s headlines.

It works.

But it works because Moe, an ailing man, dies at the moment of the experiment. This is the hidden final part of the formula. When he collapses and breathes his last it sends Leithen’s friend Sally Lamington into a panic and Leithen, in responding to her swoon and to the Professor’s death, misses his glimpse of the future.

But the others get their one-second view of next June’s Times. Arnold Tavanger, a financier with his eye on the market, sees a story about the merger of two major mining corporations. David Mayot, a young politician on the rise, sees an article naming an unexpected new prime minister. Reggie Daker, a wealthy young homebody and book collector, sees an article about his imminent departure for the Yucatán. Sir Robert Goodeve, a promising young MP of an ancient noble family, and Captain Charles Ottery, a veteran of the Great War now working for a London business, see their own obituaries.

The rest of the novel relates what each man does with his scrap of foreknowledge over the coming year. Tavanger, equipped with what he thinks is a foolproof bit of inside dope, sets off on a globe-trotting adventure to buy up shares in one of the companies that will merge in a year. Mayot, an unprincipled political operator, maneuvers to place himself as near the top as possible in the coming change of prime minister. Reggie Daker, who doesn’t even know where the Yucatán is (“He fancied it must be in the East; places ending in ‘tan’ were always in the East; he remembered Afghanistan, Baluchistan, Gulistan…”), is convinced Moe’s method was erroneous and lets himself be swept up in a one-sided romance with a ferocious girl and her domineering family, who turn his antiquarian interest in books into an exhausting commercial enterprise. As for Goodeve and Ottery, the knowledge that they will be dead in a year produces radically different effects.

I don’t want to risk giving too much away. This oddest of all of Buchan’s novels may also benefit most from reading it cold, spoiler-free. When the late Sir Roger Scruton wrote that “The belief that human beings can either foresee the future or control it to their own advantage ought not to have survived an attentive reading of the Iliad, still less of the Old Testament,” he might have been stating The Gap in the Curtain’s thesis.

Each of the five sections presents a different style and tone of story, all related through Leithen, who chances to run into each of the five men at various points through the political and economic upheavals of the next year. The stories also escalate in seriousness.

Tavanger and Mayot, seeking a profitable deal and political prominence, respectively, prove themselves unserious and worldly. Their stories come across as petty wheeling and dealing when eternity is at stake. Mayot is particularly unpleasant, a self-serving striver and user, a creature of political gossip and the smoke-filled room—a type with which Buchan, as an MP, would have been familiar. Tavanger, at least, has the saving grace of not taking it too badly when his understanding of the future turns out to be incomplete and misleading. Unlike Mayot, he can laugh it off.

Reggie Daker offers a comical interlude. A hobbit-like lover of quiet pursuits, of angling and riding and contentedly browsing his books in an armchair, he finds his life turned upside down. As with Tavanger and Mayot, what he saw in next year’s Times turns out to be true—sort of. The reader sees where Reggie’s story is going pretty quickly; the joy comes in seeing Reggie trying to keep up and finally rushing into his surprising, last-minute fulfilment of what he saw through Moe’s technique. This section shows Buchan at his most playful. Reggie, whom Kelly explicitly compares to Bertie Wooster, could also be one of the kindly but clueless side characters of Evelyn Waugh. His aggressive fiancée and her horrible family are even more Waugh-like.

But the meat of The Gap in the Curtain is in the final parallel sections concerning Goodeve and Ottery. Faced with death, they follow opposing tracks. One man feels himself invincible—at first. Then he succumbs to passivity and despair. The other goes from wrath to resignation before finding a redeeming courage through love. One isolates himself, retreating more and more into himself as the fatal date approaches. The other indulges himself before turning outward, toward another, to face the future together. Through relationship he discovers courage.

The Goodeve and Ottery stories, coming after the dull and laborious self-centeredness of Tavanger and Mayot and the hapless comedy of Reggie Daker, astounded me. As meditations on death and fate, despair and courage, they prefigure Leithen’s final adventure in Buchan’s final novel, Sick Heart River. But juxtaposed as they are in the last third of this novel, they take on an exceptional power. The last section’s love story is one of the best and most surprising in all of Buchan’s works, and lies at the heart of the books hopeful vision.

I wish I could say more and in greater detail but, again, I don’t want to give too much away.

The Gap in the Curtain can be straightforwardly read as a story about fate and predestination. Certainly, the characters themselves argue about what they’ve seen in next June’s Times and debate the meaning of free will—most pointedly in that final story—and the unresolved ironies of the way the predictions are and are not fulfilled is a key part of the novel’s power. The novel also suggests that the certainties of science, with all its pretensions to mathematical objectivity, are illusory, or at best incomplete. The characters who trust most in Professor Moe those driven deepest into greed or despair.

These themes place it in good company among science fiction and time travel stories. But The Gap in the Curtain is also a story about character and virtue. Assuming you could get a glimpse of the future, what would you do with it? Self-advancement, distraction, brazenness and courage, despair and hope—these are responses brought forth and sharpened by knowledge of the future, not created by it. And, most especially in the final section, Buchan dramatizes the necessity of love as a response to whatever the future holds.

The Gap in the Curtain is a bold experiment in concept, structure, and theme, and it’s uncommonly rich for the kind of tale it is. Just note that Leithen and the rest undergo this experiment during Whitsuntide, the Pentecost celebration commemorating the coming of the Holy Ghost. But it is also a fun, surprising, and deeply moving novel about something all of us will face, though without Professor Moe’s method—the future, and death. The Gap in the Curtain also suggests the best way to face them.

Eugenics and Other Evils

One of GK Chesterton’s lesser-known works is the 1922 treatise Eugenics and Other Evils. This is a shame, as it was and is an insightful and challenging polemic on a topic that has changed its rhetoric and outward forms but has grown no weaker in the century since he wrote it. I first read this over a decade ago—I would guess around 2009 or 2010—and revisited it via audiobook in the late spring of 2020. The following is not a proper review, but the notes I posted to Goodreads when I finished. I hope this will encourage y’all to read this book.

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Chesterton at his most lucid and persuasive, arguing forcefully against post-WWI British schemes to establish legal eugenics regimes. (The same thing was going on in the US at the same time, culminating in the Eugenics Society’s notorious 1927 test case Buck v. Bell, which went all the way to the Supreme Court and resulted in a decision upholding mandatory sterilization laws for the “feebleminded,” a decision encapsulated in one of the most mean-spirited court opinions in the Court’s history, authored by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Chesterton argues that eugenicist advocates are overenthusiastic about an untested and highly theoretical “science,” that they cannot possibly have the iron grasp on heredity that they claim, and that the legal measures proposed for the implementation of their plans will create a division of haves and have-nots more cold blooded and brutal than anything established by the spoliations of late nineteenth century industrial capitalism. Urban industrialism and the cruelties of commercialism have already robbed the poor of their dignity and their private property, he argues, so the plans of the eugenicists to take away even the family and the freedom to choose a mate and be fruitful—one of the only licit pleasures left to the proletariat, he notes—is both of a piece with modern social Darwinism and an unprecedented monstrosity.

If the hubris and cruelty of the eugenics movement are staggering, even more so are their condescension to the poor, whom they propose to help by slowly winnowing them, and their lack of awareness of their own elitism, as they are never the object of their proposed plans but, should they get their way, the autocratic enforcers. Chesterton rightly discerns that the cult of the expert—a fin de siecle obsession that has never really left us—is ultimately about establishing an unaccountable new hierarchy of powerful elites.

Chesterton’s arguments strikingly anticipate the shape of much modern argument about issues like abortion on demand and other bioethical questions—not to mention the rise of divorce, the establishment of intrusive state-mandated medical regulations, and the confiscation of children by the state on grounds of hygiene or ever-shifting psychological criteria—and his arguments against “scientific” interference with birth as well as birth control and the ever more intrusive top-down government control of everyday life feel very prescient indeed.

Not everything in the book is on target. His lengthy tangent on capitalism—a favorite Chesterton hobbyhorse—feels too much like a tangent, but where he strikes home, he’s excellent, and his feel for the larger underlying assumptions of the issues of the day make this lesser known book still shockingly relevant.

I first read this probably a decade ago. I’ve just listened to the excellent audiobook read by Derek Perkins. I recommend it, though a print edition with minor annotations to explain who some of the now more obscure figures of the Edwardian eugenics movement may be preferable.

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I first read Eugenics and Other Evils in Volume IV of Ignatius Press’s Collected Works of GK Chesterton. It is also available as an audiobook—the one I refer to in these notes is a really excellent reading—and for free online at Project Gutenberg and Wikisource. This is a short and punchy book that is still important, and is well worth your while.