The Grief Of Oppenheimer, First Man & Arrival

Tracing The Grief Of Oppenheimer To First Man & Arrival

This is #ViewingRoom, a column by OTTplay's critic Rahul Desai, on the intersections of pop culture and life.

THE HUMAN MIND is a stubborn thing. No matter how far we run, it tethers us to the emotion we’re trying to escape. For instance, I recently went for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. The anticipation of an IMAX experience had me excited. But it had little to do with my cinephilia. I was convinced that, for those three hours, I’d finally be consumed by something other than grief. I welcomed the prospect of an evening without wrestling with memories of my late friend. Maybe there would be no space, no time, for me to miss him. Maybe an immersive film would allow my longing to rest. But I underestimated the intrusive power of loss. Somehow, my mind found its way home, back to that aching corner – through the strangest chain reaction. It felt like a rubber band snapping back in place with a stinging thwack.

Here’s how my mental journey unfolded. In the early portions of Oppenheimer, Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), a US Lieutenant General in charge of assembling the top-secret Manhattan Project, recruits the film’s protagonist, J Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), to build the atomic bomb. Despite his past, the physicist assures the army-man that he has no communist sympathies. But the way Damon plays the moment hints that Oppenheimer’s communist roots are precisely why Groves hires him. He hopes to harness the Jewish scientist’s genius from the embers of his leftist leanings. Oppenheimer’s sense of identity is driven by a very practical patriotism – the desire to defeat Nazi fascism and end a war – and Groves strives to weaponise it. Oppenheimer’s slow-burning socialism, which is later used against him in the 1954 Security Hearings, is what ends up driving the project.

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MELANCHOLIA

What Three Modern Masterpieces Say Of Genius, Loss & Grace

By Rahul Desai

... This scene, in turn, reminded me of a scene in Damien Chazelle’s Neil Armstrong biopic, First Man. Substitute Oppenheimer’s politics with Armstrong’s pain. NASA is interviewing for Project Gemini, the human spaceflight programme, and Armstrong is one of the rare civilian candidates. At the end of the interview, one of the bosses deliberately brings up the death of Armstrong’s daughter. The open-ended question hints at the possibility of the astronaut’s grief, and his personal conflict, being a distraction. But his answer – that it would be unnatural to assume it wouldn’t influence him – is so frank that they select him. Like Groves, perhaps the NASA chiefs expect to harness Armstrong’s genius via his former attachments – or specifically, via the male determination to numb grief with the pursuit of greatness. They suspect that his desire to not confront the feeling might take him far: maybe as far as the moon. That the rage of losing a child might turn the man into a machine.

And they’re not wrong. Eventually, Armstrong is almost robotic in his quest to the moon. It’s a cold and fearless grasp at immortality. He’s less afraid of death because he views it as a place where he can meet his daughter again. Only once he’s up there, taking those famous steps, we see him dropping her bracelet into a crater. We see a lone teardrop through the visor of his helmet, the culmination of an odyssey of grief. Armstrong’s “escape” happens to result in the most significant event of mankind, which got me thinking (see my chain of thought? Ridiculous): Given the inherent relationship between genius and loss, are normies like us pressured into milking our suffering? Are we conditioned to make the pain mean something by looking for meaning in it? Are we so desperate to not forget a loved one that we keep looking for ways to make our feelings memorable?

I know that heartbreak has wrung words out of me, but I wonder about these pieces that emerge from grief. I wonder if I’m writing because I must or because I need to. It’s tricky – this process of excavating pain for catharsis and creation – but it’s also distinctly human. Not everyone can afford the canvas, and so the paint dries up. Sometimes I write because it’s an escape from hearing myself speak and stumble across incomplete emotions: about how much he meant to me, about why I can’t imagine a world without him, about how I can’t get through an hour without revising our time together. I let every film, every distant and fictional story, take me there. I let every social exchange pull me into the void. If someone reads this, that’s nice, but I’d be lying if I claimed it’s the reason I express myself. It’s more selfish than that. Just as aspiring authors are advised to write like nobody’s reading, I’m an aspiring man trying to feel like nobody’s watching. I don’t want to let any hurt slide, and often, I start typing without knowing how, or if, a sentence will end. All I know is that I’d become a machine if I don’t do this. A machine without a moon to reach. A steely-eyed missile man without a launching pad.

So Oppenheimer, for no fault of its own, led me down this rabbit-hole of broken musings. It took me to First Man, with a more wounded perspective. Another disarming aspect of Chazelle’s film is the way its narrative is designed to reflect the rebounding nature of grief. Just as the inevitability of this feeling followed me during a seemingly unrelated screening, Armstrong is stalked by grief during his NASA journey. He accepts the offer, hoping to start afresh in an area that houses other project families. But death – and the hollowness of waking up a world with one less inhabitant – remains a constant. He loses at least three of his colleagues in testing accidents, in a phase where NASA comes under fire for not only draining tax-payer dollars but also their dwindling safety standards during the lunar race with the Soviets.

It’s the timing of these deaths. They keep popping Armstrong’s fleeting bubbles of sanity. The moment he lapses into some kind of normalcy – with neighbours and friends and a job and a relatively happy family – a tragedy yanks him down to earth with a thud. It comes like a recurring nightmare that refuses to let him wander too far or feel too ordinary. It’s why he is so destined to reach the moon: to find solace away from the gravity of the planet’s misery, to find refuge in the zero-gravity glow of the moon. Every loss deepens his desperation to succeed, because they become a raging reminder of his disdain for grief. He thinks he’s defied its stranglehold by shooting up into the sky, farther than any shattered human has been before. But it takes him less than a minute to realise that the moon is, in fact, his reckoning. It’s his white flag, a confession that his grief summoned the power to expand the universe – and this wider world will be his enduring eulogy.

I often hear the First Man theme ringing in my head. It’s beautiful music, haunting music. It’s a very specific sequence of sounds, the sort that makes regular listeners sway but grieving listeners pray. I react to it differently now. My ears are no longer the only recipients of the piece. The lullaby-like rhythm buries itself into my being, like a secret code that gets unlocked only if I dare to address the ache. Every time I pretend like he’s still around, like he’s here, my eyes fall on the Federer artwork he gifted me on his last trip to Mumbai. Or on the duty-free gin he generously gifted my partner. Or on my phone’s wallpaper: the image of his beaming face. Or on my laptop, to find words that I’d have never understood if not for his eloquent emails and candid spirit. Or on a Whatsapp chat with some of his friends I’ve had the privilege of connecting with. I can tell that the soundtrack – the orchestration of our universe-condensing grief – echoes in their heads too, whether they can hear it or not. I don’t know what our success looks like, or if it can redefine the fabric of our space. I do know that every small step we take will be a giant leap into the future. I’m just not sure if I’m ready for that future. I’m not sure if I want to turn this into my past.

Speaking of futures, stirring soundtracks and grieving parents, my train of thought tends to roll from First Man to another modern masterpiece, Arrival. In terms of the narrative of loss, the two films are divergent pieces. On the face of it, Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi drama is about a linguist who saves the world by preventing miscommunication between aliens and humans. In doing so – and this is only revealed towards the end – she learns to alter the linear perception of time and experience memories of future events. So the montage this movie opens with – the birth of her daughter, the little girl’s death from an incurable disease – is actually a premonition; it’s something the protagonist, Louisa Banks, is yet to go through. The story we see, then, is the past all along. She knows what’s coming, she knows the mission will make her fall in love with the physicist, she knows they will have a daughter who falls ill. But Louise still chooses to experience it. To savour – and not endure – it. She still opts to barrel into a future of separation and loneliness, a new manifestation of that old proverb: It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

While Arrival becomes a poignant expression of predestined paths and not taking life for granted, I also look at it as a potent projection of grief. The film creates an illusion of the conventional trope that shapes First Man: Louise mourning the death of her little girl and turning to ‘work’ (which is a parable for the bond between grief and language) as a coping mechanism. Her job, this mission, is supposed to rescue her and give her purpose. The viewer is tricked into processing her journey through this prism: She is allegedly rebuilding after a tragedy. This is apparently her second chance. But it is really her only chance. This mirage teases our binary reading of grief and its shapeless agency. It not only implies that grieving doesn’t have an image but also that people can choose to confront it without an exit plan.

Louise senses she’s heading there, but that doesn’t deter her from inching forward. The opportunity to love outweighs the trepidation of loss. Her choice is an extension of life itself: Despite knowing that our bodies end – and ‘end’ is not necessarily a synonym for tragedy – we soldier on without fretting about the imminence of death. The fear of the heart stopping seldom stops us from pumping that heart with oxygen and blood. Louise does not reach her ending with a solution, because there is no cheat code: Grief is personal and complex and non-linear, and it demands to be acknowledged, just as emotions deserve to be expended and food demands to be eaten. It cannot have a medicine, a cure, because that would reduce love to a temporary condition. It would frame grief as a science of deflection rather than a language of loss.

Arrival confirms my suspicions about falling without a parachute, about the inconspicuous gulf between thriving and surviving. It may look like we’re caught in an infinite loop of healing and breaking, but we’re really just laying the foundation for feeling. What I’m going through right now, I have no definition for. There are moments when it’s unbearable, when I feel rudderless and weak, when I curse myself for boarding this train to nowhere. I always knew I was too sensitive to handle this void, and that I’d seek his presence and defy his absence in weird ways. I knew that, some day, I’d be defeated by loss. But would I do it all over again?

To paraphrase the film, if I could see our friendship from start to finish, would I change things? Watch Oppenheimer on a rainy night, knowing that it’ll catapult me into the holding units of First Man and Arrival, back into my grief that I thought I had fooled, back into my memories of us meeting on a similarly rainy day twenty years ago in an empty classroom and deciding to go for a movie? Would I have gone for the movie, knowing it’ll trigger a lifelong kinship that would be cut short on the cusp of middle age? Would I have shared that bottle of rum with him on the pavement in 2008 with a drenched dog for company while the city went underwater? Would I have let him christen me with a corny moniker (RD) in college that’d stick for the rest of my days? Would I have done all those long video calls, hoping to hear his infectious laugh and bask in his fascination for life? Would I have travelled with him across the globe if I knew that the last trip we do together features me, alone, channelling his spirit after he’s gone? Would I grow up with him if I knew that I’d grow old without him?

The answer is simple. It gets clearer with every passing day, like debris rupturing the dust after an implosion. I’d do all of it – irrespective of where our story begins – because indefinite despair is proof that we scaled the summits of joy. I’d do it all – irrespective of where our story ends – until the departure of love stops resembling the arrival of grief.

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