kitty oppenheimer deserves better than what OPPENHEIMER made her to be

christopher nolan loves a troubled man. his movies are usually lead by male characters whose dead wives haunt them. the men get complex characterizations, wishes, and needs; the women are just The Woman. the exist only in the gaze of the man, only as plot devices. take any of nolan’s female characters and try to define them w/o resorting to talking about their male better-half.

when OPPENHEIMER was announced, i was skeptical, but open to seeing nolan’s take on the subject. knowing his track redord, i was scared that he would not give kitty oppenheimer or jean tatlock the respect they deserved, but i figured that since they were real life figures, maybe he would be able to write them as three-dimensional. unfortunately, nolan failed the women.

maybe i’m harsh w his treatment of jean. as played by florence pugh in the film, jean appears rather briefly as a figure from oppenheimer’s life who leaves a mark on his life. i was going to call her role important, but the film doesn’t dig into their affair as much as it should. even oppenheimer’s homage to her is largely ignored; the trinity test is said to have been named after a john donne poem (‘batter my heart, three-person’d god’), an author jean introduced into oppenheimer’s life.

even so, jean gets off rather easily. while her diminished importance in oppenheimer’s life is a shame, it’s nothing compared to what nolan did to kitty oppenheimer, the scientist’s wife.

first of all, emily blunt is good. she manages to dig into the character to try to find the complexity nolan refused to give her. but blunt doesn’t play kitty oppenheimer. blunt plays The Wife, the sad woman who only serves to further The Man’s role. while it’s true that kitty was Not a Good Mother (robert strunsky, a princeton neighbour of the oppenheimer, said ‘i think to be a child of robert and kitty oppenheimer is to have one of the greatest handicaps in the world’) and she did descend into alcoholism, kitty was also a firecracker scientist.

kitty was a trained biologist and botanist, something the film fails to acknowledge. while she did put her work aside to focus on family, she had achieved things in her career, especially in a field and time when women a woman in a classroom was considered a lost secretary looking for her boss. while robert may have achieved more things, kitty’s brief career (she graduated w honours from college) should not be forgotten.

what’s more, the portrait nolan paints of kitty is that of a weak woman. in real life, kitty was described in the book AMERICAN PROMETHEUS (which served as inspiration for OPPENHEIMER) as ‘charming and competent’ and a woman w ‘an impish sense of humour’. ‘kitty also set the stage for many fine performances in which she and robert played the gracious intellectual couple’. the kitty in the film is completely different than the real life kitty.

while her marriage to robert is described in PROMETEHUS as being ‘everything to her’ and she was apparently ‘utterly dependent upon robert’, she was also someone whose troubled life (multiple marriages, societal expectations for women, a dead lover, the second world war) left her a scarred woman, but also a survivor. while in princeton, she is described in the book as a ‘tigress caged’. she knew how to put on a show if needed. she was a firecracker, a woman who liked to press people’s buttons. nolan insetad presents her as an extension to robert, a mellow character and not as her own person.

her one big moment is the hearing when she stood up for her husband. while that did happen in real life, it’s a shame that that’s her one memorable moment. all she does in the movie is mope around and defend her husband. she is never her own person.

how foolish of me to have a glimmer of hope that nolan would give kitty the respect she deserved. i don’t know the man’s views nor do i want to speculate or throw accusations around, but it is disappointing that even when presented w a real life figure, he sucked the life out of her. instead of being Kitty Oppenheimer, Biologist Who Married Robert Oppenheimer, she is Robert Oppenheimer’s Wife and nothing more. what a disappointment.