maybe we can dispense with the whole plot synopsis because this is a very popular movie that everyone

knows. Robert Oppenheimer, played by Killian Murphy, he's making the atomic bomb folks, and he's

conflicted about it. And also, they want to take his security pass away because he's a goddamn

communist. There's a lot that's interesting to me about this movie. First of all, I like the

movie. It's very entertaining. And,

you know, it moves like a freight train and it has some interesting ideas in it. And technically,

it's, you know, superlative as Nolan's films always are. Nolan is a liberal, basically.

That's how I would read him. Again, I don't say that to disparage him. I'm just sort of describing

him. He's a liberal you mean in the sense that like almost anybody, apart from a few very exceptional

cases, almost anybody in his kind of position in culture is sort of a liberal, given that being a

liberal describes the median set of cultural and political commitments and the sort of the spectrum

of ideas that someone in his position would would almost certainly

necessarily hold 100%. And so you look at a movie like The Dark Night, The Dark Night Rises. They are sort of the products of a reactionary liberal mind in the late Bush early Obama eras. You know, they're articulating a right-leading liberals ambient fears.

Yeah.

Because he's one of the mass market autours, one of his jobs, one of his points of interest

is sort of synthesizing the ambient fears and anxieties of the current moment and presenting

them to us.

And this movie, which resonated so strongly when it was in theaters this summer, it's

interesting to chart the political progression, the received wisdom, the ambient wisdom that a prestige blockbuster is selling us compared to 20 years ago.

Compared to what Charlie Wilson's War looked like, for instance.

You know what I mean?

Rancidly reactionary.

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