We Have to Talk About Those Sex Scenes in ‘Oppenheimer’

Spoilers for Oppenheimer

Christopher Nolan is not necessarily a filmmaker one thinks of when considering the eroticism of modern cinema. He’s beloved for many other reasons (and dismissed for a fair few more), but his particular brand of adult-oriented dramas and high-concept speculative blockbusters aren’t really known for their portrayals of sex. Indeed, red-hot chemistry between his characters was never a major priority for a director of intense technical detail and achingly well-built tension. So, the news that his latest film, Oppenheimer, would include some good old-fashioned boning between its aesthetically pleasing stars Cillian Murphy and Florence Pugh, proved to be a surprise for many. Would these scenes go off with a bang (sorry) or fizzle out before they even happened? The end results were mostly fascinating, if somewhat muddled.

Murphy plays the eponymous J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who headed the Manhattan Project that brought the world the petrifying terror of the atomic bomb. A noted womanizer, Oppenheimer was infamous for conducting various extra-marital affairs behind the back of his weary wife Kitty (played by Emily Blunt.) The most notable of these was with Jean Tatlock, a psychiatrist and communist who wrote for the Communist Party USA’s newspaper, Western Worker. Tatlock, portrayed in the film by Florence Pugh, began seeing Oppenheimer in 1936, when she was a graduate student at Stanford and Oppenheimer was a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. They dated for a while and he proposed to her twice, which she turned down. Their romance continued after Oppenheimer’s marriage.

Tatlock’s ties to communism meant that her phones were tapped and she was placed under surveillance by the FBI. After the Second World War, when Oppenheimer was subject to a hearing to strip him of his security clearance and end his work with the U.S. government, his relationship with Tatlock was submitted as evidence of his supposed anti-American politics. Tatlock died by suicide in 1944, having struggled with severe clinical depression for many years. She was 29.

Nolan’s portrayal of Tatlock is one of the weakest elements of an overall strong and politically strident film. Pugh isn’t given much to do, and the real layers of Tatlock, including her politics and potential queerness, aren’t discussed much. She isn’t in this three-hour film for very long, with the bulk of her screen time being filled in two sex scenes (and the post-coital chit-chat) with Oppenheimer. These moments are fascinating, not just because of their role within the context of Oppenheimer but as a display of Nolan’s strengths and weaknesses as a storyteller.

In the first sex scene, Tatlock and Oppenheimer are getting it on when Tatlock seems to get bored mid-act and goes to browse Robert’s shelves (which is hilarious.) She locates a copy of the Bhagavad-Gita and asks Robert to read that passage as they restart their shenanigans. This moment is odd, cementing a connection between the now-iconic ‘I am become death’ quote Oppenheimer used to describe his work on the atom bomb and his (presumably great) sex with his communist lover. Add an ’80s rock ballad to the background and the true cheesiness of this moment would shine through.

It’s in the second sex scene where things fully line up. We see Oppenheimer, his wife sitting dutifully behind him, being interrogated in the committee hearings set up largely to publicly shame him. This hearing is a blatant kangaroo court, a meeting of nefarious intentions under the guise of patriotic duty. It’s happening during the height of the McCarthy witch-hunts and Oppenheimer has left a lot of fuel for the fire against his (never truly) good name. That includes not only his associations with former and current communists but his affair with Jean.

Kitty, who watches the committee hearing with a mixture of resentment and weariness, already knows about her husband’s womanizing. There doesn’t seem to be a person in his life who wasn’t aware of it. She also knows about his intense feelings for Jean. That doesn’t make it any easier when the story is dragged up by the committee and positioned as one of Oppenheimer’s biggest crimes. As the interrogation continues, Kitty imagines Oppenheimer, sitting ramrod in his chair, being f**ked by a fully naked Jean, who stares her down as their passions erupt.

Moments of surrealness puncture the strident realism of Oppenheimer, mostly through the title character’s visions of nuclear devastation and blinding explosions that periodically taunt him following the bomb drops on Japan. This is one moment where she sees that intrusion of the unreal from another perspective. For Kitty, it’s another reminder of the humiliation she’s been smothered by, thanks to her unenviable position as the wife of J. Robert Oppenheimer. If the whole world is now to know what she’s been aware of for years, will they look at her and see what she sees in her mind all the time?

There was much online drama over these sex scenes, in large part because we’re stuck in this perennial cycle of puritanical scorn with its origins in tedious social media discourse about whether there’s ‘too much sex’ in pop culture and if such scenes are ‘necessary.’ That’s an argument I’ve had many times before and don’t want to get bogged down in now, but it does remind us of the ways that basic human sensuality is deemed by many to be narratively superfluous or outright fetishistic. The idea of showing sex as a plot device, as a moment of character development, or just because it’s interesting to do so is shunned by many overtly vocal voices online. Christopher Nolan giving it a go for Oppenheimer elicited the expected replies. But not every scene of a biopic should be a Wikipedia-esque reading of their backstory (ideally, no scene should be so hackneyed but the genre is laden with cliches it has never sought to retire.) Oppenheimer, historically, f**ked. Why not show that? His womanizing clearly impacted his life, that of his family, and the American government’s ability to throw him to the wolves when he outgrew his initial worth.

I don’t foresee a future in erotic dramas for Nolan, but I continue to think about his foray into sensuality for this weighty drama so heavily concerned with ethics and political responsibility. It doesn’t all succeed but I think it deserves more critical consideration than a bunch of Twitter scolding.