The blockbuster movie ‘Oppenheimer’ leaves out the real story’s main characters: New Mexicans
The terrible emptiness of “Oppenheimer” Searchlight New Mexico, by Alicia Inez Guzmán, August 8, 2023
Bernice Gutierrez was eight days old when a light 10,000 times hotter than the surface of the sun cracked open the predawn sky. No one in south-central New Mexico knew where it came from, or that the tiniest units of matter could be split to unleash such energy. Nor could they know that when the cloud that followed bloomed some 50,000 feet into the sky, it was surrounded for the briefest of seconds by a blue halo, the “glow of ionized air,” as the Manhattan Project physicist Otto Frisch described it.
The impacts of that unholy halo were all too apparent in the years after, when her great-grandfather died of stomach cancer. One person after another would receive their own wrenching cancer diagnoses — 41 people in her immediate family, spanning five generations. Every one of them had lived in the Tularosa Basin and within 50 miles of the Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb, nicknamed “Gadget,” was detonated on the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert.
Gutierrez was one of a group of downwinders, including Mary Martinez White and Tina Cordova, cofounder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, who watched the movie “Oppenheimer” together when it opened. In one scene after another, New Mexico’s landscapes unfurled — all painfully beautiful and all, it appeared, empty and unpeopled.
In New Mexico, we have lived in the blind spot of a national narrative for eight decades, repeated once again in this box office hit. Over its exhaustive three-hour run-time, it managed to avoid mentioning what we here have been sharing with loved ones at kitchen tables for decades: the violent evictions that took place on the Pajarito Plateau to build Los Alamos, the Pueblo and Hispanic men and women who did essential work for the Manhattan Project, or the thousands of New Mexicans affected to this day by the Trinity test.
To watch J. Robert Oppenheimer’s character instead create and destroy in the state’s big, beautiful and ostensibly barren lands is to deny the presence of so many people whose lives were indelibly transformed by the dawn of the atomic era and continue to be shaped by the juggernaut that is today’s nuclear industrial complex.
Oppenheimer, the son of a wealthy businessman, had come here as part of a cultural moment. He hiked, rode horses and camped. He stayed at a dude ranch in Pecos. He fell in love with and then changed New Mexico forever.
“I am responsible for ruining a beautiful place,” he would later confess.
The film, Gutierrez said, skipped blithely over the ruin. “They leave out the fact that in those isolated areas lived ranchers whose lands they took away and who were never compensated for it.”
The blast was so hot it liquified sand and pieces of the bomb into hunks of green glass. Lead-lined tanks were dispatched to take soil samples at ground zero as fallout cascaded across 46 states. Ash fell from the sky like snow for days afterward, contaminating cisterns, acequias, crops, livestock, clothing and people. At the time of the detonation, 13,000 people lived within a 50-mile radius.
‘Love-struck’ with the beauty
Oppenheimer initially arrived in New Mexico among a wave of smitten travelers. Artists, writers, dancers, anthropologists, museum boosters, health seekers and at least one psychoanalyst (Carl Jung), all had come as well-to-do tourists in search of the ineffable — landscapes, light, exotic cultures, “a patch of America that didn’t feel American,” in the words of writer Rachel Syme.
Long before he became the father of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer was “love-struck” with the stark beauty of New Mexico, as Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin wrote in “American Prometheus,” the biography upon which the movie is based. He would later lease and then buy a home in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains with his brother, Frank. Like so many others, he’d been mesmerized by the West.
New Mexico and the Southwest had long been lodged in America’s psyche. Landscape painting and photography pictured this new and alien frontier to incoming settlers and tourists as early as 1848, the year the United States annexed the region from Mexico. The art forms ended up serving the nation’s gospel, Manifest Destiny, by portraying “uninhabited” landscapes open to settlement. At the same time, U.S. forces brutally removed Indigenous peoples and others of mixed descent from their ancestral lands.
That aesthetic was at work in “Oppenheimer,” a movie that not only played up the romance of the landscape but also made it appear that the atomic bomb test only affected an elite group of scientists watching raptly in cars and bunkers.
“That’s the thing about the white supremacist imagination, right? They create alternate realities for our lives and communities and we have to live with the consequences,” said Mia Montoya Hammersley, an environmental attorney and member of the Piro-Manso-Tiwa tribe whose ancestry includes the earliest stewards of the Tularosa Basin, where the first bomb was detonated.
“This narrative that New Mexico is this empty barren place, people still really buy into that and believe it.”………………………………………………………………………………………………
There is nothing to suggest during any of that storytelling that New Mexico was essentially poisoned, its residents never warned, evacuated or educated about the health hazards of the July 16, 1945 Trinity test.
“It was,” as artist Medina put it, “a great act of desecration.”
Some geologists propose that this moment marks the start of a new epoch of geologic time, the Anthropocene. In New Mexico, it marks a new epoch of our own — when we became a nuclear colony. We are the only “cradle-to-grave” state in the nation, home to uranium mining, nuclear weapon manufacturing and waste storage. Two of the nation’s three weapons labs — Los Alamos and Sandia — are located here, and some 2,500 warheads are buried in an underground munitions complex spitting distance from the Albuquerque Sunport.
Los Alamos National Laboratory is currently undergoing a multi-billion-dollar expansion to create plutonium pits on an industrial scale — the “new Manhattan Project,” as Ted Wyka, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s field office manager, recently said in an aside before a media tour. Wyka told me he imagined himself in the role of Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project; LANL’s current director Thomas Mason was his Oppenheimer, he said.
The film gestures obliquely toward a future world irrevocably changed by the spectacle of nuclear military might. That future — our present — is now a global arms race. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
in the film, there are only two references to Indigenous peoples. In the first, Oppenheimer is selecting the Pajarito Plateau for the Manhattan Project. The second arrives after the U.S. decimates Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A scene in the oval office shows a crass Harry Truman asking Oppenheimer what to do with the site now that the bombs have been dropped.
Oppenheimer’s response? “Give it back to the Indians.”
Instead, the nuclear arms race was born……………………………………………………………………………………………………………
What remains is a persistent belief that the creation of atomic weapons ended World War II and made for “one of the greatest scientific achievements of all time,” as a plaque near the Santa Fe Plaza reads…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Gutierrez, White and Cordova, all three on the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium’s steering committee, left the film no less resolved. Days after seeing the movie, Gutierrez was back at work, researching all the infants that died the summer of the Trinity test. Cordova was busy writing about the movie and pushing for compensation for New Mexico’s downwinders, her mission for the past 18 years. And White had helped organize a photography exhibition in Las Cruces on the legacy of Trinity from a local perspective.
The movie’s over, but the battle goes on.
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