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My Take | Modern physics and movie nudity, or how I passed my science week

  • ‘Oppenheimer’ the movie got on my nerves, so I reread a book by Werner Heisenberg to calm down

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Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer. Photo: Universal Pictures/TNS

I finally got to watch Oppenheimer on my go-to “free” movies site. It claims it’s all legal so who am I to question about copyright issues?

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It’s the second time I watched it and I still can’t decide if I like it or hate it. It certainly showed more skin than it needed, such as showing a naked Oppenheimer having sex. That’s way more than anyone needed to see or imagine. What is it about contemporary biopic movies that keep taking the clothes off real-life scientists who were usually known for the beauty of their minds?

There was Ammonite, about a little-known but important 19th-century palaeontologist called Mary Anning and her lifelong friendship with another woman. There was zero biographical evidence that the two were lovers. And yet, you have Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan having hot lesbian sex. Granted, that one I objected to less than seeing Cillian Murphy play Oppenheimer in the nude, however charismatic the Irish actor was.

There was also a brief self-indulgent self-parody by the director Christopher Nolan in Oppenheimer that the audience could easily miss, so it might be forgivable. In the scene, Oppenheimer took off his army uniform in exchange for his trademark wide-brim fedora hat, tie and tobacco pipe laid neatly before him. That was Bruce Wayne discovering his true self with the Batman suit hung before him in one of those previous Nolan blockbusters.

So, what’s my new takeaway after watching it a second time? Well, it brings back a memory in Hong Kong. When an old neighbour, a retired professor – his father-in-law was the first Chinese from the mainland to earn a PhD in physics in the United States – learned that I studied philosophy in college, he said, “Boy, your dad must have lots of money [to waste].” He didn’t actually say the last two words, but that was what he meant.

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