Let’s get this out of the way first — like many people, I was super pumped about Barbenheimer opening weekend and bought my tix for both movies in advance. My preferred order was Oppenheimer on Sunday, then finish up with Barbie on Tuesday (cheaper this way and ends on a light pink note rather than a plutonium-tinged one).
But after seeing it and being thoroughly gutted and literally shook (I made sure to get a showing in XD, so the sound effects were very palpable), I now regret my chosen order. Knowing what I know now, I should have done it in the opposite order (Barbie first, THEN Oppy). Because the closing credits weren’t even rolling yet when I thought to myself,
I am watching the greatest movie ever made.
It was perfect in every way — the casting, performances, direction, script, narrative structure, subject matter, cinematography, editing, and on and on. There’s nothing that could have been changed to make it better. Well, I can think of only one — I wanted it to be even longer!! FOUR HOURS NOT THREE!! When they come out with the director’s cut Blu-Ray with extra scenes and mini featurettes, I will buy that sucker on Amazon immediately. Along with an actual Blu-Ray player.
Florence Pugh for me was the heart of the movie. There are many articles out there about how Cillian Murphy was singing her praises and about the backstory of her character. So, I shan’t go into any of that. Here’s what I will get into — I have a bit of personal experience with what her character goes through. So strap in, and put on your welder’s goggles for this one!
How I relate to Jean Tatlock [Warning: this content may not be suitable for readers under the age of 13]
So she met Oppenheimer at a party and then there are like 3 nude scenes Florence had to do after that with Cillian. At first glance, well yeah a lot of people can relate to meeting someone at some kind of social gathering and then hooking up sometime afterwards.
Well, I am here today to confess I have a particular affinity with all of this. I’ll summarize the various angles below, then get into a bit more detail on each one:
The Communist Party angle
Oppenheimer being a physicist
Who worked at Caltech
Who is actually not that good at math
Hot physicist nookie is a thing
My first job as a newly minted college grad was working as a research associate for what today we might call a boutique “quant shop” in the “fintech" industry. It was a couple blocks down the street from Caltech, which until I watched the movie, I didn’t know Oppenheimer was a visiting professor there.
While I was an employee at this investment firm, I befriended this summer worker who was a Caltech graduate (as several of my coworkers were also — as you can imagine I was the dumbest one in the whole joint with my lack of MIT or Ivy League credentials). It turned out we had the same birthday! So even after that summer, and after I was let go in a mass layoff (about a fifth of the company), I still through this friend managed to get an invite to one of these Caltech pocket protector parties in one of the dorms.
The Communist angle
The party had a very interesting, uncommon theme that no other party I had ever attended before or hence ever had. Many Caltech students were Eastern European, so at the party you had Russians, Romanians, Hungarians, Czechs, etc. Thus, the decor of the party tended heavily towards iconography such as sickles, Lenin banners, and pamphlets written in Cyrillic rather than the Western alphabet.
Anyway, it was there that I met this grad student in astrophysics. We were playing one of the fun party games that was on the wall. It was basically “Name that fascist dictator just from this photo and no other context clues!”
He was absolutely gobsmacked that I correctly identified Nicolae Ceaușescu and Pol Pot.
Honestly, I don’t know how I knew that stuff, but unlike most normal guys, he seemed to be turned on rather than terrified; and we eventually wound up dating for over 1.5 years. Fast forward to today, and I’m happily married to another glasses-wearing nerd well-versed in physics who got (one of) his (two) master's from a top STEM school in France. (But not the Sorbonne like my girl Marie Curie did. My husband is smart, but not double Nobel-prizewinning smart like MC.)
I identify with Oppenheimer and Einstein needing other people to do the math for us
In the movie, there is a scene where Oppy and Albert are discussing how they’re bad at math. And then another scene where J Robert was saying integrals suck or something like that. He was being very salty about forgetting all his advanced calculus training, and this is why he had to assemble an international brain trust comprising the likes of Enrico Fermi and Werner Heisenberg to do all that lowly individual contributor grunt work.
“Hey, can someone tell Dick Feynman to stop playing the bongos and start doing those Monte Carlo simulations already? I’m sort of busy here doing real science with my quantum, not Newtonian physics. Cheers!”
When I first met my husband, I wanted to bust out all my math skillz so that he would like me and we could you know, generate some kilojoules together if you catch my drift. And he actually wrote down an integral and wanted me to solve it. Dammit!
I struggled. I couldn’t remember how to integrate this thing. Natural logs and Euler’s constant always trip me up. But in the end, we still wound up collaborating on a demonstration that Mass times Acceleration does indeed equal a whole lotta Force. I’m telling you — physicists are so good at thermodynamics, you gotta have at least one in your career if possible. You know that website I F*ing Love Science? It’s no joke!
This article originally appeared on Medium.
I got an A in Advanced Calculus, but can’t remember a thing. Being out of college over 20 years, do I get any slack?😊🤣 Great piece as usual, Marmi!
Cute! I married one who I met when both of us were engineers in undergrad. We still crack nerdy jokes and love to laugh at how much we've now forgotten... the love - and mutual admiration - remains.
PS> Oppenheimer was fabulous, like all Nolan stuff. Won't bother with Barbie.