Warning: this article contains spoilers, and references to suicide
I resisted going to see Chris Nolan’s latest film, ‘Oppenheimer’ because I’m a woman and women tend not to go to Chris Nolan films to feel seen. But I don’t always need to feel seen to enjoy a movie.
When you watch a Chris Nolan film, you enter a contract with the filmmaker — which is that you expect to be entertained, and that the entertainment will be largely driven by watching unreasonably attractive men do unreasonably cool things.
What bothers me about enjoying really cool films made by male directors is when they frame women in a way that feels unnecessary — in the case of ‘Oppenheimer’ — the exposure of Florence Pugh’s boobs.
Pugh plays Oppenheimer’s mistress Jean Tatlock — the only other woman who gets any substantial speaking part beside’s Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, played by Emily Blunt.
Audiences are given two scenes in which we see Pugh’s boobs — the first when she is on top of Oppenheimer in a love scene — the second, post-coital when the lovers are sitting on separate chairs across from each other, discussing the state of their affair.
Pugh’s boobs felt unnecessarily gratuitous in the same way that Gwyneth Paltrow’s head didn’t need to end up in a box at the end of David Fincher’s 1995 classic ‘Seven’. ‘Seven’ would still have been an excellent film without audiences being subjected to the ONLY WOMAN CHARACTER’s decapitation.
In the same way, we didn’t really need to see Pugh’s boobs “to understand their relationship and to really see inside it and understand what made it tick” — as Nolan has said about Oppenheimer’s affair with Tatlock.
The famed director said he wanted to do his first ever sex scene “…without being coy or allusive about it.”
He wanted “to try to be intimate, to try and be in there with [Oppenheimer] and fully understand the relationship that was so important to him.” Couldn’t he have achieved all that just as successfully without showing Pugh’s boobs?
Obviously, I have no problem with female nudity (bring on the boobs) — but if Pugh is being asked to show her boobs, why can’t audiences be allowed to see something equally as revealing or explicit or vulnerable from Cillian Murphy?
I asked a male friend this, and he replied — “But a penis is a genitalia and it’s not the same as boobs.” What is the male equivalent of boobs? Butt? Could Nolan have asked Murphy to show the world his buns? Why didn’t he?
I asked a female friend and she said, “I’d rather see Pugh’s boobs than Murphy’s penis.” She told me that at the end of the day, cinema is about visual beauty, and the female body is just more aesthetically pleasing to the eye than the male body.
Of course, the history of nudity in Hollywood has always been about the exploitation of women’s bodies. Hollywood’s central capital comes from giving audiences pleasure — unfortunately, in our patriarchal world, that pleasure derives from “men looking at women,” as John Berger once said — “Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.”
Here, I am reminded of David Fincher’s famous adage: “I think people are perverts. I’ve maintained that. That’s been the foundation of my career.”
For days after I saw ‘Oppenheimer’, I felt very self conscious about my boobs and I’m usually never conscious about it.
I get it — Nolan’s films are great. They exemplify male genius. I can accept those terms when I buy a ticket to his films. I don’t care if you don’t have great female characters in the same way that I’m not bothered if foie gras isn’t served at a Chinese restaurant.
But I do start to care when you use women in a way that feels bias. If a woman is asked to expose her breasts, please give us something as exposing and vulnerable from the man. I didn’t feel that any part of Murphy was exposed in quite the same level of intimacy.
It felt like Pugh was asked to put more on the line — giving her lover (and audiences) everything. And she ends up killing herself too. Her depression is only given one line by Murphy in the film: “She was undergoing psychiatric treatment, she was extremely unhappy.”
In real life, Tatlock left a suicide note where she described herself as “a paralysed soul from a fighting world.”
In a three hour-long movie, there was no room for even a tiny sliver of agency or power from this respected physician and psychiatrist, a woman who attended America’s top medical schools.
She is presented as the cold, cruel, emotionally void lover throwing away the flowers that Oppenheimer presents her at each rendezvous, while he is presented as a romantic. She addresses him in the film: “You drop in and out of my life and you don’t have to tell me why, and that’s power.”
During an emotional scene together, he says to her: “We both know I’m not what you want.” Doesn’t it irritate you when a man tells a woman what he thinks she wants?
In all the scenes they have together, she feels like the one with less power — yet in real life, Oppenheimer had asked for her hand in marriage several times. Why wasn’t that shown in the movie? Maybe the producers thought male audiences wouldn’t be able to deal with seeing their hero rejected.
In the movie’s most “controversial” scene (their first sex scene together) she is merely a slate where the male hero gets to utter the film’s most powerful and memorable line.
Pugh stops in the middle of their love making, gets off her lover, moves to the bookshelf and picks up the Bhagwad Gita — one of the most sacred text of Hindu scripture. She returns to the bed with a page opened, and asks her lover to read it in Sanskrit, where he utters his most famous line: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Wow, Oppenheimer is so smart!
Also interesting to note that the male backlash to ‘Barbie‘ has been huge, while there’s hardly been any female backlash to Oppenheimer.
This simply indicates our acceptance of Hollywood’s dominance of male stories. We don’t bat an eyelid when a movie centres a guy (because that’s as unremarkable as air) but when a movie centres a woman (‘Barbie’, ‘Promising Young Woman‘) — the backlash is huge. Do you need clearer evidence of movie’s misogyny?