An Oppenheimer actor added one of the script’s most shocking lines
The actors had "tons of homework to do" to flesh out their real-life characters, Christopher Nolan said
Aux News Oppenheimer
While Oppenheimer deftly handles all of the the nuance and contradiction inherent in America’s foreign policy during World War II and The Cold War, Nolan’s biopic is clearly a deeply critical film overall. Still, in a script chock full of indictments, one singular, stunner of a line stands out above the rest. If you’ve already seen the film (as many, many people have), you probably know the one. If not, consider this your spoiler warning (and get yourself to a theater already).
The lines come in a scene where Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer is meeting with a group of government officials to decide where in Japan to drop the atomic bomb. The ensuing conversation already feels way too bros-palling-around for such a heavy decision, until U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson—played by James Remar—heightens that icky feeling to cataclysmic proportions. The U.S. shouldn’t destroy Kyoto because of its culture, but also because he and his wife honeymooned there, he says. Remar delivers the line with the same level of care he’d use to describe the weather, a chilling distillation of the film’s entire project in just one sentence. It’s not just his performance that makes the moment so good, however. According to Nolan, Remar actually added the line himself (via the New York Times).
Since Oppenheimer is so singularly focused on Oppie himself, Nolan encouraged actors to “com[e] to the table with research about what their real-life counterpart had been.” “They had tons of homework to do,” he joked.
This assignment paid off in Remar’s discovery that the real Stimson had indeed taken Kyoto off the list of potential targets due to he and his wife’s happy memories there.
“I had him crossing the city off the list because of its cultural significance, but I’m like, just add that,” Nolan said of the last-minute edit. “It’s a fantastically exciting moment where no one in the room knows how to react.” At least in this writer’s experience, no one in the theater did either.
104 Comments
That line legitimately made me sick to my stomach. People on social media saying that the movie didn’t do enough to condemn the people in charge of the Manhattan Project 100% didn’t watch the movie.
Except it’s not true.https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2023/07/24/henry-stimson-didnt-go-to-kyoto-on-his-honeymoon/
Uh… are you promoting your own blog? This is such a random source. This isn’t how to source things.
A). No, it’s not my blog, and B). Alex Wellerstein is an academic with a PhD, and a published author on the subject of the history of secrecy and nuclear weapons, and C). the blog itself is very well-sourced.
Having read the blog, it seems murkier than simply saying it’s untrue. They have no idea where he honeymooned and can’t actually rule out Kyoto, but can say for a fact that he visited Kyoto twice at other times on vacation (yes these were vacations that were ultimately useful to his career, but as someone in Foreign Relations you could say that about literally any trip he ever took – the visit to the Philippines with the Governor General seems to have been work, everything else just sounds like a good excuse to sightsee. Even the blog acknowledges that there are almost no diary entries on Kyoto, because he wasn’t there to take notes).
So instead of saying he and his wife honeymooned there, it could have said holidayed there. It’s a very mild change of context.
Eh, I suppose, but when people are making a big deal about the actor researching and adding a line, I’m not going to congratulate them on getting it “kinda right, but also not.”
After I told a friend I liked the movie and suggested he go see it, he questioned me harshly if they even addressed the morality of building the bomb. My answer was, “That was like the entire point of the movie.”
Right? Like*spoiler*…the last line of the movie is literally Oppenheimer saying “I think we’ve destroyed the world.” It doesn’t get much less ambiguous than that.
I think it could have gone farther. People are numb to giant explosions. Does the average person truly grasp the weight of all of this?
Tell your friend it addressed how the US felt after Japan bombed our naval base on Pearl Harbor in a surprise attack at 7 am on a Sunday morning. Destroying or damaging over 300 aircraft, 21 ships, and killing 2400 people, military and civilians. This number doesn’t include the 1100 people wounded. Describe the atrocities that happened at Bataan to Allied forceshttps://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/bataan-death-marchand on othershttps://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/hidden-horrors-japanese-war-crimes-world-war-iiLegend has it at one point a German ambassador was sent to Japan to tell Hirohito to “cool it”, with the torture, etc. Also tell your friend we told Emperor Hirohito that if he didn’t surrender and step down in accordance with the Potsdam Agreement, total annihilation would happen. Fuck around and find out.
As usual, a significant chunk of those people were doing so before it was even released.
Condemn, huh. Ok.
Like, the entire narrative framing device was the hearings for Strauss’s appointment, with the big dramatic reveal being that Oppenheimer had made it his life’s work after Manhattan to pursue arms treaties and prevent the development of the H-bomb out of guilt.
Which leaves out his enthusiasm for miniature tactical nuclear weapons (favored by the Army over the Air Force). Arguably consistent with his idea that nukes would prevent war by making war dangerous for armies (vs strategic fusion bombs threatening civilians), but probably more vulnerable to a Dr. Strangelove scenario than having nukes kept far from the frontlines.
I had at least two people (one who saw it and one who didn’t) criticize the movie for not focusing more on the consequences of the choice to drop the bombs on Japan. I had to point out that the focus of the movie is on Oppenheimer himself, yes, heavily centered around the Manhattan Project, but it’s not ABOUT the Manhattan Project. We see the areas around the decision to drop the bomb on Japan that centered around Oppenheimer, but he was not the one making the final decisions. He may bear some guilt for the Japanese death/casualty tolls from the bombs, but definitely no more so than Truman, his administration, and the military leaders who actually made the final decisions to drop the bombs and target Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The movie certainly doesn’t shy away from showing Oppenheimer’s doubts about dropping the bomb on Japan or his guilt over the consequences. In no way does this movie try to apologize for the use of two nuclear bombs against a country’s citizenry. If anything, I think one of the biggest messages from the movie is that old Dr. Malcolm line from Jurassic Park: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”There are better movies to watch if you want to see something that is focused on the horrible aftermath of those decisions, movies that are specifically about that.
The military leadership were all against the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Stimson was the civilian head of the War Department and he and Truman enacted the plan against their interests.Interestingly, I kind of roll my eyes at the excuse of, “We don’t talk about the consequences of what this guy did in terms of human cost because HE didn’t care about the consequences of what he did in terms of human cost.” It’s the same nonsense they gave for why none of Jordan Belfort’s victims of his financial schemes exist in his films.The real answer is, “We didn’t want to make a movie where you hate the main character for what he actually did, we want you to hate the system for creating a person who might have done something terrible in the abstract.”
That line jumped out at me, as well. Always nice when the actors bring something to their character that makes them feel more lived in, even for single scenes.
Even if it’s not true, which this wasn’t?
Yes, of course, even if it’s not true. What does truth have to do with movies?
Well, the author is praising the actor for improvising a line that came from character research. So either his research was inaccurate, or he just made something up, neither of which is impressive.
Yeah, but OP is making the point that it improves the characterization. Even if that characterization is false (and it seems to be all around, based on an article SoftSack posted above), it still adds considerably to the movie.
Gonna improve the characterization of Ghandi by improvising a line about biting the heads off small puppies.
Neither finding inaccurate research or making something up is impressive, but to the OP’s point, Remar’s contribution made his character, who only appears in a single scene, feel more lived in, which is nice.
In a biopic?
Even if it wasn’t exactly accurate, its inclusion contributes to the tone of the scene and film. Getting those details right is obviously preferred in a historical drama like this, but I already assume they stretch the truth in films of any type – even documentaries. What makes you say this is not true, though? I understand it could be a myth, but I’m wondering where you read this.
Nolan’s got a rep for being meticulous in the way he crafts his movies, but I’m glad he’s not so overbearing that he stops actor improvisation. Apparently the moment in ‘The Dark Knight’ where the Joker claps along to Gordon’s promotion was improvised by Heath Ledger, and Nolan was smart enough to tell the rest of the cast to run with it.
Oh, Chris Nolan, why do you fail at the most basic aspects of filmaking while insisting on showing your virtuosity? You are like the wankiest heavy metal guitar player that ever wanked out a solo to the detriment of the actual song.
???
exactly! I’ve been thinking this same thing. Amazing how a film can simultaneously be so technically adept and emotionally hollow, like a 3 hour long Joe Satriani track
Every time someone calls Nolan films “emotionally hollow” (and it’s been more than once), I have to fight the urge to get defensive, because I find his movies – er, most of them – to be highly emotional. In some cases, I wish he’d ease up on the emotion (he has a tendency to drift into melodrama, but I also have a predisposition to dislike melodrama).But also, like… is it me? Am I the one that’s wrong because I read emotions into his movies?
Prestiege and Interstellar are very emotional, at least. Memento, Inception, Tenet and the batman movies not so much. I need to see Dunkirk and I might be forgetting one.
His other two movies are Following and Insomnia. One is definitely experimental in form and the other is a remake of a procedural, so not the most emotionally engaging works. I thought Batman Begins and Inception are both very emotional; especially Inception, which I think successfully deconstructs why we feel emotions when we watch movies at all. It doesn’t matter whether they’re in a dream or not; all of it is fake. But damnit, when Fisher reconciles with his father in his subconscious vault, I still tear up. When Cobb passes through immigration, I feel relieved. For me, it’s probably his most emotional film he’s ever made.Dunkirk isn’t my favorite movie in any conceivable category, but it’s another example of many people criticizing it for being unemotional. The biggest reason I remember is because none of the characters are fleshed out. But in that case, I admired that instead of using typical war movie tropes and narrative structure, the movie is about the collective emotions of a group of people. Dunkirk tries to get you to care about everyone, not just one or a few main characters. To this day I don’t know if I believe it was successful, but I liked it.
Dunkirk is very emotionally resonant. Actually my favourite Nolan movie in that respect (not in general though). It’s just that the emotional core is not tied to one individual, and that the emotions in question are fear and anxiety, which apparently doesn’t register for many people as “emotional” in relation to movies. The quiet in the opening scene, the abandoned town, the foreboding pamphlets and suddenly that burst of gunfire echoing through the tight streets, fading into the distance… It’s frightening stuff. It’s also the movie where he really shows he can use audio with restraint, making the movie’s emotional core all the more effective. Which makes it all the weirder why something like Oppenheimer is so continuously loud.
I really need to see that one, I forget why I missed it in theaters.
“Memento, Inception, Tenet and the batman movies not so much.”
Memento isn’t emotional? Maybe watch it some time. Or shut up.
Maybe that was harsh but I just can’t connect with a lot of his work on an emotional level. In particular there was never a moment in Oppenheimer where I was able to just get lost in it, instead of being acutely aware I was watching a movie. His obsession with non-linear storytelling feels increasingly like a crutch, and in this particular story was wildly distracting/unnecessary to me. Like, man, just have some confidence in your actors and stop interrupting with all the jazz hands razzledazzle every 45 seconds.. It’s striking how much more this movie felt like a director playing with dolls than the literal Barbie movie didNot to mention all the unintelligible dialogue, which was more of a problem for me than ever this time. I’m a professional sound editor, who mostly works with dialogue, and I had no clue what they were even saying at some points. I mean.. maybe the sound system at the theater I went to had an issue, but given Nolan’s track record I doubt it
If it’s your genuine opinion, then I don’t think it’s harsh at all. I’ve seen multiple people online claim the same thing, to the point where it’s fair to say he has a reputation for making emotionally hollow movies. But I feel like that criticism in particular is so taken for granted that I rarely see even professional reviewers expand on it. And it’s so subjective that even when I feel the opposite – whether it’s Nolan’s work or anyone else’s – I have a hard time articulating why I didn’t think it wasn’t emotionally hollow. Either you feel it or you don’t and for whatever reason, more often than not, I do leave Nolan films feeling a lot.The sound thing is probably a huge culprit. I said this in another post but I have trouble understanding dialogue in almost everything scripted that I watch. It doesn’t excuse how Nolan mixes his sound; I’m just so used to not understanding what people said that I’ve been coping with it for a long time. People with better hearing working harder to understand what Nolan’s characters are saying are probably justifiably in feeling alienated.
I came out unsure whether the sound improved as the film went on, or if I was just gradually tuning in to it. The early RDJ scenes were a real struggle but after that I thought the sound was fine.
Your points on the dialogue speak to me. Do you have any clue on why in some of his films the dialogue is so difficult to hear? I felt the same way with Tenet. I couldn’t understand most of what was being said in that movie and in Oppenheimer there were moments where it was the same as well. It wasn’t the theater either as I was in one of those massive Dolby sound theaters. The sound was incredible, except for the dialogue in a lot of areas. Just curious if you know why his movies have those issues with dialogue. Is it intentional??
“I’m a professional sound editor, who mostly works with dialogue, and I had no clue what they were even saying at some points.”
It wasn’t difficult for this moron layman to understand. If you couldn’t get it then you have no business charging people for your work.
It’s not just you; I definitely get an emotional response from Nolan’s films. But I do see that a lot of his films are about emotionally stunted people, so the way they deal with things can seem cold or impersonal to some viewers.Take Emily Blunt’s role as Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty in this movie. She has deep wells of feeling – rage, jealousy, a sense of betrayal, dissatisfaction. But she’s also a very prickly person, who clearly doesn’t want to seem vulnerable, so she keeps a lot of it behind this icy facade. I can see a lot of people watching that and thinking there’s no passion in the central relationship.
Don’t go after Satch! haha.
I think that’s a little unfair on Satch. I guarantee you, however, you’re bang on the money and there IS a guitarist out there who fits the bill. I don’t know him, you don’t know, but I guarantee you he’s a guy who thinks that sweep-picking some soulless, weird-arse scale in 19:16 time on an eight-string is music’s peak.
This is a weird take for an article pointing out the collaborative nature of making movies.
Yngwe?
He’s defo a Malmsteen.
I too found this line a stand-out, wonderfully complex and haunting for the admission of having to choose the lives of some innocent people over other innocent people.
It was bookended by Truman’s (rightful) slapback at Oppenheimer when they met.
He was right to put Oppenheimer in his place but woefully short-sighted about the Soviets getting the bomb.
Right, which plays into the whole myopia of the government.
Raidin Wins!FATALITY
FINISH HIM!
(atmosphere ignites)
I actually first heard of this a few weeks ago listening to The Last Podcast on the Lefts 5 part series on the Manhattan Project and the dropping of the bombs. I highly recommend it as long as you are ok with your highly detailed and impeccably researched information side by side with the occasional dick joke. Doubly recommended if you want to know the aftermath of the bombings, its truly horrifying stuff.
occasional?
Too bad it’s bullshit.
https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2023/07/24/henry-stimson-didnt-go-to-kyoto-on-his-honeymoon/
Interesting. Makes me wonder where Remar got the info.
Appears to be journalists in the 21st century who started the myth.
Yeah, the article SoftSack linked to concludes that it probably started with a journalist in 2002 referring to a later Kyoto trip by Stimson and his wife as a “second honeymoon” just as an artistic fillip, and subsequent journalists copying the reference but dropping the “second” part.
“Hey honey, would you like to go to Japan? Ever since I bombed the living shit out of that country I’ve been wondering what it’s like.”
It’s worth noting that just like the internet commentariat, Actors can get their sources from “wherever”. If the cast had a cynical view of the people involved, a lie he heard somewhere could have sounded just as good as the truth.
As others have said, there were journalists who mentioned it before, so at least he didn’t just make it up.It does make me think, though, that as impressive as it sounds to have your actors do research, it might be more impressive to then have an expert fact-check said research. It’s sort of irritating to think that a random actor Googling stuff can have more sway over this kind of narrative than actual historians, but I guess that’s the world we live in.
What frustrates me so much about this is that most of the things I. The movie that seem unbelievable really are true, but this one is a steaming pile of bull excrement.What disappointed me is that we didn’t get the real line of the day after the test: “Now we are all sons of bitches.”
“but this one is a steaming pile of bull excrement.”
“Unconfirmed” is not “steaming” anything.
This is a good article, thanks.I always wonder how stuff like this generally taken by the audience. Like a lot of people, the line stood out for me, and I wondered if it was true. I filed it under “probably fiction, but maybe!” in my head and resolved to look it up after but forgot. I feel like most people see a movie like this, which is not in any way a documentary (Not that that would guarantee truth 100% either), and will casually conflate movie details with real details. Interesting that it was “true” in the sense that it came up in Remar’s research and wasn’t just made up whole cloth, but probably not actually true.
No problem!And yeah, with this line I remember feeling the way you and the article author did – it felt a little bit too on-the-nose to be true. But I’ve definitely made the kind of mistake you describe with other films before.
I’m kind of torn by it as well. There’s a part of me that really enjoys
a lot of historical dramas, as long as they’re believable. But there’s another part of me that hates how they
all flatten real events into these pat, ahistorical narratives, and kinda thinks that every historical drama should have the absolutely maximum fidelity to real-life, no matter how boring or alienating it makes the resulting product.In the case of this line, though, I do think there’s an additional harm that comes with skewing the facts, in that it makes the decision seem a lot more cynical and callous than it was (or might have been, IDK). Given Kyoto’s traditional historical and cultural importance, the decision not to nuke it makes sense to me, or at least I can see a strong argument for leaving it that goes beyond the ‘honeymoon’ argument.
But there’s another part of me that hates how they all flatten real events into these pat, ahistorical narratives, and kinda thinks that every historical drama should have the absolutely maximum fidelity to real-life, no matter how boring or alienating it makes the resulting product.I get that. It’s obvious to me that doing this would basically torpedo historical fiction; audiences are probably never going to want to see what amounts to a faithful historical reenactment in the numbers they’re going to want to see an “ahistorical narrative” like Oppenheimer. So if interest is lower, then budgets are lower, and it essentially dies as an art form. Note that I’m not necessarily saying that’s a bad thing overall. If we lived in a world where people enjoyed studying history instead of watching historical fiction, we might be a lot better off as a culture.
Even if we did go the “maximum fidelity” route, who decides what’s faithful? There’s still plenty of argument, even between expert scholars, about what the real history is for just about any historical topic or personage of any interest.
Even if we did go the “maximum fidelity” route, who decides what’s faithful? There’s still plenty of argument, even between expert scholars, about what the real history is for just about any historical topic or personage of any interest.For sure, it’s totally unworkable and would never happen, and would almost certainly have negative side effects. For the sake of discussion, I suppose my conception of it would be that you can still have some creative freedom, but it has to work within the bounds set by historical fact and not depict anything that 100% didn’t happen. Like, maybe you could use libel/defamation standards as the template for what you can and cannot depict and apply those to historical figures/situations
Even within those parameters, we could say: ‘Well, we can’t prove that Stimson didn’t mention a honeymoon in Kyoto, like, as a joke!’ And that’s before you get into all the postmodern grist of history-as-fiction/narration; plus all the permutations of historical drama, historical fiction, historical-set fictional drama-based-on-real-events etc.My guess is creators would just say ‘Based on a true story,’ and rename all the people/places/events in the story as an excuse to do whatever. Although maybe that would be a good thing? At least then it would confuse things enough so that people wouldn’t be able to assume that what they saw in the movie was fact.
Yeah, as you say, that would all be effectively impossible to enforce. But you and I think along the same lines. 🙂
The current state of things would be a lot easier to swallow if the public at large was more interested in history. Like, imagine a world where virtually everyone reads history on a regular basis. Maybe not everyone is devouring thousand-page LBJ biographies every week, or whatever, but the average person reads at least a few history books a year, or follows history blogs/podcasts/etc. Historical fiction would probably be a lot less popular, and when it was made, people would already know that it’s not accurately representing things.For my part, whenever I absorb any historical fiction (usually, let’s face it, TV shows and movies), I always make an effort to read about the real history afterward, so that I’m getting an immediate corrective to whatever I just saw. It’s not perfect, of course, but even learning about a particular historical topic (and how history as a discipline works) can give a viewer a more skeptical eye toward the clearly ahistorical stuff in fiction. I’ve been reading Bret Devereaux’s blog for the past couple of years, and prior to that, I wouldn’t have blinked an eye at the battle sequences in the trailer for the upcoming Napoleon movie. But because I have, I saw even just glimpses of a few battle scenes and I was immediately like “that’s not how those battles worked!”
Agreed! To be clear, I’m not a history buff so I won’t know as much about this stuff as you do, but I have also gotten into the habit of reading up on historical dramas after I’ve watched them to fact-check stuff (or sometimes because I’m arguing with someone on here, admittedly). Not necessarily historical dramas either; but any movie based on a real-life situations. In some ways I guess you could spin that as a good thing – I’ve learned a fair bit about stuff I didn’t/wouldn’t know about otherwise, and you could say that’s indirectly because of these movies. But I doubt most audiences are doing the same.
And yeah, I think it has made me better at spotting when a particular
moment is real vs when it’s Hollywood doing its thing – a few years ago I
might’ve bought the ‘honeymoon in Kyoto’ line, but now I’m wary of that
kind of simplification. Also, I watched Sully recently, and while I did actually enjoy it there was never any doubt in my mind that all the NTSB/hearing stuff was complete bullshit.
I think what bothers me about situations like these isn’t so much people’s ignorance of history, science, current events etc but the assumption of knowledge. A phrase I learned recently is ‘epistemic modesty,’ and this seems to be a quality that very few people have – most people don’t really consider things like how they know if their information is true or not, and seem to process so much of what they hear as automatically true – whether it’s from a film, TV show, AV Club article etc. But it’s definitely a quality that society could use more of.
A phrase I learned recently is ‘epistemic modesty,’Are you me from another dimension?! The version I recently learned was “epistemic humility,” but I imagine they amount to the same thing.And yeah, people with very little knowledge acting firm in their beliefs is… well, a pretty constant element of the human condition. There’s not much we can do about it except advocate for education (and epistemic humodestility).
Haha could be… I think ‘humility’ is the generally accepted expression; but I heard it first as ‘modesty’ and stuck with it.And true. I think we can all fall victim to it sometimes; I’m certainly not perfect in that regard. But some are definitely worse than others.
Thank you for posting this; I did sooner but I’m still in the grays after all these years. 🤬
-1, strawmanThe claim with respect to the movie isn’t that Stimson honeymooned in Kyoto, it’s that Stimson said he took Kyoto off the target list because he honeymooned there. That article includes no statement at all about what Stimson said about taking Kyoto off the list, neither to substantiate nor to refute what the movie says was his stated reason.It would be a bullshit reason if that was his stated reason, but that does not mean it was not his stated reason. Plenty of stated reasons are bullshit.
Are you following me or something?
Also… -10 for not understanding what a strawman is or what bullshit is.Stimson never honeymooned in Kyoto, and there is no evidence that he ever said he did. There is certainly no reason that think that he ever stated it as his reason. The article appears to establishes the provenance of this myth as coming from a twist of language used in a 2000s article about Stimson. So why would he have said that?
The filmmakers believed a myth about Stimson and put words in his mouth based on that myth. Even if they somehow got lucky and it turns out Stimson actually did say that (for God knows what reason), they couldn’t have known that. Hence, bullshit.
“ not understanding what a strawman is”The article refutes a claim that the movie doesn’t make. That’s the very definition of a strawman argument.“So why would he have said that?”He’s a politician who might want a plausible-sounding-in-the-moment stated reason to cover for his actual reason.“The filmmakers believed a myth about Stimson and put words in his mouth based on that myth.”Yes, the movie does make the claim that Stimson said that. And the article makes no effort whatsoever to find out what Stimson said was his reason or what Stimson’s actual reason was if it differed from what he said.
I have never seen a more deliberately obtuse take on this site before.
The article refutes a claim that the movie doesn’t make. That’s the very definition of a strawman argument.The article is entitled: ‘Henry Stimson didn’t go to Kyoto on his honeymoon.’ I am calling the line bullshit.
Let’s say that one day, I write in a comment (this one, in fact): ‘radarskiy fucks goats.’ This is then uncritically accepted as fact by multiple journalists.Then, someone making a movie featuring you as a character reads one of those journalists’ articles, thinks that it’s a true fact about you (due to lack of proper research) and has your character say: ‘I love fucking goats!’ in such a way that heavily implies it’s really true.
Then someone publishes an article saying: ‘Actually, there’s no proof that radarskiy ever fucked a goat, and the idea that he did was completely made up.’By your logic, that line in the movie would still be perfectly valid, because even though it’s obvious that you never actually fucked a goat we can’t prove that you never said you did at one point in your life. And even though this line in the movie propagates a myth about your life, it’s not bullshit because it’s theoretically possible that you said the line and theoretically possible that you had some random, unknown, unattested motivation for doing so.Something isn’t not bullshit just because you can’t prove it didn’t happen. Literally everyone else on this thread gets that. Ask yourself why it is that you don’t.
And the article makes no effort whatsoever to find out what Stimson said was his reason or what Stimson’s actual reason was if it differed from what he said.Read the footnotes.
Sorry to tell you that “more probably than not a myth” isn’t exactly the damning evidence you think it is.
“Probably didn’t happen” isn’t the same as “that story is bullshit”.
“Shocking” might be just a tad hyperbolic. It was funny, which is weird to say about anything in the ceaselessly glum films of one Chris Nolan.
Except that wasn’t true. At all.
Alex Wallerstein has done the most to debunk the myth… but he still says there’s a grain of truth in that the idiosyncratic preferences of one individual spared Kyoto (not just from nukes, but the earlier firebombing as well). Those preferences just don’t derive from a mythical honeymoon.
The only part that isn’t true is the word “honeymoon.” Henry Stimson visited Kyoto before the War, that’s been printed in books since at least the 1980’s. And he did visit it after the war, which he referred to as a “second honeymoon.” So no, the line is not historically accurate, but to say it’s not true “at all” implies a level of deceit that doesn’t really apply here.
“Except that wasn’t true. At all.”
Except it might be. Lack of evidence is not evidence.
“The Warriors actor added shocking line” ftfy
Apparently Stimson took Kyoto off the list several times and nobody is quite sure why…what we have here is a fictionalized account where a fantastic and underrated actor created one of the best moments in the film. It might not turn out to have been fair to Stimson but historical figures have suffered worse fictional slights (and if you decided to drop an A-Bomb on 2 civilian cities you can fucking take it maybe?) for example all of the lies about LBJ regarding the Voting Rights Act in Selma.
Also, they had a lot of homework to do because the script was underwritten and overwritten at the same time.
What was the controversy over LBJ in Selma? It’s been long enough I’ve forgotten now.
It wasn’t enough that LBJ was aware of the FBI surveilling MLK (which he was) they had to make LBJ totally evil and completely opposed to the Voting Rights Act…when in reality he fought tooth and nail about it, which is much of the subject of most works about LBJ because it’s the truth. The VRA was effectively gutted only a little before the movie came out and the film’s end cards made no mention of it…it just seemed like the director didn’t really know the history.
LBJ was a complicated historical figure. But he’s very easy to villainize for narrative expediency.
True, but not giving credit where credit is due and making somebody 100% opposed to their signature accomplishment they fought for seems like an easy line to draw. This is like if somebody made Joe Biden out as against the Violence Against Women act, or made Bernie out as against men with patchy beards who smell like a grosser stickier version of patchouli and ghost after two dates
It’s correct that others have noted that the Stimson honeymoon angle is not supported by the historical record, but Stimson DID visit Kyoto on several occasions in the 1920s, and I think the scene at its heart, if not factually correct, captures a more important truth about the decision of which city to bomb. Kyoto was spared for a number of reasons, but chief among them seems to be aesthetic in nature, being deemed of important cultural value, a beautiful place, that Stimson had personally experienced. The scene conveys how the fates of tens of thousands were sealed by an essentially capricious and subjective method.
Well said.
Thing is – forget the “spared” comment –
Make the claim that Kyoto was a better military target than Hiroshima (Southern Command) or Nagasaki (Ordinance).What worries me is I believe we’re starting to witness modern day mythmaking about the event, in a way that’s less serious and far less consequential than the people of the day would have actually taken it.
I saw an Oppie documentary that discussed this – the naval bombing planners had Hiroshima removed from the target list of conventional munitions so that the impact (both political and literal) of the bomb would be more easily measured by both the US and Japan.When the scientists reviewed the pictures of the bombing victims, they were physically ill.
It captures the vibe of Stimson’s interest. There was a pretty big list of targets and Stimson kept pushing Kyoto off the list even though his survey team kept putting it back on.Thing is, the two targets they eventually went with, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, weren’t military targets at all.Hiroshima was a big population that hadn’t seen many bombing raids because it was primarily a huge civilian center with no military targets. They needed a demonstration of destructive power so they picked a place with a ton of buildings to knock over where educated Japanese people were close enough to survey the damage.Nagasaki was chosen because the weather over their previous target was foggy and Stimson wanted both bombs to be used no matter what.When Truman saw the reports of the destruction Hiroshima did, he was apparently unnerved by the unanticipated scale. But he had also washed his hands of military planning after August 3rd when he personally overrode his military leadership to go ahead with it, so everything was basically on autopilot with regard to the program with the military checking in with him once in a while to update him.
The Bomb sucks, sure, but Allied firebombing was way worse. Guess it can be two things, etc.
Most Americans don’t know that more Japanese were killed in firebombings. They believe that dropping the atomic bombs was a necessary evil because more would have died in an invasion. I wish Nolan had pushed back on that myth. It’s just repeated without any deeper interrogation. I think they do a good job of demonstrating that the Americans think using the weapons will deter the Soviets. But also ignores the fact that the Soviets had declared war on Japan and invaded Japan between Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The invasion was planned well in advance, the Soviets didn’t know much about the US atomic program at the time. The US was in a hurry to end the war on its terms, rather than negotiating with Japan (and the USSR), who had resolved to surrender, just not without conditions.
Yeah. I think the American civilian and military leadership at the time sincerely believed Operation Downfall would cost a lot of Allied casualties, and we don’t know when (not if) the Japanese would have folded without usage of the bombs. I guess I don’t believe the decision to drop the bombs were largely based on realpolitik; I think the Americans truly wanted to force a surrender with minimal Allied casualties first and foremost. The brutal island hopping campaign was fresh in their minds. Even with the war now safely in the past, the atomic bombings are still a grey area. Were they necessary to win the war? No, but we really don’t know if the available alternatives would have been better or worse (for both sides).
My point is they did have enough information as to the leanings of Japanese leadership regarding surrender. https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japan-stalin-did/ This is just one resource, but I’m sure there are more available to dig into this topic, if you’re curious.
When I was younger & first learned about Hiroshima & Nagasaki, I remember getting angry over how many noncombatants died in the blast, how many people/animals indirectly got sick because of the radiation.
My history teachers all repeatedly insisted the bomb was literally the only way the war would have ended, that Japan would still be trying to attack us today had we not used nuclear weapons. Friends who were history buffs tried to argue it was American retribution for the “comfort women” in Korea (…which I’m not even sure if we knew about at the time).
Remar has always been a super underrated actor. There’s a scene in Hellraiser: Inferno where he has to deliver a bunch of super dry exposition, and he makes it riveting.
Whenever I see James Remar in something I remember that Roger Ebert, in reviewing the “Psycho” remake, said that the filmmakers had done something to Remar’s voice in post to make it unnaturally deep and that the effect was weird and distracting. Ebert had to post a correction after being informed that no, that’s just what James Remar sounds like! It is a very distinctive speaking voice and he uses it well. He has a lot of presence, too.
“Did I do thhhhhhhhhhhat?”
For me, the most hard hitting line in Oppenheimer is “Shut the fuck up, Einstein.”
I thought it seemed a little off when Murphy said “It’s Oppen-time-er.” before pushing the button.But glad to know the story behind it.