Barely twenty-three minutes into Christopher Nolan‘s Oppenheimer, stars Florence Pugh and Cillian Murphy find themselves in the throes of ecstasy. Murphy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer has just met Pugh’s Jean Tatlock at a Communist party mixer and the two go from debating politics over drinks to a hot, sweaty hookup that crescendoes as Oppenheimer translates Sanskrit for Tatlock. We learn that the mismatched intellectuals keep their steamy affair going after Oppenheimer weds wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) and starts work on developing the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. Tatlock’s politics — and access to Oppenheimer’s most secret, intimate self — puts her in danger. Oppenheimer, now streaming on Peacock, leaves it purposely ambiguous if the mentally ill Tatlock died by suicide or was, as some theorize, killed to protect state secrets.
In most of Tatlock and Oppenheimer’s scenes together, they are either having sex or completely nude. At one point, Kitty finds herself haunted by the vision of a naked Tatlock grinding on her husband as he confirms details of the extramarital affair during a private security hearing. Critics of the film have called the nudity not necessary, some nations went so far as to cover Pugh’s naked body in a CGI dress, and a woman went viral last summer for complaining the sequences triggered “betrayal trauma” for her husband.
The outsized reaction to Florence Pugh’s pert nipples popping up in a film about the creation of the atomic bomb and its moral fallout is sort of, I suppose, to be expected. We live in a culture dominated by prudes, more ashamed of their bodies’ natural urges than the fact that our nation once ended a war by dropping hellfire on two cities teeming with civilians. But the Oppenheimer Florence Pugh sex scenes are incredibly integral to the film’s plot. They reveal a tender, human side of a man remembered as a modern Prometheus, and illustrate the intimate, human fallout of Oppenheimer’s mistakes.
Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan’s three-hour-long magnum opus about the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the architect of the nuclear age. The film flits between timelines, dramatizing the physicist’s life through his own words to a kangaroo court, and showing us the rise and fall of Oppenheimer’s greatest nemesis, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.). Jean Tatlock has only a small part to play in this opus, but it’s pivotal for our understanding of Oppenheimer’s heart and soul.
During the couple’s first hookup, Tatlock halts mid-hump to examine the scientist’s bookshelf. It quickly becomes clear that the two aren’t just physically attracted to each other, but intellectually. He tells Jean, a psychiatrist, that he himself studied up on her field because he tried to poison his tutor at Cambridge. His vulnerable admission opens the door for Jean to succinctly diagnose his troubles: “You just needed to get laid.” She goes on to tell Oppenheimer that he’s convinced everyone he’s more complicated than he really is.
“We’re all simple souls, I guess,” Oppenheimer says.
“I’m not,” Tatlock disagrees before making him read the iconic line, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” while they have sex.
The sex is important in this scene because it translates for the audience that although Oppenheimer might be remembered as a great, genius man — so much so that he has a three-hour Christopher Nolan film devoted to him — he was just a man. He, like many other men, just needed to get laid. The scene demystifies Oppenheimer while also establishing a key point of stress in his ongoing affair with Tatlock: he just needed to get laid, but she, being more “complicated,” demanded more of the relationship.
We later learn that while in the throes of his dizzying work overseeing the Los Alamos Project, Oppenheimer visited Jean Tatlock in a San Francisco hotel. As he carefully tries to defend meeting with a known communist at this time, we cut between his literally stripped down, post-coital conversation with Tatlock and his wife Kitty’s horror imagining them together, again, in the middle of the interrogation room. It’s a complex bit of filmmaking that weaves together the end of Oppenheimer’s affair with Tatlock, her subsequent death, Kitty’s own pain, and the government’s ruthlessness.
So why did Nolan need the nudity? To communicate disparate levels of intimacy. Note that as Oppenheimer tactfully evades Jean’s questions about his work, his legs are crossed, covering himself up, while she — seeking total emotional intimacy — is completely open in her nudity. Furthermore Kitty’s unsettling vision is supposed to reveal not just her emotional state, but how transgressive this line of questioning is for Oppenheimer. His most personal passions are being laid bare in the name of national security.
The question, perhaps, shouldn’t be were Florence Pugh’s Oppenheimer nude scenes necessary, but were those questions necessary? Was one woman’s life, love, and dignity worth destroying on the off chance she could have been a spy?
Of course, the real outrage drawn from Oppenheimer shouldn’t have anything to do with the man’s personal life at all. Bodies are bodies, sex is sex, and J. Robert Oppenheimer might have reluctantly set humanity up for a world-killing nuclear apocalypse. Nolan never loses sight of this reality. Indeed, much of the film is spent on Oppenheimer’s own horror at his creation.
Oppenheimer‘s audience should be more troubled by bombs than boobs.