No, we don't need to show victims of war

"Oppenheimer" is not racist for omitting Japanese actors

As the Oppenheimer discourse continues, an increasing number of people are arguing that the movie is yet another example of Hollywood centering whiteness while neglecting to depict Japanese victims of the bomb. In other words, the film is racist.

One problem with this argument, of course, is the fact that Oppenheimer himself was Jewish. So was Lewis Strauss, Albert Einstein, Isidor Isaac Rabi, Hans Bethe, Robert Serber, Richard Feynman, Lilli Hornig and Leo Szilard. All featured in the film.

Also, Jesse Ernest Wilkins Jr. was Black.

The counterargument here might be to say, like Latino identity, Jewish identity runs the spectrum of racial categories. There are Ashkenazim, Sephardim and Mizrahim. There are white Jews and Black Jews and even Japanese Jews such as the journalist Karl Taro Greenfeld.

But the movie is set during World War II at a time when Jews were not only not considered white but were being exterminated for not being white. Race is a social construct and we cannot superimpose our current construction of it onto earlier constructions. That would be like saying that the current meaning of the word “extra,” or overly dramatic, can be superimposed on early stages of its etymology. But you cannot read the word “extra” that way in anything Waring Cuney ever wrote.

This leaves the question of whether it is ever okay to make a movie about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki without depicting the victims.

First of all, I think it’s a disgrace that such a movie has never been made. To my knowledge, Hollywood has never made a single major film about the bombing of Japan that centers the victims. It’s despicable that we could nuke a nation twice and not even be bothered to include the event in our cinematic memory.

This is maybe even more disturbing when you consider studios would probably make five movies doing exactly that, plus a prequel and a Netflix series, if there was enough public interest. In other words, we nuked a country twice and we barely even care.

There are movies that center the Japanese victims but of course these have all come out of Japan. If you’re interested in seeing one, here’s a quick list of my favorites.

There’s the 1950 film The Bells of Nagasaki, based on the book, an intimate retelling of the director’s experiences as a survivor of the Nagasaki bombing. There’s Barefoot Gen, the 1976 classic based on the manga series of the same name, about a young boy living in Hiroshima when the bomb dropped. The 1989 film Black Rain, based on the novel, tells the story of a family fleeing the apocalyptic ruin of their hometown. Finally, there’s the Akira Kurosawa classic Rhapsody in August, starring Richard Gere, which is mostly a quiet story about family, though it does include a hauntingly symbolic scene in which the grandmother marches through a storm gripping her snapped umbrella.

But as I said in my previous post, which was a review of Oppenheimer, the film is making a specific moral argument, using this historical event as a vehicle for examining contemporary issues, in the way Shakespeare used to do in order to avoid offending court personalities while commenting on their affairs. What happened to the Japanese victims of the bomb is irrelevant to the argument he is making.

But even if the movie wasn’t allegorical, even if the whole the point of the film was to retell the history of the bombing, it still wouldn’t need to depict the victims, nor would such an omission necessarily be heartless, racist or imperialist.

I admit, this particular kind of movie is very hard to do—one that focuses on the history for its own sake and tries to deal with an issue involving untold human suffering in a compassionate way yet without depicting the atrocities directly. And yet, there is something even more powerful about a film that can pull this off.

For one thing, a movie that doesn’t show the charred remains of human flesh or raped corpses of women in the streets of Nanjing is a movie parents can take their kids to see to introduce them to difficult subjects without literally traumatizing them.

Also, in order to accomplish such a feat without the easy gut punch of gory scenery, the movie would have to excel in masterful writing, directing and acting. But it can be done.

When I was a kid, I saw the 1961 black-and-white courtroom drama Judgment of Nuremberg. Being a courtroom drama, the film is full of dramatic speeches, lamentations and the odd soliloquy. It is a dark and meditative poem on the nature of evil and it communicates even more effectively the argument put forward in Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

Some of the scenes from this movie have stayed with me ever since.

The idea that a movie like Oppenheimer must depict the victims is almost like saying that a poem about the bombing must include photographs. I agree that if the point of the story is to tell important history, as opposed to use it as a metaphor in the way that I think Nolan does, then it must communicate what was done, and what was lost, and what was learned. But images are not always the most powerful way to do this.