J. Robert Oppenheimer lit up more cigarettes than nuclear bombs. Believe it or not!

It’s 1986. DC Comics has begun publishing Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen in monthly installments. It is one of several contemporaneous works that change the medium, for better or worse. Its most powerful character is Jonathan Osterman, a nuclear physicist turned by a freak laboratory accident into the nigh-omniscient, nigh-omnipotent Dr. Manhattan fourteen years after the end of World War II. Although the word “quantum” is never used in-story, his origin and intimidating powers are directly tied to the Atomic Age and the emergence of quantum mechanics. The American government employs him as an ultimate weapon, wins the Vietnam War, and changes the world and its timeline, for better or worse. As extrapolated by Moore as a sort of offshoot from quantum superposition, Dr. Manhattan perceives everything that has ever happened, is happening, or will happen to him all at once, rather than in chronological order, within/outside of each and every second that ticks by for us mortals (up to a pivotal event in the concluding chapters):

“There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.”

It’s 2023. Oppenheimer is the new film from Christopher Nolan, the celebrated writer/director whose works often play with time-shifting and experiment with our perceptions in their storytelling construction, for better or worse. Tenuous connections stretch between the leapfrogging reminiscence of the fictional Dr. Manhattan and Nolan’s narrative of the real-life Mr. Manhattan Project himself, theoretical physicist Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer. Much as Dr. Manhattan’s life is portrayed as a series of flashbacks that are out-of-order to us mortals yet interlock conceptually by the end, Nolan likewise eschews the standard Hollywood biopic formula (this happened, then this happened, then this happened, then The End), with a slightly modified form of the other standard Hollywood biopic formula (ordinate flashbacks within an end-of-timeline story frame) to chronicle the lives of the masters of the atom from interwoven character arcs. Certain images recur from one era to the next for foreshadowing and epiphanies and so forth. Ultimately the audience needs to experience the whole tapestry before they can truly see each component for what it is.

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