“How Do You Live?”: Oppenheimer and The Boy and The Heron

For me, Oppenheimer has been like one of the black holes that served as the focus of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s early career, pulling in everything around it, just like the man himself did. He was the convergence point, accumulating scientists and dollars and research and government officials until it all exploded into something terrible around him. And in American life, and in fact global postwar life, Oppenheimer still is a black hole, a gaping dark spot that draws countless people, objects, phenomena, into himself by virtue of the outsize impact of what he did; so much matter existing in the universe feels his gravitational pull, whether that’s subsequent nuclear tragedies like Chernobyl, or Watchmen’s Dr. Manhattan, or innocuous refractions of the world that he (and America’s postwar dominance that he enabled) created, like the warped Americana of David Lynch films or atomic age anxiety of Talking Heads songs.

But when I’ve thought about Oppenheimer, along with the gravitational force it’s had on my work and art and relationships, what swirled around it was what was absent from the film itself—the Japanese perspective. As I turned Oppenheimer over and over in my head, I thought of the films that consider the Japanese experience of the war and its aftermath. Director Christopher Nolan has been very frank about his reasoning for not depicting the bombings themselves or any semblance of a Japanese voice in Oppenheimer. “The film presents Oppenheimer’s experience subjectively,” he said in Variety. “Oppenheimer heard about the bombing at the same time that the rest of the world did.” Oppenheimer is an explicitly American telling of this chapter in history. The Japanese are inscrutable enemies, almost less present than the Germans, whose own efforts to build an atomic bomb are what spur the Americans’ sprint toward theirs. The people who bear such unfathomable carnage, an almost otherworldly retribution for their country’s role in the war, are an afterthought.

In the film, at the site of the Manhattan Project, the younger cohort of scientists argue to Oppenheimer that the Japanese are near to surrendering and there’s no need to drop the bomb. He calmly tells them that maybe by dropping the bomb this once, humanity will be so terrified of its power that it never happens again; his argument, of course, disregarding what it will mean to use it even once. But even so, he seems about as convinced by this line of thinking as the discussion group is, which is to say not much. This might be all for naught, the sacrifices of human life not leading to any prevention of war in the end.

More ghastly and infuriating is the scene that shortly follows where Oppenheimer and the other lead scientists and government officials confer on which cities to drop the bombs on. They’ve narrowed it down to twelve cities, words on paper. The Secretary of State removes Kyoto from the list—he and his wife honeymooned there and it was lovely. Pawns moved, lives spared, all capriciously, fates unraveled by a bureaucrat’s fond memories. The Japanese people are thought of only in the abstract. Kyoto’s world heritage is what saves them, while Hiroshima and Nagasaki are thought of as expendable, no claim to fame to spare hundreds of thousands of people living there.

Nolan’s film can afford to do this, not only because it is stronger for showing the inhumanity of the Americans, but because there already exists a diverse, deeply felt body of work that wrestles with Japanese memory of the war and of the bombings. There is not only The Human Condition, Kobayashi’s multipart epic, but Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (whose Tom Conti stars in Oppenheimer as Albert Einstein), The Grave of the Fireflies, Hiroshima Mon Amour, The Wind Rises, Godzilla, even Akira, the tendrils of nuclear anxiety extending into the 80s. What could Nolan’s film hope to contribute that has not already been so evocatively depicted there?

Even in 2023 alone were two Japanese productions taking place during the war and the years that follow: Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One and Hayao Miyazaki’s supposed final film, The Boy and The Heron. Yamazaki’s film deals with the war head-on, a story of survivor’s guilt set in the rubble of a grieving Tokyo, while returning to the Godzilla origin story as a creature borne of the nuclear age—when this Godzilla shoots ice blue rays of fire from his mouth, the blinding light our heroes shield themselves from looks like nothing so much as the blast from the Trinity Test.

Meanwhile The Boy and The Heron references the war more obliquely. Unlike The Wind Rises, which was based on a true story and presented as a moral dilemma inextricable from the war, Miyazaki’s latest uses the war as a departure point, quickly drawing its young protagonist Mahito into a fantastical realm that only alludes to the forces and choices present in his own world.

Oppenheimer and The Boy and The Heron are very different films, with very different subject matter. Yet strangely enough, at their core, they pose very similar questions, led by that of the Miyazaki film’s Japanese title. Both films, through an exploration of reality and unreality, of things seen and unseen, of worlds crumbling around their heroes, ask their audience the most cutting, salient, important questions—how do you live, and what do you leave behind?

As it turns out, the coming of age story is the perfect genre for exploring these kind of questions, as many have done for centuries, from Great Expectations to The Catcher in the Rye to Demon Slayer. Both The Boy and The Heron and Oppenheimer fall into the genre in their own way, with the former more firmly situated in it and the latter only taking its cues for the film’s first third, but then using the promise of that opening act to underscore the disillusionment and horror of the rest of the film.

In The Boy and The Heron, our hero Mahito arrives at his aunt Natsuko’s countryside estate a diffident young boy, reeling from the tragedy of losing his mother. His father has just remarried his aunt, making her his new stepmom, and she lets Mahito know upon his arrival that he’ll have a new little brother or sister soon. He does not want to be there, and makes no secret of it: he bashes his head in with a rock to get out of school, complains about meals, disobeys house rules, avoids visiting Natsuko while she’s bedridden with morning sickness, and steals cigarettes from her when he does finally visit. He resents the change that insists itself upon his life, acting out when he can and disengaging otherwise.

Only with the consistent haranguing of a grey heron that lurks around the property does Mahito find himself presented with a journey where he’s forced to grow up, to make choices and take on responsibility. Promising that Mahito will see his mother again, the heron takes him into a fantastical world hidden within a tower built by Mahito’s granduncle, where he encounters all kinds of magical creatures and analogues to the people he knows in his life. As soon as he meets the pirate girl Kiriko, a youthful version of one of his housemaids, she puts him to work, helping her steer her ship and dragging a massive fish onto her ship and gutting it. Later he grits his teeth and reunites up with the wily heron to bring Natsuko, who’s wandered into this realm, back to their reality, knowing that even if he’s not thrilled by the prospect of her as his new mother, he needs to rescue her from the depths of this place. And at the film’s end, he turns down his granduncle’s entreaty to inherit his role as the creator of this realm, to return to a world more messy and unpredictable, completely out of his control.

By the end of his adventure, he’s a more mature version of the boy who was lured by the grey heron to the tower to satisfy a desire to see his mother again. He even grows to care genuinely for Natsuko, calling her ‘mother’ as he tries to take her home. As Granduncle’s world crumbles around them, Mahito makes sure that everyone gets out and back to their respective realities, even coming to terms with parting with Lady Himi, a young version of his mother, in essence saying goodbye to her forever.

While Mahito’s newly encountered world presents him a series of challenges, Oppenheimer’s coming of age takes on a different light. The world he discovers, the quantum world, is full of promise and excitement, with only some undercurrent of dread, as opposed to Granduncle’s realm that feels teeming with danger. Oppenheimer stands on the precipice of an entirely new physics, a total reconception of the world as we know it—terrifying but more so exhilarating. He likens it to the Modern, to these boundless works of art being created at the same time, discarding rules, reflecting a changing world.

His political activities fall into a similar mode, with his interest in communism stemming from an interest in a new way of looking at how we live in order to build a more equitable future. He supports students’ discussions and organizing efforts for the same reason. Labor movements, communist discussion groups, the republican party in Spain—all of these seem to Oppenheimer a route to building something better, through an advancement of new ideas in favor of the old.

But while Mahito’s coming of age leaves him more connected to the world and in love with the people that inhabit it, a powerful feeling to take with him back into a war-torn country, Oppenheimer sees his youthful optimism turn to dust in his hands. His embrace, or even simply exploration, of communist ideas becomes an albatross around his neck in the Cold War era, derailing his career and more importantly reputation. Maybe more dear to him, though, is the way his leadership of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos turns his love for physics into something tortured and dangerous. The culmination of his work becomes this ‘gadget,’ which kills hundreds of thousands and scars so many more, while setting into motion an arms race that threatens to obliterate humanity. The thrill of physics that motivates the film’s first third, from the instantly iconic “Can you hear the music?” sequence to the vivid practical special effects that illustrate Robert’s work, to the way his students and peers literally race down streets and bound into classrooms to herald new developments in the field, curdles into something tragic as soon as Los Alamos becomes a reality.

Both Oppenheimer’s and Mahito’s coming of age journeys are prompted by the discovery of worlds that are unlike their own, that are uncanny, unnatural, and yet certainly real: nothing is a dream. As Oppenheimer begins and Robert recounts his past in prepared remarks to fight to maintain his security clearance, he describes his time at Cambridge as “plagued by visions of a world I could not see.” Nolan visualizes this world through abstract flashes of light and movement—glittering particles, bands of light warping and cycling, stars pulling in toward each other, sparks flying. Oppenheimer can sense this all under the surface of our known world, but is troubled by an inability to express it within the limitations of current scientific thought, trying to replicate these hidden structures and formulations by breaking wine glasses in his dormitory and getting his mind onto the right wavelength by consuming Modernist works of art.

The physical world that Oppenheimer finds himself in is one that shouldn’t make sense—as he works his charms on the future Mrs. Oppenheimer, he puts his hand against hers and remarks that really, the both of them are mostly empty space, groupings of energy waves bound only by “forces of attraction strong enough to convince us that matter is solid, stop my body from passing through yours.” Later, with the development that spurs the Manhattan Project, scientists split the atom, to Oppenheimer’s disbelief—something thought impossible, the breaking apart of the smallest known unit in the universe, the building block of all matter. It’s an unituitive world, a contradictory one, one primed for the creation of something as unearthly in its power as the ‘gadget’ Oppenheimer facilitates.

Of course, only a human world as unstable and unreal as this natural one the quantum physicists have uncovered could give rise to a weapon of this kind. The horrors of World War II, of the Holocaust, the Rape of Nanking, crimes against humanity perpetuated by all powers involved, bring war to a new plane, one unimaginable even 20 years prior. That’s even without the American politics of the war, the policies of neutrality, the suspicion of communism in the face of the real threat of fascism, the internment camps. It’s a world of going back on promises – to citizens, to allies – full of fissures, full of uncertainty, just like the material underpinning it all.

Mahito lives in that same world, just from a very different vantage point. A young boy as well as a Japanese citizen, his life is uprooted by the war. He is in Tokyo during the bombings, and has vivid memories of rushing from his house to try to save his mother, ill in a hospital nearby. He gets lost in the chaos, the crowds of people running to safety, the fires all around, the confusion of neighborhood streets rendered unrecognizable. From there, he is taken to a place that makes even less sense. His aunt is now to be his mother, he will have a new sibling, his home is now a sprawling estate of Japanese and Western architecture, his school mostly serves to support the war effort through agriculture.

Quickly, though, the supernatural seeps in. Things that appear only strange at first - the elderly housemaids introduced as an undulating gaggle of figures fawning over his father’s suitcases, the heron that flies through the house’s veranda and continues to follow Mahito, the deserted tower at the edge of the property - give way to the truly unearthly.

The heron reveals that he can speak, beckoning Mahito to the tower, which is more than just a condemned edifice built by his granduncle. While Oppenheimer’s introduction into his new, “fantastical” world was marked by abstract interludes representing atoms and electrons, Mahito is inundated with multiples, almost tessellations of beings. The housemaids begin this motif. Then when the heron makes his most forceful attempt to lure Mahito to the tower, hundreds of fish jump out of the water, calling to him, and frogs climb up his body, swarming him. They’re portents of what’s bubbling up underneath the surface, what’s invisible to him now but will be present once he arrives to the land his granduncle designed. There he finds hordes of pelicans, bursting through burial ground gates; gaggles of Warawara, marshmallowy and tumbling over one another before their flight to Mahito’s world; phalanxes of fascist parakeets in lockstep, on their way to take total control of this place.

It is a more plainly imaginary world than the one Oppenheimer lives in, of course, but bears enough resemblance to our own to make it unsettling. Visually, it has flora and fauna and buildings that look like our own; while, echoing the state of contemporary Earth, pelicans search for fish in barren seas and dictators threaten to usurp power. While Oppenheimer’s hidden world melded with the revolutionary logic of the Modern, Mahito’s (really his granduncle’s) takes on the playful twistedness of the Surreal, what with talking animals and melting mothers and a finale that sees lengthy halls ripple and bend and come free into the cosmos. Both the Modern and the Surreal hold the promise of seeing reality a different way, an appealing thought when you inhabit worlds on the brink of destruction.

In Oppenheimer, Robert begins his security clearance testimony with the world coming apart at the seams, in the late 20s in Europe, where he meets Isaac Rabi on a train to Göttingen. Rabi asks Oppenheimer if he gets the feeling that “their kind” isn’t welcome in Germany, a portent of what’s to come, an anti-semitism that would continue to rise and rise throughout the next decade until put into action as genocide. Back in California, Oppenheimer donates to the cause of the Spanish republicans, fighting against the fascist Franco, and rifts are emerging in American life between those in favor of unions and sympathetic to communism, and those who see them at best as a political and professional liability and at worst a symptom of an encroaching communist wave. That sentiment returns after the war, at the start of the new Cold War, derailing Oppenheimer’s life at a time when any leftist sympathies are cause for complete professional annihilation and by virtue, personal, as well. WWII starts in earnest with Hitler’s invasion of Poland, but the makings of the war had been simmering for really two decades, and finally now do they boil over, with yet another ‘war to end all wars’ that threatens to destroy life as we know it. That’s even before Oppenheimer’s gruesome invention creates the ability to obliterate humanity in a way never seen before - its invention ‘solves’ one instance of the countries of the world dragging us all toward certain disaster, and replaces it with another, a Cold War world ever on the brink of destruction, the doomsday clock forever counting down.

Mahito inhabits that same world as Oppenheimer: his Tokyo set ablaze, men conscripted into the war even as Japan’s prospects turn grim. But his granduncle’s realm is no more stable than his own. We see it first with the pelicans eating the Warawara, that something is not quite right here. In one of the most beautiful sequences in film last year, Mahito watches the bouncy Warawara, just fed by his and Kiriko’s catch, begin their flight upward. They float gently into the night sky, forming spiraling towers as their number grows. Suddenly, the pelicans reappear, scooping up Warawara by the beakful to eat. The carnage is stopped by Lady Himi, the young version of Mahito’s mother who visited this world, but the great flames she shoots upward from her boat set afire pelican and Warawara alike - a horrifying scene that ends the pelicans’ feast but leaves not many Warawara to survive, either. Later that night, Mahito finds a burned pelican on the verge of death outside Kiriko’s cottage, who explains to Mahito that his kind no longer have fish to eat in these seas and the Warawara are all they have left. Even their young are beginning to forget how to fly, a species in the throes of dying out. What happened to the fish, we don’t know, but it speaks to an environment with a sickness in it.

Shortly thereafter, Mahito and the grey heron encounter the parakeets, who seem to have assumed dominance of this world. Murderous, goosestepping, and in thrall to their leader, they have obvious parallels to the forces that exist in Mahito’s time. They overwhelm frames of the film, so many of them packed into small spaces, and are hellbent on capturing and either eating Mahito and Lady Himi or presenting them as tribute to Granduncle, as a way to secure his favor in their effort to more formally rule his realm.

Even Granduncle realizes that this world is a sick one, which is why he wants Mahito to take it over. He is getting too old to continue to balance all of the elements in this place he’s created, literally re-stacking thirteen blocks every three days in different combinations to keep it from falling apart. The barrier between order and disorder, between existing and free-falling into chaos, is so thin, so impossibly fragile. Granduncle presents Mahito with a choice—to take his post and become the good-hearted ruler of this place, to be responsible for saving it from destruction but also have the power to do so, or return to his world, where he has no power, a world full of murderers and thieves, soon to be consumed by flames. Mahito chooses the latter, forsaking a world with the possibility of harmony and the promise of control, for one in which he will likely have neither.

His is a choice that speaks to the question of the film’s Japanese title: “How do you live?,” the title of a (real) book that Mahito’s mother had left him. It’s a question that encompasses so many others: Who do you choose to follow, who to protect? Do you save yourself or others? Do you grasp for power or content yourself with the absence of it? What is your role in the world? Mahito makes the choice to return to wartime Japan, a bleak place with an uncertain future ahead of it, even once the war ends. He is offered the power to build his own world, to live in a place of fantasy, to, yes, have the responsibility of a world-builder, but to also reap its benefits, to sit atop a food chain as a benevolent ruler whose subjects are set on winning his favor. Instead, he shepherds Kiriko and Natsuko home, narrowly escaping the parakeets, the world crumbling behind them. He leaves his mother once and for all when he says goodbye to Lady Himi—the promise of seeing his mother again the entire reason he began this journey. Mahito would rather save his friends and family and return home, a brave plunge into relinquishing control.

J. Robert Oppenheimer doesn’t make that choice. When he offers himself up as the director of the Manhattan Project, he makes a decision to turn his decades of work in physics, and, as Isaac Rabi points out later, really 300 years of physics, of countless scientists’ theories and experiments, to a horrible end. When his wife Kitty tells him that the world is changing and this project is his moment, he believes her—out of hubris, out of a desire for recognition, out of a belief that this is a chance to do something monumental that no one else can, out of a genuine, admirable commitment to end the war and stop the Nazis. He assumes this awesome responsibility instead of shirking it, instead of considering like Rabi that perhaps this force shouldn’t be unleashed, and that perhaps it shouldn’t be the decision of one country to do so.

It’s not a simple choice, and it’s one that torments Oppenheimer after the war, and even during the building of the bomb. During the Trinity Test, strapping on his goggles, he mutters to himself: “These things harden your heart.” Somewhat glib, it should do more than harden his heart, and it surely does, as we see in the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a rally shortly after the conclusion of the war, Oppenheimer speaks to a feverish crowd of patriots, stomping their feet and chanting for ‘Oppie,’ who takes the stage and dissociates, imagining the room consumed by a nuclear blast. He’s later given an audience with President Harry Truman, where he expresses to the unsympathetic president that he feels he has blood on his hands. When presented with slides at Los Alamos of the victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he can’t bring himself to look.

Oppenheimer’s guilt is to the extent that a decade later, in the fight over his security clearance, Kitty asks if he thinks the world will forgive him now that he’s made himself a martyr. For his own peace, for his own ability to sleep at night, did he need to abdicate his role in the world, the role he created for himself? Did he need to, far too late, exchange hubris for humility? And at this stage, years into the Cold War, years into an American-occupied Japan, who does this save but himself, his own conscience?

It’s the often inevitable dark side of invention, the inability to know what your creation might herald. Oppenheimer operates in a world of theory, of hypotheticals, of “near zero.” He’s fairly certain that the bomb won’t ignite the atmosphere, but there’s always a slim chance it might. His scientists are mostly sure they’ve built the watchtowers at a safe distance for the Trinity Test, but you never know until the bomb is dropped. Oppenheimer is hopeful that the bomb could end all wars, but as his friend/antagonist Edward Teller reminds him, that’s only until someone builds a bigger bomb. There are absolute knowns with this invention - the predicted death toll, the height of the blast, its radius, its mental effects on those who witness it - and there are some probable political and scientific ramifications, but there’s no certainty of what will happen when theory becomes experiment.

Granduncle’s world has similarly spiraled beyond his control. What was surely at the outset a curious experiment in creating a world wholly from scratch has turned into something that’s often nightmarish, beset by ecological troubles and power-hungry factions. Perhaps in its early days Granduncle’s world was more at peace, but now it’s become a place held together by the precarious stacking of thirteen blocks. When Granduncle implores Mahito to take his place, it’s partially because he realizes his invention has run aground under his stewardship, and hopes the good-natured Mahito can put it back on track.

But neither Mahito nor Oppenheimer can put their worlds back together. They were broken before either entered them, whether that’s the earth of the 1940s that they both inhabit on opposite ends, or Granduncle’s world that exists in some liminal space. In two films uniquely preoccupied with questions of legacy and what we leave behind, the matter at hand is less how to fix a world careening toward disaster, but how to live within it: how to not make it actively worse, how to not fall to its level, how to take care of the people around you. The scales are wholly different—as Matt Damon (intentionally?) hilariously puts it in Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project is the “most important fucking thing to ever happen in the history of the world.” So while Granduncle’s realm is real and not imaginary within The Boy and The Heron, it is still self-contained. It may have parallels to what’s happening in the world above, but no implications on it.

It’s where the two films diverge, where one is a work of fiction and the other very palpably real. Mahito’s choosing the ‘right’ path has no impact on our world; Oppenheimer choosing the one that leads to the creation of atomic weapons very much does. Mahito will return at the end of the film to a postwar Tokyo that is the one Oppenheimer inadvertently built. He’ll go through life as a teenager and young adult in MacArthur’s Japan, a citizen of the atomic age. You can’t help but wonder, all those years later as Oppenheimer wrings his hands and seeks martyrdom, where Mahito is, and what he thinks of the world around him.

“How Do You Live?”: Oppenheimer and The Boy and The Heron

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