Deadlier than fiction

Steve Barnes

We helped save the motion picture industry, my wife and I. We saw “Oppenheimer,” which depicts the creation of the atom bomb and profiles the physicist who, more than any other scientist, fathered the device.

I am not especially attuned to the entertainment industry so I was unaware that Hollywood was again on its last legs. I knew (how could anyone not know?) that the COVID shutdown had driven many conventional theaters to the edge of bankruptcy and pushed others over the edge. I knew also, as did you, that the virus had accelerated the shift to streaming presentations — original productions commissioned by Netflix or HBO, or one of the other premium cable channels, for viewing at home. Some good stuff was offered, so good it made a great many people wonder why they should risk viral contagion and suffer outrageous prices at the concession stand when they could relax in their living rooms in jersey or fleece and, having popped their own popcorn and popped the top from a beverage not necessarily available at their local cinema, take in a first-rate film at a fraction of the box office cost. For many families, the big screen had come to mean a screen as big as the one they brought home from Sam’s Club or Best Buy or wherever.

With the big studios — Disney, MGM, et cetera — said to be, well, reeling, along came Tom Cruise, just in time, with the sequel to his “Top Gun” movie of almost 40 years ago. As of this writing the follow-up, “Top Gun: Maverick,” has earned almost $1.5 billion against its $170 million budget, a pretty good return on investment. More, it is said to have reminded moviegoers around the planet of what they’d been missing — the theater experience: reclining seats, sound from speakers that would satisfy a rock band, previews. Still, the moguls lamented, film fans were not turning out in numbers to sustain the industry.

Determined to do our part, resolved to give young Arkansans dreaming of stardom a chance at immortality, my wife and I went to the movies. “Oppenheimer,” we thought, was the hot ticket. Hot, yes, we discovered — but the hotter, hottest ticket was pink. Nuclear fission, now that’s hot. But not as hot as Barbie. Barbie and Ken. A “feminist manifesto in bubble gum pink,” one critic termed the movie.

“Oppenheimer” has a different message. Over three engrossing hours, the film assays the emotions and the intellects that eventually merged (or collided?) in research laboratories and university classrooms, in the chambers of government at the highest levels, before arriving in the New Mexico desert, their product atop a 100-foot steel tower, in an experiment that was code-named Trinity. The scientists, including Robert Oppenheimer, were not certain it would work. It worked much better than they had hoped. The movie was finished well before the disclosure, only days ago, that radioactive fallout from Trinity blanketed practically the entire North American continent, Arkansas included. No matter: The finished film asks if we, to this day, comprehend what Trinity demonstrated, what the human race is capable of, which is destroying the human race.

We sat in the dark of the theater, a pair of aging reporters, thinking back to a hot, humid September night in 1980 when our small state brushed against the realities of a mechanism created to deter with the promise of death on a barely measurable scale. An Air Force crewman engaged in fairly routine maintenance in a missile silo near Damascus dropped a nine-pound socket. The socket fell about 70 feet before bouncing against a Titan II, puncturing the missile’s skin and permitting its toxic and highly explosive fuel to escape. Emergency mitigation efforts were unsuccessful. About nine hours after the vapors began leaking, Launch Complex 374-7 exploded. The thing atop the Titan, the instrument of deterrence — a nine-megaton nuclear warhead that experts say was three times more powerful than all the bombs dropped in World War II including the atomic weapons used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki — was blown free of its perch and landed about a hundred feet away. It was promptly recovered. National security types in the public and private sectors were quick to assure the state, the nation and the world that there was never any chance of the nuclear device detonating, that the firing sequence involved processes totally indifferent to and immune from conventional explosion. That it was, sort of, fail-safe.

Together, “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” are setting all manner of records, exceeding expectations. Rather as did Trinity.