I may be the only writer in the country this week who made it through 2,000 words about Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer without mentioning Florence Pugh’s—ahem—blast radius. I held out as long as I could. But the time has come: we’ve got to talk about those sex scenes.
It actually surprised me that the whole thing caused such a stir. Pugh’s character Jean Tatlock first appears nude in the movie when she seduces Cillian Murphy’s Robert Oppenheimer, who gives off some endearing beta radiation as he fumbles his way through their first encounter. The two of them get naked twice more—once in an adulterous hotel room tryst, and once in the agonized fantasy of Oppenheimer’s wronged wife.
Reader, it hardly fazed me. Make of that what you will, but suffice to say that the average male’s reaction to naked Florence Pugh is not, like mine, best expressed as “meh.” Still, I don’t think the sex scenes really stick out so dramatically in the movie, because Nolan justifies and integrates them within the plot: each one conveys more than mere titillation, dramatizing the shifting power dynamics among the various characters. Tatlock is intimidatingly aware and in command of her own allure; she displays her body like a dare. We understand what entrances Oppenheimer about her, the status she loses when he regains his composure in her presence, and how each of them destabilizes the other. I wouldn’t take a young kid to this movie—for this among many other reasons—but still, it’s not porn. It’s art.
Reading the press coverage, though, might give you a different impression. From the way some people are reacting you’d think that Nolan cuts away in the middle of the climactic detonation sequence to reveal Pugh in a “Miss Atomic Bomb” outfit, performing a 30-minute strip tease. In some countries Pugh has been draped in a CGI modesty slip. In the West she is being minutely analyzed from all angles. For more than a few feminists and evangelists alike, the scenes were offensively gratuitous.
All this strikes me as the mirror image of another kind of criticism from a different corner altogether. Ask a certain sort of viewer and you’ll hear that the movie doesn’t brood enough over the horrors of nuclear devastation, that it never includes any shots of Japan, and that it “centers” “white” “voices.” Let me be up front about my own perspective on this line of argument, which is that it’s hokum. If anything the film spends a little too much time for my taste wringing its hands over (admittedly horrifying) wartime necessities. Still, it does so in a graceful way that doesn’t further bloat its already considerable runtime. That means focusing in on Oppenheimer’s point of view.
But I’m less interested in arguing about either the nudity or the racial politics, than I am in stressing the fact that both these critiques are moral critiques. Each one rests on ethical claims about what you depict and how. Perhaps you’re more sympathetic to the concerns about sex—typically a more right-coded domain, though there is no shortage of feminist indignation on display in the reaction to Pugh. Or maybe you find the left-coded racial argument more persuasive than I do. Either way, you are making an argument about what should be shown and how it might affect the ēthos, the character of the viewer.
This perfectly illustrates something I argued in my book at the beginning of this year: the culture war in America is no longer a war between free-wheeling libertines and censorious conservatives. I’m not convinced it ever was. There was a time not long ago when it may have seemed at least plausible to describe the fight as one between a left-leaning “art for art’s sake” crowd and a right-leaning “keep it clean” crowd. But as Adam Kotsko observed in the Atlantic, the most vigorous factions on the Left are no longer anything even approximating liberal. Nor is “liberalism” quite the easygoing, live-and-let-live free-for-all it was advertised as. There are moral absolutes behind every philosophy, and they show up sooner or later in how we react to art.
You can see the same thing at work in the vigorous condemnation or endorsement, to taste, that has met Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town.” Here’s a song that depicts a way of life in moral terms, as country music often does: don’t riot, respect the flag, that sort of thing. Aldean has defended his attitude as honorable and sensible, which for my money it is. But what it is not, is neutral. The song gives voice to a set of attitudes that Aldean thinks all Americans should share. The reactions to it reveal hatred or love of those attitudes.
What I’m driving at is that “art for art’s sake” was always a bit of a canard. It’s a relatively unusual and pretty baseless idea that a depiction of life can float independently of any ethical outlook. To paraphrase what Cicero said of rhetoric, the best art always “delights, moves, and instructs” all at once. It shows us the world as seen through human eyes, and that is simply not a neutral thing. When Shakespeare reveals Iago to us, he reveals him as a morally compromised figure: duplicitous, enigmatic, self-pitying, spiteful. That’s what it means for him to have a character at all. What we feel about him both informs, and is informed by, our outlook on what is right.
We can’t escape from this. We shouldn’t want to. What we should want to do is talk sensibly and with self-awareness about what we’re asking of art when we make moral claims upon it. Good art is never going to be “moral” in the way a treatise can be moral: by telling us in stern terms which ideas are right. If we demand that of it, whether we come at it from the right or from the left, we will end up tasteless and obtuse. The question to ask about a depiction is not what it “says” but what it shows, and whether what it shows is true.
Aristotle observed that even ugly and painful things give some pleasure in representation. This is because ugly and painful things are in the world, and to be honest about the world is a refreshment in sorrow as in joy. Art is not for art’s sake. But it is for our sake, and we are more than any treatise or lecture or moral system can boil down. That is the beauty of us, which delights even as it moves, and moves even as it instructs. It could not be any other way.
Rejoice evermore,
Spencer