‘Oppenheimer’ and the Pulsing Soundtrack of Doom
Nolan's brilliant film reminds us that there's more to a story than just words and performance.
It’s easy to focus on writing1, but other aspects of cinema can make or break a film. In Oppenheimer, like many Nolan films, it’s the soundtrack.
If you’ve seen the film, you probably walked out of the theater a little off your game. As with most of Nolan's films, Oppenheimer is very well made and somewhat disorienting2. Few other filmmakers are so willing to dice and splice time, play tricks on their audience, and expect you to piece together details to figure out who’s who and what’s going on. On the Nolan Scale of What the Fuck is Going On, this is no Tenet, which remains only slightly below Primer in terms of necessary re-watches to get the timeline right3. But it’s also not a story told in lumbering linear fashion.
The flippity-floppity timeline business isn’t why Oppenheimer stresses you out, though. Neither is the subject matter, although the last line is chilling and, sure, you very likely come out of the film feeling a little depressed about the chances of our species surviving much longer4. No, whether you realize it or not the main reason you’re disoriented after Oppenheimer is because of the sound design (by the brilliant Ludwig Göransson): Like many of Nolan’s films, the soundtrack of this movie is constantly shouting anxiety and tension at you. It’s the most powerful aspect of the film5.
Endlessly Falling
I don’t usually consciously notice sound design or soundtrack music, unless it’s the “needle-drop” variety. I have an acquaintance who does notice movie music, especially old-school symphonic soundtracks, and he can talk for hours about a particular movie’s background music. I don’t have much to contribute, because by and large I can’t really remember the background music or sound effects in a movie.
Nolan’s films tend to be exceptions for me. Structurally, Oppenheimer is calibrated to push you through the story like you’re drunk and lost your balance and have been stumbling forward for miles without hitting the ground6. The story flashes back and forth, but it’s the sound that sets the pace. Every scene in the film has a pulsing, rhythmic element to it. There’s the foot-stomping that creeps into the mix after the Trinity test, the pops and snaps of embers, the sizzling sound of quantum space. It’s designed to get under your skin, and provides a sense of kinetic forward motion at all times, even when the film is flashing back, or sitting in a small room with a few angry men7.
More subtly, the early scenes of a younger Oppenheimer realizing his intense passion for science and the quantum world are marked by sweet strings and relative calm. As Oppenheimer ages and gets more entangled in a messy life and the dangerous vision of the atomic bomb, the soundtrack becomes fractured, discordant. It stops soothing and begins to irritate8.
All the Tools
There’s a lesson here for writers, even if the closest we get to creating sound design for our books is a curated Spotify playlist or some input on the audiobook production. Oppenheimer uses all the tools available to set tone, pace, and rhythm. Many films use their soundtrack as filler, pouring sound into the empty spaces between actors’ dialog and giving the audience some crowd-pleasing bangers to hum along to during the action sequences. Some TV shows use needle-drop songs every five minutes to gin up drama or excitement that their scripts failed to generate9. But Oppenheimer is a film that weaves its soundtrack through the dialog, punctuating and emphasizing, commenting and reminding. It doesn’t view its soundtrack as an afterthought.
There are many ways to produce that driving beat effect, to subtly get your reader’s blood pressure rising and give them a sense of propulsion. There are also less-subtle ways, like the textual layout tricks of A Mouse’s Tail or House of Leaves that convey movement, momentum, constriction, and visual confusion by manipulating the layout of the text itself:
But you can convey rhythm and propulsion with purely textual tools. Repetition, done thoughtfully, creates a sense of rhythm. Manipulating the length and complexity of your sentences can signal speed and action or lethargy and contemplation10. In Oppenheimer, music and sound is always there, pushing at us, making us feel the anxiety and worry on the screen, making us feel the growing terror that the man himself faces, that worry that a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world might have been started.
Films like Oppenheimer make it very clear to me that it’s a very good thing that my parents wouldn’t buy me a Super 8 and give me $500 to film my Star Wars parody Star Farts when I was 11 years old, because I am certainly no filmmaker11. Though if anyone’s interested, I have a 700-page screenplay for Star Farts you’re welcome to use12.
Next week: The Nice Guys and character work.
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Or, if you’re me, easy to focus on whiskey, which we refer to as ‘writing’ in all our tax documents. Please do not tell the IRS.
Especially if, like me, you kept expecting Cillian Murphy to break out the Peaky Blinders Brummie accent and start murdering people. At least he had the same haunted look on his face.
Tenet is one of those films that is a lot more enjoyable if you stop trying to make sense of it. After all, if you found yourself enmeshed in a back-and-forth timestream war you probably wouldn’t know what the hell was going on either. I can barely keep my own daily schedule straight.
I did enjoy the way Nolan captured a scientist’s simple desire to build something that proves a theory, even if it is a bomb that could kill 50,000 people in a moment.
Aside from Cillian Murphy’s cigarettes, which, as usual, do a lot of powerful work here.
This takes more skill than you realize, in both a writing sense and a that’s what-I-did-last-weekend sense.
There is a surprising amount of time spent in a very crowded, very small office space in this film. In that sense, it may be the most realistic film ever made.
Much like my company. All my social engagements start off pleasant and fun, but by the end of the evening you’re wondering if it’s time to call the police and delete me from your phone.
A personal gear-grinder is when shows needle-drop a great song and only play it for about ten seconds before fading out or dropping another song. For god’s sake, plan your shots to give me the whole damn song so I can finish this embarrassing dance!
Or, more frequently, they can convey I-forgot-about-this-deadline-until-five-minutes-ago-so-I-slammed-an-energy-drink-and-will-now-perform-a-trick-I-can-only-survive-once.
Back in college, my roommates and I got our hands on a VHS camera and planned an elaborate horror movie about one of us going crazy and cooking the others. We had some shitty practical effects shot and a vague gesture at a script. Then one night we got drunk and filmed a 12-minute sketch where we all got mad at each other, crept out of our rooms with knives, and murdered each other, scored to the Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies. One of us has that tape and I now realize I must hunt it down and destroy it.
See? Me and Christopher Nolan are kind of the same.
My excessively long, never quite produced except for one mortifying scene film project was called “Son of Hamlet” and its sequel, “Son of Hamletson.” Clearly I was a much more erudite dork.
Those footnotes are hilarious. 😭