Two Dramas To Consider If You Loved 'Oppenheimer
Manhattan & Twin Peaks The Return
Oppenheimer is not a movie about a bomb. It’s also not a love story. It’s about the most ambitious, important, and complex project in human history up to its time and arguably since. This film is a milestone in Cinema. All the history and mastery of this art of Cinema have come together into 180 minutes of excellence in directing, composition, lighting, editing, sound design, cinematography, acting, and (first among all the arts), writing.
And I would love to write about it today, to convey as much of what the experience was like for me, a simple lover of Cinema my whole life, as I sat in the IMAX theater and lost myself for three hours during Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece. But I have made a moral choice not to write about new theater releases or currently airing small-screen dramas until the Actors and Creative Professionals are victorious over the broken executives at media companies who seek to destroy the distribution of art if they can’t own the entire value chain. Eff those guys. I will always stand for the artist first. So instead of writing about the magnificence of Oppenheimer, I want to refer you to two other works of art from the recent past. The following suggestions are for those who were as overcome as I was when the credits started rolling on Oppenheimer.
Manhattan (2014-2015) - Streaming on AMC
This is a phenomenal two-season television drama. Created by Sam Shaw, the same brilliant mind who brought us Masters of Sex, this show delves deeply into the work of the scientists working under J. Robert Oppenheimer at the Los Alamos Project site. The show is filled with Class A talent. They are given situations in scenes with dialogue that can only be described as art. Every one of them is a story arc dealing with the morality of sacrificing the ideals of humanity to build a weapon of mass destruction before the Nazis got there first. Featuring Rachel Brosnahan (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), Ashley Zukerman (Succession), and many others, including Christopher Denham, who plays a Russian spy in this show and the film Oppenheimer. This coincidence might bend your brain when you watch it. Despite spanning only two seasons, Manhattan tells a complete story that will deepen your understanding of what happened between the scenes in Oppenheimer.
Twin Peaks The Return (2017) - Streaming on Showtime
Over the past six years, I have written nearly a million words about this show by Mark Frost and David Lynch. I am not going to try to explain its value in a paragraph. If you know, then you know. Instead, let me tell you about the experience of watching Part 8 of this 18-hour season of the most brilliant cinema I have seen.
The rumors started flying around Twitter and private text threads. “Don’t miss tonight! It’s going to be something to remember.” Cryptic shit that we all fell for, and thank God, because it removed any doubt that all Twin Peaks fans would be watching this episode live together and then talking about it online. That’s exactly what happened, and I know because I was watching the public conversation with what was world-class monitoring software at the time. Here is the image I caught that night from the analytics. What is revealed is the only time in history that the show Twin Peaks trended globally on Twitter.
Source: Salesforce Marketing Cloud
The episode began with the bad guy's murder. He’s shot dead on the ground. Then a hard cut to Nine Inch Nails performing a banger named She’s Gone, then a hard cut back to the bad guy waking up from being dead.
And then a cut to black followed in short order by an overlay announcing a date and time.
What followed was the most beautiful representation of mass destruction ever put on film, including the bomb sequences in Oppenheimer. However, I look forward to writing more about those after the SAG-AFTRA strikes are concluded.
Reading this sequence from the bad guy’s murder to Nine Inch Nails to the bomb is complicated. It’s contextual to inside knowledge of Twin Peaks that one can only gain from repeatedly watching all three seasons and the film.
