Christopher Nolan’s movies all explore what scares him most

Interview with a 2018 interviewee Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan went viral — possibly because it was the first time he’d ever appeared relatable. In that conversation, he said his children sometimes jokingly call him Reynolds Woodcock, after the aloof, reserved protagonist of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread Though Nolan’s scripts often feature signature, repeated (and often mocked) tropes, including time manipulation, dead spouses, and protagonists who face complex moral decisions, he injects very little of his own personality into his movies. Characters like Leonardo DiCaprio’s troubled team leader in Inception and Robert Pattinson’s equally troubled handler in TenetNolan’s style is evident in the films. Nolan’s movies are not as well known for their worldview.

One underappreciated idea does recur over and over in Nolan’s work, though, and it surfaces again in Oppenheimer. Nolan’s protagonists are often obsessed by a particular fear, and will go to any lengths to understand it or to control it. It’s a good idea to keep an eye on the movie. Nolan’s first blockbuster, Batman Begins, gangster Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson) tells Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), “You always fear what you don’t understand.” The quote acts as something of a guiding light not just for Bruce, but for Nolan’s back shelf of protagonists who seek a deeper knowledge of their phobias for the sake of control. In Oppenheimer, Nolan imprints this narrative device on a historical figure for the first time, and it feels like he’s being more open than ever about revealing what keeps him up at night.

Universal Pictures

It is not known that J. Robert Oppenheimer was haunted by images of highly energetic subatomic particles. This doesn’t come through in any documents about Oppenheimer the man, and Nolan seems to have added the idea to dramatize the film, as Oppenheimer periodically pauses to register and recoil from flashes of light, particles, and fire, all representing wordless fears he can’t explain. Though the movie’s dialogue never explicitly references these mysterious events, Nolan’s evocative imagery asks the audience to fill in the gaps themselves — are we seeing what’s in his mind, his future, or something else entirely?

Nolan’s Oppenheimer presents as an awkward, unsociable student with something off about him. It isn’t hard to imagine that he’s troubled by something. This student is terrified. What do they do? He dives deep into particle physics, devoting his life to understanding and attempting to control his fear — until it reaches critical mass.

This is the origin story Batman Begins is the clearest example of this phenomenon: Batman’s vigilante persona was inspired by a traumatic childhood experience with bats. That plot point hews closely to Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s classic 1987 comic arc Batman Year One, but the film dives far deeper into Bruce’s fervent need to understand and control his terror. In a number of sequences featuring fear gas used by the movie’s villain, Scarecrow (played by Cillian Murphy, who also plays Nolan’s Oppenheimer), the filmmaker dips his toes into horror-inflected imagery. Gothic architecture and nightmarish scenes where the villains view Bruce as a monster are combined to create a metaphor for Bruce becoming his greatest fear.

Warner Bros.

Follow us on Instagram Batman Begins, Nolan’s Batman movies continue to dwell on this theme. Nolan attacks his hero with villains that take the form of nightmares. It’s as if he’s trying to teach Batman how to overcome the things he most dreads.

In addition to Bruce Wayne, the two protagonists Oppenheimer most resembles in this way are Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dom Cobb in It is a good idea to start with a new one. and Guy Pearce’s Leonard Shelby in Memento. The latter, Nolan’s mainstream breakthrough, focuses on a man with short-term memory loss who is so afraid of forgetting his purpose that he has it tattooed on his body. The majority of The Inception of the Technological Revolution takes place within Cobb’s dreams, which, through a very thinly veiled metaphor, are haunted by his wife Mal, played by Marion Cotillard. Guilt-ridden by the circumstances of her death, he subconsciously creates a murderous avatar in the shape of the shame he’s too afraid to face. In his attempt to control his memories, he tries to conceal her in the basement of his mental image. It doesn’t exactly work out.

The entire Oppenheimer’s three-hour run time, Cillian Murphy’s protagonist struggles with existential horrors that are much larger than his personal regrets. In addition to the frightening visual bursts of atomic space, the film focuses most of its second-act tensions on the threat that the first atomic bomb test might ignite the hydrogen in Earth’s atmosphere. Los Alamos physicists discussed this threat and dismissed it in real life. Nolan, however, lingers, asking Oppenheimer for the opinion of Albert Einstein who is portrayed as the patron saint of the science industry in the movie. Einstein does not provide any comforting responses, increasing the fear and tension felt by both characters and audiences.

Photo: Sony Pictures

The threat of humans bringing about their own extinction is no new ground for Nolan’s films. And that may answer why, exactly, he’s so obsessed with fear and the war for control. It’s not just about fear. InterstellarClimate change is a dystopian future where crops are destroyed by a dystopian, futuristic blight. In his movie 2020 TenetIn the distant future, a society tries to reverse the time flow to stop the climate change. In between those two films is the World War II Film DunkirkIt’s about the fight for survival in a world of faceless threats. The Nazi presence is implicit in the film. Dunkirk doesn’t linger on a potential apocalypse in quite the same way as other Nolan movies. However, the dread is still present.

It’s the final moments of OppenheimerNolan shows his hero a dystopian future ravaged with nuclear weapons. His visions of dancing particles and flames give way to a clear, unambiguous doomsday — an uncountable number of rockets fire from an unknown country, streaking across the globe and detonating. Everything is consumed by fire.

Nolan’s devotion to the theme of people wrestling with their fears ties him to his protagonists, and his more recent focus specifically on humanity causing its own doom ramps that fear up to a universal level. It’s a heavy, existential worry, but it’s an illuminating glimpse into the mind of an artist who rarely lets the audience in. In his films, when a character obsesses about a topic, it typically means that’s the fear that keeps them up at night and drives them toward obsession as a means of control. Nolan, and the version of J. Robert Oppenheimer he portrays in his films, both reveal their deepest fears about humanity’s ability to destroy all life on Earth. And as climate change and political tensions simultaneously rise across the planet, it’s hard to blame him.