Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer co-dominated the weekend’s box office, raking in immense praise from critics and fans, and more than $80 million domestically. The film, based on the J. Robert Oppenheimer biography American Prometheus, stars Cillian Murphy as the titular theoretical physicist known as the “father of the atomic bomb,” who was pivotal in creating the first nuclear weapons as director of the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II. Already, Oppenheimer is being lauded as a spectacle for the ages, and rightfully so.
The film has not been immune to criticism, though, especially regarding the people whose stories are not depicted. Some viewers have slammed Oppenheimer for failing to include Japanese voices as victims of the bombs. (One common rejoinder to that has been: Japan has a robust film industry with plenty of cinematic works from those Japanese voices about the atrocities in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) But, when it comes to omissions, a more immediately salient question might be: In a film that portrays the magnitude and horrific implications of the creation of such weapons in New Mexico, where are the New Mexican people?
The real story of the people of Los Alamos starts with the fact that Trinity, the code name for the site where the bomb was tested, isn’t actually near Los Alamos, where the bomb was developed. Trinity is more than 200 miles away from Los Alamos in White Sands, New Mexico, but “the film does not do a good job of establishing that,” noted Joshua Wheeler, an assistant professor at Louisiana State University who recently published a sweeping Distillations Magazine feature about the generations of people most affected by the Manhattan Project’s nuclear testing at the Trinity site. Many such people are known as “downwinders”: those who have been exposed to the effects of nuclear tests, often because they work in the nuclear industry or because they live downwind of the test sites.
In a film like Oppenheimer, already chock-full of plot and characters in its three-hour run time, this distinction can seem slight, but it actually erases important parts of the story. For one, it glides over the fact that the government forcibly displaced the inhabitants of multiple areas of New Mexico—often for as little as $7 an acre for Hispanic homesteaders, compared to $43 an acre for an Anglo-owned ranch and $225 per acre for a school property. “Every time the film shows the New Mexico landscape, they’re showing these wide-open, empty vistas. And that’s certainly beautiful for the cinematography, but it’s really not indicative of the way things were at that time,” Wheeler said.
People were at those sites, and they suffered at the hands of the American government. Near the Trinity test site, Wheeler’s own family, who were ranchers in southern New Mexico, saw their land taken under eminent domain, which allows the government to seize private property without the owner’s consent. (They were one of many families involved in class-action lawsuits asking for the return of their land or fair compensation—lawsuits that were mostly unsuccessful for decades, according to Wheeler.) The Pajarito Plateau, where Los Alamos is located, was indigenous homeland for multiple villages of Pueblo people, as well as more than 30 Mexican American families who owned ranches and farms, Myrriah Gómez, author of Nuclear Nuevo México and an associate professor at the University of New Mexico, told me. All of those people were removed. The land also featured an elite school for boys, the only previous occupant of the land that the movie explicitly acknowledges. (Murphy’s Oppenheimer says, “There’s a boys’ school we’ll have to commandeer, and the local Indians come up here for burial rites.”)
“My great-grandparents were one of those families who were displaced, and they were sent these letters [of notice]. Some families never got the letters, but the bigger problem was that the letters were written in English, and these were Spanish-speaking people,” Gómez explained. In many cases, locals were displaced with force and violence, a reality highlighted by author and journalist Alisa Lynn Valdés in a viral Twitter thread. Gómez, recounting what her grandmother has told her, said that the federal government bulldozed crops, the military used livestock as target practice, and there were fights and “racist altercations” between locals and the military police who occupied the plateau. This is a stark contrast from Oppenheimer’s myriad sweeping shots of desolate desert—in line, Gómez said, with “what the federal government continues to repeat: that Los Alamos and Trinity were remote and uninhabited.”
The eliding of Trinity and Los Alamos in Oppenheimer also glosses over one large indicator that the scientists of Los Alamos knew of, or at least assumed, the devastating impacts of detonating a nuclear explosive: There’s a reason they didn’t want to test it anywhere remotely near their “own” backyard of Los Alamos. Instead, they tested it in the backyard of the native Hispanic population, the residents of the large indigenous Mescalero Apache Reservation, and the others who constituted the 149,000 or more people (according to the 1940 census) who had settled in that area within Trinity’s 100-mile radius.
“We have stories of very high rates of cancer in these areas, thyroid cancers and autoimmune diseases in particular, which are often related to radiation exposure. These are anecdotally sort of tallied up through the generations since Trinity,” said Wheeler. But anecdotes are often the only proof that these downwinders have. According to Wheeler, the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project weren’t committed to collecting thorough data about the Trinity test’s fallout. “They either didn’t have the foresight or they just flat-out refused to do it because they were afraid of what they were going to find. So it becomes very difficult, then, with the Trinity test in particular, to say, ‘These are the people who were exposed, these are the people who were overexposed, and this is how we know that exposure affected them.’ ” In some cases, upon measuring radiation levels around ranchers’ homes near Trinity after the blast, it was discovered that “people had been exposed to 10,000 times the safe level of radiation that everyone had agreed on at that time,” noted Wheeler.
Because the Manhattan Project and the Trinity test were top-secret, victims of the testing fallout were lied to about what was happening. In those crucial weeks after the Trinity test, when locals’ houses, crops, wells, and cisterns were saturated with ash from the fallout, the military put out press releases telling residents to continue as normal. “Those are the weeks in which people are still washing their newborn babies with water from their wells that has been contaminated, and drinking from their wells, and eating food that has been contaminated,” said Wheeler. “They were told, ‘Don’t worry. Nothing bad has happened. You can go on eating and drinking your food and water just like you always have.’ ” What was even more appalling was that the scientists and the government knew that the ingestion of plutonium was even more dangerous than external exposure. According to findings from an investigating committee appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, the Manhattan Project had begun experimenting on hospital patients across the country—in several cases, without the patients’ knowledge—to assess the effects of ingesting radioactive substances.
But it wasn’t just the locals facing radiation exposure in their homes—many inhabitants, with their land now occupied, were left with little choice but to work for this military-industrial complex that was harming them. “So you had people in the area who, on the one hand, knew about dangers of what the military was doing in their backyard, but on the other hand, could only make money by working for the military or the government in these laboratories or test sites,” Wheeler explained. That availability of labor was actually one of the draws of the Los Alamos site, according to Gómez.
The two types of labor that they recruited for were construction work and custodial work. At the end of the workday, janitors—who had to clean up and handle the radioactive waste—“would scrub themselves off with Bon Ami, which is like an Ajax,” said Gómez, whose grandfather and great-uncles worked at the labs and all died of cancer. “They would scrub their skin and run them through Geiger counters, and they were supposed to wash until they stopped ringing, and then they would send them home. But nobody ever explained to them why, or what that meant. So most of them just went home.”
The absence of the workers of Los Alamos in Oppenheimer is glaring. “I sat there watching Oppenheimer, and even if I take away all of the bias that I have from all of my knowledge about the entirety of this period of nuclear weapons development, you don’t see anyone in Los Alamos who’s cleaning the houses or who’s building the structures there,” Wheeler said. “These were all the local people, and they were often chosen because the military and the scientists felt like they were not intelligent enough to be a security threat, perhaps because they didn’t speak English, or perhaps just because of plain old-fashioned racism. But those people were there, and you don’t see them in the movie at all.”
Nuclear colonialism, which Gómez described as “a state-sponsored occupation of indigenous homelands resulting in the displacement or elimination of indigenous peoples in favor of a nuclear economy,” is the story that Oppenheimer leaves behind. The most important distinction, per Gómez, is that the story of the making of the atomic bomb is an ongoing “structure,” not just a single event. “We continue to examine the Manhattan Project as an event, the atomic bomb-making as an event. The fact is that nuclear colonialism continues to pervade New Mexico today because we have a cradle-to-grave nuclear-industrial complex.” The state is still host to an entire chain of nuclear production: “We mine uranium here, they develop the bombs here, they test the bombs here, and they store the waste here. This massive industry that happens in New Mexico obviously brings a ton of money into the state, but that comes with lots of consequences,” Wheeler said.
There is another crucial misrepresentation of the truth in Oppenheimer: The film shows the atomic bombs being shipped off to Japan after the Trinity test, but according to Wheeler, “The bombs were already on their way to the Pacific before the Trinity test ever happened. They had already made a decision to send those bombs there and to use them regardless of what was going to happen at the Trinity test.”
But despite this miss, among others, the film does successfully depict, in a way, one reality: the United States’ pattern of incurring harm and piling up unnecessary collateral damage for false ideals. If there’s one thesis that Oppenheimer is trying to impart, it’s that the dropping of the atomic bombs was not necessary to win the war. The military had grimly accepted, from the very beginning, that it would have to “sacrifice” innocent lives for a hypothetical “gain” that only opened up a larger nuclear can of worms.
Seeing a telling of your already harrowing story bungled or effaced can feel like being wronged again—not only did you have to live through it, but now you have to spend your life convincing people that it actually happened that way, if at all. “I’m really excited about the movie for a lot of reasons, but also, I’m just disappointed that they just couldn’t carry it through and do a little bit more work. It’s half a history,” Gómez lamented. But, as much as it might hurt to be left out of a film like Oppenheimer, such large-scale depictions of what happened in New Mexico are still opportunities for the people of Trinity and Los Alamos to tell their own stories. “People think, Oh, this movie sucks. I’m not gonna see it. I’m like, No, this is great, because what’s gonna happen is people are gonna Google ‘Trinity’ and ‘Manhattan Project in New Mexico’ and what’s gonna come up?” Gomez posits. There are other cultural products out there to be discovered by Oppenheimer viewers: works like Lois Lipman’s upcoming documentary film First We Bombed New Mexico, and the 2005 Peter Sellars and John Adams opera Doctor Atomic, which incorporated local downwinders for a 2018 revival run in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Wheeler’s biggest worry isn’t necessarily that no one will hear the story of the downwinders and the Los Alamos community—his fear is that we will fall into the trap Hollywood is great at ensnaring us in. “When you see that film Oppenheimer and you see how much they’re putting on Cillian Murphy’s face in terms of regret for destruction of the world, it’s not on one guy’s shoulders,” he said. “That’s the problem: If we think it’s on one guy’s shoulders, that alleviates the rest of us from having to feel guilty about our part in it. American culture allows us to continually overlook marginalized communities, discriminate against marginalized communities, destroy those communities, under the guise of scientific advancement or economic advancement.” It’s a story we all know, whether it’s the freeways bisecting underserved city neighborhoods, the nonconsensual medical testing of Black males as part of the Tuskegee Study, or the condemnation of the Black-owned Bruce’s Beach under eminent domain. As Wheeler said, “In any number of different great projects that have made America, there is almost always a marginal community that is being destroyed. And the Manhattan Project and the Trinity Test is just one more example of that.”
