As I stepped out of the shadowy theatre hall, I came face to face with the enormous, blindingly bright four-letter sign.
"IMAX."
Ludwig Goransson’s thunderous electronic opera was booming behind me, reverberating through my skull, and the grey blob within had but one thought.
“I need to see that again.”
After experiencing Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer in the sole IMAX theatre that existed in tiny Thiruvananthapuram, the way the director intended, I felt something that I had not felt in the longest time — this overflowing desire to experience whatever I had experienced just then, one more time. Not a ‘want’, mind you, but a ‘need’. This need, however, did not come from a place of wonder and awe for cinema like it usually did, but more from a place of confusion.
Oppenheimer was a product of unparalleled skill, passion, talent, and decades of experience in the world of filmmaking. The awe-inspiring analogue visuals shot on large format film, backdropped by Ludwig Goransson’s incredible score, all woven together by an intricate, almost-labyrinthine edit — the film is a relentlessly fierce display of mastery in executing an onscreen narrative. However, no amount of custom-developed 65mm black and white film stocks or visually striking practical effects seemed to be able to provide a large enough carpet to sweep the weakest link of the film under - the script. We will circle back to this problematic carpet later.
With dialogues that read like they were taken right out of a superhero movie at times (that one JFK line had me audibly giggling), and a somewhat compulsive need to cut between decades of Oppenheimer’s life like a detective madly flipping between chapters of a novel, correlating events in hopes of a great revelation, Oppenheimer plays out like (for lack of better phrasing) a highly condensed and convoluted Wikipedia article - mind-numbingly detailing every single major event in Oppenheimer’s career in a calculated, neutral manner, all while being unable to portray any inkling of humanness within the man. The film felt hollow, and cold, at its heart. It imparted this deep dissatisfaction after the credits rolled, a dissatisfaction I was perplexed by.
If not evident by now, I was not exactly a big fan of the screenplay. Yet, I am the same person who bought two IMAX tickets to Oppenheimer on the same day and watched it alone. And with great enthusiasm, too. And would do it again, in a heartbeat.
As I spent many nights pondering hard upon this conundrum (imagining Goransson’s Can They Hear The Music to be playing in the background), hoping to find some enigmatic explanation that involved some appraising of the film and some degrading of my IQ, I was met with disappointment. Only one explanation remained at the end that seemed to make any sort of sense to me - Oppenheimer did such an incredible job of appealing to the senses and being one of the great cinematic experiences of the century, that I was willing to wholly skip over the unattractiveness of arguably one of its biggest elements, the story.
Notions like these are winding tributaries inevitably leading to colossal, problematic questions that no one, at least not I, would want to think about.
What does one mean by ‘cinematic’? Is good cinema just a very effective way of pandering to the human senses and conveying a feeling of grandeur, regardless of how terrible the story being told might be? Could it be something more? Or are we simply lying to ourselves to try to make it anything more?
Be it Star Wars, Lord of The Rings, or any number of historical epics, Bollywood romances, or Rajnikanth flicks, all these films marked by a successful audience reception are rooted amongst those audiences as ‘cinematic’ experiences. They are easily done so because they are far removed from reality (see: blowing up the Death Star, or anything Rajnikanth says or does in a movie). However, films that are much more rooted, too, we deem ‘cinematic’. Lower budget, independent films like Call Me By Your Name or Aftersun or any number of Netflix dramas are seen as far more ‘realistic.’ Yet, we seem to enjoy their cinematic quality just the same.
Copious amounts of lens blur, high-definition close-ups of human faces, smooth camera moves, moody directional lighting, congruent colour palettes, editing that feels invisible, or “just right”, and beautiful music scores for the most part, are all attributes we tend to associate with good movies (Oppenheimer, as it so happens, includes all of the above), and a film lacking many of these aspects we quickly categorise as amateurish, or offbeat. We find ourselves drawn to dramatic moments of pain, anger, and euphoria and long, drawn-out, improbable action sequences.
Ultimately, the unifying strand that seems to tie all those attributes and all these films together, is the strand of unrealism.
How often in everyday life does one encounter directional lighting that perfectly outlines the contours of someone’s figure as they make their way across an otherwise pitch-black alleyway? Or stand so up close to a person’s face that it fills their field of vision, as you watch them make an impossible decision? When one hears long, drawn-out emotional dialogue between two individuals madly in love, it is almost reflexive to call them out - “They’ve been watching too many movies!” (which has a good chance of being quite true), or “Gosh, they’re so dramatic!”
Films, of course, have always existed that tend to move against the current, at least to an extent. Independent filmmakers have long since challenged this notion of the mainstream, of the ‘cinematic’. Film buffs who enjoy Italian neorealist cinema from the 1950s will praise them for their use of natural lighting, real locations, and non-actors delivering naturalistic dialogue. However, one could argue that the simple act of cutting to any shot that one cannot replicate with their eyes itself is a betrayal of reality. Hell, the act of cutting itself can be put into question. Films never seem to miss a beat, always being where the action is. Rarely, however, does life play out that way. It is also worth noting that neorealist cinema (as is with much contemporary realist cinema) was also a practical product of simply the absence of expensive equipment and studios, damaged from the impact of the Second World War in Italy. Furthermore, once the impact subsided, filmmakers were quick to drift away from this aesthetic, finding increased commercial success elsewhere, be it perhaps at the cost of less scholarly appreciation or intellectual appeal.
Does A24 produce films that don’t have explosions because it chooses not to, or because it can’t afford to? A little bit of both, perhaps. And the moment they could afford to, they decided to include everything, everywhere, all at once.
It appears that the further we try to stray away from the grandeur and spectacle that cinema seems to be so good at, the further we wade into displays of intellectual allegory, contrived metaphor, and symbolism through reality. These films find smaller audiences and smaller yet, ultimately entering areas that many deem intellectual self-gratification, and leaving little room for much else.
Films are not an accurate representation of reality, nor were they ever meant to be. Even those that dub themselves real, grounded, humble, or any other eye-roll-inducing synonym of the same.
When the Lumière Brothers created the first ‘Cinématographe’ picture system in 1895, and simply ‘documented’ a group of workers leaving a factory, it is perhaps worth asking, why did none of the workers look directly at the lens of that loud, never-before-seen behemoth of a camera system even once?
The concept of unrealism lies deep within every frame of every film, regardless of what the film may be about. This 'cinematic’ chimera that we constantly pursue, is exactly what it is. A chimera, fantastical. We want to escape, we want to imagine, we want to fantasise. We watch unreal stories, worlds, and dramas to do so, but rarely do we think about the method through which we consume them, and how the fabric of make-believe is interwoven deep within it. And this make-believe, if woven just right through filmmaking, forms a carpet so large that an unsatisfactory story could be swept underneath it, and vice versa.
Perhaps Oppenheimer’s carpet was indeed large enough. Perhaps, just a little lumpy. Lumpy for me, at least. Still a great carpet, though.