Audiences watch Oppenheimers work as it runs in tandem with his personal struggles.
Its the depiction of Tatlocks death where Nolan gives audiences a reason to believe she didnt actually kill herself.
There were bread lines, large camps of homeless people, and kids going hungry in the streets.
Cillian Murphy (right) as physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and Florence Pugh as psychiatrist Jean Tatlock in the 2023 film Oppenheimer.
They would later get caught up in the anti-Communist political hearings of thelate 1940s and 1950s.
All of that context brings us to the way Tatlocks troubles are depicted in the movie.
His wife Kitty finds him, and he explains how Tatlock died by drowning herself in a bathtub.
Gif: Universal Pictures
But if audiences look closely, we get a glimpse of another explanation.
I made the GIF below to highlight the two-second sequence where things arent quite what they seem.
Did you catch that?
Gif: Universal Pictures / Gizmodo
Its hard to see, given the desaturated color grading of the film.
It appeared to me as a flash of what just happened?
If you look closely, you wont just see a womans hand in the bathtub water.
Youll see two black-gloved hands holding Tatlocks head and body down as she struggles.
It was a blink-and-youll-miss-it moment in the theater, but it was included for a very good reason.
And the way Tatlocks death is described in the book definitely helps fuel the conspiracy theories.
Jean Tatlocks body was found by her father,J.S.P.
Tatlock, on Jan. 5, 1944.
For whatever reason, Professor Tatlock did not call the police.
Instead, he picked his daughter up and laid her on the sofa in the living room.
It read in part, I am disgusted with everything.
To those who loved me and helped me, all love and courage.
I wanted to live and to give and I got paralyzed somehow.
I tried like hell to understand and couldnt.
From there the words ran into a jagged, illegible line.
Stunned, Tatlock began rummaging about the apartment.
Eventually, he found a stack of Jeans private correspondence and some photographs.
Whatever he read in this correspondence inspired him to light a fire in the fireplace.
The first phone call he made was to a funeral parlor.
Someone at the funeral parlor finally called the police.
Tatlock told the police that the letters and photos had belonged to his daughter.
Four and a half hours had passed since he had discovered her body.
Its impossible to know, of course, what was actually going through Tatlocks mind at the time.
But its undisputed that the FBI was surveilling her and tapping her phone.
Almost all of the color scenes are presented from Oppenheimers very narrow perspective.
But it was a decision that was clearly a conscious choice by the director.
And thats part of the genius in how this sequence was constructed.
Were presented with Oppenheimers idea of what may have happened in that San Francisco apartment when he wasnt there.
Was Tatlock killed by the FBI?
If Im being completely honest, I was disappointed with the movie immediately after I saw it.
The stakes are literally about the potential end of the planet.
I left the theater thinking, who gives a shit about his security clearance?
It also handled Tatlocks death in a way that gives an appropriate nod to the conspiracy theories.
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