Christopher Nolan became infamous for prioritizing male genius and exceptionalism. It’s an interpretation that’s followed him since the Dark Knight trilogy and met renewed interest with the announcement of his latest release, Oppenheimer. It played into the odd dichotomy of the Barbenheimer double feature, which almost asks for gendered separation: the omnipresent dichotomy of “boy” thing versus “girl” thing.
Oppenheimer does seem to feature every available white actor over twenty-five in some capacity. The film is a who’s-who of character actors, and there are so many great performances, including what I consider a career-best for Cillian Murphy. It’s easy to forget the two female leads: Florence Pugh’s Jean Tatlock and Emily Blunt’s Kitty Oppenheimer. The two women are certainly not set dressing in the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, nor does Nolan portray them as such in the film.
Though her life is largely discussed in relation to Oppenheimer, both in the film and in historical circles, Jean Tatlock was an accomplished scholar with a rich academic and personal life. Tatlock’s father was a prominent Medieval literature scholar and opened up the world of academia to her. She received a prestigious education– graduating from Vassar College, UC Berkeley, and Stanford Medical School– in an era when women were primarily encouraged to remain in the domestic sphere. By the time Tatlock began studying for her doctorate in child psychology at Stanford, she was also a prominent member of Communist Party USA’s Bay Area chapter. Her political savvy and intelligence entranced J. Robert Oppenheimer, leading to two separate engagement periods; it haunted him long after her death. Tatlock’s participation in CPUSA comprises the majority of her legacy, meaning biographers and academics overlooked the specifics of her work are largely overlooked in favor of a conspiracy about her death and how her personal associations affected Oppenheimer’s career.
Jean Tatlock is physically present in a much smaller role in Oppenheimer, which is sadly congruent with her death at twenty-nine. Although Florence Pugh resists playing Tatlock as a doomed, scorned woman, Oppenheimer still leaves out some of the real Jean Tatlock. For example, the film alludes to her struggles with major depressive disorder but omits her reckoning with her bisexuality– even though the real Tatlock presumably would’ve made the real Oppenheimer privy to both. So Oppenheimer’s Tatlock isn’t the most three-dimensional portrait of an enormously complicated individual, but it’s certainly not unsympathetic. Pugh and Murphy’s Oppenheimer play their characters as intellectual equals with genuine chemistry; they make the couple’s decades-long chemistry palpable, even after Oppenheimer’s marriage and his required discretion with the Manhattan Project. Even their sex scenes place the two as equals. The two’s last meeting shows them as equals, with their nude bodies communicating a wordless mutual vulnerability.
Oppenheimer’s wife, Katherine “Kitty” Puening, was anything but subservient or stereotypical. The only child of German immigrants, she quickly became bilingual and could speak German and English without an accent. Initially, Kitty pursued a degree in biology at the University of Pittsburgh but dropped out after a year to marry her first husband. A year later, following the annulment of that marriage, Kitty met her second partner, Joseph Dallet Jr., a major player in CPUSA’s East Coast operations. Kitty would join the Party and become Dallet’s common-law wife. She planned to join him to aid those fighting in the Spanish Civil War, but severe ovarian cysts prevented her from doing so. Though Kitty eventually made her way overseas, Dallet would die on the front lines, as mentioned in the film. By 1938, Kitty re-enrolled to finish her undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania. She met her second husband Richard Harrison, and she left the CPUSA. Kitty completed her bachelor’s degree in botany from UPenn and would complete a postgraduate fellowship at UCLA and work at the X-ray lab at CalTech. She would briefly apply her postgraduate work when she tested blood for radiation at Los Alamos.
Emily Pugh’s Kitty Oppenheimer is given more room to develop into a multifaceted woman by virtue of being in Oppenheimer’s life for a considerably more extended period of time than Pugh’s Tatlock. Her presence in Oppenheimer’s third act is primarily marked by volatile behavior and debilitating alcoholism. However, Kitty’s testimony at Oppenheimer’s security hearing is nothing short of a stand-out moment. It’s definitely a hint at her deep-rooted tenacity and her intellectual prowess. The actual Kitty was indeed an alcoholic and heavy smoker for most of her life (though her husband wasn’t much better), but she was also an intellectual equal and partner in every sense of the word to her husband. Oppenheimer frequently sought out Kitty as counsel during and after their tenure at Los Alamos; this facet of their relationship is hinted at during the trial section of the film and the “bring in the sheets” line during the Trinity Test and the trial results.
In context, considering the three-hour-long runtime, the characters Jean and Kitty play much more minor roles in Oppenheimer’s fall from grace than their real-life counterparts. However, it’s important to note that an unreliable, biased narrator guides the audience through said odyssey. Nolan’s first-person screenplay frames how Oppenheimer both held reverence for and discredited the two key women in his life. Jean’s intelligence and dedication to the CPUSA led to Oppenheimer confiding in her. Ultimately, her dissident status hindered his pursuit of further theoretical knowledge. Kitty was his partner, but she also suffered from debilitating alcoholism and was less than maternal. Though it may seem like a cop-out to justify some neutering to the two female leads, we as an audience are seeing events through the lens of J. Robert Oppenheimer: a womanizer, non-committal to a fault, and fully detached from the practical results of his actions.
A lesser version of Oppenheimer would be disinterested in exploring his morally gray actions and lack of commitment to a single belief system. That is not the case in the version Christopher Nolan directed. While the full extent of their complicated lives– including some elements that would’ve been relevant to the film’s thesis– aren’t included in the biopic, it’s fundamentally incorrect to deem Jean Tatlock and Kitty Oppenheimer as sidelined characters. Both women are given intellectual and emotional strength and the space to show off genuine chemistry despite Oppenheimer’s unreliable narrator and the film’s overall narrative complexity.
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