My Kongenheimer Week

How do you judge a story?

Years ago, I surprised my friend Fi by suggesting we see Kong: Skull Island at the cinema. She indulged me and we spent most of the movie giggling our heads off at a) the randomness and scale of it all and b) the fact we were there of our own volition watching it. This has now become a tradition, so of course when Kong x Godzilla was released on Wednesday we were first in line for tickets. Fi collected her cup of tea at the food counter, I brought my water bottle, and we both smuggled in chocolate bars to share without even discussing it. Then we settled ourselves in for the thrill of watching Kong and Godzilla explode buildings and rip their enemies apart for a couple of hours. We were the only middle-aged women in the cinema without a teenage boy in tow. We cringed as the body parts of megabeasts flew around the screen. We were appalled at the monsters’ casual disregard for world heritage sites. We looked at each other numerous times to burst out laughing at some inane moment on the screen. And we had no problem following the story because the plot is pretty simple. Find the threat. Beat the crap out of it (preferably exploding it in the most grotesque way possible). Save the world. Repeat. It’s a film that wants to take total command of your neurotransmitters, like being on a theme park ride for two hours.

Rewind three days. My husband, teenage daughter and I sat down to watch Oppenheimer, eager to experience the lauded 2023 film that had garnered all those Oscar wins and nominations. As expected, the cinematography and the actors were incredible. However, two hours into the three-hour film, we were still struggling to figure out how some of the characters on screen fitted into the story. I wanted more clarity on the people around Oppenheimer during the Manhattan Project. I wanted less senate and security clearance hearings, and more about why Mrs Katherine (Kitty) Oppenheimer seemed to hate their kids, and the influence she had on her husband. I wanted the film to somehow represent the unimaginable destruction wrought in Japan in the direct aftermath of the bomb. Instead, it felt like a series of artistic set pieces: Oppenheimer poisons an apple. Oppenheimer meets Einstein. Oppenheimer listens at a hearing. Oppenheimer watches a bomb explode. It was beautifully rendered, but in this story the effect of the bomb itself is secondary to the quandaries and experiences of the man who helped design it. This is particularly clear in the scene when the bomb has just been dropped, when we watch Oppenheimer struggle while his coworkers cheer the news of the impact. The moment switches between their triumph and imaginary moments of the same people as victims rather than the victorious. Oppenheimer pictures those around him crying in distress; he steps on a figure turned to ash. But this is a symbolic rendering of his crippled conscience, with the effects of the bomb transposed onto his American friends, nowhere close to a vision of the true carnage occurring in Japan. It left me cold, but perhaps it was meant to - because another later scene shows Oppenheimer watching actual footage of the aftermath and flinching. I understood that. My eyes were opened about Hiroshima at age 16 when my friend gave me a slim book written in 1946 by John Hersey, which detailed the catastrophic impact of the bomb: such as melted eyeballs, and people vaporised leaving only their shadows on the wall. I’ve never forgotten what I read. But this movie wasn’t about that. It was Oppenheimer’s story.

These two experiences left me thinking about how we receive and judge stories, because we all know that certain books and films are given a higher cultural value than others, and this doesn’t always correspond with popularity. One of the most recent high-profile newsworthy examples was the outcry over the perceived Oscar nomination snubs for Barbie’s Greta Gerwig (director) and Margot Robbie (actress), because Barbie was a cultural phenomenon and the highest grossing film of last year (well above Oppenheimer), making 1.4 billion dollars. There is a regular discussion around the derision applied to certain stories: such as those written by women, about women or for women; or the value of commercial versus literary fiction. But what’s fascinating and disturbing about this kind of genre/gender-based cultural cringe is that, because it’s so insidiously pervasive, no one can pinpoint exactly where it’s coming from. Yes, it sometimes shows up clearly in nomination lists and media articles, but although these are often recognised and called out, they still leave us with an uncomfortable read on the current cultural temperature. And the same biases and judgements can feel like they’re everywhere but nowhere, revealing themselves in the offhand comments of friends, a snarky sentence from a reviewer, or the trail of comments on a social media post. After a while we don’t even need external input as we develop our own barometers of taste.

Perhaps another way of judging a book or a film is to consider what it’s trying to be, and then to decide if, in our humble opinion, it achieved its aims. If I proceed on that basis, then Kong and Godzilla nailed it. Which was probably why the testosterone-filled theatre burst into an unexpected spontaneous round of applause as the credits rolled.

Did Oppenheimer nail it too, in the context of telling the story it wanted to tell? It was certainly a fascinating and stylish film - a piece of cinematic art - and the cast and crew deserved all their accolades. And it gave a nuanced and thorough account of Oppenheimer’s life, as evidenced by his grandson’s reaction in Time magazine. So I can’t say it didn’t deliver - but, for me, it wasn’t the gut-punch of a story that I was hoping for.

How have you decided to choose the stories you consume? Do bestseller lists or box-office takings add credence for you - or do you look for something specific and more personal? And how do you judge them? Is it by artistic merit, originality, or what you learned, or how they made you feel? Is it sometimes disconcerting when you don’t connect with a story that has been widely praised? And how do we decide which stories to treasure the most, after a lifetime of imbibing cultural perspectives about what we collectively consider to be valuable?