Suzanne Harrington: I love Cillian Murphy, but hate the glorification of the bombs

Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer.

Move over St Patrick, and make way for St Cillian, creator of an atomic-level afterglow in which we’ve all been basking since that middle of the night moment when Brendan Fraser read his name aloud to a roomful of talented show-offs.

Since then, we’ve all been subsumed in an absurdly joyful sense of pride, as heartwarmed as if we had all somehow been personally involved. 

I spend the day after telling anyone who will listen that I am from the same town as Cillian. He’s just Cillian now. Like Bjork or Madonna.

I’ve never watched the Oscars in my life, yet was up half the night waiting to see if he’d win. Like he was a family member. 

Involuntarily punching the air when he did. Daughter in Australia is equally delighted — she loves Cillian from Peaky Blinders.

A flurry of WhatsApp memes ping between time zones. Will he be the next James Bond? Would he want to be?

He’s just played a genius who, like Prometheus, took the fire of the gods and shared it with stupid, destructive mortals, with catastrophic results.

Would he really want to play a smug psychopath with fantastic gadgets? Better a Bond villain, with a pronounced Cork accent: “C’mere to me, Mr Bond …”

Oppenheimer is the only film of the 10 nominated for Best Picture that I haven’t seen.

On the day of its release, I chose Barbie and its joyous take on patriarchy, rather than watching the actual patriarchy plotting to kill us all. It wasn’t a difficult choice.

But since Cillian held that gold statue aloft and dedicated it to all the peacemakers, to have not seen Oppenheimer seems a bit Fomo, so I duly download it. 

Ninety minutes in, I fall asleep. I have another go the following evening, and the same thing happens.

The third attempt, I start earlier, with coffee, and end up reading Oppenheimer’s bio on Wikipedia instead, learning how he read the Bhagavad Gita in its original Sanskrit and Das Kapital in German, in between devising weapons of mass destruction. That detail sticks.

Despite Cillian’s magnificence — white-lipped, clenched, thrumming with intensity — and the utter delight of everyone in Cork, and the whole of Ireland, that he won that most revered of gold statues, Oppenheimer the movie, for all its actorly brilliance, leaves me corpse-cold. 

Leaves me with a tired feeling of here-we-go-again, in terms of the glorification of men and the erasure of women other than as props.

There is no mention of Lise Meitner, the physicist who discovered nuclear fission in 1939; without her, there’d have been no Manhattan Project. Instead we have the alcoholic wife and the suicidal lover.

But far more than that Bechdel failure, we have the fetishisation of bombs, where the bomb and its inventors are presented as heroic, and the deaths they caused glossed over. Same old, same old.

The glorification of the tech bros of that era, as they created monsters, unleashed hell. I really wanted to love the film as much as we all love Cillian, but I just couldn’t.