![]() It’s open to visitors twice a year, on the first Saturday in April and the third Saturday in October. The Trinity test, I’d read, is the climax of Oppenheimer’s second act, so the site plays a big role in the movie. A few years ago, I talked the army into letting me visit the Trinity Site, the spot in the New Mexico desert where the first atom bomb was detonated a few weeks before the bombing of Hiroshima. I have a special reason to be curious about Oppenheimer. Something about the scene strikes me as comically incongruous-all these people in somber clothes who are waiting to see a movie about the extinction of life on earth, surrounded by Barbie iconography in a theater next door to an Applebee’s-but there’s something a little unsettling about it, too, an eerie quality of foreshadowing that I will struggle to identify until well into the third act, when it will hit me like a thunderclap, all at once. There’s also, uh, a nonzero number of guys who match my general description, men in their 30s and 40s who’ve come to see Oppenheimer alone. There’s a cool girl in suspenders and wide canvas trousers. But it’s a Nolan crowd in the concessions line. ![]() We’ve got a Barbie van, life-size Barbie cutouts, Barbie posters. Inside, the lobby decor is a pink fever dream of Barbie paraphernalia. One of the entrance doors has a sign on it that says, “Please Use Other Door.” People are freely going in and out through this door I can’t decide whether this would irritate Nolan or not. There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV. Some of the crowd, though not all of it, cheered during the torture scenes. I saw Zero Dark Thirty at the Carlisle Commons. I liked that, but it never seemed to have much to do with the reality of moviegoing in America. When I lived in L.A., I went to all the fancy theaters, the ones with ushers and light meters and the correct film stock. It’s got eight screens, a gray lobby, a couple of arcade games, industrial carpet. But the place to see Nolan movies is the multiplex on the edge of town, the R/C Carlisle Commons, a minor outlying island in the concrete sea surrounding Staples and Walmart. We have one semi-highbrow movie theater, a crumbling old vaudeville palace on High Street that shows foreign films and art films and sells quaintly tiny servings of popcorn in rigid boxes with “Popcorn” written on the sides. I live in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a town of 20,000 people in the middle of the Keystone State. Then it hits me that the truly Nolanesque touch would have been watching it switch from 6:51 to 6:50, or from 6:51 to -2:a9, for reasons that had recently been explained to me by a man in a very sharp suit. This strikes me as a satisfyingly Nolanesque touch. I actually watch as the clock switches over from 6:51 to 6:52. ![]() Time is always a big deal in Nolan movies. I make a point of checking the clock because I’m on my way to see Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s new biopic about the physicist who supervised the development of the atomic bomb. when I pull into the Walmart parking lot.
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