Oppenheimer: Was [SPOILER] Murdered In Real Life?

Contains spoilers for "Oppenheimer."

Christopher Nolan's historical drama "Oppenheimer" makes a surprisingly effective reference to one of the most chilling mysteries of World War II.

About halfway through its gargantuan three-hour runtime, the film reveals that J. Robert Oppenheimer's (Cillian Murphy) on-again-off-again Communist lover, Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), died by suicide. At least, that was the official cause of death. For the controversial physicist, there appears to be at least some momentary confusion as he imagines two versions of her demise: one where she dies in the official manner described and one where she is murdered by an unseen assailant.

In reality, there is some speculation that Talock was murdered. The first and perhaps most superficial piece of evidence is the lack of a signature on her supposed suicide note. She had ingested a bizarre cocktail of drugs, none of which were apparently found in fatal enough doses, even in combination with one another. The book "American Prometheus" (which inspired Nolan's "Oppenheimer") offers that she may have been murdered by U.S. agents working on behalf of the Manhattan Project, quoting a doctor who said, "If you were clever and wanted to kill someone, this is the way to do it." But does this all necessarily mean that Nolan was casting doubt on Tatlock's official cause of death?

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Christopher Nolan's films are told from deliberately subjective points of view. This is especially true for "Oppenheimer," which presents scenes and events differently depending on if they're being remembered by the man himself or by his greatest adversary, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.). When the audience is shown the two different versions of Jean's death, they're depicted as flashes of possibilities tormenting the guilty J. Robert Oppenheimer.

It's telling that the first conclusion he jumps to after hearing the news is that she may have been murdered, regardless of whether or not it's actually true. Admittedly, Oppenheimer had been given cause for this concern by Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), who warned him about what the violently anti-Communist Colonel Boris Pash (Casey Affleck) might do to his associates. Perhaps it's possible, in the continuity of this film at least, that without Oppenheimer revealing to Pash the name of the potential Communist mole, the Colonel made a grimly justifiable leap in logic and went to interrogate Oppenheimer's most well-known Communist associate. That's what Oppenheimer seems to imagine at first, anyway, arguably to distance himself from guilt as much as possible.

It's only after he sees Jean taking her own life in his mind's eye that he tearfully accepts responsibility for her death. While he may be doing so in the case of either scenario, it's possible the flashback implies Oppenheimer's acceptance of the truth. Whatever tragedy befell Jean in real life, the ambiguity is almost certainly meant to be a window into Oppenheimer's guilty conscience rather than mere historical skepticism.