Oppenheimer and Jean Tatlock: How To Botch A Woman

I’m not the first person complaining about the representation of women in media, and I probably won’t be the last, but there is a specific case of bad representation I would like to highlight and have, oddly, not really seen anyone talk about. If you’ve read this blog post’s title (if not, how did you get here?), you’ll have guessed I’m talking about how Christopher Nolan’s "Oppenheimer" represented the persona of Jean Tatlock. To show you why I find this important to talk about, I’ll first go through what Tatlock was shown to be like in "Oppenheimer", before then comparing that to the real Jean Tatlock.

Jean Tatlock, the Character

In "Oppenheimer", we first meet Jean Tatlock at a communist event. This is one of two scenes in the entire movie she is in for a reason other than being with the movie’s namesake, J. Robert Oppenheimer. Even then, the independence of her character is short-lived as after a bit of talking to him, they go to a more private location and have sex for the first time. A thing I found weird about that scene was that while having sex, she asks him to read to him from the Bhagavad Gita. My best guess is that this is meant to show Oppenheimer is well-educated?

After this, it takes a while until Tatlock reappears in the movie, again after hooking up with Oppenheimer during the Manhattan Project. The dialogue between them amounts to little more than "I miss you J. Robert Oppenheimer, you should come visit me more!", to which he hardly responds.

We’re shown how much she’s missing him in her second to final scene, where she’s dying by suicide and it’s implied that the reason for her suicide was her missing Oppenheimer. Her death doesn’t really affect the movie all that much - Oppenheimer gets one (1) scene where he’s sad and feeling guilty, but that scene is mostly used as a plot device as it ends up strengthening the bond between Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty. None of the other characters particularly mind.

There is one last callback to her during Oppenheimer’s hearing, where Kitty sitting next to him is juxtaposed with Tatlock again having sex with him. This is probably meant to show his connection to communism, but the movie already does so in so many other ways that it doesn’t really contribute to the big picture.

I think that last sentence sums up Tatlock’s arc, if you dare call it that, perfectly - it is consistently used to show things about Oppenheimer, but we know all those things already. We know he’s well-educated, that’s his whole deal. We know he’s very busy and stressed during the Manhattan Project, that’s what like half the movie is about. We know he has connections with communism, we know his bond with his wife is strong, all of these are things the movie has numerous ways of showing us. Tatlock never really interacts with any other character in the movie, the only other mentions of her are during Oppenheimer’s hearings, as she introduced him to communism.

That aside, there is a bigger problem I see with how the movie treats Jean Tatlock, and that’s that she was a real person.

Jean Tatlock, the Person

To be specific, my problem lies in the differences between the real Jean Tatlock and "Oppenheimer"’s representation of her.

Tatlock was a communist, she was in a relationship with Oppenheimer, they met at least once during the Manhattan Project and she did die by suicide. Actually, her suicide note is public on her Wikipedia page, and it doesn’t make any mention of Oppenheimer.

The suicide note does, however, sound like that of someone who has clinical depression, which Tatlock just so happened to suffer from and was being treated for at the time of her suicide. But it gets worse:

There is reason to assume Tatlock was a lesbian (or bisexual) in denial. In a letter to a friend, she argued that she’s "forced to believe it, but really, logically, I am sure that I can’t be because of my un-masculinity" (So much for why representation of queer people is important). Mason Robertson has also (allegedly) stated Tatlock told him she was a lesbian.

The reason this is relevant to her suicide is that she lived in a time where being queer was pathologised and treated as a disease to cure, something she must have been painfully aware of given that she was a psychiatrist herself. So you can (and I will) argue that being unable to "cure" her homosexuality might have also contributed to her suicide.

(There are theories that Tatlock did not actually die by suicide but instead was murdered by the CIA. The movie slightly touches on this, but I don’t think it’s too relevant to the point I’m making, so I won’t get into it too much.)

The Person vs. the Character

So on one hand, you have a woman who suffered from clinical depression and being a repressed lesbian and died by suicide as a consequence. On the other, you have a character who only serves to show things about the protagonist and eventually kills herself because she’s missing him.

To be clear, other pieces about/mentioning her are guilty of this too - even on her Wikipedia page, the majority of the text is about her relationship with Oppenheimer, while her work in the communist party is barely mentioned. After "Oppenheimer" released, there were a few articles in magazines about her (all titled something along the lines of "The True Story Behind Jean Tatlock". I love journalism.), and while the ones I’ve had a look at did correctly state that she died by suicide because of her clinical depression, most didn’t make mention of her sexuality and her issues around it (So much for the "True Story". Journalism.).

But either way, seeing as "Oppenheimer" is easily the widest known portrayal of her in modern pop culture, it has an effect. I have so far seen one (1) post about her out in the wild (but sadly don’t have a link to it), and it was a meme making fun of her dying by suicide because she lacked Oppenheimer’s Penis. I remember looking at the comments and seeing most people essentially agree that yes, that is what happened to Jean Tatlock.

While it is fascinating on some level to see how one portrayal of a woman that was never really known in pop culture can shape how people think of her (similar to how it’s fascinating to learn why a building collapsed, that is), it’s also just disrespectful towards her. Not necessarily by those commenters - they probably didn’t know better - but by the movie itself and how it decided to portray her. I don’t want a single movie to be able to rewrite a queer woman’s story into her being some scientist’s side piece, and nothing more.