Even at three hours long, Oppenheimer still doesn’t have quite enough time to get into everything that’s fascinating about Jean Tatlock.
Oppenheimer met his wife, Kitty, during a party in August of 1939, and his relationship with Jean had fallen apart by the end of this year. So the breakup scene between them in the film is very plausible. But as we see in the movie, their relationship did not end there. They continued to see each other about twice a year between their breakup and 1943; as Oppenheimer later explained, “we had been very much involved with one another, and there was still a very deep feeling when we saw each other.
Oppenheimer was under “near-total surveillance” during his time at Los Alamos, with the government never letting go of their suspicions about his Communist ties. After this visit with Tatlock, that surveillance extended to her too. On September 1, 1943, J. Edgar Hoover himself wrote a memo recommending that her phone be wiretapped because she had become “the paramour of an individual possessed of vital secret information regarding this nation’s war effort.
Tatlock’s death was ruled a “suicide, motive unknown.” She had ingested a number of drugs and left a note that read, in part, “I think I would have been a liability all my life—at least I could take away the burden of a paralyzed soul from a fighting world.” Inthe authors speculate she may have been struggling with her sexuality at the time, telling a friend before her death that in order to overcome her attraction to women, she had “slept with every ‘bull’ she could find.
In the film we see Tatlock’s death in snippets many times, seemingly from Oppenheimer’s imagination. Sometimes she slowly, methodically lowers her head in the bathtub; a few other times we see a black-gloved hand pressing her down as she struggles. That’s a nod to the lingering uncertainty some have about whether Tatlock’s death really was a suicide.
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