Chances are near zero.

Near zero?

What do you want from theory alone?

Christopher Nolan's modern cinematic masterpiece Oppenheimer is a surreal, brooding, and pensive story about a man driven to create an instrument of war that forever reshapes the globe.

I just want to create beautiful airplanes.

Like that?

Very graceful.

I have a long way to go.

Hayao Miyazaki's The Wind Rises is also about a man driven to create an instrument of war that forever reshapes the globe, and yet it's not the surface level recounting of these two films that truly bond them together.

It's the simple fact that they're both constructed around the unifying theme obsession.

I wanted to study the new physics.

Was there nowhere here?

I thought Berkeley had the leading theoretical physics department.

Yes, once I built it.

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The Wind Rises or literally translated from Japanese as The Wind Has Risen, the film is a sweeping biopic about Jiro Horikoshi, a man who has a burning passion for planes and the idea of flight.

You were talking in your sleep.

He told me that airplanes are beautiful dreams.

So I'm going to make beautiful airplanes.

This eventually manifests as a career designing planes for the Japanese military.

He will eventually design a terrible instrument of war, the Mitsubishi A6M Zero.

Despite the carnage that this device will inevitably wreak, Jiro is obsessed with flight and spends the whole movie pursuing this idea of perfecting the act of flying regardless of the ends that his ideas will ultimately be utilized for.

Airplanes are beautiful cursed dreams, waiting for the sky to swallow them up.

The film Oppenheimer, based on the book American Prometheus written by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin,

positioned its protagonist J. Robert Oppenheimer as arguably the most important man who has ever lived, a scientist and mathematician who had wild theories of what the known universe held in store for mankind.

Oppenheimer was recruited by the United States government to oversee and run a top secret enterprise known as the Manhattan Project, a clandestine operation

with the simple goal of constructing a weapon that could compete with the at the time theoretical menace of nuclear weapons.

It's easy to see the surface level parallels between The Wind Rises and Oppenheimer.

They're both films that center on driven men carrying out scientific pursuits based on what they think are imperatives spurred on by the mechanisms of war.

In The Wind Rises, Miyazaki has recurring dream sequences where Jiro interacts with Gianni Caproni, the Italian civil, electrical, and aeronautical engineer who designed numerous planes.

Caproni is something of a mystical dream mentor for Jiro, giving him both encouragement and offering words of caution that the devices Jiro is working on will be used to kill enemy combatants in war.

However, Jiro does not heed this second part.

He repeatedly ignores the moral fallout of his actions in pursuit of accomplishing a task.

I wanted this design to use the latest aeronautical advances.

Minimal drag will be the key.

I pushed the design to the limits of technology.

It bears stating that both of the films in question are deeply autobiographical for the men who created them.

In The Wind Rises, many of Jiro's biographical elements are evolved or altered to fit Miyazaki's actual life story, a perfect example being Jiro has a wife with tuberculosis and an insatiable desire to create,

two things that are very obviously part of Miyazaki's life with his mother having tuberculosis and his own relationship with creativity being famously fraught.

Similarly, Christopher Nolan obviously struggles with many of the issues that Oppenheimer does in his film.

Nolan obviously relates to Oppenheimer's struggle and his commitment to his work.

There seems to be some sort of personal metaphor interlaced with how Oppenheimer's personal indiscretions and shortcomings--like literally abandoning his son in favor for his work--strike a deep chord with Nolan personally.

Is making a movie the same as inventing nuclear weapons?

From looking at his work, it's easy to come away with the idea that Nolan views himself as someone who is shouldering the weight of the world, and that's exactly how he depicts Oppenheimer,

a man destined for so much greatness that his personal life is almost required to be thrown by the wayside.

Now it's your turn to deal with the consequences of your achievement.

However, the more interesting discussion to have is to analyze how each of these men deal with the magnitude of the negative side effects that each of the inventions in question have had on global culture.

Miyazaki chooses to portray Jiro as the criminally naive man, driven by the insatiable desire to conquer a technical problem.

How that solution is eventually used is of relatively little interest to him.

It's the puzzle at hand and his passion for flight that pushes him onward, but even more disturbingly, Miyazaki doesn't seem particularly interested in drawing a clear picture that what Jiro is doing is wrong.

In Nolan's film, Oppenheimer repeatedly says that he's not sure any global government should have the power to ignite nuclear war, but he definitely knows the German military should not be allowed to have access to this power first.

Therefore, there is no choice but to pursue the very technology that could unmake the world.

Does this moral relativism absolve the character from further scrutiny?

It shouldn't, but that's about as far as Nolan goes for the first hour and a half of the film's runtime.

Nolan depicts Oppenheimer's dogged crusade as just and true one.

He never pushes back against his subject or provides any truly questioning moments until almost two hours into the movie when it's been revealed that Germany has lost the war, but the bomb must be finished.

And then the US government decides to utilize it on the Japanese people.

We intend to demonstrate it in the most unambiguous terms twice, once to show the weapon's power and a second to show that we can keep doing this until they surrender.

Nolan seems to be reverential in Oppenheimer at nearly every turn as in the man's flaws were the only possible solution when taken in the context of his duty and calling to the literal fate of humankind.

On the surface, it appears as if Nolan is attempting to construct a full portrait of a man.

However, he still never fully delves into the fallout or cost of Oppenheimer's actions either interpersonal or professional.

Similarly, Miyazaki depicts Jiro's dedication to his work even when the character should be caring for his ailing partner Nyoko as a noble thing.

It's apparent that to Miyazaki, the process of attempting to conquer the seemingly impossible and the dedication to one's work are the highest calling, even when there are people literally dying of tuberculosis in your immediate vicinity.

You work better when you're holding my hand.

You're right.

If only I could leave my hand right here for the test flight.

Both films are driven forward by the idea of obsession, largely because both filmmakers obviously relate to the protagonists through their understanding and lived experience with being obsessed.

In some ways, both of these films are the most personal and most autobiographical pieces either filmmaker has produced and therein lies a potential reason for why each of them refuses to fully explore the moral relativism surrounding their protagonist.

Why is it that Nolan did not depict any actual wartime conflict in Oppenheimer?

Why is it that Miyazaki never chose to have a robust deconstruction of the futility of attempting to use the mechanisms of war to pursue your passions of creation?

Maybe that's because too close an examination of these characters would force the directors to examine themselves and come away seeing something they didn't like,

or maybe they just realized that the men in questions obsession caused death on a scale previously undreamt of.

And that would just be too hard to handle.

Well, that's all we have for this episode.

What do you think?

Did Nolan and Miyazaki each handle the subject matter at hand accurately?

Let us in the comments below.

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