this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
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Since Oppenheimer was such a success, can we please get a high-budget Feynman film already? The guy was far more interesting and cooler and just generally more of a badass than Oppenheimer. And he fucked a lot more than Oppenheimer.
All we've gotten is Infinity which... it was okay, but come on. The guy got bored at Los Alamos and decided to learn how to safecrack. In the middle of the Manhattan Project. Because he was fucking bored.
I've read Feynman's autoanecdotal (It's not quite an autobiography?) book, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman...and he makes himself sound like an idiot. It's basically a book about what he did in his spare time; he deliberately avoids his science work and just talks about his hobbies and passtimes. And it's hundreds of pages of shit that sounds like this:
I went to the bar. To look at all the girls. And there was this music playing. It sounded great! So I went over to the guys who were playing the music. I said "Hey that sounds great! What is it?" And they said it's African Jazz. And I asked if I could play. They said sure. They gave me a little drum. They said it was a froingoboingo drum. You hit it with your fingers. They started playing, and I started hitting the drum. It was great! I played with them all night. I joined an African Jazz club. We played all the time. Until one time we went to this other place to play, and there was a guy there who didn't like that I was playing the drum. So I never played the drum again.
It's like he leans SO hard on being a straightforward guy that he tips over and lands in safety pencils and circle of paper territory.
From the book, "learning to safecrack" might be a bit of a stretch. The way I read it...Los Alamos was supposed to be like, the ultimate in secure locations, because Manhattan Project, right? Except they kept the most secret documents in the world in ordinary filing cabinets. The kind that don't have backs so you can just slide the thing away from the wall and pull the documents out. Or pointed out that people invariably left combination locks still pointing at the last digit of the combination. He didn't really get to the point of using The Tool That Bosnian Bill And I Made.
Not to mention his quest to reach Tannu Tuva. Or all the crazy things he talks about in "Surely you're joking, Mr Feynman". I feel like a movie about him should capture his playful approach to learning and teaching, and actually go into the subjects he studied. He was good at explaining things simply and the movie could do the same. It should awaken a desire to explore the mysteries of the universe. An antidote to all the anti-intellectualism we suffer from today.