What if you combined the Trinity bomb test scenes from OPPENHEIMER and TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN?
A transformative editing exercise to quell my curiosity.
Upon first watching Christopher Nolan’s pre-Oscar-winning Oppenheimer in July of 2023, my initial thoughts were preoccupied by the following notion:
When Oppenheimer comes out on home video, I can't wait for someone to inevitably splice together the depictions of the Trinity atomic bomb test from both this, and Part 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return.
All the horrors of the world unleashed with one atomic blast, Ludwig Göransson's feverishly intense score building to an overwhelming crescendo, before giving way to Krzysztof Penderecki's 'Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima', and David Lynch's nightmarish vision of the unfathomable insides of that first fateful mushroom cloud...
Cut to December of 2024, and having noticed that I still hadn’t seen anyone else do this mooted mashup I’d envisioned, I decided I might as well do it myself.
Of course, this presented the problem of where I could host this fair use editing experiment for others to see, considering video-hosting platforms such as YouTube would almost inevitably hit it with a copyright strike, and block it from anyone’s view.
That’s where my good ol’ Substack comes in, and with any luck provides an elegant solution to this potential problem, by way of me just hosting the clip here on its lonesome for others’ perusal.
So, what changes did I make when editing the two Trinity test scenes together, and what did I find when I intercut Nolan’s reality-grounded recreation of history’s first nuclear explosion with Lynch’s impressionistic, abstract, supernaturally-driven recreation of the same event in Part 8 of The Return?
Change-wise, I expanded Oppenheimer’s widescreen aspect ratio to match the 16:9 full frame of Twin Peaks: The Return’s cinematography. In keeping with the wish to make the two disparate clips meld together more seamlessly, I also changed Oppenheimer’s colour grade to black-and-white, so as to fit with Part 8’s black-and-white aesthetic in its flashback to the Trinity test. This allows for Oppenheimer’s colour to be reintroduced by the end, thanks to Part 8 switching back and forth between monochrome and colour as it visually depicts the fabric of reality getting violently torn open on a molecular level by the power of the bomb, allowing unearthly evils and horrors to bleed through.
Without the context of all of Twin Peaks’ lore and iconography established prior to Part 8, there’s a strong likelihood that anyone who is unfamiliar with Lynch’s epic television masterpiece will be confounded by what they see emerge from the transition between Nolan’s comparatively traditional based-on-a-true-story narrative filmmaking, to Lynch’s onslaught of uncompromisingly abstracted visual and sonic noise intersected with seemingly random imagery of soot-stained hobos milling in and out of an ominous convenience store, or a sinister pale entity floating through nothingness and birthing/vomiting a string of grey globules that includes a sphere containing the face of Killer BOB. Hell, even that last sentence probably doesn’t make a lick of sense to those not versed in Twin Peaks mythology, or general Lynchian weirdness. But don’t worry: even if it doesn’t make literal sense on a logical basis, the sheer feeling of unfathomable cosmic horror evoked by Lynch’s filmmaking is all you need to understand, and to take away from this Nolan/Lynch mashup. Their styles almost couldn’t be any more different, but when combining both directors’ reconstructions of the same earth-shattering historical moment, their disparate routes nonetheless converge to convey a similar sense of mortal dread at the unholy power of the A-bomb, and the horrors its creation irrevocably unleashed upon the world.
Special mention should also be noted towards how well Ludwig Göransson’s score, with its relentlessly suspenseful and increasingly frantic strings, perfectly tees up the apocalyptic atmosphere, and shared instrumentation, of the shrieking orchestra and disturbing discordancy heard in Part 8 soundtracking the A-bomb’s detonation with Krzysztof Penderecki’s ‘Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima’ (a composition whose title’s relevance to Oppenheimer and Trinity pointedly goes without saying).
With all that preambling ado being said, here now is the clip that finally answers the question:
“What would it look like if you combined the Trinity bomb test scenes from Oppenheimer, and Twin Peaks: The Return…?”
Footage from Oppenheimer (2023) belongs to Universal Studios.
Footage from Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) belongs to Showtime.
This edit is made under fair use for educational purposes.