#dave lindorff

'Nuclear war is definitely front of mind in the public conscience nowadays. Between Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, tensions between the U.S. and China over Taiwan, and the film event that is Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, it's hard not to be constantly confronted with the frightening concept of atomic warfare. Hoop Dreams director Steve James's documentary A Compassionate Spy compounds on that with the story of Theodore Hall, a 19-year-old undergrad working on the Manhattan Project who shared nuclear secrets with the Soviet Union in an attempt to prevent the U.S. from holding a nuclear monopoly. James isn't simply following a trend or trying to capitalize on all the nuclear buzz, however.

Speaking to Collider's Chase Hutchinson, he dove into his thought process behind creating a character-driven documentary before any of the aforementioned events were brought to his attention. Although it turned out his documentary would release at the absolute perfect time and, in his eyes, play a perfect companion piece to Nolan's Oppenheimer, James wasn't particularly interested in the nuclear war angle at all. Like his previous documentary Life Itself, which explores who famed film critic Roger Ebert was behind his reviews, he was far more interested in Hall the person, the enduring love he had for his wife, and what makes a person betray his country out of compassion. When the comparison between A Compassionate Spy and Life Itself was brought up, he agreed that they both had a similar focus on their subjects:

"Yes, I think that's true. I'm driven by character in virtually every film I've made. I'm not driven by issues. It's not like I heard about Ted Hall, and I said, 'Oh, I think it's time to do a film about the dangers of nuclear warfare.' I mean, frankly, Putin hadn't invaded Ukraine, Christopher Nolan hadn't decided to make Oppenheimer; it was sort of like no one was talking about nuclear weapons. We were all worried that climate change was going to kill us, not nuclear weapons. And so, what really drew me to it was the stories of people, and that's always been a guiding principle for me as a filmmaker. So like with Roger, yes, I admired Roger as a critic, but I needed to read his memoir because I was interested in, 'Well, what kind of person was he, and what was his life like?' Because I wouldn't just make a film about a great film critic. I'm not that interested in that. [Laughs]"

A Compassionate Spy and Oppenheimer Fit Well as Character-Focused Pieces

The character-focused nature of A Compassionate Spy makes it an even more fitting pair with Oppenheimer. Nolan's film is less about the bomb and more about the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer who changed the world and was forever haunted by the devastation left behind by his creation. Developing the bomb is a major part of the film, but it also follows him in his early days as a young physicist and later into the emotional and controversial hearing over his ties to Communism and loyalty to the country which effectively destroyed his career.

March 18 DC peace march almost completely blacked out in US corporate media. Covering (Up) Antiwar Protest in US Media By Dave Lindorff / Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)  ScheerPost  March  31, 2023  byEDITOR In the early morning of March 20, 2003, US Navy bombers on aircraft carriers and Tomahawk missile-launching vessels in the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean, along with Air…

Senate Democrats, with Few Exceptions, are a Gang of War-Mongers Where’s the ‘democratic socialist’ challenge to militarism?

  By Dave Lindorff/ ThisCan’tBeHappening.net/ August 3, 2018

  Democrats in the US Senate showed themselves to be just another war party this week, with 40 of their number out of 47 voting to pass a record $717-billion military budget for FY 2019. Only seven…

IT’S ONLY OUR MONEY

The Pentagon Money Pit By Dave Lindorff/ Counterpunch/ August 11, 2016 What if the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services were to report that $6.5 billion in spending by that federal agency was unaccounted for and untraceable? You can imagine the headlines, right? What if it was $65 billion? The headlines would be as big as for the first moon landing or for troops…