Two weeks ago, on a Sunday, I literally ran out of my six-hour Patient Care Technician shift to watch "Oppenheimer," Christopher Nolan's biopic starring Cilian Murphy as the Manhattan Project scientist, J. Robert Oppenheimer. In ninth grade, I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Benjamin Bederson, who was a bomb switch operator for the Manhattan project, so the inner high school history nerd in me was ready to be enthralled by the movie of the summer.
However, the iconic and controversial "Gita" sex scene where grad student Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) descends on Oppenheimer had me literally running out of the room faster than I ran out of my job to watch it in the first place. In this scene, the two sleep together for the first time following a communist party gathering. Midway through intercourse, Jean picks up a bound copy of the Hindu scripture "Bhagavad Gita" from Oppenheimer's bookshelf, and asks him to read from it – where we get the foreboding quote, "Now I become death, the destroyer of worlds" – before proceeding with the act as he continues to read. Although the film has received rave reviews, this scene has garnered immense criticism from Hindu nationalist group, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), for its insertion of religious scripture into sexual intercourse.
