Hollywood has always had a way of flattening differences. In the grand illusion of cinema, two things as far apart as night and day can, with the right framing, appear indistinguishable. The business of film thrives on archetypes, but sometimes the archetypes are chosen with so little care—or perhaps so much calculation—that they collapse distinct histories and philosophies into one misleading picture. As the world approaches the eightieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, it is worth revisiting how Hollywood has systematically placed Eastern symbols into Western nightmares, encouraging audiences to see the sacred through the lens of the profane.

Two films, separated by more than sixty years, offer a striking study of this phenomenon: Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023). Both films confront cataclysmic episodes in modern history—the Nazi crimes against humanity and the making of the atomic bomb—yet each imports Hindu symbols at decisive moments, almost as if to suggest that the moral ambiguities of the West and the spiritual legacies of the East occupy the same continuum. To the uninitiated viewer—and let us assume this is the overwhelming majority—these moments collapse cultural distances, turning difference into sameness.

Consider Judgment at Nuremberg, whose opening credits depict the shattering of a swastika. At first glance, the symbolism is unambiguous: the icon of Nazi horror reduced to rubble. Yet the image that lingers on screen is not the crooked, tilted hakenkreuz of Hitler’s Reich but the upright, balanced form of the Hindu swastika, a sacred sign of prosperity and cosmic order that predates Nazism by millennia. The misrepresentation is not trivial.........

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