‘Barbenheimer’ Asks: Who Ruin the World? Men.
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This weekend, legions of movie lovers will descend upon theaters, popcorn in hand and catheter in place, girding themselves for the single most unlikely double feature ever conceived by the internet.
When it was announced that Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s big-budget, bigger-canvas biopic about the man dubbed “the father of the atomic bomb”; and Barbie, Greta Gerwig’s big-budget, bigger-ambitions movie about the doll dubbed “Barbie,” would both be opening on July 21st, 2023, it looked like nothing more than a genius stroke of counterprogramming. Neither would be directly competing against any superhero movies; Tom Cruise’s new Mission: Impossible film would have had its chance to dominate the box office and media cycles for two weeks by that point; and given that the likelihood of one film stealing away the perceived core audience of the other was next to zero, people would have dual viewing choices that got them back into theaters either way. Studio executives patted themselves on the backs and lit comically huge cigars. That the center of this cinematic Venn Diagram might be bigger than anyone thought hadn’t occurred to a single suit.
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Enter Barbenheimer.
The idea of hardcore filmgoers turning the duo’s shared opening weekend into a full-on marathon experience, complete with a Brangelina-level name, began life in the usual manner: first as a joke, then as a series of memes, then endless think-piece fodder, and finally as a dead-serious cultural phenomenon. And while the temptation was to do your best Seth Meyers’ version of “Really?!?”, it made a weird kind of sense once you took in the bigger picture. Film bros may worship The Dark Knight director to a fault, but both cine-omnivores and people desperate for movies not aimed at 12-year-olds tend to love both Nolan and Gerwig for making smart, singular takes on familiar genres (heist thrillers, space-exploration dramas, literary adaptations, coming-of-age stories). Both have earned the title of auteur in an age where the “from the visionary mind of…” tag gets handed out like kindergarten participation trophies. And both raised expectations that they’d be respectively subverting the categorical norm for each project. Surely a great-man biopic from the guy behind Inception would not be generic Oscarbait. Truly the woman who gave us “Lady Bird” McPherson and a take-no-prisoners Jo March would not deliver a mindless two-hour commercial for a divisive, physics-defying toy?
Good news! The writer-directors didn’t, and the movies aren’t, and as reviews began to go online earlier in the week, the pitch around Barbenheimer has become even louder and more fevered. This. Is. Happening! And having spent a full day taking both movies in, almost but not quite back-to-back, I can confirm that it’s a rich yet whiplash-inducing experience, going from the candy-colored kitsch & commentary combo of Barbie to the somber, near-apocalyptic sturm und drang of Oppenheimer. They’re so different in texture and tone, with each setting up camp on opposite sides of the artistic and aesthetic field. Yet both are so smart and complex in their own ways, refusing to talk down to its audience and pander to the lowest common denominator. Both remind you that film is a medium with not depth but width, and each scratch a very different itch. Yet surprisingly, they also share one major thing in common. Both movies ultimately answer the question: Who ruin the world? Men.
[Spoilers a-comin’! Spoilers a-comin’! ]
Barbie sets up an alternate doll-iverse in which the Barbies — sunny, optimistic, presiding over a Supreme Court that actually cares about women’s rights — are calling the shots, and the Kens — handsome, shredded, really into campfire sing-alongs of Matchbox 20 songs — are what Gerwig has called Barbieland’s “underclass… almost like Planet of the Apes.” One Ken in particular, played by Ryan Gosling, lives to be the object of the Margot Robbie main Barbie’s affection. It’s the only reason why he would go AWOL from his very important job of “Beach” (that’s it, just Beach) to accompany her on a voyage to the real world. Maybe this is his ticket out of the friend zone. The very thought sends shivers all the way down to his anatomically ambiguous crotch flesh pouch.
Once the two are in our reality, they both have their eyes opened. Barbie discovers that a beautiful blonde rollerblading in a leotard attracts a certain type of male attention that’s a little too aggressive. She also notices that the power structure is predominantly dudecentric, and many men would prefer to just keep women in a box — figuratively, but in the case of Mattel’s manic CEO (Will Ferrell), literally. As for Ken, he soon comes across something called the “patriarchy.” Once he returns home, the Malibu Dreamhouse is transformed into the Mojo Dojo Casa House and this newly converted Kencel imports some good old-fashioned toxic masculinity into Barbieland’s power structure. Now the brainwashed Barbies do their bidding. It will end in tears, fake horse-clomping, musical numbers, and all-out war.
You don’t need to scream “I’m an ally!” on social media to clock how the movie is holding a funhouse mirror to a gender inequity that has only seemed more pronounced in recent years, and that people are calling bullshit on more firmly than ever. Nor do you need to have seen the worst that Twitter and Trump rallies have to offer to have noticed that the backlash to pointing out blatant sexism has become increasingly more venomous and violent. Barbie eventually deprograms her fellow sisters, who catch on to the fact that they don’t need to be second-class citizens. (Or, for that matter, listen to someone mansplain The Godfather and Pavement albums.) They weaponize a collective jealousy among the he-man Kens and, while the bros fight each other on the beach, the Barbies get some laws passed.
It’s played for both laughs and ahems, and by the time the Kens catch on to what’s happened, order has been restored. But the message is still there, hiding in plain sight: Given the chance, the Kens of the world will probably tilt toward Hummers, posters of horses, and hogging the limelight. They’ll also destroy each other and everything around them if their fragile egos are even slightly bruised or they feel threatened. You get the sense that they’d burn every Mojo Dojo to the ground before giving an inch. There’s the slightest tinge of sourness to all of the pretty-in-pink sweetness that Barbie puts forth in the name of one doll’s liberation. In their world, the patriarchy’s worst aspects can be tempered. In our world? We have not come a long way, baby.
Still, credit where it’s due: It’s been a while since anxieties over whether dick-measuring contests between nations might result in nuclear annihilation filled our every waking moment. (Or, at the very least, a few years!) Oppenheimer brings us back to the origin story of those worries, focusing on the man who led a group of scientists in a race to invent a nuclear bomb for the U.S. military before the Nazis did. Played by Cillian Murphy, J. Robert Oppenheimer is portrayed as a hero, a martyr, a genius, a pillar of morality, a midwife to mass destruction and, interestingly enough, a bit of a cad. (We’re told he’s a womanizer and see him making eyes at the then-married Kitty Puening, but with a few notable exceptions involving an affair, we mostly witness him fretting over labor unionizing, science, and the potential extinction of the human race.)
Nolan throws a lot into his IMAX-sized biography, from courtroom dramas to anti-communist fervor to academic in-fighting. The bulk of the three-hour-plus movie, however, deals with the use of science to perfect a killing machine, and how said invention will change the course of history. More specifically, it could destroy the world several times over, something Mr. “Now I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds” had picked up on even before the Trinity test showed him and his fellow eggheads the power they’ve unleashed. There are a number of gut-punch moments in this tale of a man fighting for his legacy and his soul, but the haymaker comes courtesy of Matt Damon’s Major General Leslie Groves, who Oppenheimer asks to think about the responsibility of using this weapon on an enemy population. “We’ll take it from here,” the general coolly replies, before heading back to the Pentagon.
An entire history of proliferation and arms-race brinksmanship resides in that one line of dialogue. And though women are not treated as an afterthought — Emily Blunt’s Kitty is the one to put a zealous lawyer in his place, and Olivia Thirlby gives Manhattan Project scientist Lilli Hornig a sense of personality in her brief screen time; only Florence Pugh gets the Jezebel treatment — we’re talking about the 20th century world of politics, the U.S. military, and university science departments. It’s very much a man’s world we’re dropped into, in other words. And a lot of energy is devoted to what these men hath wrought upon everybody. Nolan never shows the actual bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a decision that’s already generated some controversy. But he does show you Oppenheimer imagining a blinding blast, a charred corpse at his feet, the sudden blank space where his cheering colleagues once sat. The man won the war and lost the battle.
Barbie begins with a utopia, which will be restored before a killer last line is spoken and the end credits roll. Oppenheimer begins with rain drops gently plunking into a puddle (ahh!) and ends with a vision of Earth on fire (argh!). Do the Barbenheimer double feature the way the nickname intends, and you leave despairing at a patriarchal legacy that still haunts us to this day. Reverse it, and you leave on a shiny, happy note. That’s the ending in which you contemplate women ruling the world. This may be an even more instructive double-feature pairing than anyone might have guessed. Never mind the Barbenheimer. Long live Oppenbie!
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