I, Barbenheimer
I know it was just an internet gag, but Barbie and Oppenheimer paired like a fine wine
Folks, I did it: I Barbenheimered. I think I liked both movies better together than I would have liked them separately. Both were good, but not quite great: more on that soon.
First, some programming notes: I wrote this on a Tuesday in LaGuardia airport, where I am on my way to Las Vegas for a much needed vacation plus the annual Star Trek convention! I’ve never been to Vegas or a Trek convention before, and I’m eager to report back next week. I like nerd conventions, though I always find them a bit alienating at the same time; I’ve done Comic Con a few times and the excitement of seeing people in wildly creative costumes is always dampened by the fact that all this wild creativity is performed in celebration of an IP which is owned by a couple of guys in suits. The WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike is going to affect the convention—some actors and writers aren’t coming, and the ones that do won’t be able to promote the new shows, but that’s fine, because the new shows are mostly annoying, and an obvious attempt by a couple of guys in suits to unleash that wild creativity via consumer-targeted algorithm.
But whatever, at the end of the day it’ll be people having fun with stories that they care about, and it’s nice when people really care about something, enough to dress up and get excited. That’s what made Barbenheimering so fun, even a week late: people were THERE for it, in tight pink dresses or just that one pink t-shirt from the bottom of their drawer. My friend K wore pink shorts and a black trilby hat; he looked great. The movies looked great, and they’re very exciting. Just not quite—enough.
I like Christopher Nolan, but I don’t love him. I think I like him better when he plays with space than when he plays with time. I loved Memento, at least when I saw it. Interstellar looked gorgeous, but time-dilation-as-metaphor-for-loss has been used in scifi before, and the trick didn’t pack as much emotional force for me as the backwards-dawning nightmare of Memento. I still haven’t watched Tenet, because by the time I got to Dunkirk, I really wanted Nolan’s time games to start taking on greater significance. Dunkirk has three storylines that run at different paces—the “land” storyline takes place over the course of a week, the “sea” storyline takes place over a day, and the “air” storyline takes place over an hour. That’s a very cool idea, when you write it all out like that. But does it really…mean anything? All the emotional resonance in Dunkirk lies in the crosscutting between the storylines, in the different groups of people and their trials as they converge on the same historical moment. This is technically a matter of space AND time: so really, the time play in Dunkirk provides a solution to the logistical problem of getting all these people into the same spot at once. As a narrative trick, I have no problem with it: but it ends up being tremendously distracting, especially for something that’s just a trick, a gimmick, with little meaning of its own.
Oppenheimer also plays with time, sprawling over J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life from young adulthood to old age. There are two major storylines, which announce themselves through titles near the beginning: “Fission” and “Fusion.” “Fission” is shot in color, and covers how Oppenheimer ran the project that made the atomic bomb (and how he became the man who would make the bomb). “Fusion” is shot in black and white, though it’s set after the “Fission” storyline, and covers the attempted confirmation hearing of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), the former head of the Atomic Energy Commission and an important political figure despite his association with the now-disgraced Oppenheimer. After the dropping of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer had something of a change of heart, and opposed the creation of the H-bomb; in a series of scenes scattered through the movie, Oppenheimer and his associates are questioned by bureaucrats who simultaneously insist he’s not on trial and accuse him of being a Soviet spy. These scenes would seem to be part of the “Fusion” storyline, but are shot in color, I guess because they come before the confirmation hearing and are not from Strauss’s point of view.
The movie is three hours long, because this is all quite a lot: Oppenheimer’s early years; the race against time to make the atomic bomb before the Nazis or the Soviets; the agonized debate over what creating a weapon like this would mean; Oppenheimer’s messy personal life; his later “trial” for being a spy; Strauss’ relationship with Oppenheimer and his quest for political power. It’s a lot and I’m sorry to say it’s a bit too much, and the narrative weight is improperly distributed along all those storylines.
Until General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) arrives to recruit Oppenheimer to head the Manhattan Project about an hour into the movie, I don’t think anything really clicks. There’s a lot of zipping about through Oppenheimer’s life, as he meets famous scientists and moves from job to job: the first hour is mainly composed of short sharp scenes, and feels a bit like a resume. There’s a lot to establish very fast, and some of it feels clumsy, especially the scene when a young Oppenheimer meets Heisenberg in Europe. This ought to be a fateful moment, since Heisenberg would later work on the failed Nazi version of the bomb—but their conversation is rushed and seems to exist mostly so Oppenheimer can brings up, in a kind of non-sequitur, that he misses the U.S. and wants to go back to New Mexico. Nolan needs to establish Oppenheimer’s connection to New Mexico and the future bomb-building site at Los Alamos, so the reference gets tossed into an unrelated scene, and we zip away from Heisenberg to someone else.
The problem with biopics—and I generally don’t like biopics—is that their creators often fall in love with their subjects and the whole sweep of their lives. I don’t necessarily need to know every important person Oppenheimer ever worked with and the ins-and-outs of his fellow professors’ attempt to organize a union. In fiction, the obvious move would be to simplify: combine several of the brown-haired gloomy male scientists into fewer characters, and cut down Oppenheimer’s flirtation with socialism and communism into a tidier narrative arc. But he was a real person, and you can’t play too loose with his timeline or the historians will get you. (My husband is a Cold War history buff and a big Nolan fan; we kept joking about how this movie is his MCU. When a scientist who is also a Soviet spy arrives at Los Alamos, my husband whispered to me “that’s Fuchs, he was a big-time spy!!!” Needless to say, my husband loved the movie.)
Anyway I’ll allow some degree of unnecessary narrative bloat, because it’s a real story and history isn’t as clean as fiction; but ultimately Oppenheimer is interesting to us not because he was a genius physicist who lived in a lot of places and met a lot of important scientists, but because he built the atomic bomb. The bomb is the proper subject of Oppenheimer: that’s why we care about him in the first place, and that’s why the story picks up when General Matt Damon arrives. The really good part of the film comes in the middle, where Oppenheimer and his team in Los Alamos start figuring out how to make the bomb and reckoning with the hell they may unleash. There was a nonzero chance, according to the extant atomic theory of the time, that a single nuclear bomb could have ignited the atmosphere and destroyed the world. The scientists knew this, and they kept going: the Nazis were working on a bomb too, and the Manhattan Project scientists (many of whom were Jewish) knew what the Nazis were capable of. And then, before the American bomb could be completed, Germany surrendered; but the chain reaction of the bomb’s making was, at that point, seemingly unstoppable. With the lead-up to the “Trinity” test of the atomic bomb in New Mexico, the movie’s pacing dramatically slows down: the “Fusion” plotline disappears almost entirely. The sequence leading through the Trinity test to Hiroshima is slow and gripping and powerful, as Oppenheimer comes to grips with what he’s done in physical and visual terms. I don’t want to describe this too much, because it’s stunning filmmaking and some of Nolan’s best work: you really just have to see it.
Then we get the resolution of the “Fusion” plotline; some of this is great, and very compelling, it’s just all much, and nothing about that little committee room where Oppenheimer is being questioned or Strauss’s confirmation hearing is as cinematically compelling as what came before. We find out that it was Strauss who undermined Oppenheimer, planting the idea that the physicist’s opposition to the H-bomb was a sign that he was disloyal and a potential Soviet spy; Oppenheimer becomes both the symbol of the bomb and a martyr to it. This lets off Oppenheimer off the moral hook a bit, and seems misplaced: Oppenheimer’s attempt to stop the creation of the fusion bomb is an expression of his guilt and his grief over what he did. The narrative doesn’t need to exonerate him as a falsely accused innocent when he’s already condemned himself.
There’s an all-important conversation between Oppenheimer and Einstein, which is referenced through the whole movie: early in the film, Strauss sees the scientists talking, but doesn’t hear what they said to each other. When Einstein angrily brushes past him, the paranoid Strauss takes it as proof that Oppenheimer is trying to turn the scientific community against him. At the end of the film, we get to hear the conversation at last: Einstein and Oppenheimer were talking about the atomic bomb, and whether its creation did destroy the world in a way. The conversation was never about Strauss; it was only ever about the bomb. And that’s really very cool—it puts Strauss in a position of something like the guy in Pale Fire who thinks that everything is about him, when it isn’t. But it means that Strauss’ “Fusion” plotline was only ever a frame story: the real story is the bomb. The “Fusion” story gets so much time and carries so much weight that you might think the movie is about something else, when it isn’t; Strauss’s plotline is a trick, and that’s the point, but it’s too much of a trick and it doesn’t need to be. Take away the tricks, and there’s a much tighter, more focused and relentless movie; take away the tricks and there’s a bloom of fire at its heart.
And now, Barbie! We had literally 10 minutes between movies; it’s impossible to describe how weird and jarring and hilarious it was to switch from one movie to another. Barbie is very fun and funny. It leans into the impossible strangeness of its mission—to tell a corporate-approved and yet still feminist story about famous dollies—through surreal sets and dance-offs and a lot of absurd physical comedy. The Barbies (and Kens) live in the perfect Barbie world as living Platonic avatars of the dolls. The perfect Barbie world is run by Barbies; they hold the presidency and the supreme court, they’re the doctors and the scientists and the writers. The Kens hang out on the beach possessed by an unnamable existential dread, because they have no purpose and don’t meaningfully exist unless their respective Barbies pay attention to them. This is an inversion of the Male Gaze, and I respect Greta Gerwig for not directly explaining this to us, in a movie otherwise full of direct discussion of the patriarchy (the phrase comes up a lot) and the impossible contradictory demands placed on modern women. Ryan Gosling absolutely steals the show and chews the fake plastic scenery as a Ken who enters the real world and comes back with the idea of the patriarchy, which he confusedly thinks has a lot to do with men riding on horseback. He’s so funny that he deserves an Oscar; he’s so funny that he ultimately upstages Barbie. He’s kind of like Strauss, really, in that he thinks he ought to be the center of the story and can’t tolerate that he isn’t; but he’s so fun that he outdoes the protagonist’s emotional journey, instead of working as an accessory to it.
There are lots of thinkpieces about the feminism of Barbie and I haven’t read any of them. I’m sure some are fine. There’s not much to depth to the film, really: it’s fluffy entertainment for little girls, molded over a grinning death’s head of corporate power. Mattel produced a movie that jokes about how all their executives are men, men sure dominate the real world, haha! It’s because men hold so much power in the real world that Barbie is important: girls, we’re led to understand, need the fantasy of unlimited possibility. This is why the Barbie world returns to the status quo at the end, where Barbies hold all the jobs and the Kens are second-class citizens. We’re led to understand that this will change, someday, when men in the real world figure out their shit, but for now it’s important for the Barbie dream to exist, for girls to be able to imagine that someday they can be anything.
They can be anything, of course, but not do anything. We get a President Barbie but never see her wrestling with a tough moral decision; we never get a hint of what Physicist Barbie is working on in her secret lab. (I don’t think she even HAS a secret lab, which is obviously misogyny.) “Would President Barbie drop the bomb???” is too silly to ask; but then, girlboss feminism is fundamentally silly. Women can only dream of power, of holding jobs, not what we would actually do with them. We fantasize that if we did have these jobs, we would do them perfectly; we wouldn’t fuck things up like all these awful men. Hillary Clinton ran, in a way, as President Barbie: it was time for a woman to hold this job, which she could do as well as or better than a man; she would maintain a “muscular” foreign policy (her team literally encouraged sympathetic journalists to use that word.) The contradictions of girlboss feminism mean that President Barbie wouldn’t drop the bomb, because under the reign of women everything must be perfect and peaceful; but President Barbie would also absolutely drop the bomb, because that’s something male presidents get to do, and women should get to do the same things as men. There’s no moral ambiguity and no guilt in this version of feminism: a man might tear himself up for his choices, but women only weigh their choices against the choices that men get to make. Women are still only ever looking at men; they are still only accessories.
I find girlboss feminism very tiring; it really is “girl” feminism, not in the sense of being girly but in only making sense for little girls. Barbie isn’t a “female” movie any more than Oppenheimer is a “male” movie: Barbie is a girl’s movie, and Oppenheimer is a human movie, just one that’s mostly about men. I like Greta Gerwig as a director: I think she’s clever and talented, and she gets great performances out of her actors. But what I disliked about Barbie is ultimately what I disliked about her Little Women: the worst fate Gerwig can imagine is that a woman doesn’t get all the power she wants. The consequences of what happens when you actually get all the power you want—those far more serious and troubling moral questions about how you could hurt other people—doesn’t seem to be interesting so far in her universe.
Nolan’s time obsession is beginning to annoy me, but at least when I show up to his movies I know they’re going to be about interesting subjects: history and physics and dreams and guilt. But it feels lately like Gerwig’s movies are alway going to be about…women. Not women as human beings who do interesting and even reprehensible things (Lady Bird was this), but women who are blocked from being human, and can’t consider anything except that blockage. It’s not possible for a corporate movie like Barbie to be any more than it is, but it would be nice to see more women directors reaching beyond the fact of their womanness into something deeper than professional blockage and personal unhappiness with the patriarchy. I would like to be annoyed with a woman director’s continued obsession with an iron law of the universe. I don’t want every woman’s movie to be the second-place reactivity of Barbie—even though it was very funny!—while men make Oppenheimer and everything else.
Fantastic
Nailed it