The summer of 2023’s cultural juggernauts met head-on in Washington over the weekend of July 21st-22nd and quite literally rocked the state. Taylor Swift’s Eras tour played Seattle’s Lumen Field, with fans’ raucous enthusiasm causing the equivalent seismic activity of a 2.3 magnitude earthquake, and Barbenheimer opened in cinemas across the state (and country) with in-person, moviegoer zeal not seen since well before the pandemic.
“Barbenheimer” is the cumbersome portmanteau created by the mashing together of Warner Brothers Picture’s Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig, and Universal Picture’s Oppenheimer, directed by Christopher Nolan.
“Barbenheimer” is the cumbersome portmanteau created by the mashing together of Warner Brothers Picture’s Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig, and Universal Picture’s Oppenheimer, directed by Christopher Nolan. When word got out last year that the anticipated works would be released concurrently, jokes abounded across social media as to the incongruity of the two. Quick to note the traction the humor was gaining, promoters at Warner Bros. and Universal got to work reviving the all but dead movie marketing tool, the double feature. Among others, they enrolled Tom Cruise, who shared photos of himself holding tickets to the films and wrote: “I love a double feature, and it doesn’t get more explosive (or more pink) than one with Oppenheimer and Barbie.”
The campaign worked: both movies outsold box office predictions, making it the fourth largest U.S. opening weekend of all-time. And despite a combined marketing budget for the projects of over a quarter billion dollars that threatened to the make the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon itself bigger than the movies, Barbie and Oppenheimer delivered.
Barbie, a live-action movie based on the eponymous children’s fashion doll introduced in 1959 by Mattel, Inc., is a clever political, feminist commentary on society. The fantasy comedy begins in Barbieland with a visual overload of stereotypical girlhood of the middle half of the 20th century. Barbie, played by Margot Robbie, lives in a very pink utopian matriarchal world populated by the multitudinous Barbies who hold all positions of prestige, including lawyers, doctors, and politicians, and the various Kens who occupy themselves with days at the beach.
After a girl in the real world playing with Barbie transfers her insecurities, including perceived physical flaws, to Barbie, who in turn has an existential crisis, she and Ken, played by Ryan Gossling, travel to the “Real World.” There they find a patriarchal society, which terrifies Barbie, but thrills and enlightens Ken. Ken brings this reverse societal order back to Barbieland. At first, it is funny with stereotypical “bro culture” becoming the norm. Soon though, the audience troublingly realizes that the laugh is on them. Ken’s extreme blueprint for Barbieland is the world in which we live.
Barbie continues its mischievousness with the audience – and the boasting of its self-awareness – throughout its almost two hours that ends predictably. One notable instance by breaking the fourth wall and having its narrator, Helen Mirren, point out that Robbie is the wrong person to cast if it was going to convincingly portray someone who could feel insecure about her physical characteristics.
Oppenheimer, based on Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s 2005 biography American Prometheus, on the other hand, though filled with abrupt time jumps and scene transitions, plays no games with its audience. While like Barbie it is big-budgeted, star-studded, and visually stunning, unsurprisingly there is no campy veneer to Nolan’s biopic of the head of the Manhattan Project that developed, in the secret city at Los Alamos, NM, the first nuclear
weapons.
The “father of the atomic bomb,” J. Rober Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy, lead a complex, enigmatic life full of contradictions that is portrayed on screen from two points of view: his own, in color sequences, and that of the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss’s, in black-and-white. Stauss is played by Robert Downey Jr., whose performance almost steals the show. The captivating career of Oppenheimer wins out though.
The film focuses on three eras of his life: his studies at Cambridge with the likes of Nobel Prize winners Patrick Blackett, Isador Isaac Rabi and Niels Bohr, and at the University of Göttenberg with Werner Heisenberg; directing the Manhattan Project during World War II; under scrutiny in a security clearance hearing, orchestrated by a slighted driven Strauss for having opposed the use of nuclear weapons and their further development.
The IMAX format film used by Nolan, combined with the gravity of the subject matter, makes every scene of Oppenheimer feel larger than life, every shot feeling indispensable to the story. Oppenheimer is filmmaking at its best. It may not be the best movie ever made, but it does hold within it the reason we go to the movies – at a cinema: It is a spectacle to be seen with other people.
Nolan, in promotional interviews for Oppenheimer, hyperbolically states that “like it or not, J. Robert Oppenheimer is the most important person who ever lived. He made the world we live in, for better or for worse.” It is quite possible that the atomic bomb and its use may be the pinnacle of testosterone driven development in human history. Today though, women with a gentler touch are outpacing men in almost every aspect of society, from college attendance to wage earnings to new hires in management positions throughout the corporate world. While the end results of the Manhattan Project may lead us to believe this is a welcome change from masculine aggression to female empowerment, ironically and counterintuitively, Barbie reminds us not to ignore the struggles of so many boys and men who are feeling disempowered in our modern world.
Beneath the hype of the summer of 2023, there lies lessons from the pop music of Taylor Swift who sang “If I was a man” and Oppenheimer and Barbie who warn us of what it is like to be a man - and a woman.
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