I Survived Barbenheimer
How the feminine-oriented Barbie and the war-oriented Oppenheimer match up
I obeyed the marketing so that you don’t have to, if you don’t want to.
That marketing has been labeled as Barbenheimer, or OppenBarbie, commemorating this weekend when two big movies are released.
“Barbie” has been so awesomely marketed, attaching itself to a Nolan film that was going to get mega-publicity, that I say kudos to their team.
Still, their movie isn’t as good as the bulk of critics are saying, not even close.
“Oppenheimer”, meanwhile, is worth it if you are willing to pay close attention to particular, even petty-seeming details over a three-hour stretch. It will be taxing for many moviegoers with shorter attention spans, perhaps.
Reviews of both follow. Thanks as always for reading and subscribing. (Donate if you please!)
“Barbie” Review
"Barbie" watches to me as if someone took three college intro courses: one an evolutionary psychology class, another on the Frankfurt School, and another on feminist philosophy.
That person was so confused about how those might fit together — and I don’t think they do at all — that they made this movie, idealizing their favorite toy while undercutting its multiform cultural symbolism, only to promote Mattel in the end.
And Mattel does win in the end. This is a marketing movie glorifying a product, if nothing else.
A short synopsis of the plot: Barbie lives in a utopian toyland called “Barbieland,” where all the Barbies rule and have perfect days every day, with all of the Kens serving them and waiting on them.
But the stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) one day wakes up with an existential crisis: she becomes aware that she might die.
That’s not as serious as you might think. It really means mostly aging, especially anti-beauty aging such as gaining cellulite and getting flat-feet.
To stave this off, Barbie goes to the real world, where she tries to find her girl-owner. Ken tags along. There Ken finds out about patriarchy and bro-culture, which he brings back to Barbieland. That world is promptly changed to Ken-dom, where the Kens become dominant rulers and the Barbies are all cheerleaders and serving-wenches. Barbie herself has her house co-opted by Ken.
When Barbie gets back to Barbieland, she’s got to put everything in order. To do this — and I am spoiling this a bit — she does stereotypical female stuff, such as lead Ken on into believing that she’s into him, when in fact she’s plotting something else.
Now, this is a girl’s toy-fantasy movie first and foremost, dominated by Mattel marketing. I have complained before about the toyland movies I've seen in the last decade or more. The first "Avengers" watched as if it were a recreation of the toy battles I had in my room as a six-year-old, brought to you by Mattel and Hasbro for sure.
Here "Barbie" is the girly version of that, and I suppose it was high time we had it, since God knows how many Marvel and DC movies there have been before this.
But you won't find a humanized Barbie who becomes a complex character through trials and adventures, the kind of humanist literature that acted as a bulwark against dominate modern ideologies that wanted to reduce us humans to only minds, units, labor, or numbers.
Everything in "Barbie" remains a type to be analyzed by "Barbie's" own narrative. The movie is a story that is always meta. In one scene, a voiceover narrator comes on and tells the moviemakers that Margot Robbie was a bad idea to cast as Barbie because she's obviously super-beautiful.
And yet the movie wants Barbie to be super-beautiful because Barbie toys are awesome.
The movie, really the moviemakers, want to love the ideals of the Barbie toy while criticizing them. It’s as if they are wanting to embrace biologically-determined feminine drives while worrying about the cultural-Marxist implications of that. Watch “Barbie” with that last sentence in mind, and the entire thing is a hoot to observe the anxious dance of womanhood versus feminism at play.
In my view, female drives win out! But you don’t have to watch it that way.
And yet I return to a refrain: this is a Mattel movie. It was thirty minutes into the movie when I began counting how many times they said or showed "Mattel" -- I got 42 total, and surely there were more. I also have never seen so many copyright restrictions signs on-screen in a movie, as they flashed Barbie outfits on-screen, one after another.
It's really hard to make anything like this and not have it be in part a 2-hour commercial for a product, in spite of whatever cultural-Marxist analysis you try to inject in it.
But does this movie make Mattel out to be bad guys? The CEO and the corporate board are the dumb villains in the movie, after all. Doesn't that undercut Mattel’s apparent commercial ambitions in making and marketing this movie?
No, not here.
By my study of persuasion in psychology, my view here is that showing and talking about Mattel so much just reaffirms the brand. Casting goofy Will Ferrell as the "evil" CEO just sucks all the possible moral evil out of the Mattel depiction. A contrast to this movie's attempt to describe its corporate brand is the recent film "The Founder," starring Michael Keaton as McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc, in which I felt much worse about McDonald's after watching it than before.
You likely won't see that in any movie made and sponsored by Mattel. Note that they have a whopping 45 movies and TV shows about their products in production. Yep, that’s right. You have been warned.
As for director Gerwig, I don't think she takes too seriously the ultimate existential crisis she places in the movie. That is that Barbie becomes aware of her own death. This is one-upped by her fear of flat-feet and cellulite, tabled for most of the movie, then brought back up in the emotional ending, only to be undercut by the jokey final scene.
Do these filmmakers know what death is? I read this movie as flippantly avoiding the subject even while bringing it up.
That's a cardinal sin of literature in my world: do not underestimate or make light of the seriousness of that subject. Yes, you can joke about death; we all do. But when you make your character aware of her own mortality after she's been blissfully ignorant of it, you ought to follow that to serious places.
Granted, I suppose that cannot be done in any movie about a Barbie doll.
I can't imagine taking an 8-year-old girl to this film. What will she get out of it? A couple of fun Busby-Berkeley numbers. And a wide knowledge of Barbie's history and product line.
But not a grand adventure about complex humans, that's for sure.
I wonder about Gerwig. She put out on Criterion and letterboxd that she loves Michael Powell's "The Red Shoes," Wim Wenders' "Wings of Desire," and “The Umbrellas of Cherbourgh.” The thing is that those movies are predicated on great thoughtful literature, such as Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust.
Yet "Barbie"? I don't detect serious conversations about life here, even though the movie focuses on ideologies of money and power in a Frankfurt-School sort of way.
In the end, I just know that Margot Robbie is a stunningly beautiful woman and Mattel makes Barbie. That’s my five-second takeaway from the film, and what I will remember most.
How much does this movie reaffirm the cultural order it wants to take a run at?
Maybe a lot more than the filmmakers think, or would want.
“Oppenheimer” Review
Now we know what a Paul Schrader/Oliver Stone mashup channeled through Christopher Nolan would look like.
If you don’t know those directors, that’s okay. But the first and last acts of “Oppenheimer” almost out-did Stone’s penchant for thorough and sometimes turgid political details about real events. This film has a touch of “Mishima” and maybe quite a bit of “JFK,” two classic movies I cannot strongly recommend enough.
For whatever reasons, Nolan decided to interpret a sometimes dynamic, mostly dull-in-the-details biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History yet also partly annoyed me because it's about 90% politics, with hardly any science in it.
You'd think a biography about a famous scientist would have, you know, science. But it has almost no quantum physics talk at all. (btw, Nolan really blows Oppenheimer’s research about black holes out of proportion. For movie purposes, he does this quite a bit, understandably in my view, yet that’s a warning to beware taking this movie’s historical details too literally.)
The trouble with making a major world-event movie like “Oppenheimer” about a genius scientist is that you can't do that much with it.
As with “A Beautiful Mind,” the brilliant scientist, as a character, is too much a great genius for the audience, so movies have tended to show these figures as eccentric, even mad, with flashy shots and montages that indicate genius without really being about anything.
Nolan does that too, with plenty of 2001-like amorphous shots of something fiery doing things my Windows 95 screensavers used to. Only his look a lot cooler. Granted, Terence Malick already covered the creation/destruction of everything visually in "Tree of Life," a movie I was briefly reminded of whenever Oppenheimer had his anxious visions of either the subatomic world or nuclear weapons blowing everything up. For Nolan, those abstract shots probably signify both.
He also uses the raindrops-into-puddles shots to convey ... something. It's his opening shot here, nearly his closing shots, and a bunch of them scattered in between. Raindrops are bombs dropping, or particles merging, or something.
That confusion is part of the narration as well. Yes, I haven’t even mentioned the plot. It covers Oppenheimer’s life from the 1930s to 1950s, and that timeline is thoroughly mixed it up in Nolan’s script-blender. The result is biopic-puree.
In Nolan fashion, he throws together about six timelines in the first fifteen minutes without sorting them out for us, his only help being a colorized vs. black-and-white scenes, which he labels as “Fission” and “Fusion.” I honestly couldn't figure out the real difference between those two, other than black-and-white meant the power politics of 1950s anti-communist Washington DC. It's arguable that he didn't need the color contrasts, though I’m sure a worthy interpretation will be found of their differences.
Anyway, Oppenheimer in real life was of course the leader of the Manhattan Project. The movie gives you the construction and work on that project, through the first atomic-bomb testing in July 1945. That’s largely the middle act of the movie and arguably its most engaging section on first viewing.
Much of the rest of the movie covers Oppenheimer’s political allegiances in the 1930s, to communists in coastal California, and his hearings in the 1950s that got him in big trouble for being a communist-sympathizer in previous decades. If you aren’t prepared to detect the shifts in views of communism between the ‘30s and the ‘50s, this movie could be a difficult watch.
And I think it will be for most people, who will come away bewildered by details such as the AEC commission, the CAEGT, Lewis Strauss, Chevalier, Colonel Pash, and when Oppenheimer said what to who in 1938 and 1942 and what stories he told to get security clearance in 1944 that he may or may not get in the 1950s because he could be a lying communist son-of-a-gun.
It’s all a bit hard to sort out, I think, on first viewing. Certainly, if I were to use this movie in a college class, we’d spend half of our time just parsing out what happened plot-wise because a good deal of the students would claim they got lost in the details. That’s just the way it is: the movie will be confusing to a great many people, who might benefit from reading a plot summary before watching the movie.
By the way, I did read the "American Prometheus" biography about six months before the movie, so I was well prepped for the absolute confusion between mid-1930s Oppenheimer dealing with German quantum physicists and San Francisco communist hussies, and then 1950s Oppenheimer answering detailed questions about when Colonel Pash said what to who back in 1942.
If you can sort out exactly what Oppenheimer is on trial for in this movie, even though it's not a trial, God bless you.
For that reason alone, I cannot recommend this movie to anybody except cinephiles, people interested in film portrayals of scientists, and anybody into the atom bomb's creation. You have to be prepared to pay attention, closely.
Still, I liked Cillian Murphy playing "Oppie", with nice contrast with Matt Damon's engineer-colonel character. Once Damon pops on screen fifty minutes into the movie, you should feel everything shift to MOVIE MOMENTS, something finally entertaining and watchable.
Also, as a caveat to you, the lady who normally takes my credit card and gives me the movie ticket said that she fell asleep in the first fifty minutes because she "didn't get any of the science they were talking about." I checked and she's wrong: they actually talk about politics politics politics in the first fifty minutes, and the science comes in the first part of the second act. So I can't tell if she was bored by the '50s political intrigue material or the slightest whiff of quantum physics, which is all this movie has of science stuff.
Anyway, Murphy and Nolan create a pretty complicated character that I'm thrilled to see, as we don't get that as much as we should in movies these days. Oppenheimer was a communist sympathizer in the 1930s who became the patriotic supporter of the war, a non-practicing Jew concerned with Hitler who kept working on the bomb -- which he called a "gadget" euphemistically -- even when Germany surrendered.
The movie shows a guy willing to do science, build the ultimate weapon, not think morally about it, then think morally about it, be terrified of its consequences, and also accept the celebrity accolades and awards of being the Manhattan Project leader. Paging Paul Schrader, as that's his territory. It's no wonder he called this a terrific must-see movie.
I am dubious about my normie friends watching this, though. I can see people checking out in the last hour because they feel as if the movie climaxes with the bomb testing.
But no, Nolan wants to climax with 1950s Congressional hearings, which have never been entertaining, otherwise C-SPAN would have higher ratings.
My wife asked me what I thought about this movie when I came home from it, I replied that a one-word answer could not suffice. It's frustrating, dynamic, gripping, turgid, confusing, and cool. I can come up with 20 interpretations and applications of this film -- which is usually something I give high marks to -- but I am also thinking this film is a slapdash mess in major parts of it.
(Among those applications: present-day vaccine research, Ukraine-Russia war, AI development, America’s military might, bombings in the Middle East and elsewhere, nukes in India-Pakistan rivalry, North Korean politics, and of course the ever-present threat of nuclear Armageddon.)
“Oppenheimer” has does one awesome scene where Oppenheimer gives a speech right about the Japanese are bombed. Absolutely loved what they did with the sound in that one. For that alone, maybe this movie is worthwhile.
BTW and last, one interpretation here, which I got from the American Prometheus book itself, is the total interwining of science and statecraft. Oppenheimer himself is a symbol of that. This movie for three hours just hammers you with hearings and trial details that no person can withstand, plus Machiavellian intrigue and power politics. It makes me wonder what happened to scientific discovery and the pursuit of knowledge. According to "Oppenheimer," that's all completely bogged down in committee hearings and statecraft procedural stuff.
Which means science is all the worse for its subservience to the nation-state and its militaristic ambitions.
(One final note, a bugaboo for me: “Oppenheimer” makes an argument that the Japanese wouldn’t have surrendered without the atomic bombs being dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It doesn’t tell you the entire truth, though. “Surrender” means “unconditional surrender”; that is really what they mean in the movie, even though they never say it. The Japanese had already been fire-bombed severely by the US and were going to surrender just not unconditionally. For that reason the bombs were dropped. From there, you can morally analyze the justice of that action.)