The People Demand My Barbenheimer Take
So much for my summer hiatus
Watching
Oppenheimer (2023)
In her short story My Heart Belongs to Bertie, Helen DeWitt bemoans, in an author’s note, the paucity of “fiction that shows the way mathematicians think.” Her story, which includes many inserts of probability graphs to visually demonstrate this, is her attempt to think through the problem of thinking mathematically, and why some people see the value in it while others don’t care.
Oppenheimer doesn’t show how nuclear physicists think so much as it shows how Christopher Nolan, screenwriter, thinks. Even at 3 hours I found Oppenheimer admirably economical. Characters say exactly what is necessary to propel the plot forward, or occasionally in circles. Women don’t have much to say, but if you’re really getting worked up over that fact in a Christopher Nolan movie this far into his career I don’t really know what to tell you; you still bought that ticket. Insofar as the movie is an adaptation of Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, I can’t tell what precise liberties Nolan has taken with history, as I haven’t read the book. Nonetheless the film strikes me as ahistorical in at least one sense. I haven’t sat in on a physicist rap session in a while but I’m pretty sure no one in Oppenheimer’s circle spoke with such breathless, constant clarity about the stakes of every last decision made in the lead up to the creation of the atomic bomb.
A 2023 movie about the Bomb exists in the shadow of David Lynch’s 2017 hour of television about the Bomb, in which Lynch imagines the July 16, 1945 Trinity nuclear test as inextricably linked to the birth of (new and improved) evil, replete with audiovisual abstractions and Krzysztof Penderecki’s “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” to relate the event at hand to the forthcoming genocide of Japanese civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nolan mounts a hair-raising production of his own—a two hour march toward the inevitable—then dismounts with one of the most impressive sequences of his career. Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), fresh off the successful deployment in Japan of the invention whose creation he oversaw, enters an auditorium of Manhattan Project scientists and delivers a rousing speech that aims at patriotic pride. If only we had had the bomb sooner to drop on Germany! he yells to roaring applause; but the walls behind him are quivering and oozing like something out of a bad mushroom trip. The screen flashes white and the voices congeal into a shriek. Oppenheimer staggers for the exit and steps in the imagined, fragile corpse of an ashy child on the way. Inside the hall, young physicists cheer and kiss all around him. In the fresh air, he’s greeted by a man vomiting over a fence.
Draped around this primary narrative is a secondary one, set in 1954 and indicated with black and white photography1, where Atomic Energy Commissioner Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) instigates a hearing into Oppenheimer’s alleged Communist background and present political sympathies in order to revoke his security clearances. This is the most directly I can recall any Nolan movie taking on politics. Like the science-heavy sections, the parts dealing with the Communist element of Oppenheimer’s biography are digestible, if somewhat forcedly so for the sake of keeping things moving. Between these two timelines are enough rotating supporting cast members to play a robust game of “Hey wait, it’s that guy!” For all the gesturing at science that goes on in the first two thirds of the film, Oppenheimer is a character study in the end. Yet it’s hard to imagine Nolan, who only occasionally dabbles in reality, ever making another biopic; who else’s story would let him play around with pyrotechnics on this scale again?
Barbie (2023)
Not even Barbie, a thoroughly postmodern and of-the-moment movie, is immune to charges of ahistoricity. According to Amy Taubin, who lived through the introduction of Mattel’s now-ubiquitous doll in the late 1950s, grown-up dolls were very much already on the market in the 1940s, contrary to the assertion in the film’s prologue that little girls had nought to play with but baby dolls until Barbie walked onto the scene. But why not fudge the facts a little if doing so lets you open your movie with a spoof on 2001: A Space Odyssey?
The irreverence and nonstop gags of Greta Gerwig’s long-awaited (if not long-dreaded) Barbie reminded me of two other movies: The Emperor’s New Groove and What’s Up, Doc? All three movies are aware of the filmmaking traditions they belong to, but Barbie has the added responsibility of having to be extra aware of itself. This is 2023, after all, and you can’t be expected to make a movie about a culturally significant toy that plays it straight. Gerwig and co-screenwriter Noah Baumbach are playing with dolls, figuratively: there are some limitations to what they can do with their movie, imposed by Mattel, Inc., but otherwise their imaginations are free to make of the Barbie IP what they will, up to and including a (rather gentle) mockery of Mattel itself. I can see how this approach would be disaffecting to some viewers, though I had fun with it.
In every frame of Barbie you can see Gerwig’s visual influences on display—the colorful movie musicals of the 1950s and 1960s, the matte backgrounds of Powell and Pressburger films, and so on—but rarely do these influences announce themselves as such. The estimated $100 million dollar budget she was given to work with on Barbie is the biggest opportunity Gerwig has had yet across her three solo-directed films to pay tribute to her faves. For every obvious reference like the 2001 opening, there’s a softer callback, like when the Kens break out into a dance for dancing’s sake reminiscent of the closing ballet in Singin’ in the Rain. Gerwig directs her parade of homages and references judiciously: at the expense of always trying to land that One Perfect Shot™, she opts for just the right shot to keep the film moving and to keep the audience from totally losing track of what’s going on and why.
At the level of construction, then—and I haven’t even talked about the set design or costumes—Barbie is an impressive feat. Casting-wise, the movie is a match for Oppenheimer in the “Hey wait, it’s that guy/gal” department, and is led by two perfectly earnest performances by Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, possibly the best of their careers. So what of the movie’s politics? You can take your pick of which scene you want to take issue with; the one I keep trying to wrap my head around is America Ferrera’s third-act monologue about How Impossible It Is to Be a Woman Today, rousing a room full of Barbies to fight back against the PG-13 patriarchy that Ryan Gosling’s Ken has brought to Barbieland. Ferrera’s character means it sincerely and it has its intended in-universe effect, but does that mean the movie is sincere about it? Is it too on-the-nose? Do we read it as a cri de coeur from Gerwig herself, or as a caricature of a crusading woman with an Instagram account? Or both? Would it have been funnier if this scene had just gone for broke and had Ferrera reading off an excerpt from, like, an Andrea Dworkin essay? (Yes, but I’m not the one in charge here, so.)
In trying to be a little bit of everything for everyone under the Mattel-overseen circumstances, Barbie comes off as a fairly confused movie. That doesn’t stop it from being enjoyable—anything that doesn’t quite work is easily written off under the pretext that this is the Barbie movie, after all—and that isn’t to say the confusion isn’t the point, though it has made writing coherently about it a royal pain.2 I do wonder how Barbie will play on a rewatch, with some distance from the context of the present cultural phenomenon it helped inspire. The real test of its quality may be in how well it holds up when its novelty is no longer a selling point.
Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography is universally wonderful throughout the film but these scenes in particular left me practically begging for someone to give him a noir to shoot as his next project.
Although if you really want to see a critic take a swing at it, Nathan Lee’s Deleuze-quoting review sure puts my bumbling thoughts in their place.