Hacking Cinema #6: Barbenheimer Edition

Yes I did the double feature

When I received word that Oppenheimer and Barbie were going to be released on the same day, my first instinct was to find someplace to hide (a bunker, basement, or similar) until things blew over.

Here is why:

The Manhattan Project and the decade or so of physics leading up to it have been mid-tier obsessions of mine since I was a teenager. Christopher Nolan’s handling of any kind of science-adjacent material has not been to my taste. Thus, apprehension. Between that and the choice to focus on Robert Oppenheimer, who is in my opinion a very boring guy, the whole project sounded like a recipe for not-happy Christine.

I feared that Barbie would land in my personal uncanny valley — I have a deep terror of Pee-wee Herman, the Jim Carrey Grinch, and other similarly real-but-unreal forms of live-action media. However, the trailer didn’t fill me with a nameless dread, and as we all know, Ryan Gosling is our greatest actor.

I would probably have seen Oppenheimer out of obligation/ respect/ masochism anyway, so partaking in the now-legendary double feature seemed the right move.

I think it may be too soon to understand what the long-term impact of the Barbenheimer phenomenon will be, but packed theaters are never a bad thing. My verdict is that both movies are good, but I wouldn’t immediately categorize either as great.

Oppenheimer

The most unbelievable thing about the Manhattan project is its timing.

The neutron was the key ingredient. Its lack of charge makes it the perfect subatomic baseball — it won’t deflect when you shoot it at other charged stuff, like atoms. Throw it at a nervous wreck of an atom like Uranium or Plutonium, and the target splits apart, spewing out energy, and also a handful more neutrons. Ensue chain reaction, ensue bomb.

Thirteen years before Hiroshima, we didn’t even know the neutron existed.

The discoveries needed to make the nuclear bomb possible all happened, one after the other, in near lockstep with the rise of Fascism. None of these discoveries were motivated by the possibility of weaponization — the men and women making them were interested in understanding the fundamental nature of matter. They shared their discoveries freely with international colleagues, because that’s what scientists do.

If the scientific timeline were delayed by even a few years, we may never have opened the gates to the nuclear hell we still live in. The path we chose wasn’t inevitable — we could have chosen another one, and should have. But for physicists in the 1930s, the line between the pursuit of knowledge and the pursuit of destruction wasn’t just blurred, it was invisible.

Enrico Fermi is famous for saying “Ignorance is never better than knowledge”. He may have been wrong, at least for his own time. Did we need to know about the structure of the nucleus? Was that pursuit worth it, if we ultimately used what we found inside to wipe out two cities?

I think these are interesting questions, but Oppenheimer can’t slow down to think about them.

Nolan is completely uninterested in the composition of individual shots, so all of his storytelling happens in the cuts. The more complex the ideas he’s swinging for, the more complex his cutting gets. This has mixed results for me (Tenet haters raise your hand). It’s also a bit of a problem with the specific material of Oppenheimer: the non-linear, fractured, and pacey approach can work in many cases, but when you’re dealing with a cast of 20+ white guys who all have small but important variations of the same job, you get a movie that’s pretty hard to track.

No one thread of the story is followed for long enough to get a feel for any of the characters other than Oppenheimer: Feynman, Fermi, Szilard, and about half a dozen others were only ever the screen for seconds at a time, gone before you could clock their significance. (Really really funny to have one of the like five shots of Jack Quaid as Feynman to be him playing the bongos though.)

Easily the best sequence in the film is the actual Trinity test. It’s pure Nolan cinematic excellence in pacing, suspense, and detail richness. By comparison, the endless scenes of people talking about Communism and espionage feels like a waste of space.

I’ve never thought that Robert Oppenheimer himself was the most interesting guy in the whole drama of the Manhattan Project. The leader, sure. Tortured, I guess? But the best lens through which to examine the tragedy of how discovery turned into calculated mass murder? I am still not sold.

The (CGI-free!) visuals depicting Oppenheimer’s creeping foreknowledge of what nuclear physics could unleash were effective, but they’re front-loaded in the movie and don’t come back much. For most of the film, we don’t live in the allegedly special world of Oppenheimer’s head, but instead in the boring, windowless rooms of his interrogations and hearings. Even though I can only name Trumbo (2015) as an example of this, I spiritually feel that I have seen a guy interrogated about his dubious Communist affiliations one million times.

Cillian Murphy’s performance is good, but the material doesn’t allow him to turn the subject into anything other than the same frustrating cipher he is at the outset. Oppenheimer didn’t technically do any of the science that made the bomb, and he didn’t stop it from being used, despite knowing how horrific the results would be. He’s by definition a reactive character. All Nolan can do is try to show us the enormity of his inner conflict. Having him hallucinate his colleagues faces flaking off is a moderately creative way of doing this, but I can’t say it was especially affecting.

Maybe it worked better for others — it’s possible that I’ve thought about this topic so much throughout my life that I’m kind of numb to it now. But in general, if you can’t strike a deep emotional chord while depicting people reacting to arguably the worst thing that’s ever happened, I’m not sure how successful the entire exercise was. This is in huge contrast to Dunkirk, which made me cry in the theater. It was so good at conveying the emotional experience of living through a horrifying time and (for the lucky ones) coming out the other side. Where Dunkirk was huge and experiential, Oppenheimer is small and talky.

But Josh Peck pushing the big red button??? Can you believe???

Barbie

I think that Greta Gerwig is very possibly our generation’s answer to someone like Steven Spielberg. Even though she came from a mumblecore-ish, indy background, she seems to be interested in making huge, enduring movies, and in bringing a high level of filmmaking craft and sophistication to those commercial efforts.

The Warner Bros Barbie project was an interesting test to this theory. IP-driven studios have a fun habit of hiring interesting filmmakers and apparently just paying them to stand on the set while their machinery turns out a generic product. However my optimistic thinking was that Lady Bird and Little Women bought Gerwig just enough pull for the studio to actually let her cook, so to speak.

Pleased to report: I was correct! I don’t think that the result is a perfect movie, but its overall massive success means that Gerwig is going to be able to keep taking huge swings, at least for now.

And Barbie is a huge swing. It’s also a type of movie that we just don’t see anymore. A good comp might be the Robert Zemekis classic Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988): both are triumphs of production design and analog effects, both are densely-written character-driven comedies, and both are about a kid’s thing, but made for adults. Roger Rabbit still has the edge for me in terms of plot construction, but I think Barbie could end up with a similar legacy.

The sets are huge, real, and packed with thoughtful and funny details. It’s a live-action cartoon in the best way: every shot is packed with the type of visual gags that can only come from specifically crafting the environment to the story. Even the characters are kind of in awe of the world they inhabit: Kate McKinnon’s “Weird Barbie” character quips “thanks, I built it” when showing off her elaborate diorama map to an impressed room of Barbies.

The comedy comes from everywhere: the characters, the staging, the way that the individual scenes play out. Gerwig gives every sequence and set piece a clear direction, drawing from a deep set of film references — the fictionalized Mattel offices are straight out of Jaques Tati’s Playtime (1967), but with an energy of corporate mayhem that reminds me of Hudsucker Proxy (1994).

Barbie’s content apparently made B*n Shap*ro and other online reactionaries mad, which is always funny and good. A lot of the (unnecessary) defense of the film against the right-wing furor seems to say that you shouldn’t project political meaning onto a movie about a doll, but I think that’s selling Gerwig & co short. Barbie is a deeply political film! It doesn’t present a philosophically airtight version of feminism, but it’s definitely about gender, which, like it or not, is a political discussion.

On my first viewing, I had an impression that Barbie fell backwards into a mild form of assumed gender essentialism. Through its humor, the movie appeared to be at least symbolically engaging with the idea that mens’ and women’s interests and values are completely and necessarily disjoint. Men like Rob Thomas, women haven’t seen The Godfather, ect, ect. After my second viewing though, I think my reaction was a bit knee-jerk. Barbie is about the system of symbols that we use to describe and enforce gender, and their complex relationship to our actual selves.

The main arc of the movie is Barbie’s journey from symbolic to actual womanhood, in a world that is outgrowing her value as an aspirational figure. This connected for me during America Ferrera’s monologue (which should earn her an Oscar nom). In it, she specifically talks about Barbie as a representation:

“I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don’t even know.”

Meanwhile, Ryan Gosling Ken (who is perfect) discovers that the real world contains an entire construct of male-ness that could serve him and the other Kens very well: the patriarchy! The Kens’ attempt to re-create a male dominated world minus two or so millennium of actual oppression within Barbieland is very, very funny. Ultimately, though, Ken is disillusioned by the symbols that he discovered in Century City (he doesn’t even like horses). On a human level, the patriarchy fails to provide identity. Barbie’s thematic endgame is to posit that our gender symbology fails to serve anyone, but with the acknowledgement that women are the ones materially damaged by it.

This isn’t perfectly executed: the script gets a little hand-wavy and overcrowded with ideas in the second act, which is likely why the messaging didn’t land for me the first time I saw it. Ferrera’s monologue itself is great, but repeatedly paraphrasing that speech is turned into a plot mechanism, which feels like a C+ solution to a blank space in your script where you’d type in “insert character realizations here”. By the end, we’re talking about what it means to be human, let alone a woman, which is quite literally the biggest topic there is. I admire the ambition, but scaling down the thematic slate could have made Barbie more instantly get-able.

Mattel’s willingness to engage in self-roasting in the ultimate interest of selling more dolls is also interesting to ponder. Can a movie that is funded by and in promotion of a corporation actually be anti-corporate? Maybe not in a really strict sense, but I think Gerwig taking advantage of Mattel’s capital to make something with this much artistic and cultural merit is… wait for it… good. The idiots with the money will be forgotten, but film is forever.