Basta, Barbenheimer
Welcome to Barbie vs. Oppenheimer Friday.
Perhaps you missed the 20 billion signposts leading up to this historic crossroads. You may not yet know that Barbie is a universal proxy for womanhood and that Oppenheimer symbolizes all that went sideways with modern civilization. If you don’t agree with those takes, consult a physician about a heart blackened by hype.
Nobody wants to be Eeeyore at this palooza. Barbie and Oppenheimer —a pair of epics about dangerous American toys—are ingenious entertainments. Hollywood and everybody else need some happy news. If this concocted media moment delivers a little relief to a boiling planet, why be so sour?
Well, the tsunami of publicity was a bit much. At this point, it feels like Barbie Summer was declared in 1974. Incidentally, this season was not branded Atomic Bomb Summer because sadly, no kid ever played with a J. Robert Oppenheimer action figure. We heartily endorse collect-em-all-theoretical physicist dolls (growing up, the only Barbie discussed in this correspondent’s household was Klaus). But Mattel was always going to win this trumped-up smackdown.
Promotion must happen, but lately, it’s felt as if the entertainment industry is behaving like a drunken aunt at a wedding, hectoring guests to get out on the dance floor. The more it urges us to do the Cha Cha Slide, the more we feel a prickling urge to crawl under the table. Then again, Hollywood only exists to make a spectacle of itself. Dark clouds loom, but this weekend, we crank up the ABBA.
And, the movies are worth discussing. The initial atomic bomb test lit up the New Mexico desert in 1945, while the first Barbie dolls debuted at the International Toy Fair in 1959. They were products of a much-mythologized age. Oppenheimer and Barbie’s inventor, Ruth Handler, each riffed on European knowledge—he imported scientists; she was inspired by a German doll called Bild Lilli. In their idiosyncratic ways, they both remade the world.
Another American export, perfected at midcentury, was the movies. Hollywood made slick commerce of out of nostalgia, and sentimentality leaks from this odd Barbie/Oppenheimer moment. The blitz of social media and plain old media—the New York Times has run more than 20 stories on Barbie alone—is a massive act of wish fulfillment. Longing is what brings us here — for swaggering American ascendance, for bygone manufacturing prowess, for lost childhood, for blockbusters, for simply being psyched about the same dumb, shiny things.
Oppenheimer, an opus from a bloody-minded auteur, has been greeted like the rapture by critics. Christopher Nolan all but detonated an atomic bomb to make his movie. More impressively, he’s determined to hold the line when it comes to film as an expressly theatrical art. This takes courage, ego, and gobs of money. Oppenheimer will do no favors for nuclear power advocates. But in lavishness and scope, it echoes the great roadshow pictures of the past. With all its pretensions and flourishes, it’s the rare drama for grownups that transcends streaming.
Barbie, a good-natured trifle about a piece of plastic, inevitably collected more mixed reviews. However, nobody cares about reviews! Greta Gerwig, another mega talent, has elevated toy advertising enough to make that gauzy thing—the Summer Movie, a Grease, a Legally Blonde—that people are quite determined to like. There’s zero point in picking a fight with it.
If there’s a debate to be had, it’s not really with Gerwig and her collaborator, Noah Baumbach, but with those who insist on making gimcrack more than what it is. Even after exhaustive buffing, Barbie isn’t so much a character as a blob of you-go-girl clichés heaped on top of impossible feminine ideals. She’s not a queer feminist icon or an advocate for body positivity and empowerment. Nor is she a quisling for corporate wokeism and Chinese imperialism. She’s a dress-up doll. Or, as somebody once nailed it, a body with a name.
There’s no regulation against turning trolls and Legos into movie stars. Toys are a near-universal touchstone in a badly splintered culture. We all recognize them, even if we can’t agree on anything else. Pictures are built around tchotchkes because—what other durable I.P. is left? In a business dependent on scale, greenlighting Barbie is easier than revisiting the ominous legacy of Los Alamos.
Studios confronting extinction should have at it. What’s tired is our habit of slapping a thin gloss of hipness on merchandising. Patriarchy jokes and double entendres do not inoculate the audience from the primitive appeal of the product. Ask kids from Kuala Lumpur to Kalamazoo who they think Barbie is. They likely won't say she can do anything or wear any dress size. They won’t talk of bursting through glass ceilings and flying to Mars. They won’t wax about the virtues of a Girl Power Supreme Court. They will conjure up the bombshell at the center of the candy-colored action. The Blonde endures. Everything else is a lesser brand extension.
That, as they tediously intone around the quad, is problematic. Barbie is canny enough to acknowledge that nearly as many little girls have been forbidden to play with her as have worshipped her. This inexorable tension — what is blindingly bright might also be really, really bad for us — is what these ballyhooed summer movies share. For all its labor headaches and financial pains, Hollywood itself remains an alluring mixed bag. If it can deliver this weekend, there may be life in it yet.
