Perhaps we should credit the weather for the phenomenon that is ‘Barbenheimer’, cinemas being the perfect refuge from never ending rain or blistering temperatures…
but whatever the reason, we can surely acknowledge that the release of the two films ‘Oppenheimer’ and ‘Barbie’ on the same weekend has created one of those rare moments in life when everyone wants to find out what the buzz is all about.
I suspect that yoking the two films together in order to offer one five-hour long cinematic experience has resulted in very many more women sitting through Christopher Nolan’s three hour hyper-masculine epic about the development of nuclear bombs, and many more men sitting through Greta Gerwig’s hyper-feminine parable about ‘Stereotypical Barbie’ being expelled from the feminist paradise of Barbie Land because she starts to develop both cellulite and thoughts of death.
I saw ‘Oppenheimer’ first, followed by ‘Barbie’ a couple of days later. Have two films ever been made and released at the same time which are such perfect mirror images of each other? I doubt it. And although both of the worlds that they evoke are firmly rooted in the 1950s, they still resonate powerfully with the world in which we now find ourselves.
Oppenheimer, played to perfection by Cillian Murphy, is a charismatic and brilliant theoretical physicist. Nolan has made a film about his leadership of a fraternity of like-minded male scientists who work together to create the most destructive force the world has ever, and will ever know. It’s 1942,so they are in a race against time to create an atomic bomb before the Nazis do, but there is considerable jeopardy to their endeavour because in releasing the nuclear energy of the bomb they may detonate a chain reaction which will destroy not just their intended victims, but the whole world. If there is any ethical debate in the film about the rights or wrongs of what these men are doing it is entirely covered by the aphorism “the end justifies the means.”
Barbie, played to perfection by Margot Robbie, is the beautiful archetype of the physically perfect female. Gerwig has made a film about her leadership of a sorority of like-minded female Barbies who together have created a world in which women are all powerful and totally in control. This is a world without sex or genitalia, so, no babies. Mattel apparently created a pregnant Barbie but this was thought to be so weird that they discontinued it. There are some ‘Kens’ in this feminist pink paradise, but they are mere adjuncts to the main action (as are the women in ‘Oppenheimer’). At the beginning we see all the Barbies going about their business being ‘whatever and whoever they aspired to be’, lawyers, doctors, physicists, presidents, until the jeopardy of a tear in the fabric of Barbie Land takes Barbie and Ken to the Real World in order to repair the fault line in their utopia.
Spoiler Alert: Please stop reading now if you intend to see the film and would prefer not to know how Gerwig’s film plays out for Barbie...
When they arrive in the Real World, Barbie and Ken encounter the patriarchy (so powerfully portrayed in ‘Oppenheimer’) for the first time. Much to Barbie’s horror and Ken’s delight this is a world in which the men call all the shots. Barbie’s first confusion is feeling not only ‘conscious’ but also very ‘self conscious’ because of the way that the men leer at her and freely make comments about her body. Ken, on the other hand, is amazed and thrilled to find that everywhere he looks, men are clearly powerful and in charge of every aspect of life including business and all the important institutions. In a neat subversion of the ‘dumb blonde’, Ryan Gosling (who deserves an Oscar for his performance), plays the newly radicalised Ken for laughs and soon he’s enthusiastically on his way back to Barbie Land to subjugate all those uppity Barbies and create his very own version of patriarchy called ‘Kendom’.
Meanwhile Barbie is having a truly awful time in the Real World. She is cruelly spurned, derided and rejected by a group of stroppy ‘tweens’ who make it clear that she long ago ceased to be any kind of role model for their lives “you’ve been making women feel bad about themselves since you were invented. You set the feminist movement back 50 years, you fascist.” Hurt and dejected, Barbie makes her way to Mattel HQ, believing that this must be full of women who created her in their own liberated image, only to find that here too, the men are firmly in charge and just want her to ‘get back in her box.’ She narrowly escapes with the help of Gloria, the designer of new Barbies at Mattel and the mother of Sasha, one of the stroppy ‘tweens’. It’s a depressed Gloria who has been thinking about creating Barbies with cellulite and thoughts of death, so she’s the one responsible for the tear in the fabric of Barbie Land and the only one who can help Barbie to repair it.
Alarming news of the newly created Kendom reaches Barbie in the Real World, so she rushes back with Gloria and Sasha in order to stop the Kens enacting a constitutional change which will enshrine their new patriarchy in law . To do this Barbie has to undo the brain-washing that the other Barbies have undergone by the Kens who have successfully convinced them that they have no brains, no worth and no role beyond servicing the needs of their male counterparts.
It’s here that Greta Gerwig finally gets to deliver the powerful punch that the whole film has been leading to. When Margot Robbie’s Barbie puts herself down, Gloria tells her:
“It’s literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong. You have to be thin, but not too thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but you also have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can’t ask for money because that’s crass.
You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean. You have to lead, but you can’t squash other people’s ideas. You’re supposed to love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman, but also always looking out for other people. You have to answer for men’s bad behaviour, which is insane, but if you point that out you’re accused of complaining. You’re supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you’re supposed to be part of the sisterhood.
But never forget that the system is rigged. You have never to get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It’s too hard! It’s too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal and says ‘thankyou’! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.
I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll representing women, then I just don’t know.”
Believe it or not I thoroughly enjoyed both ‘Oppemheimer’ and ‘Barbie’. Nolan has made a compelling film and told the story of a complex and brilliant man forced by the circumstances of a world war to face an irreconcilable ethical dilemma. However, for all the visual pyrotechnics, and undercurrent of doom, death and destruction in ‘Oppenheimer’, it is Gerwig’s film which is the more surprising of the two because it packs such a subversive yet powerful punch, whilst also being, in Gerwig’s own words, “wild, anarchic and completely bananas.” Apparently ‘Barbie’ has stirred considerable controversy in the more conservative parts of the USA. I’m not surprised. It’s an iron fist of a film clothed in a very bright pink velvet glove.
Tricia x
Top Image from article on CNN. Photo Illustration: CNN/Adobe Stock/Universal Pictures/Warner Bros. Pictures. See here
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