Much has been made of the stark thematic contrast between the simultaneously released Barbie and Oppenheimer, to the point of receiving their own comical portmanteau: Barbenheimer. The differences are obvious: Barbie is a Toy-Story-esque fish-out-of-water comedy about a Barbie doll who must leave her pink and perfect ‘Barbieland’ in order to fix problems in the alternate and very imperfect ‘Real World’, whilst Oppenheimer is a biopic rooted in the very grey and male ‘Real World’, telling the story of the nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who became ‘father of the atomic bomb’. Despite these differences, however, the films share a basic theme: in both the protagonists peer through the mirage that pacifies the masses and become haunted by mortality and moral evil.
Early in Barbie, the protagonist ‘stereotypical Barbie’ interrupts the perpetual party of Barbieland by asking if any of the other Barbies had thoughts of death. The music stops as all the other Barbies look on aghast. This realisation opens up a world in which stereotypical Barbie becomes vulnerable to embodied frailties and real injustices. A similar sequence occurs in Oppenheimer at the Manhattan project’s first ‘Trinity’ test of the nuclear bomb. As it explodes, the silent awe of others is contrasted with Oppenheimer’s grim realisation that he has ‘become death, destroyer of worlds’. Consequently a vision of nuclear holocaust intrudes on Oppenheimer’s victory speech and his meeting with President Truman is polluted with Macbethian concerns that he has blood on his hands.
In both cases, however, the films hide how the weaknesses of their subjects crumble under the weight of this imposed subject matter.
When Barbie first interacts with a girl from the real world, she is condemned as a ‘fascist’ who promotes an oppressive view of women. After Barbie’s innocent tears and a tour of Barbieland, however, the same girl is won over by the ‘cool’ world of possibilities Barbie opens up for her. Then Barbie’s real origin in Bild Lilli, the sexually objectified 1950s play doll of the right-wing German tabloid Bild, conveniently goes unmentioned in the whitewashed origin story that closes the film/advert’s mission to reclaim Barbie as a pure idea open to endless reinvention.
Oppenheimer is similarly sanitized. The story is forced into that deeply stupid Hollywood genre of tortured genius films, which relentlessly refer to a protagonist’s intelligence rather than the dialogue and drama itself displaying any of its own. Lots of well-known ‘God doesn’t play dice’-type quotes are thus crammed together alongside shots of Oppenheimer staring at clever things: TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, Picasso’s Woman Sitting with Crossed Arms, Stravinsky vinyls, Einstein on a walk, Oppenheimer’s own blackboard scribbles. Meanwhile, his weaknesses are largely absent. His serial infidelity is reduced to a tragic love-triangle where the women initiate every dalliance and his brazen disregard for human life is traded for a largely fictitious guilt complex - in reality, Oppenheimer always defended the nuclear bombing of Japan, he proposed poisoning ‘at least’ 500,000+ German civilians, and he disturbed colleagues by his prizefighter-like postTrinity test celebrations.
The film’s most revealing omission is Linus Pauling, a close friend who rejected Oppenheimer’s request to work on the Manhattan project because of his pacifist beliefs and who fell out with Oppenheimer after the latter unsuccessfully tried to seduce his wife, Ava. Instead, the one character to trouble Oppenheimer on screen with the idea that it is wrong to build a mass murder weapon (a misrepresented Isidor Isaac Rabi) is immediately won over by Oppenheimer’s ingenious ‘but, the Nazis...’ argument. This is because the director Christopher Nolan did not want to trouble consciences with the idea that we are not merely victims of circumstance, but that we choose our future, for better and for worse.
The truth is that Oppenheimer was not chosen by the US military to lead the project solely because of his scientific achievements - there were other more obvious choices - but because his hirer Leslie Groves saw in him an ‘overweening ambition’ that would get the job done at all costs. These costs are, of course, absent from the film, for to let such suffering speak would be to let truth itself speak. Rather than the deaths and screams of Japanese innocents, then, the film closes with an hour-long sermon on our hero’s technocratic attempts to limit nuclear arms proliferation and the state’s technocratic attempts to limit him. The problem is, the damage has already been done. As the film shows, Oppenheimer was a radical youth and in later life he acted on a deep fear of nuclear expansion. But ultimately the moral sense of his life was mortally wounded when he sought to murder the innocent for career and country: a tragedy even greater than the lives lost.
Barbie exhibits a similar moral compromise, but this time it doesn’t center around the protagonist - after all, Barbie is a doll with no soul to sell - but with the film’s director, Greta Gerwig. A darling of independent cinema, the director, writer, and actor has been skewing mainstream for a while now, having progressed from writing and acting on low-budget mumblecore films such as Frances Ha (excellent) and Mistress America (OK), which praise authenticity to the point at which it collides painfully with our culture’s inauthenticity. Her subsequent work directing Lady Bird and Little Women lands a softer blow, but is still committed to resisting the ideological and economic oppression of women. Barbie, however, plays nice, especially cutting back on economic critiques. And while it references the Barbie brand’s commodification of the female body, the punches at Mattell Corp are carefully pulled. This is not to say it isn’t a funny and intelligent film.
Barbie's narrative stages cleverly track life stages. The opening Barbieland sequence is innocent childhood play: girls play dress up and boys play fighting. Then, like adolescents, when Barbie and Ken go into the ‘Real World’, they discover ‘Patriarchy’. Whilst young Ken-men wield this power, Barbie-women are enslaved by it, until an older enlightened Real World woman injects a strong dose of feminist critical theory, enlightening the enslaved Barbie dolls. Here, however, the story becomes unmoored as the answer of what to do about it is exchanged for a cheap joke: the Barbie dolls must flirt their way to power. A final coda tries to redress this absence but the film’s answer to women’s liberation is abstract self-actualization, without any collective sense of how we can address injustices. This ignores that self-actualization is so often denied to women by the modern West’s ‘feminization of poverty’ and gender-based violence. Again, Hollywood keeps such realities well from view and proposes the abstract, atomized self as the solution.
Ultimately then, both Gerwig and Oppenheimer prove that while we may attempt to wield the state-capitalist complex to our own will, ultimately the system can and will only wield us, as it continues to churn out all those Barbies and bombs.