I’m doing a double feature review for these two, since the internet decided that two films of differing genres releasing on the same day is the most interesting thing to ever happen in the history of the world… and they’re absolutely right because of the very fact that people have made this a “thing”. People’s mass interest in this double feature is in of itself evidence of the fact that it’s interesting, and so I too will indulge in this huge meme and review these films as a package deal, in the order in which I watched them.

Barbie

This is a very strange movie. As I’m sitting here typing this, I can’t believe this turned into a massive box office hit that made over a billion dollars. This isn’t a knock on the quality of the film, it’s heartening to see that genuinely weird stuff like this can be a monster hit at the box office, but again, it’s so weird. I knew going in that Greta Gerwing was going to do something ambitious with the Barbie property, but I didn’t expect the studios to let her. This movie is part screwball comedy, part medidation on the trials and tribulations of womanhood in contemporary society, and part think piece about Barbie as a brand’s relationship to American culture and girls.

Something Gerwig understands (and what Mattel doesn’t judging by the fact that they want to make numerous films about their other toys), is that Barbie is a lot more than a toy. She’s a universal symbol of womenhood that is both liberating (Barbie can be anything!) and constricting (Barbie can’t be fat or unfeminine), that girls projected so much of their fears and hopes for the future into, with many taking those anxieties into their adulthood. That’s why the tag line put forth by this movie’s brilliant market team, that Barbie is everything, works so well. She’s so many things to so many people, which is why I suspect Gerwig made the film about Barbie figuring out what she is to herself. This works out nicely because it’s a struggle a lot of people, and especially women, can relate to. What makes this movie so weird is the fact that so many of these themes are front and center. Barbie contemplates death, Barbie talks loudly about not having genitals, Barbie at one point tries to choose being able to walk in heels again and not having cellulite over learning the mysteries of the universe… none of this is speaks to a lighthearted romp in Barbieland. This isn’t to say the movie’s not comedic, it’s filled with jokes, I just didn’t expect them to be about how the patriarchy still exists covertly, or frankly, for the film to make patriarchal society so central to its story.

Barbie’s forray into the real world worked because of how simplistic Barbieland was. In the real world, she’s sexually harrassed almost immediately, she gets lectured by a child who despises what Barbie represents to girls growing up, and there’s even a moment where she just sits on a park bench, taking in the world around her and feels her feelings. The real world is a far cry from the ultra-positive matriarchy she hails from, and yet she’s oddly compelled by it. She finds a kindred spirit in the form of a mother played by America Ferrera, who once owned Barbie as a child, whose human feelings seem to be causing Barbie to develop her own sense of melancholy due to their past connection.

The main conflict comes when Ken, troublingly the film’s most interesting character, goes to the real world and realizes society is largely run by men, which is in total contrast to the secondary role Kens play in Barbieland. In a concious reversal of the creation myth in our world, Ken’s existence is only to serve as a male companion to Barbie, but in a clever reflection of the aromantic/sexlessness of the way the pair is marketed, Ken will only ever be a platonic companion to Barbie. He exists to compliment her, she’s his entire world, but to Barbie he’s no more important than any one of the accessories in her home. Ken’s pain from these circumstances leads him to adopt an archaic and stereotypical form of patriarchy from the real world, and use it to subjugate the Barbies in Barbieland and reverse the fortunes of his fellow Kens, renaming the world as the Kendom. He also evicts our main Barbie from her home and works to punish her for what she put him through. What’s so brilliant about this is that Barbie never actually wronged Ken. Ken’s rage at Barbie doesn’t come from her cruelty, or any kind of disrespect to him, it’s from her indifference. Her politely telling him to leave her home so she can sleep/have a girl’s night doesn’t warrant anything he’s done, but he interprets this as a kind of mortal affront that deserves retribution.

The most fascinating aspect of the Ken story arc is how resistant Barbie, most of the other characters, and the film itself to an extent, is to fully condemning him. There’s a great moment where Barbie has qualms about retaliating, and America Ferrera’s character has to plainly tell her that he stole her house and infected their world with patriarchy. Ken’s patriarchal power doesn’t come from the crude chauvinism of the stereotypes associated with manhood, it’s from people happily acquiescing to his demands and finding contentedness in this subservient existence. Molding the world around him to cater to his whims, not through force, but through the honest expression of his feelings and warped desires. The other Barbies in the Kendom are delighted to be reduced to serving him and his friends’ whims, Ken himself isn’t overtly cruel to any of the women (besides the main Barbie), he and the other Kens simply center their interests and whims over those of the Barbies. Patriarchy, the film argues, is not something that is forced upon society, but more something that is enabled by passivity. It is not merely the forceful repression of woman’s wants and desires, but more a total disinterest in them. Its power does not come from fear, but general positive feelings people have for certain types of men, feelings that starkly contrast with the antipathy men and women alike have for women (something the film ruefully acknowledges). This is surprisingly a lot more thoughtful than most “battle of the sexes” movie plots tend to be.

The movie concludes with the Kendom being toppled by the power of feminism TED Talks, and the world restored to its natural matriarchal state, yet surprisingly, Barbie rejects the simplistic bliss of her world and goes back to the human world with America Ferrera and her daughter to live as a real person. From a certain angle, this is the movie rejecting the corrupting, binary simplicity of Barbieland for the messy and complicated real world in which Barbie herself got arrested for a punching a creepy guy, but also where she met America Ferrera. The movie ends with a punchline that I won’t dare spoil, but I’ll say it’s as weird and suprisingly thoughtful as the film was.

The flaws of this movie are personified in Will Ferrel’s CEO of Mattel character, who is as confused a character as the movie itself is in its worst moments. Is he a corporate money grubber? A covert mysoginist? A clueless guy just trying his best? I don’t know, and the movie certainly doesn’t either. He really feels like a one off joke Gerwig wanted to tell, but either due to hubris or corporate pressure, was made into a bonafide supporting character. Besides Barbie and Ken, the supporting cast of this film is a bit thinly sketched in general, with a major supporting player played by America Ferrera being a character the film didn’t quite put all the pieces together for (evidenced by the fact that I 100% forgot her character’s actual name in the movie).

Happy to report though, that Barbie is probably as weird and as thoughtful as a billion dollar film is ever going to be allowed to be.

Oppenheimer

Arguably Nolan’s best film. This is a really thoughtful and informative movie about the father of the nuclear age, which isn’t bored of the bureaucratic and scientific material of the subject matter, but nonetheless feels about as propulsive and easily engaging as a blockbuster epic. Oppenheimer’s life is sketched out, in all its contradictions, and this movie does the incredibly surprising step of engaging seriously with his leftism, the burgeoning American military industrial complex, and the cynical purpose of the bomb in the way it was deployed.

Oppenheimer starts the film as an ideolistic Jewish leftist building a weapon to stop the fascist state that is eradicating his people, and ends up handing a superweapon to an anticommunist bureaucracy that drops the bomb on a different fascist state to achieve cynical foreign policy objectives against the Soviet Union. Oppenheimer himself comes off as a brilliant, charismatic guy who was too blinded by his own hubris and moral cowardice to see what was really happening before it was too late. It’s inconceivable to imagine that America would actually destroy the political power of the most important scientist alive, but this movie tells that story in detail (with a terrfic score to accompany almost every scene), in 3 great parts covering his rise, triumph, and downfall.

I would have liked to go over the great performances of the many (and I mean many) famous supporting players, or how engaging it was to see scientists bounce ideas off each other to joyfully build a machine designed only for killing, or talk more about the mature decision not to veer far outside Oppenheimer’s perspective by zooming in on the aftermath of the bombing, but what I’d like to close on is how the film portrays the character of Oppenheimer. A person that is so burdened by the use of his atomic bomb, but also refused to partake in the very real movement among the scientists advocating for it not to be used after it was clear the war was mostly over. What a brilliant decision it was to to not let the sick narcissism of Oppenheimer’s lamentation of his own creation go unnoted (he clearly loved playing the role of the tragic hero), even as he is being unfairly targetted by another bitter narcissist, Lewis Strauss (played by in an uncharacteristic performance from Robert Downey Jr).

Oppenheimer is the rare biographic film that balances the greatness of its central figure, while being so keenly clued in on his personal tragedy. I’m not entirely convinced by Nolan’s assertion that Oppenheimer is potentially the most important figure in history, as even the film makes clear, the race towards the atomic bomb was going to happen with or without him, but what makes him so important to history is probably what knawed at his soul more than anything else. He’s the guy that delivered the bomb for America faster than anyone else, which gave the West enormous leverage against the Soviet Union on the onset of the Cold War. As much as Oppenheimer denies it, his clear sympathy for the Soviet cause made this fact deeply troubling to him, and the fact that the film would zero in on this specific dynamic seemed inconceivable to me before I actually saw it.

Another cool discussion this film touches on, and something that is especially relevant today, is the question of scientists and the political power that they hold. Should they be merely used as tools for elected politicians and bureaucrats to further their country’s ambitions, or should they have a say on how their discoveries are used? This film convincingly argues for both sides, while also concluding that the human race is fated to die in an eventual nuclear holocaust anyways. Fun film!

I loved this movie, and you should 100% go see it because there are a lot of angles and things to enjoy besides the specific stuff a 20th century history nerd like myself could appreciate (like Emily Blunt giving a very funny performance as Oppenheimer’s frequently drunk wife).

Long live Barbenheimer! Two movies being released on the same day only has the meaning we give it, and we as a society sure gave it a lot of meaning in this instance.