Barbenheimer is a rare beast, an unintentional, organic marketing crossover, an absurd juxtaposition that promises loads of ironic, hi-tech, dystopian humor. It is all that, but it's so much more besides: a mix of opposites so combustible it’ll blow your mind if you let it.
I didn't even watch a trailer for Barbie, and I assumed it would be a fluffy, light-hearted farce. It’s not. It’s a nuclear-tipped cultural missile of wokeness launched by Hollywood directly at the beating red heartland of America. The film is directed by Greta Gerwig, one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People who I’d never heard of but will pay attention to from now on. Intensely self-conscious and self-deprecating, Barbie is filled with sincere yet hilarious feminist rage, stylistic home runs every second of runtime, and flagrant male homoeroticism that’s pervasive, yet never directly acknowledged. No wonder conservatives hate it, with Ben Shapiro and others acting surprised and hurt that the PG-13 movie isn’t suitable for young children and doesn’t portray the values they think it should. This hand-wringing and backlash is the latest evidence yet that conservatives have neither self-awareness nor a sense of humor.
I knew I had misjudged the film early on, when Margot Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie became Pervasive Thoughts of Death Barbie. The movie never lets up, naming every bad thing about living as a woman--or a person, really--in our patriarchal, capitalistic society. In the process, Ryan Gosling's Ken goes on his own journey of self-discovery, transforming from an empty-headed muscle man into a 3-dimensional human being. Humanity, decency, and emotional intelligence. That’s what the right are calling “toxic femininity”. If that’s what it takes to kill toxic masculinity, then let the duel of poisons begin.
Barbie is as serious as a heart attack, but aside from one ill-advised and overlong monologue near the end, the message is wrapped in a fun and funny package that is indeed very pink. Unless you’re a conservative snowflake who can’t take a joke, go see it.
I knew Oppenheimer’s story, at least at a high level. And with man’s man Christopher Nolan directing, it was exactly as ponderous, self-aggrandizing, and dramatic as I expected. Full of A-List male actors and man’s man Emily Blunt, the film tells the grand story of the man who led America’s project to build the (so far) most terrible weapon ever. In contrast to Barbie’s feminist world of girl stuff, malleable men, and honest humanity, Oppenheimer glorifies patriarchy’s holy trinity: power-hungry politicians, useful-idiot soldiers, and the scientists who have all the real power, but give it away for peanuts to the former two groups.
Nolan has the chutzpa to portray Oppenheimer as a tragic, misunderstood, and unfairly attacked hero, despite the movie ending with the revelation that he knew all along exactly what the politicians and generals would do with the bomb. Did they really have “no choice”, as they liked to believe? The war was essentially won without the bomb, and the Manhattan Project let the anti-labor Democrat Harry Truman start the Cold War and the nuclear arms race. The brutal hegemony of the United States has put a lot more than blood on Oppenheimer’s hands.
But the movie, released in our contemporary day, isn’t about the bomb. It’s about AI (I know, everything's about AI for me, but it's really true this time). This was clear to me the moment Cillian Murphy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer climbed the tower in Los Alamos, alone, to commune with the Trinity device. He regarded this slumbering mechanical lump of potential energy in all it’s alienness, yet still decided to give it life. They thought for a while that setting off an atomic bomb would ignite a nuclear chain reaction in the atmosphere, destroying all life on earth. At the time of the Trinity test, the odds of that happening were still non-zero, yet they went ahead anyway. The parallel to today’s AI researchers isn’t just analogous, it’s an exact repetition. Many AI researchers give it about a 10% chance of destroying humanity, yet they’re building it anyway, knowing it’ll be used by the most ruthless of capitalists and governments to bring on a new hegemony.
As the movie made clear, the politicians and generals needed the physicists. If the nerds of that day had actually had any brains and/or balls, and all refused to build bombs, maybe we could be living in a peaceful world with abundant nuclear energy. But they whored their power to the politicians, the most widely despised people on the planet. Likewise, today’s AI researchers could form their own non-profit, people-centered Manhattan Project to benefit all humanity. Instead, the AI arms race they’ve started means we’re likely to see a shooting war between the US and China, and the world's people will be enslaved to AI masters regardless of who wins. Not because AI is evil, but because the only people who can build it are giving it to the people least suited to wield it. Today’s AI scientists would do well to notice how the politicians not only discarded Oppenheimer when they no longer needed him, they tried to humiliate and destroy him when he dared speak about how to use the bomb he had helped create. But since Oppenheimer was smart enough to foresee this, he has only himself to blame.
The last interesting thing I’ll comment on is how Mattel not only allowed their IP to be used in the movie, they produced the film. I think it’s brilliant in the way only a for-profit company can be brilliant in a way that looks totally stupid. They created a movie that acknowledges and condemns all the harm their toy has done and continues to do, while portraying the corporation itself in the most unflattering possible light. While a scientist or engineer will only prostitute themselves if they look cool doing it, a corporation will happily shit on itself and its employees if it’ll make a buck, which of course it will. From Mattel's support of this film, I tentatively assert that corporations are easier to align to human needs than governments, though not by much.
So what is Barbenheimer? A contest of pink vs. dark aesthetics? If so, Barbie obliterates Oppenheimer, which looks so ugly in comparison. A contrast in silly vs. serious filmmaking? Not at all; both movies are weighty. Barbenheimer is a choice we need to make as a society. Do we want death-worshiping masculinity or life-affirming femininity to lead us forward?
