How was Barbenheimer for you? Who survived this five-hour incongruous double-bill? I finished work and rushed to the cinema to catch Oppenheimer at 5 and then Barbie at 8.50, leaving just enough time for a glugged glass of white wine in between to reverse my aesthetic aerial. My daughter was in another city watching at the same time the same films the other way round, which she told me was the correct order (she is a student of film).
The first thing to say is that to make a comparison between a knowingly ironic take on a girl’s doll’s plastic world and the manic preparations for and detonation of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki does not at first blush look easy. When I was a student a friend and I used to read novels against each other: I read aloud a page of Jane Austen’s Persuasion and she read aloud a page of D. H. Lawrence’s Women In Love and so on. After a while strange kinships and striking disparities insinuated their way into ones brain. This was also a time (I was a young man) when if someone mentioned Barbie I pretended they were referring to Klaus Barbie the Gestapo killer of Lyon. (It didn’t get a laugh then either.) Anyway, here goes.
Barbie (Margot Robbie) is living a life of perfection in Barbie Land: she is perfection, each day is wonderful and everyone loves her: ‘today is perfect, just like yesterday and just like tomorrow’. The himbo Ken (Ryan Gosling) wakes each day and waits to be noticed by Barbie. He is purely an objectified, emasculated appendage hanging on for his longed-for, validating gaze. She’s a Barbie girl in a Barbie Land, life is plastic: it’s fantastic. This is a fantasy world where pink goes with everything. However the two travel from this parody Garden of Matriarchal Eden to the real world (also known as: Venice Beach, Los Angeles) where Barbie discovers death, existentialism, tears, pain, anxiety, the condemnation by others, sadness, worthlessness, anger, loneliness and cellulite. Ken discovers – in a human world made for men – self-confidence, admiration, the ego-boost that comes from women’s desire for him, he is amazed at the respect he is being shown, and the importance he feels. He dresses as a cowboy and declares his love for patriarchy. Barbie meanwhile, with the help of others, has to struggle with her existential crisis, the board members of Mattel, the FBI and to combat the growing tendency of male dominance and female submission brought – by the treacherous Ken – back to ruin paradise. Today and yesterday may be perfect in Barbie Land, but tomorrow looks like gender trouble.
Oppenheimer also has a double-world structure. The place of (intellectual) perfection is called Los Alamos, New Mexico. Here quantum scientists and theoretical physicists enjoy complete control over their studies, laboratories and experiments, lecture to each other, are bank-rolled by the US government with a billion dollars, raise few ethical questions and have a battery of soldiers to keep everybody else out. J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is living here a perfect life where everybody loves him and spends time congratulating and clapping and lionising him. This is a fantasy world of clever physicists in clover. Today and yesterday may be perfect in Los Alamos-Land, but tomorrow looks like genocide.
The world is made of two things: matter (atoms) and language (stories). Christopher Nolan shows us that both can be split. His non-linear story is divided into Fusion (filmed in colour) and Fission (filmed in black and white). And here is where the film – otherwise visually stunning and superbly acted and shot with striking close-ups – falters. He correctly realises that to end a movie that is concerned with the considerable scientific achievement of splitting the atom with the two bombs being dropped on Japanese cities in August 1945 would be – to say the least – an utterly crass climax. So instead this event occurs two hours into the film, leaving the last (black and white) hour for two 1950s governmental hearings in Washington. In the first Oppenheimer is investigated to decide whether his security clearance is to be revoked. In the second a man called Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jnr.) is investigated to decide whether his cabinet appointment as Secretary of Commerce is to be confirmed. Both hearings are given, by Nolan, a simultaneous dramatic filmic crescendo so that an alternative final climax to the movie can be reached. This has the absurd (artistic) effect of making the dropping of two nuclear bombs the subject matter for negligible findings of two minor governmental tribunals.
The protagonists of Oppenheimer are earnest self-regarding men, with a high degree of portentous self-interest, being treated with great importance by the screenwriter, fighting hard in the drama on behalf of their ego, vanity and reputation. The two one-dimensional female characters Kitty Puening and Jean Tatlock played – excellently – by Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh are adjuncts of their man, living for him and for his regard of them. This is exactly the attitude – in reverse – that Barbie is satirising and seeking to combat. Barbie and Ken confront awkward ethical questions about self, death, change, growth, free will, relationships to others, body-image and imperfection. Oppenheimer has little ethical content and instead has men exchanging facts and making strident assertions of finality loudly at each other in stuffy rooms.
One word about the music. Nolan’s soundtrack is obtrusive with the goal of eliciting emotion from the audience. Greta Gerwig’s tongue-in-cheek, punk-ethos, exuberant, wacky, slick soundtrack – put together with Mark Ronson – includes Ice Spice, Nicky Minaj, Billie Eilish, Pink Pantheress, Khalid, Sam Smith and Dua Lipa, and is an ironic, mad-cap, clever counter-point to the ideas in her film. There is a late false step in Barbie as a well-meaning, hyperbolic speech from Gloria (America Ferrera) tells not shows, and the storyline gets a little lost.
In the end Ken weeps and Barbie meets her maker. In Oppenheimer Nolan neither dramatises, nor asks any questions about, those who because of the Manhattan Project met their’s. Give me serious bubblegum comedy over trivial and earnest hubris every time. Five hours of a Friday evening well spent.
Barbie is artistically and philosophically the better film.
Edward Bindloss 