Barbenheimer! Barbie (Greta Gerwig, 2023); Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023)

Greta Gerwig's transformation from mumblecore darling to Oscar-bait writer-director has been smooth and triumphant. I adored Lady Bird and Little Women and was excited to learn that she was helming a Barbie project. I gleefully bought into the Barbenheimer hype and carted my ass to an actual theatre to see the thing on opening night. And now, with both excitement and hype dissipated, I'm left feeling empty as so often happens when wrestling with contemporary Hollywood cinema. 

Part of the problem is that I naively, if not flat-out stupidly, ignored the potential for Mattel to exert a heavy hand over the proceedings. This is not to suggest that Gerwig failed to make the film she wanted to; everything I've read suggested she won most, if not all, of her battles with Mattel, e.g., deeming Margot Robbie's character Stereotypical Barbie instead of Original Barbie as the corporate overlords wanted. But more than even Gerwig's bid to compete with the tentpole franchise flicks, Barbie's most decisive identifying characteristic is its status as a cog in Mattel's burgeoning intellectual property empire. 

To be sure, Barbie is spunkier than such airless slabs of synergy as The Lego Movie, The Lego Batman Movie, and the freakishly overrated Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse. The film opens in Barbie Land, a matriarchal utopia done up in gauche Pepto-Bismals where every day is the same. Barbie needs no water to shower, no food to eat, and goes disco dancing every night with all the Kens and other Barbies. The closing credits (and IMDb) neglect to distinguish between Barbies; they're all named Barbie. But Wikipedia provides more product differentiation - Issa Rae plays President Barbie, Hari Nef Dr. Barbie, Dua Lipa appears as the Mermaid Barbies, etc. All is shiny and happy until Margot Robbie Barbie wonders aloud about her mortality. It ruins the disco vibe and so she must seek out Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) for advice on why she's suddenly feeling gloomy. 

Weird Barbie is so named because she's the mangled Barbie that results from children getting too bored with their dolls - body defaced with markers, hair chopped up, appendages twisted out of their sockets, etc. In a sugar-rimmed Twilight Zone turn, she tells Barbie that Barbie Land is the imagination of the children playing with Barbies and whoever has taken charge of Stereotypical Barbie has grown disillusioned with her. So she must travel to the real world and find the child playing with her in the hopes of inspiring her to keep on playing.

A+ up until this point. The plastic life in Barbie Land is indeed fantastic as per Aqua's catchy dictum. It feels queer even though there are no overtly queer characters. The Kens are all cute and dopey. Ryan Gosling damn near steals the film as the main Ken ("often referred to as 'Beach Ken'" as Wiki helpfully notes) and will later provide the comedic highlight leading all the Kens in a hilarious rendition of Matchbox 20's vacuous himbo anthem "Push." And the female empowerment themes are so welcome that they elicited applause at my screening and many others so I've read. 

But while Gerwig and co-screenwriter Noah Baumbach initially keep the real world distinct from Barbie Land, working in the grand tradition of The Brady Bunch Movie and The Addams Family, they jettison the world building and the two realms blend into one another imperceptibly. As someone who despises world building, I am not longing for any more here. But the person playing with Stereotypical Barbie is Gloria (America Ferrera), not only an adult who has taken command of her teen daughter Sasha's (Ariana Greenblatt) Barbie doll but also an employee of, wait for it, Mattel. She learns that the CEO of Mattel (Will Ferrell) plans to put Depressed Stereotypical Margot Robbie Barbie back in her original life-sized box. Barbie resists and flees with the CEO and his board of directors in pursuit. And in the weakest story development, Gloria and Sasha decide that the best escape route for Barbie is back to Barbie Land. There's no indication about the rules governing passage between the two realms. The characters, whether real or plastic, simply employ a variety of forms of travel - snowmobile, convertible, tandem bicycle, camper, spaceship, all with real world (or is that plastic?) counterparts on store shelves - to arrive at either side of the divide. As the real world characters filter into the plastic fantastic, the story becomes governed less by narrative than corporate logic and it sucks the oxygen out of the film. The smooth flow between realms mirrors the smooth flow of Mattel commodities into our lives.

What's excluded from Barbie is an outside, a realm away from playing with and purchasing Barbie dolls and accoutrements sold separately. Mattel has colonized Barbie Land/the imagination so absolutely that the atmosphere grows as stifling as those venal Lego films. One can glean this from how deftly Gerwig fashioned a movie that could be all things to all people except right-wing lunatics, some of whom purchased tickets anyway and contributed to its “record-breaking” box office numbers. It’s queer, DEI-certified, open to trans allegorization, and forthcoming with feminist critiques of Barbie’s unrealistic body standards, all while causing no damage to Mattel's bottom line. The balance is so careful, perfect really, that it often feels as if Gerwig shot the film while holding her breath for fear all plates could spin out of control.   

No spoilers but I read the ending as a canny way to kick off a franchise. That's why it rings false when  Screen Rant titles an article about Barbie's historic box office take "Barbie Box Office Breaks Records With Biggest Opening Ever For Non-Superhero Movie, Sequel, Or Remake." Because it will engender sequels off its status as an already-proven property. And if it hadn't, no matter. According to a New Yorker article by Alex Barasch that reads like a battle plan, Mattel is aggressively pursuing I.P. filmmaking. At least one attempt has been made at a screenplay for Uno (yes, the card game). But Barasch perfectly summarizes the suffocating nature of the intellectual property arms race when he notes that, "Some of the projects have an ouroboros quality. Tom Hanks is supposed to star in Major Matt Mason, which will be based on an astronaut action figure that has been largely forgotten, except for the fact that it helped inspire Buzz Lightyear."

***

"Nothing permits everything. To have a narrative logic is to pattern out inclusions and exclusions," wrote my Facebook friend Charlie Conway in a recent post. Plot must delimit characters and events in order for an audience to perceive a story which then governs what kind of stories get told. Any given narrative film will ignore this demographic or forget that history and in response, film critics applaud the inclusions and/or damn the exclusions.

For many critics, a remedy lies in inserting positive representations or underrepresented demographics - Total Recall but with gay characters, as I once thought I longed for until I saw a film like D.E.B.S. (Angela Robinson, 2004), a sort of lesbian Charlie's Angels, and felt empty. That emptiness results from what Kristen Warner calls, in a super-useful article I never tire of quoting, plastic representation - the characters change but the oppressive structures, e.g., the stories that ignored them in the first place, remain in pernicious place.

All these thoughts came to the fore when watching Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan's biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who spearheaded the Manhattan Project. Based on the 2005 biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, Oppenheimer is a feat of deftness as surely as Barbie. Nolan jumbles temporal order throughout most of the running time, flitting back and forth largely between Oppenheimer (played with impressive concentration by Cillian Murphy) leading his crew in the creation of nuclear weapons during WWII and the subsequent attempts by U.S. Atomic Energy commissioner Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr. in his best performance to date) to discredit Oppenheimer and relieve him of his highest-level security clearance. The editing is in keeping with the dictates of intensified continuity in contemporary Hollywood cinema. For the first few minutes, I honestly thought I was watching a trailer for Oppenheimer so fast are its editing rhythms. Where intensified continuity would typically result in de trop editing, however, Nolan uses it to keep his 180-minute film moving briskly. For a project that threatens to be consumed by elephantiasis, Oppenheimer is remarkably fleet, almost light on its feet for such a grim project.

But as plenty of critics have pointed out, Nolan remains blind to certain demographics. He has little feel for the interior lives of his women characters although Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh acquit themselves admirably as Oppenheimer's wife Kitty and doomed paramour Jean Tatlock respectively. More damningly, the impact of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are relegated to a few photographs; Nolan never took his camera to Japan, saving his third act for the white man's guilt over birthing a weapon of mass destruction. 

As Warner would no doubt concur, peppering in Japanese characters would not automatically result in a better ventilated film. But allow me to suggest some structural inclusions that might satisfy the demands of both politics and aesthetics. The fulcrum of Oppenheimer is the Trinity test on July 16, 1945 when a nuclear weapon was detonated in a New Mexico desert. Shot without sound and bathed in light requiring SPF-500 until Nolan unleashes the full sonic assault on us, it's likely to go down as Nolan's finest moment ever. But what if after the successful test, the story switched to Japan...never to return to Oppenheimer or even America again?!? Instead of centering the story on one individual, what if a dual-structure narrative took over? After watching Oppenheimer, I was thirsty for a Japanese perspective on the end of WWII and saw a remarkable film called A Night to Remember (Kôzaburô Yoshimura, 1962) about a reporter trying to trace the effects of the bombs on the Hiroshima populace. Guess what - no one wants to talk about it and those too young to have experienced it fail to treat the event with any gravitas (the Japanese title translates, ironically one assumes, as I Will Never Forget That Night although it also goes by Hiroshima Heartache). 

Now imagine how rich and dialectical a fusion of Oppenheimer and A Night to Remember could be! What would 1945 Los Alamos have to say to 1962 Hiroshima and vice-versa? I don't want positive representations; that way leads to more Hallmark Christmas movies. I want different foci, dialectics, broken gestalts, indigestible, unconsumable images, structures so porous as to trigger trypophobia.

Addendum: I'll take no questions about the format in which I saw Oppenheimer. I saw it in a theatre and that's all ye need know. After the debacle of seeing Dunkirk in IMAX laser, the theatrical experience has no corner on ideal screening conditions. And given many viewers who are younger and have better hearing than I do have complained about the difficulty of making out bits of dialogue in Oppenheimer, the film is sure to benefit from closed captioning at home.

Barbie: B+

Oppenheimer: A-minus