Barbenheimer

We’ve seen a lot of movies in the past couple of weeks.

That’s a relative term, of course. Some people see movies all the time, even in this more or less post-pandemic age. A true cinephile would be vacuuming up the films, greeting the theater staff on a first name basis, and going about their day without a worry in the world about getting enough roughage in their diet though the salt and butter-like oil can’t be good in those quantities.

I’m not one of those people.

I didn’t go to movies much at all for about a decade, a practice that the pandemic only made worse. I still don’t watch much scripted television. But I’ve been slowly getting to see more movies, and that’s probably good. For one thing, Kim loves movies and now I can go with her again. And there are some good movies about.

I’ve already noted in this space that we saw Asteroid City a couple of weeks ago, and now I know what a Wes Anderson movie is. Apparently I’ve seen three of them now, also including The Fantastic Mr. Fox, and, while flying over the Atlantic a few years ago, Isle of Dogs. They were all fun, though the last one is very much not a kids’ movie.

But this summer is the summer of Barbenheimer, and there was no way we could miss it.

For those of you living under rocks or reading this in whatever post-apocalyptic future awaits us, the two big blockbuster movies coming out this summer both came out on the same day. One was Oppenheimer – a three-hour Oscar-bait Serious Movie about the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, generally acknowledged as the Father of the Atomic Bomb and a central figure in the course that I teach on that subject. The other was Barbie – a somewhat shorter, much more colorful and rather pointed cultural satire based on the doll of the same name.

These two things are, on the surface, so unlike each other that an entire cottage industry of memes forcibly yoking them together under the heading of Barbenheimer appeared full-formed on the internet a few months ago, and people started planning their double-feature day around them. Which one to see first? How much space between them? How much alcohol would be involved?

We didn’t do the double-feature, since that would be a full day. But we have now seen them both.

They’re both very much worth watching.

We saw Oppenheimer last night, and it was marvelous. Christopher Nolan, the director, was smart enough to center the film around Oppenheimer’s 1954 hearing before the Atomic Energy Commission where he was stripped of his security clearance as a petty act of vengeance for opposing the development of the hydrogen bomb (and I think that nearly seven decades is enough time that I don’t need to worry about spoiling that plot point – it’s a given from the get go, anyway). The movie bounces back and forth between that and Oppenheimer’s life in physics on the one hand, and the 1959 Senate hearing to confirm Lewis Strauss (pronounced “Straws”) as Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce on the other. Strauss, of course, was the Chair of the AEC in 1954. Circles in circles. The Trinity test and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are therefore not the focal points or the big triumphant/tragic conclusions, but instead the hinges upon which the rest of the film swings.

It might have been better if they’d introduced more of the characters – you kind of have to know who some of these people are in advance, really. Richard Feynman, for example – one of the more colorful Manhattan Project physicists and a future Nobel Laureate – appears three times and is never acknowledged, let alone identified, so you just have to know “Oh, that’s him!” But the movie was well done and thoughtful, and it leaves you with questions to think about.

Today we saw Barbie, which was – as Lauren said – “unexpectedly philosophical and meaningful, and expectedly pink.” It starts in the brightly colored world of Barbieland, where something is clearly not right, and this leads Barbie and Ken (“just Ken”) to venture into the Real World to try to fix it. Complications, as they say, ensue, and those complications lead them back to Barbieland and some rather pointed commentary on patriarchy, relationships, power, and what it means to be human.

I was impressed that the corporate types at Mattel were okay with being portrayed the way they were in this movie, to be honest. It speaks well of them.

I can also see why all the Fragile Dudebros are so up in arms about this movie, and you’ll excuse me while I laugh myself into a stupor at their expense over that fact. This film has a take-no-prisoners view of gender relationships and social structures, and while it definitely has some funny bits to it there is a core of steel underneath them that those suffering from toxic masculinity aren’t going to welcome. Meh. Also, for all that it stars a toy that six-year-old girls play with it’s not really a movie for them, though it is a movie that perhaps tween and teenaged girls should see for both the nostalgia and the message. So should all of the boys and men in their lives.

I enjoyed it thoroughly. It’s fun, thoughtful, and interesting and there’s one really great line that got everyone in the theater laughing, and you can’t ask for much more than that really.

The credits were rather sly. All of the male actors in Barbieland were simply listed as “Ken” while all of the women were listed as “Barbie.” Not “President Barbie,” “Writer Barbie,” “Physicist Barbie,” and so on – “Barbie.” And just “Ken.” You have to appreciate the attention to detail there.

But I think I’ve had enough popcorn to last me for a while.