On July 21st, we went to see Oppenheimer in the closest thing to IMAX that we could (regrettably, we live in Utah). As long-time Christopher Nolan fans, we had been excited for this movie since it was announced. As filmmakers, we knew this would be groundbreaking technically and thematically. And as creators of Death in The Garden, with our podcast intro beginning with the haunting words of Oppenheimer himself —“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”— we were keen to see the exploration into the follies of genius scientists and the technological genies they release into the world.
After 3 exhilarating hours, the final scene is the aftershock of the Trinity test. Where before I could only see the blast, now I could finally hear it. The last lines of the film, which I will not spoil here, are likely to haunt me for some time, possibly forever. When the credits started rolling, we all sat in stunned silence. Fear, anguish, despair, anxiety, and pain rushed through my body. My heart was pounding, and I was crying in that way that only happens when your mind is racing through time and space, to all potentialities and places— not an active cry, just tears relentlessly falling, falling, falling. My feeling of overwhelm had hardly calmed down by the time the credits concluded and it was time for our group of four to leave the theater. We were all shaken and moved, and visibly overwhelmed.
There’s no catharsis or relief. You don’t get to just walk away from this movie and simply think, “What a great story,” and move on. If you’ve seen the movie and pay attention to the world, you’ll understand why. We still very much live in a world under threat of nuclear annihilation, and never before had this painful reality been so viscerally expressed, not through gratuitous or irreverent depictions of the very real violence of the atomic bomb, but through the reactions of the people who created it. We get to look on upon the disturbing delight and horror experienced at the birth of a nightmare, a monster, a demon. Beyond the more obvious tale of a world-ending “chain reaction”, this film explores the complexities of realpolitik and the blurred morality that arises in crisis. It deals with human hubris, of valuing scientific calculations over wisdom. It deals with how humans rationalize and justify the most horrific of choices, and how we avoid facing the consequences of those choices. It deals with the invaluable and ever-relevant question: what happens when we open Pandora’s box?
Oppenheimer is true art —subversive, painful, disturbing, truthful— wrapped in an impeccably crafted work with brilliant directing, cinematography, acting, editing, and music (good God, the music). It’s clear that this film was made with love and heaviness, that everyone involved understood the importance of making this message land, and land it did. It was a masterpiece from start to finish, allowing us all an unequivocal glimpse into the minds behind such fateful moments of history — minds, as I have previously discussed, that we need to understand.
This movie is important. Possibly more important than any other movie I have seen. It comes at an interesting time, where not only is the United States currently engaged in a proxy war with a nuclear power, but tech developers and A.I. researchers are openly discussing that this is “their Oppenheimer moment” — a moment where there are statistical probabilities that these new generative A.I. algorithms could lead to the end of the world, yet the red button is being pushed anyway for reasons that are incomprehensible to most people.
Nolan brilliantly explores this incomprehensibility in Oppenheimer, offering us all a glimpse into the minds of the people who make world-altering decisions. What about their quantitative and highly logical minds leads them to conclude that a “near-zero” chance that the world will end is worth the risk? What of the complex politics of a race against the Nazis, and the fear of total, never-ending war with Japan, leads to such decision-making? Can such world-altering decisions ever be justified? And what can we learn from this moment today?
Mark Twain once said that, “history never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.” While we can never predict the future, it is always worth looking back to history to understand where we came from and the mistakes/triumphs/decisions that led us to where we have ended up.
I haven’t stopped thinking about the movie since seeing it, now twice in IMAX. I don’t expect it to be relatable to everyone, but the movie had a profound impact on me as a creative person but also on a human level. It laid bare the grief that I feel for the world and gave me an avenue to express it, rather than just suppressing it and allowing myself to feel numb and avoidant as I recently have been. The movie satiated me like a well-made stew, and to extend the metaphor, I was a bit taken aback by the junk-food that it seemed to be inextricably linked to.
Before seeing the film, I was vaguely curious about the decision by Warner Bros. to release Barbie on the same day, but ultimately didn’t think it was too egregious. But following seeing Oppenheimer, I felt differently. There’s something about that fact, and the relentless press comparing the two films, that disturbed me just enough to look deeper. Why should these two disparate movies be competing with each other, yet become strange bedfellows as cinematic double-features? What do we make of the rumors that the decision to release the Barbie the same day as Oppenheimer was more-or-less made to spite Christopher Nolan for ending his relationship with Warner Bros. back in 2020?
I started to examine the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, and immediately found that many people were seeing the films as a double-feature. People have described that you should watch Barbie as a “palate cleanser” to Oppenheimer — that Barbie is the “dessert” you deserve after “eating your vegetables.” After my experience with Oppenheimer, I found the idea of consuming the film like this to be very strange— like it’s something to get through rather than to savor. Why would people want to squander those important, uncomfortable moments following Oppenheimer’s conclusion by taking such a hard left-turn into Barbie? It’s a movie that demands to be felt, pondered, and integrated, which is an increasingly rare experience with cinema. Or, do you watch them both, the other way around? Watch something light and fun, and give yourself the space to feel and reflect on one of the most pivotal times in human history? “Your Barbenheimer decision may have more existential implications than you realize,” wrote Heather Schwendel for Slate. The implied question between the two (Barbenheimer or Oppenbarbie) being, how avoidant are you of experiencing seriousness, pain, and upset?
This aura of consumption and avoidance intrigued me. Seeing all of the pink outfits at the movie theater intrigued me. A cursory look into the production of Barbie led me to see just how corporate and commercial the film was, as Mattel Films, the Hollywood arm of the company who creates the doll, was a primary producer.
I had read in one of the many articles on this subject that being the stick-in-the-mud who is not amused by the bald-faced consumer propaganda has become a more noxious attitude than being the sell-out peddling that consumer propaganda. I think that’s largely true given society’s (understandably) increasing malaise and cheap dopamine addictions, and initially I resisted that creeping uptightness (due primarily to my own childhood Barbie™ nostalgia). But alas, the party-poopery eventually got to me, largely, I think, because the comparison between these two films was thrust upon me. Had these two films not opened on the same night and not had such a media/meme-storm comparing the two, I might have just ignored this Brave New World of commercial cinema that we’re entering (although I believe I would have become suspicious while trying to comprehend why a UNO™ movie would ever need to exist). But with headlines like, “Who Won the Barbenheimer War?” I could not fail to dive into the minutiae of it all.
So I saw Barbie, and it’s much deeper than I had initially realized.
Barbie: a Trojan Horse within a Trojan Horse?
“We live in a collective adrenaline rush, a world of endless promotional/commercial bullshit that masks a deep systemic emptiness, the spiritual equivalent of asthma.” — Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture1
It only takes a moment to scroll through Mattel’s website to see that every doll based on the movie (with the lone exception of Kate McKinnon’s Weird Barbie) are sold out. The whole time I was watching the movie, I couldn’t help but to see all of the potential “iconic” moments that could be used to sell, sell, sell. President of Shopify, the direct-to-consumer e-commerce site that manages sales for Mattel, said that "across the board, we're seeing doll sales up 56%." According to a 2014 United Nations Environment Program report, toys are the most plastic-intensive consumer goods in the world. Already, on a yearly basis, 60 million Barbie dolls are sold. Most of the dolls purchased in the film frenzy will end up in a landfill.2
Mattel CEO, Ynon Kreiz, has been quite clear when discussing what this film means for the brand: the film is all about the money — about leveraging the IP they own, and our propensity to consume things that make us feel nostalgic, to expand their business. In other words, Mattel didn’t partner with Amazon, H&M, Target, and 97 other brands to sell you pink sunglasses and wineglasses because they want you to be moved by the commentary within the movie: they want to make money.
This is part of a very deliberate strategy to generate more revenue streams to continue the pattern of leveraging their IP through film. Mattel currently has 45 film projects lined up, with their products such as UNO™, Hot Wheels™, Polly Pocket™, and other toys at the center of the story. Additionally, a film about Beanie Babies also came out this year. Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and Nike both have movies coming out this year. While it’s clearly not new for movies to be based around corporate IP or toys, it does seem like this type of media will become increasingly more common as cinematic cash-cows start to die off.
It makes me think of how in Idiocracy, all of the characters wear clothes with advertisements on them. While “branded content,” brand-deals, and product placement are ubiquitous from social media to television to movies, it seems like —with the Barbie movie as a “litmus test”— films about products, which essentially amount to 2-hour-long commercials, are becoming the norm.
In Morris Berman’s book, The Twilight of American Culture, published in 2000, he discusses the need for a modern “monastic class” (a more conscious version than the Benedictine monks who are largely responsible for the Renaissance) who “saw they could not reverse these trends [of civilizational decline] but that they could do their best to preserve the treasures of their civilization, the ways of thinking and living that might be appreciated in another, healthier era.”3 He discusses at length the indicators that he saw in the early 21st century that indicated to him that America was in decline, and with it, the rest of the globalized world. A monastic class, which could see through the “kitsch” that is saturating our lives, should quietly live differently, and at the very least be conscious of the culture of the time and what it represents. One of the most important things that this so-called “monastic class” can achieve, Berman says, is to “expose the emptiness of the corporate/commercial way of life.”
That’s what I aim to do here.
“This is a movie that wants to have its Dreamhouse and burn it down to the ground, too,” writes David Fear in the Rolling Stone. So the question is, can Barbie do both? Can a movie meaningfully critique consumerism while the corporation who owns the IP for the story simultaneously starts brand deals with over 100 retail licensing partners? Can a movie meaningfully evoke “heady notions” around human rights while marketing a toy that is linked to labor rights violations and promoting fast fashion, which is known to be a grave threat throughout the garments’ lifecycles?
Vital kitsch, “the promotion of commercial energy at the expense of genuine content, of real substance,” Berman wrote, “will be the reality for most Americans in the twenty-first century, in one form or another, and it will be fueled by the globalization process. Most of those who claim to oppose the world of corporate scitech consumerism will themselves become commodities.”4 Greta Gerwig made her name directing Ladybird and Little Women, two films that not only incorporate class critiques, but also feminist critiques. We see poignant discussions about ambition, marriage and gender, and the complications of being a woman who doesn’t quite fit into the mold of the society around her. I was deeply moved by Ladybird, the complexities of mother-daughter dynamics, and the desire of the young protagonist to be grateful for what she has while also achieving her dreams. Her first film, Frances Ha, writes Tia Glista for Document Journal, “hinge[s] on the protagonist’s upward aspirations and reveal a tension between desiring more privilege and being critical of how those who have it use it.” Little Women felt honest, and gave me a glimpse into a time where women truly were expected to just marry rich and be mothers. It tackled the complexities of sisterhood, being a female breadwinner in the Victorian era, and the challenge of asserting ones own autonomy (and negotiating ones own worth) in a far more patriarchal society than we live in now. In other words, I really liked Greta Gerwig.
But, “in the trendy Land of Hype, success kills.”5
So now we have Barbie. Gone are the subtle and nuanced takes on what it means to be a human being, let alone a woman, in the world — instead we get a cartoonized version of reality that positions feminism as being about trading places with men completely, i.e. making men subservient to women. Rather than striving for equality for the sexes, Barbie advocates for women to take on all positions of power (but make it pink), and for men to have to “work their way back” into such positions as slowly and incrementally as women had to do. It’s a movie that depicts men as either vacuous idiots, sex offenders, or corporate demagogues (who are also idiots).
Because of this rhetoric being altogether absent from the trailers, Fox News types have been leveraging culture-war animosities and claiming that Barbie is a Trojan horse for the “feminist agenda.” I would argue that this first Trojan horse is actually a Trojan horse for a far more important agenda: the corporate agenda.
Barbie makes a point to poke fun at consumerism, capitalism, and Mattel in the film, albeit extremely briefly and with very little substantive analysis. It feels predictably disingenuous. “Critique can only mean so much when the entity under the microscope also happens to be the one writing (and cashing) the checks,” writes NPR’s Aisha Harris. She continues discussing the tension between filmmaking and commerce:
“Something like Barbie lays that tension bare and exposed in its unabashed commercialism and heightened sensibilities, so that you can't not think about how its aims may be at odds with its execution.”
Rather than a genuine critique, one feels while watching the movie that they’re only bringing up these issues because to omit them would be problematic. So, while Barbie may pay lip service to capitalist critiques, feminism, etc — it’s ultimate goal is to uplift the brand of Barbie™.
For example, the corresponding fashion bonanza of “bimbo/Barbiecore” is being flouted as a way for people to reinvigorate their playfulness and femininity after the pandemic years of isolation and generalized drudgery. This desire for “fun, gaudy playfulness” is an aesthetic which claims to be a political statement, specifically a new form of feminism — one which doesn’t eschew girliness and pink. The crux of the argument is this: that women should be able to wear pink and dress like “bimbos” while still being taken seriously as professionals, intellectuals, etc. Fair enough— but is this seriously the most important struggle we have against the patriarchy?
Beyond the idiocy of assuming that commercialized fashion statements are genuinely political, it also represents something deeper, which is this: its goal is to reinforce the same well-trodden notion that, as Berman points out, creates a “culture of desire” where the good life is confused with the goods.6 It’s the pacifying idea that pandemic angst or a feeling of inferiority is best alleviated buying a Barbie™ T-shirt from the Gap, or a hot pink X-box. Feeling existential about the fate of the world? Buy something fun and frilly on Amazon.
This isn’t new. What is new is that a faux-progressive veneer has been placed upon it, when really that’s just a Trojan horse for more commercialism, more corporatism, more of the same old story. The so-called “take-down” of the patriarchy in the Barbie movie services one thing and one thing alone — Mattel’s stakeholders. And it does this depressingly-so. It does so by pandering to the least-evolved and least interesting “feminist” rhetoric (“man bad”) and paying lip-service to historical critiques of the Barbie doll by talking about it just enough that they won’t get pilloried for the omission, but not enough that anyone actually has a moment to self-reflect about the 2-hour toy commercial they are watching in their brand-new $90 pink Crocs. “The movie,” writes Adrian Horton for the Guardian, “shares a self-protective streak common to many a woman online: anticipate any potential criticism, call it out first, fold it into your image.” In this way, the film comes off as self-congratulatory and self-conscious, yet any self-effacing dialogue is weighed down by the shallowness of the entire money-grubbing enterprise.
This movie, which has now made $1 billion at the box-office so far, is nothing more than a pink, plastic, shiny commodity, just like everything Mattel creates. It’s not “the most subversive blockbuster of the 21st century” like the Rolling Stone so emphatically declared: it has just enough social jargon in it to masquerade as something with depth and analysis. The film’s lamentation about how hard it is to be a woman, and how the only way to escape the complexities and double-standards that exist for (Western) women is to side-line, demonize, and ultimately supplant men is current enough to feel relevant, but regressive enough to feel antiquated and tone-deaf. The movie makes a mockery of men in such a way to suggest that women’s empowerment only comes at men’s expense. Its “eye-for-an-eye” take on the patriarchy vs. matriarchy dynamic is narrow and alienating, and, in my view, wholly unhelpful.
But the bottom line is this: it doesn’t matter to Mattel what the movie says or doesn’t say — leveraging their IP for profit is all that matters to them. In that way, feminists and antifeminists alike both get played. We can bicker all day whether or not Barbie told a valid feminist story, but it’ll never change the fact that Mattel won.
Morris Berman explains in The Twilight of American Culture that “kitsch” is defined as “something phony, clumsy, witless, untalented, vacant, or boring that many Americans can be persuaded is genuine, graceful, bright, or fascinating.”7 I would say that the Barbie movie fits into this definition quite perfectly. The ease and ability to captivate the world with a corporate movie that is genuinely not that interesting is indicative of our decline. Meanwhile, many of the 1-star reviews for Oppenheimer are lamentations that there wasn’t more violence and explosions. It is cynical to say that there is nothing genuine in Barbie, but regardless, it was safe. It wears the disguise of controversy while towing a very palatable line. I will never know what Greta Gerwig, who is doubtless a talented and creative person, really thinks about how this movie turned out, or what she thinks it accomplished. Regardless of any of her intentions, however desultory they may be, the movie is overshadowed by commercialism, consumerism, and the spreading of bad ideas.
One moment surprised me, though. When Sasha, the now tween-aged former owner of Stereotypical Barbie, finally meets Margot Robbie’s character of the same name, she lists off all of the problems with Barbie — that she’s a hyper-sexualized capitalist demon that reinforces impossible beauty standards and consumption of plastic — which causes Robbie’s character to cry. Sasha finishes her off by calling Stereotypical Barbie a “fascist.” This isn’t presented as a truth, or a take-down, but rather a subtle commentary on the ignorance of Sasha, of the ignorance of her flippant usage of that word. There are two ways to interpret this moment of the film: either that it can be used as a way to delegitimize everything that Sasha previously said, or, as a moment of subtle honesty. Could this moment cue us to the vacuousness of our political activism, throwing words around and politiking as we do, parroting the slogans of those who appear smarter than us— thus, to the vacuousness of the whole movie? Maybe. Most likely, however, like Barbie™ herself, it’s not that deep.
Barbie™, to me as a child, was just a toy. She wasn’t a feminist symbol or a symbol of how I would never be able to measure up to beauty standards. To me, the doll just wasn’t that deep in either direction. She was merely a vessel through which I could escape and create imaginal worlds— it’s only now that I see how my imagination was mediated through a mass-produced product from factories with underpaid workers, shipped across the planet on massive container ships bilge dumping and polluting the oceans, ultimately to end up in some landfill somewhere to eventually decay in ten thousand years (so maybe she is deep, just not in the way that the movie tries to proclaim). Generally speaking, Barbie™ as a product was not a toxic presence in my life, rather, the world I created with her was really the only place that I felt like I could truly be a kid.
As an adult, I can see that the world that creates such narrow conditions for a child to be a kid is also the world that makes Barbie™ possible and desirable. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle that plays on and on in the background of our lives. It’s only now, having that Great Veil pulled inexorably back, that I see what Barbie™ represents, alongside all of the things we buy to fill the void: a way to assuage our anxieties and intuitions that tell us emphatically that this way of life cannot last. Barbie™ is just a toy, ephemeral to us but a near-permanent fixture in the world. Her plastic body will long outlive each of us, and no one alive today will live to see her decay. She will be a relic of the boom-and-bust mentality of consumption that has punctuated the last 100 years of history, leaching herself into the soils— once loved fleetingly by a child, but now utterly forgotten.
Who is Prepared to Take Arms Against a Sea of Amusements?
“Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture’s being drained by laughter?” - Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death8
In an interview, Margot Robbie recounted a conversation she had with Greta Gerwig and America Ferrera about Barbie™. “Isn’t it so crazy,” she said, “that humans are so weird. They made a doll, and then they got mad at the doll.” Instead of looking at ourselves and how we can do better in the world, she said, we’re blaming the doll. “It’s a plastic doll,” she said, laughing. “And we made it.”
So where do we put our frustrations, where does the blame lie? The symbol, the creator, or the culture that enables it?
Oppenheimer tackles this question as well. J. Robert Oppenheimer justifies his involvement in creating a weapon of mass destruction, and tries to distance himself from the responsibility of what will be done with his creation. It’s only when “it became clear to [him] that we would use whatever weapon we had,” that he takes responsibility for his role in what he started: an arms race, or a Chekov’s gun, “a weapon introduced in an earlier act of our lives that will inevitably be used before our story ends.”9
In Oppenheimer, no one is let off the hook. Not the symbol, the creator, the culture that deploys these weapons—not us. Nolan makes this known in many subtle ways that we can’t sweep the nuclear age under the rug. Following the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, in the film, we see Murphy’s Oppenheimer give a nightmarish speech, at the center of which we see a young woman’s face melting off. That woman is Flora Nolan, Christopher Nolan’s daughter— no doubt a very intentional and meaningful choice. The bomb, and the worldview which created it, is coming for us, and it’s coming for our children, too. We don’t get to assume that the bomb is a neutral actor, that it’s just something we created that we can distance ourselves from.
We see Oppenheimer look away as the scientists are shown the images of the bombings in Japan, a sheepish attempt to obscure his complicity in the horror he created. The film was written in first person, with everything revolving around Oppenheimer, how he saw the world and how he rationalized his behavior. In this way, we see the brutality of what happened in Japan through the protagonists avoidance of the subject. We only see what Oppenheimer was willing to see, and understand what he was willing to understand. For example, could Oppenheimer, after a lifetime of advocating for social justice, from supporting Spanish independence against fascism to assisting migrant farm workers, cope with the reality that he had destroyed Native American sacred lands to create a weapon that would kill more than 120,000 innocent people, just to make a point? How does one reconcile their idealism with their actions?
We don’t get the goofy, declawed cartoon Mattel executive-types in Oppenheimer, instead, we see rooms of men deciding who lives and dies based on something as banal as honey-moon sentimentality. “The whole film is about consequences,” said Christopher Nolan in an interview with Vulture. “The delayed onset of consequences that people often forget.” We see a damning indictment of what it means to be the aggressor. As an American, I have to watch the stomach-churning, ravenous applause of the crowd, cheering gleefully about the death of Japanese people. I have to sit with that, knowing what happened in Nagasaki and Hiroshima— knowing that far more than 120,000 people would ultimately die from the blast, and that we’re still waiting for the moment when that gun goes off again.
While Barbie seemingly aims to nullify your critiques of the symbol, the creator, and the culture that created it, Oppenheimer forces you to wake up and understand that those distinctions don’t matter. Each reinforces each, and we don’t get to point our finger in just one direction. Whether it’s the ecological crisis, whether its the rise of A.I., whether it’s our political system, or the economy, Oppenheimer shows us the interconnectedness of all of these pieces. It shows the role of scientists and the ways that their tinkering can lead to disastrous places, yes, but it also shows us that we have a role to play. And if we don’t play a decisive role, we de facto enable the psychotic nature of our society. Regardless, therefore, we play a role.
When Neil Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985, commercial media consumption was not as constant and relentless as it is today, yet, he still felt the need to warn the public about the dangers of the rise of television. Those dangers seem quaint today with the rise of A.I. and the complete normalization of us carrying around little phone-sized Feds in our pockets everywhere we go, but I think the warnings should nevertheless be heeded.
While Postman saw no immediate danger from junk-TV at the time of writing, 15 years later Morris Berman would accurately identify that the garbage we consume does in fact impact us.10 Although we are storytelling creatures, we’ve stopped asking how the stories we consume alter our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Media is ambient— it’s the air we breathe. We hardly take time for contemplation anymore, so it’s easy to absorb what we consume like a sponge, never questioning what it’s doing to us or how it’s altering how we think. Someone close to me told me she had an interaction with a woman following watching Barbie, and the woman was laughing about how “all of the men in her life are Kens” and how she just looks around her at men and thinks, “You’re a Ken, you’re a Ken, you’re a Ken.”
How many other people are uncritically swallowing this sort of rhetoric, which is so black-and-white and objectifying? And how many people are thinking this is “progressive”? Bafflingly, many women are actually breaking up with their boyfriends if they criticize Barbie as evidenced by recent TikTok trends (of course), so to my dismay, this brain-worm might be more common than I’d like to believe. This is likely because we are largely unaware of the myths we live by, let alone where they come from— and this is a problem.
Postman wrote, “only a deep and unfailing awareness of the structure and effects of information, through a demystification of media, is there any hope of our gaining some measure of control over television, or the computer, or any other medium.”11 Like Berman’s idea of a monastic class, the exposure of what we’re consuming is the first step toward a cure.
“For no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are. It’s not important that those who ask the questions arrive at my answers… This is an instance in which the asking of the questions is sufficient. To ask is to break the spell.”12
Breaking the Spell: Why it Matters
“Why does any of this matter?” one might say. “Just let people enjoy things, let people be entertained.”
I recognize it is uncool and curmudgeonly to hold the position that films like Barbie, films that pretend to have depth but are really just new revenue streams for multinational-corporations, might possibly be a blight on our society.
It’s a kitschy movie that only half-heartedly attempts to tackle issues of corporatism and commercialism, primarily as a means of exonerating Mattel from any past or future blowback. It’s a film which normalizes creating movies about products with faux-socio-political commentary that ultimately only serves the corporations bottom line. Mattel is laughing their way to the bank with this one. They can be seen as cool, hip, and progressive for gently calling themselves out in the movie and continue their corporation business-as-usual. They can obscure their purely profit-driven and corporate ambitions behind the cartoonish facade of Will Ferrell and his entourage of grey-clad morons. It’s a genius strategy, actually, and it paves the way for it to be really uncool to call out their motivations for the other 43 product-based films they have (13 of which are currently in development, including a godforsaken adaption of Polly Pocket by Lena Dunham).
What this does, beyond its horrendous portrayal of feminism, is normalize an age where we’ve ran out of genuine inspiration, so we write stories about products instead. As Berman wrote in The Twilight of American Culture, “there is not a square inch of American (or Americanized) life that is not bombarded by commercial messages.”13 I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m tired of it, no matter how uncool that makes me. It’s gross. It’s boring. But it’s also slyly imprinting us with the message that beyond anything else, we are consumers.
Kitsch, comfort, meaningless trends — they leave us empty at the end of the day. In 1946, George Orwell addressed this in an essay called Pleasure Spots.
“Much of what goes by the name of pleasure is simply an effort to destroy consciousness. If one started by asking, what is man? What are his needs? How can he best express himself? one would discover that merely having the power to avoid work and live one’s life from birth to death in electric light and to the tune of tinned music is not a reason for doing so. Man needs warmth, society, leisure, comfort and security: he also needs solitude, creative work and the sense of wonder. If he recognized this he could use the products of science and industrialism eclectically, applying always the same test: does this make me more human or less human? He would then learn that the highest happiness does not lie in relaxing, resting, playing poker, drinking and making love simultaneously. And the instinctive horror which all sensitive people feel at the progressive mechanization of life would be seen not to be a mere sentimental archaism, but to be fully justified. For man only stays human by preserving large patches of simplicity in his life, while the tendency of many modern inventions – in particular the film, the radio and the aeroplane – is to weaken his consciousness, dull his curiosity, and, in general, drive him nearer to the animals.”
This litmus test —“does this make me more human or less human?”— for technology and by extension, entertainment, in Orwell’s essay strikes a particular nerve in light of Barbenheimer. After seeing Oppenheimer, I was haunted by this question of what kind of person do I want to be? which sent me down this train of thought, and helped me regain perspective on what my role in the world might be, and what will be required of me to fill that role. I would venture to say that the experience of watching the film lands on the “more human” end of the spectrum, whereas Barbie only reinforced an idea that I daily have to resist: that I am just a consumer.
In addition to this question of humanness, it might be useful to deploy another litmus test to the media we consume: does this media try to turn me towards an uncomfortable truth, or does it try to turn me away from an uncomfortable truth? The operative word here is “try.” We choose to let things steer us from the uncomfortable truths, and in fact, interrogating such media that tries to manipulate our attentions might reveal even more profound and buried truths, but we have to remain vigilant to not be pacified by amusement.
An advertisement will always try to steer you away from an uncomfortable truth, as it’s the “scientific management of public opinion.”14 This is something that I think will be important to keep in mind as we continue to be bombarded by commercialism, especially now that it has seeped so fully into the realm of film. Barbie’s so-called “progressive” messages are merely techniques to obscure the consumer messaging— do not be fooled. Like the atomic bomb, films/media/content are not neutral, and are even less so when they are about products. These things impact us, they change the way we see ourselves and the world. Normalizing the merger of the art of cinema with advertisements seems like a dangerous precedent to set.
Now, I clearly don’t feel that Barbie needs to be denigrated in order for Oppenheimer to stand on its own feet. By chance, or spiteful Warner Bros. executives, the two film’s simultaneous arrival compel us to compare them. I never would have considered comparing the two had the phenomenon of Barbenheimer not existed, and when I looked deeper, it revealed to me something intriguing and alarming about our culture. Even the mere fact that we have to suffer the incessant comparison of these two movies on the basis of box office revenue alone is enough to indicate the seemingly inexorable devaluation of art. “Instead of classics, we shall have best-sellers,” Berman writes, “instead of genius, technique.”15 The questions we’ll have to ask going forward are something like this: does this make me feel like a human, or a consumer? does this make me think of the world as alive and complex, or as an exchange of money for products?
I compare these two here because in Oppenheimer, I see what cinema can be. Cinema doesn’t have to be amusement at the expense of serious conversations. Cinema can move us and make us squirm — it can hold up a mirror to ourselves and the culture we live in, and it can do so without being manipulative and commercial. There’s a cost to the “pleasure spots,” as Orwell wrote. There’s a cost to consuming things that aim to prevent us from thinking, contemplating, and reflecting. There’s a cost to media that turns the world into mere consumers and products.
The truth is, Barbie does lay bare the kitsch and junk-food of our culture, but I fear that people don’t see that as an opportunity to reflect on anything. From the sales of movie merchandise and the success of these licensing deals, I just don’t know if people are capable of looking in that particular mirror just yet. Instead, I think Barbie gives the world permission to be kitschy, unthinking, and gluttonous at a time when we actually need to be conscious of the world we live in.
Neil Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death to explore the thesis that Aldous Huxley’s dystopian predictions about the world in Brave New World, at least in the United States, were far more likely to come to pass than those of 1984.
He wrote:
“Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture… In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”16
We can fill our lives with noise and bright colors, but it won’t change the reality that we live in perilous times. While 1984 certainly emphasized the dangers of pain, Pleasure Spots clues us into Orwell’s awareness that the antithesis, pleasure, is also dangerous. The chatter and the noise of consumerism and corporatism and consumption keeps us complacent and unthinking. Orwell wrote in Pleasure Spots how, even in the 1940’s, he noticed that we filled our silences with music which prevented our conversations from “becoming serious or even coherent,” while also preventing “the onset of that dreaded thing, thought.”
So is the moral of this piece to not watch Barbie, and instead watch Oppenheimer? No. Go see Barbie for yourself. Go see Oppenheimer. The moral is to think about it. To think about how cynical it is for a movie to leverage its IP with a half-hearted critique of corporatism, all in the service of astronomical profits. Disagree with me, hate Oppenheimer, find flaws in my argument. Just think about it.
You may feel nothing watching Oppenheimer. Cinema and art is subjective. For me, it tapped viscerally into an excruciating place inside of me— the side that not only fears the atomic bomb but that also fears the chain reaction set forth by Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, that fears the consequences of the Green Revolution, that fears scientism and scientific management thinking, that fears algorithms and the colonization of the mind: the side of me that wonders what the hell we think we are doing as a species. It wasn’t amusing, it wasn’t entertaining— it was like choking down medicine.
We are encircled by entertainment, and our consciousness is being enclosed. I don’t believe I’m a masochist for thinking that we need to be confronted more by the realities of the world we live in— the realities of ourselves and how we look away from the destruction we have caused. Only in the acceptance of that responsibility — to be a witness— can we truly be free to move through the world in a different way.
As a part of the so-called “monastic option,” in Berman’s book, he ultimately advocates for “individual shifts in lifeways and values [that] may just possibly act as a wedge that would serve as a counterweight to the world of schlock, ignorance, social inequality, and mass consumerism that now defines the American landscape.” 17Our minds are the final frontier for the colonization project. The individual shifts will only come through resistance against the tsunami of consumer culture that we are already drowning in, and the resistance will only come through free thought and our right to question to program. And as Postman said, the first step is to ask the question. The first step is to break the spell.
Written by Maren Morgan
Thank you for your attention, and if you enjoyed this piece, please consider sharing it with the people in your life. If you’d like to become a paid subscriber, it would mean a lot to us and our ability to continue creating Death in The Garden, which is first and foremost a film that tackles the epistemologies that have led to the ecological crisis and to a civilization that leaves us alienated, atomized, and ultimately advertised to.
Berman, M (2000) The Twilight of American Culture p. 54
Pears, A. (July 17, 2023) “In a Barbie world … after the movie frenzy fades, how do we avoid tonnes of Barbie dolls going to landfill?”
Berman p. 69
Ibid p. 129
Ibid p. 157
Ibid p. 116
Ibid p. 53
Postman, N. (1985) Amusing Ourselves to Death: public Discourse in the Age of Show Business p. 156
Ebiri, B. (Jul 21, 2023) “The ‘Troubling Reverberations’ at the End of Oppenheimer, Explained”
Postman p. 160
Ibid p. 161
Ibid
Berman p. 114
Berman p. 118
Berman p. 106
Postman, foreward
Berman p. 133
THANK YOU for this. Seriously. Brilliant insights. I haven’t seen either movie, but have felt extremely skeptical and put-off over the hype of Barbie, despite so many people trying to convince me otherwise. This was extremely refreshing and relateable.
I also very much want for people to be conscious while watching these movies. I feel frustrated by the reaction at large to consume rather than contemplate (a reaction I find present in myself as well). I agree that change can only come from changed minds, and a shift in consciousness won’t happen unless people are indeed confronted by the realities of the world.
From my perspective, there seems to be a gap somewhere between being complacent and unthinking, becoming unblinded to the mollification of consumerism and entertainment, and actually being able to confront and accept this reality and our own responsibility. Yes, it is necessary for the bars of our cage to be pointed out to us (regardless of whether they are made out of amusement and pleasure or external oppressions), but I think there is already a knowing in all of us that the bars are there, and even a gentle reminder can be more than uncomfortable, it might be unbearable. This isn’t weakness or something to be ashamed of, we simply do not have the capacity to hold that reminder in the forefront of our minds alone.
I would like to add to this well crafted and thoughtful essay by acknowledging that the numbness, passivity, and even denial present in us are perhaps deserving of appreciation. Our psyches were not designed to contain such large scale and abstract griefs of the world. We are not suited for the intake and processing of a bombardment of constant catastrophe happening both in our immediate worlds and at a global level. On our own, we cannot confront this. Numbness becomes a sort of lifesaving process.
Our culture is not set up for the processing of grief in any effective way. Feeling these “negative” emotions of sorrow, outrage, and heartbreak is a hidden affair. We tend to only let these emotions surface when we are alone, hidden. And even then, they’ve likely taken us by surprise and surfaced on their own and the common reaction is to stuff them deep back down.
I have so much compassion for all of us who are numb. I hope for us all to not feel any shame in our responses. Don’t judge yourself if you go numb, but ask yourself… what do you need in order to turn into it rather than away?
We need the support of a village. Grief is communal. It is not meant to be a private affair. We need to collaborate together in creating holding spaces for grief and healing to emerge. Without this container, how could we even begin to be fully present with the reality of our own imprisonment and participation in consumerism, corporatism, and consumption?
What does this container look like? There is no one right way. I think it needs to be spontaneous, not prescribed. A present, raw response from which authentic communal grieving emerges, specific to the needs and feeling of any one place and the beings present.
I understand grief is often perceived as a negative experience, perhaps even unhelpful or something that just gets in our way or slows us down from ‘progress’ or ‘improvement.’ I might come off as a Debbie downer to some by suggesting it is absolutely imperative to establish a healthy relationship with sorrow. I invite you to consider a different perspective: to grieve is to be alive. It enhances vitality. Grief is not just tears. It is a door to a soul reawakened and to showing up. As Francis Weller has said, “grief is also outrage. It is protest. It is an adamant refusal to allow things to proceed as they are.” It is also a gateway to feeling again… deep joy, reverence, gratitude… to becoming more human again.
It is the broken heart that will be big enough to generate the courage necessary for making a difference. Let us find compassion and patience for ourselves and others as we enter into this period of cosmic inhale, darkness (not meant in a negative sense), decay, and unknown. “I don’t think we’re going to figure this out way out of this one. But I do think we can sit together quietly in the dark and become receptive to some new imagination… we must learn how to sit in the dark together and not heroically try to “figure it out,” but to become patient enough to listen to the dreaming earth. What if the earth is a dreaming creature? We need to slow down enough to practice that togetherness.”
I have so much love for you all.
Thank you Maren and Jake for your dedication to being present, feeling, and inviting us all to join in thinking critically about the world and culture at large. I am inspired again and again by you both and I appreciate the many opportunities offered to challenge my perspectives and process feelings stimulated by your work.
Hugs,
Sydnee
——
P.S. I feel compelled to offer this word of caution: processing grief is not just a step to take in some walk of ‘self-improvement’. It’s not some prerequisite to creating ‘solutions.’ More than an emotion, it is a faculty that we need to become skilled in and exercise throughout our journies. This is not a box to check and move on from.