Why "Barbenheimer" is Deeper Than We Think
When Cinema and Industry Collide
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.
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