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I meant it when I said that Barbie and Oppenheimer might just be masterpieces. And as amazing as that is, it's even weird that my quips about them being „the perfect double feature“ ended up being not too far off the mark. I know that, on a purely surface level, that idea seems nuts. Oppenheimer is an old-school, grande historical procedural set in the mid-20th century that deals with quantum physics, the devastation of war, and fears of the literal annihilation of the entire planet, with a somber tone and sound design to match. Barbie literally sprays glitter at the camera, has a production design decked out in the most deliberately plastic sets you can imagine, and is snappy and fun and filled with wink-wink-nudge-nudge metahumor. While Oppenheimer obsesses over igniting the atmosphere, Barbie is (at least at first) only concerned with her feet. And cellulite.
But once I'd left my first screenings and starting scratching at the surface just a little bit, it struck me that both films are, at their core, remarkably astute and challenging examinations of power, power structures, and their inherently corrupting influences on both societies and the individuals within them. And also, of course, patriarchy.
The patriarchy part is certainly more explicit in Barbie. We are presented at the start with an alternative Barbieverse where gender roles are entirely flipped; women (not ALL of whom are named Barbie) hold exclusive access to power and prestige and define the society they exist within, whereas the men (not ALL named Ken) are conditioned to define themselves solely around what attention they receive from their assigned Barbie. Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling might be the central narrative Barbie-Ken pair, but there's a bright and varied supporting cast around them to accentuate the established matriarchy.
Much of this is conveyed through phenomenal production design, easily the year's best to date. Barbieland is a masterful use of taking a mishmash of pop culture IP and shaping it into a clear and coherent design that very much feels like a place that could exist. The extra effort to have things just "happen," to have characters move the way dolls do when being picked up and put down, are wonderful to watch, especially in the first act. It is "unreal" in its effect, but in a self-consistent way that allows your brain to buy in, which is what any fantasy film needs to do. It's no wonder the movie hurries so fast to get back there after its real-world-centered second act.
The screenplay is also aces, packed to the gills with sharp, observative humor than goes well beyond the most obvious, self-referential, „Mattel makes the rules“ jokes everyone knew was coming. The beginning montage features an extended clapback at the heinous Citizens United ruling, an early real-world scene provides a fantastic backdoor dig at genital-obsessed transphobia, we get insanely clever use of „Closer to Fine,“ and there's even a dig at the Snydercut weirdos we were all forced to think about from a few years back. All stuff I was absolutely not expecting to get out of a Barbie film, but I am pumped it's there.
The central force, though, is the divergent arcs of Robbie's Barbie and Gosling's Ken, a humorous take on a reverse Innocence Lost/Power Gained dynamic. Ken's first exposure to patriarchy- and to the notion he could actually REVERSE the disempowerment he's felt without being able to name it- is literally treated like a drug or virus, entering an untouched, unprotected system with no defenses to hold it back. This is the direct, textual explanation for how Ken is able to corrupt all of Barbieland with his newfound (and exceedingly piecemeal) knowledge. It's the pink-and-pastel version revealing how marginalization of a group can all too easily reproduce itself within the marginalized group and directed onward towards others. Ken's response to a realization of his previous disempowerment almost instinctually is.....to re-create that same imbalanced power dynamic, but just in reverse.
However, it's also far more nuanced and complex than the simple „man-hating feminism“ critiques that the film was always going to have tossed in its direction. Yes, Ken reacts from a place of pain, and instead of rectifying the genuine mistreatment of the Kens merely replaces one wrong with a worse one. But as the film clearly understands, this dynamic, which repeats itself with depressing frequency in our own world, usually (though not always!) comes from an unconscious part of ourselves; we (usually) don't actively seek to do harm, but when we react out of ignorance or instinct, we often do anyway.
The film is not able to offer a wholly satisyfing, in-world solution to this; the Barbies retake control, but aren't yet willing to contemplate full-scale Ken-quality, while a man remains in control of the real-world company. The focus, in the end, is on a more radically individual self-realization as a key to freeing oneself from toxic dynamics. Messy, complicated, often achy, but necessary.
This lack of a more radical in-world shakeup is one reason why some argue that Gerwig was, in the end, unable to make something deeper or meaningful than „just a toy commercial.“ And there were absolutely certain limitations baked into the project from the start, let's be perfectly clear about that; this film was greenlit by Mattel in the hopes that it will push products, full stop. That always mattered more to them then gifting the world a great artistic achievement. They are literally already marketing their new „Weird Barbie“ doll, which explicitly misses the point of what made Weird Barbie „Weird Barbie“ within the text of their own film. Corpos will always corpo.
The film has OODLES of queer subtext (and sometimes just text), but some have found both that and the film's brand of feminism too white, or that the focus on the Ken/Barbie duality pushes out trans and non-binary persons. This is a topic I, as a cishet White man, am particularly unsuited to tackle. But I think it does bear mentioning that the wonderful critic Emily St. James, herself a trans women, wrote openly about her mixed feelings about the film's gender duality while also lauding the fact that a trans actress (Hari Neff) plays one of the main Barbies. Could the film have tackled gender differently? She though yes, perhaps, BUT she also said that the final sequence of Barbie deciding to become human reminded her of coming out as trans, and made her cry in the theater to boot.
And she's not the only one to have that deep, visceral reaction, beyond any standard critic of the film. Both that ending scene and America Ferrera's earlier monologue about the burdens of just „being female“ have touched a lot of viewers, including my own wife, who found herself completely overwhelmed by it during our first screening. And from what I'm seeing, a LOT of people- cishet women, queer women, trans peoples, non-binary peoples, and even plenty of men- have reacted to the film in similar ways. I genuinely don't think the film would have been the smash success it is without that reaction.
Taking that all together, I feel that, even though I am sympatico with some of the criticisms and do have a few structural nitpicks of my own with the film's narrative, it's clear to me that Gerwig brought us the absolute best Barbie film we could have possible received and still had the official go from Mattel.
My personal obsession with Barbenheimer, however, has come to revolve around the dual figures of Ken and Oppenheimer, prime examples of the corruding influence of patriarchy and toxic masculinity. In some key moments, their characters function as near-identical twins of each other.
Yes, I am about to compare Ken and Robert Oppenheimer. No, I am not high. Bear with me.
As I've already said, both these movies are grappling with the nature of power in extremely similar ways. Sure, the specifics are different; reverse-patriarchy in a fictional plastic world and the WWII/Cold War dynamic driving arms development aren't the sort of 1-1 comp you'd be permitted to write your Masters thesis over. But, at least in the cases of these two films, the primary male character is defined almost entirely by an endless and contradictory internal struggle; both desire power, recognition, and admiration, but once faced with the prospect of actually having what they said they wanted, they find themselves unable to cope.
Ken is, of course, more over-the-top; every possible emotion is turned up to 11, as he huffs and puffs and bluffs across the Mattel multiverse. He reacts like a kid dropped into Christmas Land when he first discovers patriarchy and male privilege, then reacts in an equally over-the-top manner when his own shortcomings are made plain. He didn't know what the time was when asked- if he can even tell time- so he acquired three watches. He feels Barbie failed him, failed to appreciate him, so he takes over her house, tosses out her vintage Barbie outfits, and brainwashes an entire mini-state. Still not satisfied? Might as well choreograph a massive song-and-dance number about blond fragility that involves all the Kens.
Oppenheimer plays a much more subtle game, but the same signs are there. Cilian Murphy's portayal of the title figure is a masterpiece of subtle, almost reptilian acting. There are a thousand ways his character and reactions to events can be interpreted. He is a true cipher, seemingly able to switch gears almost on a whim in a given situation to try and elicit the reaction he wants. The real money question, though, is which parts of him we see are genuine, which calculated, and which ones the unconscious reactions of an overactive, preoccupied mind.
After two viewings- and I reserve the right to revisit this as time goes on- I think the shifts in his character reflect the same deep ambivalence to power that plagues our Ken. Unlike Ken, Oppenheimer is VERY smart, driven, ambitious, and very much enabled by patriarchy. His personal ego is a constant reference point throughout the film; he isn't even hired yet by General Groves before he sits him down and starts explaining how the entire US military apparatus has been going about the Manhattan Project all wrong. Which is certainly A Tactic.
Indeed, the fact that all his genuis and professional reputation ends up devoted to the creation of the ultimate WOMD makes it all the more fascinating that the film's opening sequence- a whirlwind tour of young Oppenheimer's education and encounters with prominent physicists in Europe- follows the vein of a Theory of Everything/Beautiful Mind biopic. This even though- whatever important research he may have done as a student- Oppenheimer's legacy does not reside in any particular atomic theory or technical breakthrough or crucial scientific discovery he himself pioneered. His legacy is the bomb, but even there, his achievement was not the literal bomb itself, but rather his overhead management and coordination of the vast, logistical and bureaucratic maze that allowed its construction to happen. It almost feels like a bait-and-switch. The atomic bomb is very much not the sort of „purely good scientific discovery“ that this kind of scientist-centered biopic tends to focus on.
Oppenheimer succeeds in nearly everything- for a time- and attains status, fame, prestige, and certainly some authority. And he knows it, too; in another scene, he quite directly claims to be a 20th-century prophet. However, like Ken, whenever he IS in a position of power and authority, part of him seems to lose itself in the process. A seemingly endless stream of contradictions appear in his words and actions. Early on, we experience Oppenheimer as not just a precocious scientist, but also a philosophical and intellectual idealist. One line of his- „We embrace the revolution in physics, why can't we embrace it everywhere else“- is about as perfect a screenwriting distillation of character motivation as it gets. But time and again, those ideals get tossed to the side, previous associations broken off or offered as sacrificial lambs to shady government bureaucrats, once they become an impediment to his rise. His spontaneous decision to just lie to Pash (a scene that positivels crackles with malicious energy) is a case in point. As is his decision- seemingly on the spot- to just abandon a union drive that he had every right to pursue and had pulled loads of his students into.
His deepest ambivalence, and even guilt bordering on masochism, is towards the primary product of the authority and status he gains; the bomb. In one scene, he says that humanity will HAVE to use it, because otherwise they will never truly fear it. Later comes his insistence is that „the scientists“ (him included) have simply made the bomb, and carry no weight over when and how it will be used, a sort of „washing of the hands.“ Then he's literally in the room as its usage is being decided and he later claims to have „blood on his hands“ as a result, even though he likely never had enough actual clout to stop the bombing even if he wanted to. Which of these reactions are genuine? Which are ones he's offering as justification to others, or even to himself?
He defends himself anew from at least some associative guilt during the crucial securty clearance hearing in the later part of the timeline, where he is challenged over his opposition to the H-bomb program and gets defensive about the reservations many had about the bomb's usage. Yet, when we go further back and see the moments where he was offered chances to object- signing or presenting petitions, going to the media, working government contacts, etc.- he hesitates. He tries, haltingly, in the room with both the Secretary of War and President Truman himself, to present a case for a more conservative, globalist approach than the purely nationalistic arms races that ended up happening. But even then, where he's literally in the room where it happens, he seems unable (or unwilling) to argue what HE thinks, to say „Mr. President, I believe this course is best because...“ It's always „Some scientists feel,“ „some in the community argue,“ „there are those,“ and so on.
Like Ken, he's the dog that somehow caught a car and then didn't know what should come next. He hides it better, of course, and in doing so is able to retain something of that mythical air he wanted; he's confronted several times with questions about what he, Robert Oppenheimer, personally believes, and he always manages to never really answer the question. He always seemed to want to be The Man of Hour, which he literally is for a time. But the panopticon of horrors opened up on the way there leave him with doubt, despair, uncertainty, the feeling that perhaps he doesn't really belong, never did, and never will, and maybe he really did guarantee the world will end in flame.
Now, on the exact opposite end of the spectrum, there's Lewis Strauss, portrayed with phenomal charisma by Robert Downey Jr. His performance is every bit the work of art that Murphy's is, and it WILL net him the Supporting Actor Oscar. This iteration of Strauss is just as ambitious and egotistical and driven as his counterpart. But while Oppenheimer starts to blink once he finds himself standing in the light, Strauss knows exactly where he wants to go and refuses to contemplate anything getting in his way. Yes, he makes that speech about how real power is in the shadows, but he's fooling nobody; he wants the sun every bit as much as Oppenheimer does.
Strauss has known struggles Oppenheimer never encountered- we have no reason to doubt that his humble beginnings and lack of formal education have made it a fight for him to ascend the halls of power- and that gives him a lot more bite. He, too, is driven by fear and doubt, but it is of an entirely different nature to Oppenheimer's. Strauss NEVER doubts that he deserves to make it, that he BELONGS in the upper echelons of power (A CABINET POST!). What he fears is everyone around him not accepting that, of conspiring to deny him what is rightfully his. So he connives, he schemes, he lies, he very adamently insists on the (debatably) less-Jewish pronunciation of his last name. And he seemingly never doubts that Oppenheimer and his „cult“ are out to get him.
This paranoid conviction is turned back on him at the very end, in one of my favorite moments in the film. An early scene where Albert Einstein, after speaking with Oppenheimer, seems to ignore Strauss is revealed to have become something of a slow-burning obsession within his mind. For Strauss, it's a catalyst for believing that Oppenheimer turned the whole scientific community against him, thus denying him the Cabinet post (A CABINET POST!).
And then, right before his aide opens the door to the reporters waiting outside, he suddenly drops the line that, maybe, they hadn't talked about him at all. Maybe, in his words, they were focused on something „more important.“ He then opens the door and the flashes of cameras instantly fill the screen. There is then a cut to Strauss' face and he clearly flinches, just for a moment.
Now, the most immediate (and, possible, more correct) interpretation of this is that Strauss is reacting to the flashes of light. But maybe- just maybe- he's flinching at a much deeper cut, at being confronted so directly with the notion that Lewis Strauss just might not be that important to occupy the minds of the Oppenheimers and Einsteins of the world. It's a testament to the power of Downey's acting and to the quality of the film around him that I can find such fascinating interpretations of a single shot, yet where it's still open enough that I can't be too sure.
Both Oppenheimer and Strauss are shaped by the world of pre-WWII geopolitics and the milieu of scientific discovery they grew up in. They are both attracted to the power, both implicit and practical, that comes with associating with the most terrible weapons humanity has ever created. And though this particular movie would NEVER have said it openly, their lives are very much defined and shaped by patriarchy, by the forms of masculinity that defined what it meant to be a man of consequence- and that time, it was ONLY men allowed- in mid-20th century America. They are under the same shadow that plagues Ken, and come to....well, not equally destructive ends. Let's be fair here. But the trajectory is the same.
Perhaps, in the end, Oppenheimer is making the case that it never really mattered what Oppenheimer, Strauss, or any other individual thought about the course of the war and the development of atomic weapons. There is a visceral power to the first two acts of Oppenheimer, leading up to and including the Trinity Test, which very much can be said to be one of the most consequential moments in world history. The combination of the editing, Göransson's dynamic score, and the pathos in the performances makes the blood pump, offering a sense of physical propulsion as centuries of scientific discovery in various fields all rapidly converge on a single point of creation that opens up an entirely new world. It is understandable that so many, including characters in the film, lament the development of the bomb as a horrific cheapening of pure discovery (not to mention the real-world harm inflicted on people both in Japan and living near Los Alamos). Yet it may very well have been inevitable. Oppenheimer was- perhaps- merely a pawn of greater forces, the last figure needed to put the right pieces together.
And these forces roll onward. Nuclear war is still a threat, yes, but when I contemplate that final image of a fire rolling across the Earth, I begin to think on climate change, and the continued refusal of humanity (as of this writing) to finally commit to a sane course of action, to turn away from catastrophe.
And all the while, the Oppenheimers find themselves trapped in horrors of their own design, and the Kens find themselves disempowered and trapped in unrealities, but with neither able to quite grasp what brought them there. And even more disconcerting, there is no guarantee they can find their way out, find a place that is healthier for them and for the world they inhabit. Though, if we're being honest, Ken might actually have a decent shot. Oppenheimer, I'm not so sure.
It's because of such deep subtleties and expansive possible interpretations that can be read into both films that has been watching and re-watching them such enriching experiences. I thought Barbenheimer would be fun, but not this challenging, this enriching, this enlightening. It's for moments like these that I stick around and keep on going to the movies.
-Noah Franc
