Perhaps what they don’t warn you about with regard to “the Barbenheimer experience” is just how jarring it actually is. Certainly, that’s the entire “point” of pairing these two films together, the reason the internet has gone apeshit: because they’re so “divergent.” In fact, the phenomenon has proven to be such an excitement to people that they’ve gone “through the archives” to find similar instances of unlikely movie pairings released the same week. Such examples include Jumanji and Heat, The Matrix and 10 Things I Hate About You and The Dark Knight and Mamma Mia! It’s really only the latter example (complete with also featuring a Christopher Nolan movie) that comes vaguely close to capturing the sort of genre/color palette dichotomy that Barbie and Oppenheimer do. But, on a deeper level than that, watching Oppenheimer the same day or week serves as an even more blatant method for underscoring the horrifying patriarchal system that Barbie does.
In Oppenheimer’s case, of course, it’s unintentional. Because never was patriarchy in America at its strongest and most accepted than in the mid-twentieth century. Nor could Nolan have planned for a movie about garden-variety male toxicity to have coincided so seamlessly with an actual moviegoing trend/phenomenon. The pairing of these two films fundamentally speaking to how patriarchy destroys lives in far more literal ways than figurative ones. While Barbie (Margot Robbie) at least gets to experience life as it should be under matriarchy in Barbie Land, maybe it’s almost worse to know what that sense of peace and freedom is like only to be forced to enter Real World territory, where males rule with an iron/button-pushing (a bomb allusion) fist.
Upon seeing how things are done in Real World, Ken (Ryan Gosling) decides he can no longer be subjected to the “tyranny” of matriarchal dominance. Of being unable to force a Barbie to do anything he wants them to (i.e., return his affection), least of all the specific one he’s pining over. Because, in Barbie Land, men a.k.a. Kens are just background. In J. Robert Oppenheimer’s (Cillian Murphy) world, it’s women who are very much peripheral, serving only as vague sexual impressions. Yet there’s never any issue with making a woman “his.” Except his on-again, off-again paramour, Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh). Unfortunately for Oppenheimer, she’s the type of “Berkeley free spirit” who can never seem to be pinned down. Oppenheimer’s eventual wife, Katherine (Emily Blunt), on the other hand, is only too eager to take a fourth husband in “Oppi.”
And yet, for as important as these women are in Oppenheimer’s life (not to mention being the only sign of women anywhere within this filmic landscape), they’re really just cursory and occasional “presences” that only interrupt the “real” work he’s doing. The truly “significant” aspect of his life. Which becomes helping male politicians destroy the world in the name of war. With Oppenheimer himself growing (like a mushroom cloud) so consumed and titillated by the resources (financial or otherwise) the government provides him with in the name of scientific research, he loses sight of the monster he’s actually creating. Perhaps as Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlaman) once did as well. Not knowing that the woman she unleashed onto the world—the one quite literally made to show girls that they could be anything—only served to further highlight all the things they would never be, both body-wise and career-wise. Therefore, Handler ended up actually accenting a more palpable and depressing divide between reality and what should be…as opposed to conjuring a beacon of hope and feminism in Barbie. And yes, it bears noting that, despite all her evolutions, Mattel has never seen fit to release a “Body Positivity” Barbie. Maybe because they know just how hollow that would come across at this juncture. Though false intentions never stopped a capitalist from trying to make a fast buck. In short, to capitalize.
Obviously, Handler and Oppenheimer are by no means comparable for what they created—though each one did offer up, in some sense, a kind of Frankenstein. Gerwig appears to know that only too well by making Handler a prominent character in Barbie. A conceit that might seem a bit out of left field to some, but is actually entirely appropriate considering she was the brainchild behind Mattel’s best-selling and most iconic toy. And it’s cruelly ironic that Handler’s “ghost” should be left to haunt the seventeenth floor of corporate headquarters while the suits with no insight into women benefit from her invention. For yes, she was eventually forced to resign from Mattel in 1974 after the taxman cracked down on her for false financial reporting (something Gerwig refers to with a joke that Ruth herself makes in the movie).
Difficulty getting along with the government appears to be a common characteristic in those who simply want to create. For Oppenheimer, too, was viewed with malice and contempt by the very political machine that was dependent upon him for developing an atomic weapon. One that turned out, in the end, to be rather needless as Japan would have surely surrendered without it. But such is the nature of patriarchy, with every man “in charge” needing to prove that his power is authoritative and incontrovertible by swinging his dick around while lives hang in the balance.
Oppenheimer makes that disgustingly clear when Henry L. Stimson (James Remar), the Secretary of War at the time, decides they shouldn’t bomb Kyoto because he and his wife honeymooned there and it’s a “lovely” place that has cultural value not just to him, but the Japanese. In other words, fuck those arbitrary shitholes, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To see a scene like this play out is indicative of just how damaging patriarchy is, for it is a system run by a gender that thrives on violence, ego and heartless decision-making. A gender that proves, ultimately, gender is no illusion; for this particular one feeds on destruction, whereas the female one is founded metaphorically and literally on creation. The great yin and yang endeavors of each type of being.
So yes, more than merely a means to appreciate the contrasting cinematography styles of Hoyte van Hoytema and Rodrigo Prieto, the Barbenheimer experience does feel somehow essential. Like it shouldn’t get reduced to being categorized as “frivolous pandering to internet tastemaking,” but rather, seen as a brutal and unique way to watch how patriarchy upends male and female lives alike on a daily basis. All because someone wanted to prove he has clout and “intelligence.” Though the dumbest thing of all is to assume that one has any significance whatsoever in the grand scheme.
Especially a grand scheme that might now invariably include going “kabluey” because a man wanted to show off the prowess of his mind knowing full well that said result would be used for evil. Indeed, quoting from a Hindu scripture, Oppenheimer would say of his creation, “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.” In some sense, Barbie destroyed worlds as well. Bringing “fire” to the “cavewomen” who were still stuck playing with (read: playing at mothering) baby dolls throughout their childhood. Accordingly, this is the very scene Greta Gerwig rightly chooses to commence Barbie with. And would that playing with/learning to emulate a “slutty” doll was the most affronting and harmful thing a man (/man-boy) ever did.
