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Luther Lazaro
Like millions of other people, I dedicated part of my weekend to Barbenheimer. It was a joy and a privilege to plan a day around a double feature, which I arranged the way I would heartily recommend to others: first Oppenheimer, then a 60-90 minute break for a meal, then Barbie. The theaters were packed; the costumes were plentiful; the popcorn at our local indie cinema was so good and refills were one dollar.
If Oppenheimer asks: Why and how do men seek dominion over one another? What can the (male) mind imagine? Why does (male) genius corrode? Then the answer of Barbie is: Great questions. But what if we asked some different ones?
Well, this has taken my Barbie interest from lukewarm to must-see! For some reason, the vibes I'm getting from this description remind me of my and my female friends' fervent positive reactions to Mad Max: Fury Road, with its juxtaposition between men destroying the world and women daring to reimagine it.
The best part of seeing Barbenheimer this weekend? The audience of young boys who were DEFINITELY there to see Barbie. I overhead comments from a pack of 11-12 year old boys including, "I want to buy a Barbie now!" (seemingly sincere?) And another one looking at me, a 6'0" blonde and saying, "Barbie!?"
Having also seen both films and very much enjoying both, the joy surrounding Barbie and the strength of its message is something unforgettable. I doubt I'll have such a wonderful moviegoing experience for quite some time.
It was movie-going at its finest, and I feel zero desire to rank one film above the other. Going to the movies is awesome, and I\u2019ve missed it horribly, and it saddens me that this weekend isn\u2019t a sign of innovative Hollywood moves to come, but the beginning of a seemingly interminable dry streak.
Oppenheimer is a Classic Christopher Nolan film. There\u2019s the twisty quasi-noir plot; a tortured and beguiling male protagonist; an obsession with brunettes; periodic (and arguably superfluous) surrealist elements; and a total disinterest in the interior life of women. That description might make it sound like I didn\u2019t like the film \u2014 I did, and I especially liked Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer. But the film, like all of Nolan\u2019s work, is ultimately most interested in the masculine world: a world of great darkness, deception, and cruelty. Men ruin men, and men make the world worse for everyone: themselves, of course, but also the suffering women who populate its fringes.
Unlike other masculinist directors \u2014 absolutely Zach Snyder, sometimes David Fincher, absolutely Quentin Tarantino, most of Clint Eastwood \u2014 Nolan does not dislike women. There is no vaguely Freudian impulse to punish them, either as actors or as characters. They are not the cause of men\u2019s suffering; men do that to themselves. No one would argue that Nolan\u2019s films are feminist, but those do place the blame for a broken world squarely on men.
Oppenheimer fails the Bechdel Test (does a woman talk to another woman onscreen about something other than men) because the dominant history of The Manhattan Project, particularly as collected in Oppenheimer\u2019s source material (American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer) fails the Bechdel Test. And this isn\u2019t (just) the history of the Manhattan Project, it\u2019s the history of Oppenheimer \u2014 who, at least as characterized here, was utterly uninterested in the conversations of women with anyone other than him.
There\u2019s one woman scientist in the film, but there were dozens of women involved in the creation of the bomb \u2014 a history expertly collected in Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project. These women not only contributed to the science that made the bomb possible, but also to the dissent and protest that becomes a key cause of Oppenheimer\u2019s own torture. They were just excluded from the larger power games that tear the men of this film asunder. They were not Prometheuses (Promethei?) They were not the main character in men\u2019s telling of the broken and still-breaking world, and thus: they are not in a Nolan film.
Which is another way of saying that patriarchy begets patriarchal art. Men\u2019s self-regard (and concern) is the narrative gravity; the idea that other audiences would also be interested in such a narrative goes unquestioned.1
There\u2019s a logic that\u2019s long guided Hollywood, at least since the beginning of the blockbuster era: Teens will watch things intended for them but will shy from things aimed squarely at adults. Adults will watch things aimed at them, but will also watch things aimed at (older) teens. Men will watch things made for them, but will shy from things made \u201Cfor\u201D women. Women will watch films made for them and will also readily watch things made for men. So if you want to make the biggest hit possible, you aim for something that will hit all four quadrants: a film aimed squarely at an audience of 16-18 year old boys.
If you look at the summer movie schedule, you can see that logic in action. The top-grossing films for each week, starting in May = Super Mario Bros., Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Fast X, The Little Mermaid, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, The Flash, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Insidious: The Red Door, and Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part 1. Apart from the fact that all of these films are built on existing IP, they\u2019re also all \u2014 with one pointed exception \u2014 built for boys.
Boys are taught at a young age that movies will bend to their interests and center their perspectives. If they don\u2019t, they don\u2019t have to watch them. I already see this in the exclamations of my friends\u2019 kids when it comes time to decide on a movie: \u201Cthat\u2019s a girl movie\u201D is enough to shut down any suggestion.
Girls, by contrast, are conditioned to identify and empathize with the perspective of men \u2014 and observe worlds in which they are perpetually secondary. Up until the early 2000s, there was a robust offering for films that refused that perspective (the so-called \u201Cwomen\u2019s film\u201D or weepie, the screwball, the rom-com) but the reorganization of Hollywood under the God of IP has all but killed the middle-budget women-centered film.
BUT WHAT ABOUT STREAMING, you might say, THERE WE CAN FIND CONTENT NOT SOLELY INTENDED FOR WHITE STRAIGHT MEN. It\u2019s true, I love it over there. But the cinema \u2014 the public, familial sphere of entertainment \u2014 remains dominated by that same tired understanding of whose perspective must always be privileged. Audiences blame Hollywood, Hollywood blames audiences, but the problem with always taking the least risk (as a studio, as a movie-goer) is that you\u2019ll keep reverting to the norm, and that norm will continue to degrade. See: Indiana Jones 5.2
So what is Barbie? It\u2019s a film with swagger like a male-oriented blockbuster. It assumes everyone, everyone, wants to see it. The marketing campaign makes that explicit in a topical sense (\u201CIf you hate Barbie, this movie is for you. If you love Barbie, this movie is for you\u201D) but it\u2019s also in the casting, the humor, the roll-out, all of it. Some of that swagger stems from its IP, which lends it the immediate recognition studios have taught us to demand to get us into an actual theater.
But it\u2019s more. Barbie understands itself as the main event. Not of the week, but of the summer. It has, as the kids say, REAL MAIN CHARACTER ENERGY. Which makes sense: the Barbies aren\u2019t just the main characters of this film, but of the whole world. They live in a matriarchy where the levers of power are controlled by women. Men are superfluous, unskilled, and primarily eye candy; the very idea that they would have an inner life is a punchline in and of itself. And if that sounds mean or heartless, imagine how it feels when it\u2019s only slightly more sublimated in all the films where men\u2019s perspective rules.
That\u2019s the joke, of course \u2014 and the punching heart of the film. Barbie doesn\u2019t argue that the world should look like Barbie\u2019s world so much as dare you to find offense in it, to just try and make the argument that a judicial branch with a token man is somehow offensive. It\u2019s smart and winking about the relationship between us and the products that become overdetermined with meaning, value, and play; it pokes at the absurdities of masculinity with the sort of familiarity of someone who\u2019s actually known a lot of men, not just known about the idea of men.
There\u2019s a real skill in making a character like Ryan Gosling\u2019s Ken so aggressively one-dimensional. (How much of this has to do with Greta Gerwig co-writing the script with Noah Baumbach? Unclear, but I imagine it contributes to the feeling that men get that patriarchy is ridiculous). And there\u2019s a real skill, too, in allowing Margot Robbie\u2019s Barbie to wake up to the realities of the world in way that doesn\u2019t feel hackneyed, but sympathetic \u2014 like the first time I realized that adults telling you you could be anything did not mean you could be anything, or when I really and truly understood, looking at that row of presidents on the wall, who was actually allowed to be president. Realizing how our world works is heart-breaking. Funny, sure, but heartbreaking. Barbie gets that.
I think Oppenheimer does too. It\u2019s an incredible piece of cinema. But there\u2019s a reason Barbie is busting all projections, why the enthusiasm for it feels contagious, why people can hold a valid feminist critique alongside the doll\u2019s truly complicated place in feminist history and their enjoyment of the film. Barbie as film, Barbie as posture, Barbie as movie-going experience \u2014 it\u2019s such a challenge to the masculinist vision of the world. Not a utopian one, not one free of the chains of consumerism or other forms of intersecting privilege, but a rejection of the de facto centering of the white male experience, both as subject matter and as audience member.
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