I Am Become Plastic, Destroyer of Worlds: Reflections on Barbenheimer

“In Barbie’s vision of the future, the threat is women breaking out of their boxes to Be Anything™, with or without a partner. In Oppenheimer’s, the threat is total annihilation– a yawning Pandora’s box that could easily destroy us all, whether or not we asked to be a part of the machine in the first place.”

The Mother of Barbie pitted against the Father of the Atomic Bomb. Last week, like many of us, I was excited to see both Barbie and Oppenheimer in cinemas. Much has already been said on the preferred order to enjoy this unlikely double feature, but speaking personally, there was nothing in the world– not even an atomic bomb– that was going to stop me dressing up as my ‘Feeling Fun Jeans’ doll from 1989 and breaking out of my own box to watch Barbie on opening weekend. That said, I am sure I would have had just as much fun running my marathon in the opposite direction. On the surface, the two films couldn’t be more different. But, in a way, they are actually great bedfellows, each shining a white hot/hot pink light on the themes, strengths, and shortcomings of the other.

First, I really enjoyed both– albeit, for completely different reasons. There’s not much that I could add to the collective post mortem of either film that hasn’t already been said by other fans and critics. But I do want to unpack the relationship between the two films. Since their shared release date was revealed, the ‘Barbenheimer’ discourse we’ve seen unfolding in the long run-up to opening weekend has been a bit of a joke at Barbie’s expense. But as the box office dollars stack up in Barbieland, perhaps Barbenheimer serves as a cautionary tale as to why we shouldn’t rush to celebrate the cinematic merits of a “serious” male-directed film, while writing a seemingly pink and fluffy romp off as juvenile.

So, Oppenheimer. While I would have liked to see a little more of the science and/or philosophy of the story explored in 180 minutes, the way its performances, score, style, and script work together to retell one of the twentieth century’s most significant events is undeniably good. But for all it meditates on the morality of what took place in Los Alamos, I’m not convinced it has the right to. As far as I’ve seen, dissecting the long-lasting impact of the decisions made by men is best left to our favourite 11.5-inch fashion doll. She has had her share of controversy for sure, but who hasn’t?


Girls and their toys

Barbie has always blurred the boundaries between fashion, art, current events, and women’s lived experiences. In some cases she even predicted the future. She had a Dream House before women could legally own their own property. Mattel sent her into space before NASA sent Sally Ride. Then, the launch of Christie in 1968 helped validate the dreams and aspirations of young black girls against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement. Barbie has had every job you can think of, from fashion model, to pilot, paleontologist, and, as immortalised in Gerwig’s film, even President. By design, nothing is out of reach for Barbie; having named her for her daughter Barbara, creator Ruth Handler has explicitly said that Barbie and Ken never get married (even if they cosplay as a bride and groom from time to time). Barbie can be a wife and mother if she wants, but she can be any number of other things. Her fate is with the child, or indeed grown-up, like America Ferrera’s Gloria, playing with her. Much has been made of Barbie’s unrealistic proportions over the years, almost all of it by adults. It turns out that this was for practical reasons, i.e. ensuring the standard material her clothes are made of actually fit her. But even if it wasn’t, the argument doesn’t necessarily line up with the reality.  Like many girls, I never saw Barbie as an avatar, with unrealistic beauty standards I had to hold myself to. I was in control of her destiny; never the other way around. Can the same be said of Oppenheimer?

When it comes to toys, girls have the trappings of domesticity; boys have the trappings of violence. Girls have dolls; boys have bombs. As both films demonstrate, either directly or indirectly, the impact of that conditioning from a young age has an impact on us all. And yet, unlike adult men who hang onto their comics and action figues who are lauded as serious hobbyists, women who retain their nostalgic affinity to Barbie are crammed in the box of “Not a Serious Person”. And perhaps most interestingly of all, nowhere are women more doll-like than in Oppenheimer.

“It’s literally impossible to be a woman” - Barbie

As has already been noted elsewhere, Oppenheimer flunks the Bechdel test spectacularly. The absence of female voices in the film is as deafening as the blast. Not only do the female characters in Oppenheimer not have their thoughts or feelings about this most serious of subjects interrogated in any authentic way, they are barely present at all– proving the Barbie movie’s entire point. In Oppenheimer, Florence Pugh’s Jean Tatlock’s very sad ending is left largely unexplained, with the audience left to assume she loved him so much, she couldn’t go on without him. In The Real World, women aren’t erased simply because they no longer serve men’s stories. Ken may also be two-dimensional, but there he is. When he decides to blow up the utopia of Barbieland, there isn’t a whole lot Barbie can do about it– until she and the other Barbies mobilise to stop him.

I think it says a lot that the themes present in the Barbie movie have seen so much backlash and white hot rage from an audience who it was ostensibly not created for. For many viewers (admittedly this one included), Barbenheimer has become not a battle of two films, but a battle of the sexes– with some taking Barbie’s success particularly personally. One of the biggest criticisms levelled at Barbie is that its male characters are treated poorly. While this misses the film’s most obvious and compelling points, the treatment of female characters in Oppenheimer says so much more. 

The message of this rage is writ large: many are worried about the threat of feminism reaching young minds much earlier than it has in the past. Much worse if those same ideas are absorbed by men, or women who may have been sleeping on them until now.

This is particularly ironic and concerning when you consider the stakes. In Barbie’s vision of the future, the threat is women stepping into their own power, the power enjoyed by their counterparts throughout all of history, and breaking out of their boxes to Be Anything™, with or without a partner. In Oppenheimer’s, the threat is total annihilation– a yawning Pandora’s box that could easily destroy us all, whether or not we asked to be a part of the machine in the first place.

To Barbie’s critics, perhaps the real threat is that women now have awareness and agency when it comes to their choices, or at least growing access to the black and white rooms where those choices are made for us all. Through the lens of the other, we see the poignancy of each film unravel in profound, horrifying detail in a way that demands thoughts, words, and actions.

“They won’t fear it until they understand it.” - Oppenheimer

In these films, for better or worse, we see the nightmare of traditional masculinity and femininity play out to their natural conclusions. Where Barbie has pop stars, humour, and revelry in the totems of girlhood and childishness, Oppenheimer has beautifully rich and sharp 65mm, a stunning score, and some career-defining performances. But it would be short-sighted to disregard one in favour of the other when it comes to deciding which is the more quote-unquote “serious” film. Strip away the monologues and striking set pieces and you have two undeniably true and powerful stories: one about the male impulse for destruction, and the other about the invention of the atomic bomb.

Disregarding the opposing feminine impulse towards peace and beauty as silly or shallow is, in my opinion, the most frivolous act of all. Seeing so many women, many of whom I wouldn’t have hoped or expected to get as much from the film, respond with such passion to Greta Gerwig’s brand of hot pink feminism through the gaze of our first and most accessible adult female friend is, to me, a win. 

It’s true that, to the more jaded among us, the Barbie movie isn’t saying anything new. But it can’t be argued that it is saying it in a new way. Would I have loved it to lean even harder into its ideas? Absolutely. But that wouldn’t have been right for this film. Taking the dogma of the bimbocore movement of recent years to a bigger, more mainstream audience is a glittery act of radical defiance. It is political. It matters, no matter how it is packaged up.