The Barbenheimer Double Feature

image c/o movie maker magazine

By Andrew Martinez Cabrera
Entertainment Editor

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*SPOILERS FOR BOTH*

Barbie
 
Barbie harkens back to a time when major Hollywood cinema had color and flair; a vibrancy that radiated through the screen. Greta Gerwig, known for her intimate and naturally stylized (in terms of look and feel) films, goes bombastic in her embrace of walking-and-talking idealistic dolls.

Like The Lego Movie before it, Gerwig and company deal with the meta as a way to critique and demonstrate a love for Barbie. Barbie tells women everywhere that they can be whatever they want to be, while also upholding unrealistic beauty standards. The dolls of Barbieland live in a bubble where they believe that injustice is no more, so when Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) goes to the real world and learns how “ugly” our world is, she is reasonably upset. Her anchor of hope is America Ferrara’s character and her daughter, the stand-ins of what realistic womanhood and sacrifice represent. As much as it is a film about a toy, Gerwig attaches the emotional core to the duo. 

However, and perhaps because of its obligation to the IP of Barbie, having these characters serve only as the springboard for Barbie’s dilemma, this real-life mother-and-daughter duo falls short. America Ferrara’s big speech towards the end of the film, which unites the Barbies to pursue a coup d'etat against the now-patriarchy-obsessed Kens, could have packed more emotional weight within the context of the narrative if more time was spent seeing these characters operate outside of Barbie’s storyline. Rather than being fully developed, they are conveniences for the plot, which is a shame considering the film’s emphasis on motherhood. I believe another half-hour or so would have remedied this, showing their relationship grow from strained to fully healed, rather than their situation shown via montage. 

Ultimately, Barbie is another genuine and heartfelt statement from Greta Gerwig’s filmography that trades the lived-in ambiance of her previous works for something that is epic-in-scale, hilarious, and richly textured in its visual look. The fear that her artistic voice could be lost dealing with an existing brand as large as Barbie was quenched when Gerwig proved that her voice could be just as impactful on such a grand scope. 


Oppenheimer

Prior to its release, I would not have thought of Christopher Nolan as a mature enough artist to tackle the paradoxical figure that is J. Robert Oppenheimer. My fear was that complexity would be traded for spectacle. So I was pleasantly surprised when instead of adulation on Nolan’s part, I got damnation. 

Oppenheimer is split up into two distinct timelines: “Fission” and “Fusion.” The former, shot in black-and-white, deals with Oppenheimer’s security hearing in the 1950s. The latter, shot in color, deals with Oppenheimer from his teaching days at Berkeley, all the way to his involvement with the Manhattan Project and after.

Despite working within the biographical genre, Nolan actively works against it. Documentarian Werner Herzog in his Minnesota Declaration about truth and fact in documentary cinema wrote, “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication[,] imagination and stylization.” Nolan does not subscribe to the cinéma vérité (truth cinema) notion when telling Oppenheimer’s story but rather distorts the narrative with Oppenheimer’s biased perspective. Oppenheimer builds himself up as a tortured genius forced to open Pandora’s box, as a means to end the rise of fascism in Europe. The black-and-white sections of Oppenheimer then contradict what Oppenheimer is supposedly saying and feeling. The artist, whose career is to manipulate, shares the same tendencies as its central protagonist; a mirror image. 

Oppenheimer is a paradox as complex as splitting the atom: self-pitying and constantly seeking validation; the father of the atomic bomb who helped end the war and the linchpin of our self-destruction. Nolan’s greatest strength is having Oppenheimer’s subjectivity hijack the lens from which the film is captured. Whereas the film’s diegesis treats Oppenheimer's greatest victory as the success of Trinity and his greatest defeat not as the consequences of dropping the bomb, but rather as losing his security clearance, which plays like a courtroom drama (tightly edited by the amazing Jennifer Lame, who makes three hours go by like nothing), Nolan comes back around to remind the audience that Oppenheimer, like Prometheus, gave fire to man, and is to be condemned for eternity. Rather than building up a titan of the science world, Nolan portrays the perils of ego and our collective suffering as a result of it. 

Barbenheimer

Barbenheimer’s success can be linked to the diversity of both films in a market saturated with sequels and reboots. Two of our greatest modern filmmakers made movies that were the antithesis of one another, inviting audiences to involve themselves in two totally different worlds. My hope with Barbenheimer is that Hollywood realizes that rather than chasing a trend, a wide selection of films should be offered to a wider range of audience members, rather than satisfying only a pocket of moviegoers. Cinema can be  anything, and Barbenheimer was this summer’s reminder. 




Sources:
Warner Bros. Pictures, Mattel: Barbie
Universal Pictures, Syncopy: Oppenheimer
https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/herzogs-minnesota-declaration-defining-ecstatic-truth