Thoughts on Barbenheimer - by Larry Lee

                                              [Larry Lee is a periodic guest contributor to Notes on Film.] 

This summer has been quite a ride for Greta Gerwig, Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, and the rest of the creative people behind the phenomenon that is Barbie.  Oh sure, Gerwig made the wonderful Ladybird in 2019 and the creditable and enjoyable Little Women remake in 2019.  But those admirable past successes could not possibly have prepared her, mentally and emotionally, for the unbelievable success of Barbie, which has zoomed past $1 billion dollars in sales (yes, billion with a “B”) in a little more than two weeks in general release.  (The movie was released on July 23, 2023.)   

Previously runaway successes were packed with thrills (Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Avatar), combined romance with thrills (Titanic), or had built-in audiences from popular books (Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter) or comic books (Spider-Man, Superman, Batman, Iron Man, The Avengers, etc.).  None were comedies.  Barbie has now, in two short weeks, doubled the gross receipts of the highest grossing comedies of all time (which readers would be unlikely to guess were 2011’s The Hangover Part II ($586 million), 2012’s Ted ($556 million), and 2004’s Meet the Fockers ($516 million).)  (These numbers do not account for inflation.)  Where the ledger sheet of the Barbie juggernaut will eventually end up after several months in release is anyone’s guess.  What should we make of this?

One clue is the number of women and girls attending showings of the movie, many in various degrees of
cos-play.  (All that pink!)  Such gender-skewed crowds suggest there is an untapped audience out there for stories that are relevant to that demographic.  It is not a coincidence that Barbie was made by a woman and that the movie is about being a woman in today’s society.  (I expect Gloria’s monologue on that subject in the movie, by the wonderful America Ferrara, will go down in movie history, as much as Citizen Kane’s “Rosebud,” Casablanca’s “Of all the gin joints…,” The Godfather’s “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse,” and When Harry Met Sally’s “I’ll have what she’s having.)  Barbie’s unanticipated runaway success shows that Hollywood’s recent emphasis on encouraging more female directors is a wise choice.

Another clue is the conniption fit that those on the far right are having about the movie.  Witness Congressman Matt Gaetz’s wife, Ginger, complaining about Ken’s “disappointing low T” (i.e., low testosterone).  That’s because the movie is not just about being a woman in today’s society, but about men’s proper role in it as well, at least from the perspective of an enlightened woman.  This is the not-so-hidden “wokeness” of the movie that gets under the skin of the far right.  The satire, indeed the ridiculousness, about Ken’s Mojo Dojo Casa House cuts the legs out from so many testosterone-infused movies, from Rambo (all of them) to Rocky (all of them) to The Fast and the Furious (all of them) and the Transformer movies (all of them).  Like white people who never realized they were benefiting from white privilege until it was questioned, poking vicious fun at Ken’s sudden awakening to the idea of patriarchy -a delicious kind of reverse wokeness - is seen as threatening to those who would like to preserve the patriarchal elements of our society and keep traditional gender roles as the only choices available to people.  So yeah, of course right wingers hate the movie.  That Barbie is nonetheless so popular gives me a little hope for the future of our country and the world.

Further inflaming the right is the presence in the film of Black Barbies, an Asian Ken, a Barbie in a wheelchair, even a trans Barbie.  This nod to DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) is a not-so-subtle jab to those on the political right, like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who are eliminating DEI programs on the asserted grounds that such programs are “divisive.”  But I don’t think the multitudes of moviegoers attending screenings of Barbie are at all put off by seeing an Asian Ken (Simu Liu) or Barbie in a wheelchair.  But I read that some young women, confined by circumstance to wheelchairs, have been moved to tears seeing their life represented on the screen, even in something as seemingly inconsequential as a movie about a doll.  So yeah, there’s something for everyone in the movie.

Barbie also builds on last year’s surprising success of Everything, Everywhere All at Once, in that we have a crazy movie where the plot moves quickly and fluidly between worlds, shifts tones suddenly (witness the musical dance number in Barbie’s first act), is visually chaotic (note the sudden transition to 2-D when Ken encounters an ocean wave that is not in 3-D) with sudden flashbacks.  So the lesson to be learned is that this style of moviemaking appeals to today’s audiences (at least today’s young audiences), and these types of female-centric stories are popular.  

The lesson NOT to be learned from Barbie’s success is that audiences want more movies based on the toys of yesteryear.  Sadly, Tinseltown is not that smart.  In development are upcoming movies about Hot Wheels (helmed by J.J. Abrams), Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em Robots (starring Vin Diesel), and — I kid you not — Chatty Cathy and Betsy Wetsy dolls.  So I guess Ms. Gerwig bears some responsibility for that as well; as Uncle Ben tells Peter Parker (i.e., Spider-Man): “With great power comes great responsibility.”  And please, God, do not let them make a sequel.  (Barbie II: The Revenge of Ken?)

Oppenheimer has also been quite successful, but not as wildly so.  It was shrewd marketing to pair Oppenheimer with Barbie (hence, “Barbenheimer”), especially as they were released on the same day, even though the movies could not be more different.  I’m not so willing to buy into the publicity tying these movies together, with the unspoken suggestion of some kind of competition, or the idea that one movie is for women and girls and one is for men and boys.  Both genders can, of course, enjoy both movies, and the box office receipts suggest that is happening, at least to some extent.  The more compelling through line is that Oppenheimer, a movie starring Cillian Murphy, about Robert Oppenheimer, physics, and the development of the atomic bomb, has outgrossed two other anticipated summer blockbusters that came with the advantage of built-in audiences, earned from previous iterations, and starring Hollywood royalty:  Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part One (with Tom Cruise), and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (with Harrison Ford).  Oppenheimer’s success suggests, ever so subtlety, that movie audiences may be tiring of predictable sequels and unimaginative plots.  (I mean, in both Dial of Destiny and Dead Reckoning, older guys go skittering around the world trying to recover both parts of a secret key or device that, when snicked together, will somehow allow the possessor to destroy the world.  Talk about Hitchcock’s MacGuffin!)

By being a biopic, Oppenheimer manages to avoid these plot clichés.  After all, Robert Oppenheimer’s encounters with Einstein and Tesla, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the subsequent revocation of Oppenheimer’s security clearance, are matters of record.  But this fascinating cinematic biography of an important, even towering, American historical figure, flawed genius though he was, is coupled with director Christopher Nolan’s gorgeous visuals and soundscape, rendering the film an almost instant classic, one that will continue to be seen for years to come.  For film buffs, his decision to film on 70 mm film stock was apparently a good one:  almost three weeks after its release, nearly all screenings in San Francisco in 70 mm are still selling out. 

One could quibble (as some have done in the media) that Oppenheimer gives a less than full and well-
rounded portrayal of the women in his story, or doesn’t do justice to the devastation in Japan caused by the bombs, or to the long-term effects of radiation to the people in New Mexico.  Okay.  But the movie is not entitled “The Story of the Atomic Bomb in All Its Aspects.”  It’s about a guy named Robert Oppenheimer and what he did in his life.  In any event, I would argue that Oppenheimer gives Emily Blunt (as wife Kitty) and Florence Pugh (as mistress Jean Tatlock) plenty to do.  Indeed, Kitty’s hearing testimony near the end of the movie was devastating, and some of the finest acting in Blunt’s career.  

A caveat:  It was hard in some (but certainly not all) scenes to discern clearly what people were saying, especially in the crowd scenes.  This was probably due to Nolan’s admitted penchant for eschewing re-recording voices for clarity during post-production, preferring to use the sound as recorded live during the filming of the scene.  Such cinematic purity might be viewed alternatively as admirable or maddening (I’m somewhere in the middle) but if you have compromised hearing or hated the naturalistic sound techniques employed by director Robert Altman in some of his films (Gosford Park comes to mind), you may wish to wait until you can screen Oppenheimer at home with closed captioning turned on.  But I recommend you try and see the movie in the theater, on the big screen, as it was meant to be seen.  Even in the scenes in which I did not catch every word, I got the gist of it.  Seeing (and hearing) the atomic bomb explode for the first time in human history on a home screen is just not the same.