Barbenheimer & the Escape from Cant

Reviews | Adrift on a sea of takes.

A few weeks ago, I asked subscribers what you’d like me to write for subscribers, and a representative sampling of you said “short reviews sound nice.” So let’s see how that goes! I’m going to start us off with a couple quick 500-word reviews of the cinema event(s) of the summer. Let me know what you think of the format in the comments.

Unlike Worthy Reads, this review will unlock for free-listers in three months, in late December. (I want to make it six, but Substack won’t let me.)

On August 19th, nearly a full month after they came out, I became perhaps the last living American to do The Full Barbenheimer.

It was an accident. A friend of mine had really wanted to see Oppenheimer for over a year, so we got the gang together. When it let out, my friend had to go home and go to bed, my other friend hadn’t been able to make it at all, my wife had already put my kids down and gone to bed, and I noticed a 9:50 Barbie showing. I had nothing to do and nobody to do it with, I was already way out in Woodbury, and tickets there are dirt cheap, so what the heck? I turned around and bought a ticket to Barbie.

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I went into Oppenheimer expecting a movie about The Bomb. I think that was a reasonable expectation. Every year, on August 6th, Overly Online American Catholics celebrate the bombing of Hiroshima by getting into bitter, violent arguments about whether Harry Truman was a hero or is currently burning in Hellfire for dropping The Bomb. This year, Overly Online American Catholics¹ started the annual celebrations in the middle of July instead, and it took me a couple of days to figure out why!

However, Oppenheimer is not about The Bomb. It is barely interested in The Bomb. It only cares about The Bomb insofar as it directly affected J. Robert Oppenheimer. (You can tell because, instead of a third act about Hiroshima, the third act is about the internal workings of the U.S. security bureaucracy.) Nor does the movie care about the morality of dropping The Bomb, whether The Bomb was actually necessary to secure Japanese surrender, or what the consequences of The Bomb were (especially once Russia got hold of it)—except insofar as all these things directly shaped J. Robert Oppenheimer. Everything in the movie is there for Oppenheimer alone. It lured you in with visions of mushroom clouds, but it earnestly just wants to tell a story about a man and his choices.

Oppenheimer commits the common biopic sin of trying to pack in wayyyy too many Important Facts about the subject without regard for the overall narrative (what happened to that baby from Act I? why were we even introduced to him?!). More biopics should learn from the example of Lincoln, which communicated everything essential in Abraham Lincoln’s character by focusing on a tiny handful of episodes from a single three-month period near the end of his life, adapting basically just the last chapter of the book on which it was based.²

Oppenheimer also has that irritating “prequel” tic. You know the one. There’s a moment where they all go camping and have a great time, and Oppenheimer has a little soliloquy about wanting to combine physics and New Mexico, and somebody asks, “Say, where are we, anyway?” A dramatic pause before Oppenheimer answers: “Welcome to… Los Alamos!” It’s like the bit in Solo: A Star Wars Story where we find out how Han got his surname. We didn’t need it. It’s just there to make the audience feel smug for recognizing something the characters don’t. Erin Horáková’s gamified continuity crosses into the real world.

Yet, looking past these common sins, Oppenheimer is still a remarkably effective biography. Director Christopher Nolan leans into his usual non-linear storytelling to destabilize his subject. The movie presents you with information about J. Robert Oppenheimer, knowing that you will form an opinion about him, only to return to the same scene five, ten, a hundred minutes later and add one crucial piece of information that it left out the first time, which changes your opinion entirely. At times, this is too cute by half (especially in the finale, when this technique is turned against cartoonish villain Lewis Strauss), but, mostly, it forces you to keep an open mind about Oppenheimer.

A typical biopic (even a great biopic, like Lincoln) wants you to understand the man in terms of the principles he stood for, or at least his virtues. Oppenheimer goes well out of its way to establish its subject as a man without clear or consistent principles, and with few obvious virtues. Nolan’s Oppenheimer is not the embodiment of some higher principle. He is torn in many directions and chooses sometimes one way, sometimes another. He is full of contradictions and mixed motives. His choices are mysterious, even though they dominate the movie.

In short, Nolan’s Oppenheimer is human. In a cinema and a culture that no longer really knows what to do with human freedom, this was refreshing.

All the same, the movie has a few slyly-inserted opinions about its subject. In what seems like the most eye-rolling prequel tic in the movie, Oppenheimer is having sex with a beautiful woman when she suddenly stops, stands up, grabs a book off the shelf, remarks that it’s unusual for a physics professor to read Sanskrit, and flips open to a random page. She makes him read it out loud while she resumes riding him. Of course, Sanskrit, Oppenheimer, do the math… of course what he reads aloud is “Now I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds,” because apparently the movie thought we needed an origin story for Oppenheimer’s most famous quote. Sigh.

However, there’s a lot of ways to read that quote. What did Oppenheimer feel as he stared into the nuclear furnace and “I am become Death” passed through his mind? Was he horrified? Proud? Somberly resigned to his duty as an American scientist in wartime?³ Was he overcome by awe, or was “I am become Death” a mere emotionless statement of fact?

Nolan pulls a neat trick to give us an answer. When the Bomb goes off, and we get a close-up of Oppenheimer’s face, you expect Oppenheimer to mutter the line to himself, quietly… or perhaps to think it to himself, with Nolan somehow letting us hear his thoughts. Instead, Nolan plays the clip from the sex scene again. It’s very audibly the same clip—we clearly hear the pages turning and his ragged breath as she rides him—and this is, of course, deliberate. As he stares into the searing heart of Earth’s first nuclear fire, Nolan tells us that Oppenheimer isn’t considering his moral duties or mourning the death of the old world. He recognizes himself as a bringer of mass destruction and he is getting off on it.

Which, given everything the movie has told us about Oppenheimer to this point, makes sense. He may think about it later. He may have real pangs later. But, in the moment of nuclear consummation, Nolan sees Oppenheimer as filled with the raw, animal exhilaration of conquest.

Nolan expresses another sly opinion in the lengthy third act, in which pencilnecked bureaucrat Lewis Strauss is presented as Judas and Caiaphas wrapped up into one, the villain who handed Oppenheimer over to be crucified.

It is an old writer’s trick to never put your opinions in the mouths of your heroes. Your audience will detect it instantly, interpret it as preachiness, and write you off. Instead, the clever writer puts all his opinions in the mouths of his villains. Then, when the hero vanquishes the villain, the hero acknowledges that the villain had a point (even if he took it too far).

It is in this light that I read Strauss’s final unhinged monologue / rant:

Oppenheimer wanted to own the atomic bomb. He wanted to be the man who moved the earth.

He talks about putting the nuclear genie back in the bottle—well, I’m here to tell you that I know J. Robert Oppenheimer and if he could do it all over he’d do it all the same. He’s never once said he regrets Hiroshima—he’d do it all over because it made him the most important man who ever lived!

But he wanted all the glory and none of the responsibility. So he needed absolution. He needed to be a martyr. To suffer, and take on the sins of the world on his shoulders. To say, “No, we cannot continue on this road,” even as he knew we’d have to! He knew he’d have to be seen to suffer for what he did. It was all part of his plan. He wanted the glorious insincere guilt of the self-important to wear like a fucking crown.

Strauss took it too far, but he did have a point! (On the evidence presented, I wouldn’t have renewed Oppenheimer’s Q clearance, either!)

This is almost enough to justify the entire Strauss subplot (which likely added an hour to the three-hour runtime). I sincerely love dramatizations of administrative hearings, so I was never bored, but there’s lots of ground to cover in Oppenheimer’s later life. Returning to Strauss feels like surplusage, especially when that baby from Act I (who presumably had some impact on his father’s life) remains conspicuously absent and Oppenheimer’s marriage has become incomprehensible.

That said, I’m always uneasy condemning Nolan’s structures. His movies are so self-consciously confusing that you’re never quite sure: is this a work of staggering genius so far above your head that you’ve identified a masterstroke as a mistake, and everyone will laugh at you for it? Will the third act of Oppenheimer someday be considered as necessary as The Scouring of the Shire?

…Or is it a glass onion, designed with a thousand twists and turns to keep the audience from noticing the places where it doesn’t actually make sense?

My two inner voices arguing with themselves after every Christopher Nolan movie. The girl one usually wins. Usually.

Interestingly, this meme serves as a concise review of the movie from which it originates, but that’s a different movie review (that I should maybe write sometime?).

You may have noticed that my review of Oppenheimer has imitated the movie’s structure: free-ranging, constantly subverting itself, and about half an hour too long.⁴

Still and all, at its heart, Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan’s attempt to valorize a man, not for his principles, but for his very human lack of them. Nolan’s Oppenheimer is free from judgment, free from cant, free from peer pressure (especially in his refusal to join the Communist Party), free from ideology of every kind… for better and, as Nolan honestly shows, for worse. Hollywood today (and America’s “chattering class” in general, me included) is ruled by ideological cant more pervasive and rigid than at any time since… well, since Oppenheimer got caught up in the Red Scare. I got the sense that Nolan admired Oppenheimer’s freedom from ideology, and that he envied it.

So, surely, must Greta Gerwig, director of Barbie.

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Though broadly popular with the (ideologically Left) film critics’ industry, and even more popular with the (ideologically neutral or incoherent) mass audience that keeps coming back, Barbie went off like a bomb in conservative thinkpiece circles. The National Review hated it, but, by contrast, their rivals at the National Review loved it. Meanwhile, the conservative National Review enjoyed it with some reservations, whereas the right-wing National Review considered it a heartfelt but misguided failure. Additional contrasting takes were offered by the National Review, the National Review, the National Review, and— perhaps surprisingly—the National Review.

That’s just one magazine! You ran out of free articles before you opened half those links!

In short: conservatives, though alert to the machinations of ideological Hollywood, could not reach anything like a consensus on what message Barbie was trying to communicate, much less whether it succeeded.

Barbie is certainly steeped in ideology from its first frame. An opening homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey replaces the Alien Monolith with a giant Barbie, who, by her sheer alien power, convinces the primitive natives (a generation of young girls) to smash the skulls of their baby dolls against the earth until they shatter. This represents how Barbie showed girls that women could be anything they wanted, not boring old moms. I am pretty sure it is supposed to be funny. Maybe, in another context, it could be.

This culture, however, fears mothers and children more than anything in the world. It treats drugs that ravage the reproductive system like life-saving medicines. It shatters infant skulls by the hundreds of thousands for the convenience of adults terrified of unchosen responsibilities. It uses the two-income trap to tie women to desks and checkout counters where they can’t easily balance jobs with motherhood—then offers them sizable amounts of money to stop you from giving birth. (It’s a lot cheaper for the company to pay to kill your baby than to pay for your maternity leave!)

In this culture, then, the first frames of Barbie come across as a celebration of hatred toward both mothers and children. Good joke-telling always entails risk, and I don’t begrudge the filmmakers taking that risk, but, usually, a bad joke just falls flat. This one filled me with horror and anxiety about the dark days in which we live. In a light comedy, that’s considered a party foul.

Fortunately, director Greta Gerwig and writer Noah Baumbach demonstrate in short order that they didn’t mean it.

The first twenty minutes follows up on that horrifying opener by depicting the world of “Barbieland,” where a community of Barbies hit the beach, dance it up, and congratulate one another on how they fixed everything for women forever. Our protagonist, Barbie, considers this a paradise. However, as we watch, the movie carefully shows us the truth: Barbieland is a horrifying dystopia and the movie knows it. Their empty, materialist lives revolve around drinking pretend milk, charging into plastic waves, and generally doing the same thing, rigidly, every day, without growth or purpose.⁵ They demand total conformity (“FLAT FEET?!”) and any word, deed, or thought that might unearth a deeper level of their shallow, miserable lives is suppressed by ruthless peer censorship (e.g., the crowd’s reaction to Barbie asking “Do you guys ever think about death?”). The figurative and physical sterility of Barbieland is accented by their ostracism of Midge, Barbie’s pregnant friend and the only representative of motherhood in their entire world. Meanwhile, the Stepford Wives who rule Barbieland condemn their distaff counterparts, the Kens, to hellish existences of emotional and physical deprivation:

This wasn’t in the movie, but is strongly implied by the movie.

Barbieland is bad! That isn’t subtext! I’m not doing some weird Jonathan Last subversive revision of the movie!

Sure, Barbie herself doesn’t recognize the waking nightmare in which she lives, because she has lived there all her life. She doesn’t know any better. The movie expects better of us, though! Just as the movie expects us to recognize that Barbieland’s founding myth (“Barbie can be anything, so women can do anything [subtext: except motherhood]!”) is nonsense on stilts, the movie expects us to recognize that Barbieland as it exists at the start of the movie is a horrible place to live. These early scenes depict Barbie slowly waking from the idiot fog in which she lives and coming to realize (reluctantly) that there’s more to life than Beach—similar to the way her confrères will have to be awoken from a different idiot fog later on.

We’re twenty minutes in, and the Barbie movie has already presented a full-fledged ideology (“Feminism means escape from motherhood into career and material prospoerity!”), then sloughed it off like dead snakeskin (“Feminism is a soul-sucking hellscape!”).

In another moment, America Ferrara’s jerk kid Sasha will expose the falsehood of Barbie’s feminism in words even Barbie can hear:

You’ve been making women feel bad about themselves since you were invented. You represent everything wrong with our culture. Sexualized capitalism, unrealistic physical ideals… You set the feminist movement back fifty years. You destroy girls’ innate sense of worth and you are killing the planet with your glorification of rampant consumerism… you fascist!

This, too, seems correct, especially as we cut to the all-male Mattel boardroom and Ken’s discovery of “patriarchy”…

…until about ten minutes after that, when we meet Sasha’s mother and discover how important Barbie was to her relationship with her child. We learn that the disruption in Barbieland is happening precisely because that relationship has gone sour.

We’ve now come full circle: first, Barbie was cast as a pro-woman destroyer of motherhood. Then, Barbie was cast as an anti-woman tool of patriarchy. Then, Barbie was cast as the glue of mother-daughter tenderness.

The tell, for me was when Barbie, weeping on a curb after Sasha’s tongue-flaying, sobs:

She thinks I’m a—-(sniffle) a fascist? (sob) But I don’t control the railways or the flow of commerce! (sob sob)

This was the moment when it first started to occur to me that maybe Gerwig and Blombach don’t actually give a hoot about the Deeper Meaning of Barbie.

Nolan constantly subverted his own Oppenheimer, presenting him in one light and then very quickly in another, contrary light until all we could see was the man himself—the contradictory, mysterious mass of impulses guided by an opaque freedom. Barbie plays a similar trick with The Discourse about Barbie.

The Barbie movie will eventually take us through every forty-year-old Hot Take about What Barbie Means. It will loudly announce and then quietly subvert each of them in their turn. I will not try and trace each one through the movie.⁶ Once you recognize the pattern, you’ll see it yourself, and, besides, Substack just flashed the “email getting too long” warning.

At the end, after every ideological hot take cancels out every other competitor, we are left with no ideology at all. The last ideas standing are:

1. Barbie is sick of having people hang ideological hot takes around her neck: “I want to do the imagining! I don’t want to be the idea!”

2. Barbie is an act of love from mother to daughter: “I named you after my daughter, Barbara, and I always hoped for you, liked I hoped for her,” followed by a montage of mothers and babies while the song “What I Was Made For” plays.

Here is my Hot Take on Barbie. It might be wrong, because it is a statement about the filmmakers, not the film itself:

I think Gerwig and Blombach wanted to make a funny little movie for moms about how great it is to play Barbie with your kids. However, they were aware of the deadly intersection between decades of toxic, contradictory Discourse about Barbie and the intense, ideological filters (and mob enforcement mechanisms) Hollywood has put in place to ensure that nothing against the Discourse gets through to audiences. By themselves, these forces make it hard to make good art. Together, they should have made it impossible.

So Gerwig and Blombach set about building a movie that systematically defuses every mine in the Barbie minefield. They gave every woke ideologue something to crow about, then carefully (but subtly) exposed the weaknesses in each school of thought, before juxtaposing a contrary school of thought. Then, they added jokes everywhere, undermining everyone and everything. (The most ideological audience members noticed.) Finally, they snuck in the movie they actually wanted to make: Barbies are fun and it’s great to play Barbie with your kids. (Also, they really wanted to play “Closer to Fine,” and, reader, who can argue with that?)

It is always dangerous to study the artist rather than the art, but there is some limited evidence for my theory. Of course, Gerwig and Blombach could never actually admit to it.

Conservatives, for their part, have long trained to detect ideology when Hollywood tries to hide it. They were naturally confounded by a movie that tried to do the opposite: hurl so many obvious ideologies at the radar that a quiet non-ideological core could get smuggled in underneath all the overripe creeds. I think the Critical Drinker, for example, didn’t misstate any facts, but he failed to notice so many of the tells—or even misinterpreted them as errors—that he completely misunderstood both the filmmakers’ true aims and (more importantly) what their movie actually says. Few conservatives missed the mark quite as badly as the Drinker, but most still tried to locate an ideological center to Barbie. This doomed them. Barbie marinates in ideology from its first frame, but has none of its own.

What it has instead is horses.

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What I see in Barbenheimer, then, is two filmmakers who are desperate to escape from cant. This is understandable. Perhaps at no time in its history has Hollywood been as full of sanctimonious jargon and narrow imagination as it is today. Indeed, this goes well beyond ideology; the modern factory-produced Marvel movie owes at least as much to Save the Cat as #MeToo. This review has hardly delved into matters of narrative structure.

The ways Barbie and Oppenheimer chose to engage today’s suffocating atmosphere were very different, and left very different tastes in the mouth, but fundamentally demonstrated (to me, at least) an awareness of, and a frustration with, the current climate. Whether that frustration builds up to anything else, only God can say.

I can say, though, that this frustration gave us two pretty good movies… and a Mojo Dojo Casa House!

Which one did I like better, you ask? I’m only answering you because it’s behind the paywall, but, if you held a gun to my head, I’d say Barbie. I laughed a lot. I enjoy laughing.

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…ha ha, the free-listers think they only missed a quick 500-word review, not this 4,000 word epic! In the meantime, friends, tell me in the comments what you think of both Barbenheimer and this format. Seriously, though, it will be shorter next time!

1. Of all the groups I know that are Too Online — journalists, law professors, audio fiction writers, basketball fans, political junkies, and Trekkies — Catholics are without a doubt the most miserable, in-fightingest bag of scorpions of them all. January 6 apologists are happier warriors. I don’t know why this is.

Perhaps it’s because at least the J6’ers know whose side they’re on. Catholics keep insisting that they all belong to the same Church and worship the same God, when they very obviously don’t do anything of the sort, and feel constantly betrayed by one another as a result. On the other hand, law professors, who should have the same problem, are the most amiable and generous group of all.

(Second-worst are the audio fiction writers, but that’s just because the space is so far Left that performative outrage and assumed victimhood are the coin of the realm. The Catholics are still worse by a mile.)

2. Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin. It’s an excellent book about the Lincoln Administration and its incredible cast of characters at an impossible moment in American history. I loved the movie, but I still loved the book even more.

3. This is how the real-life Oppenheimer explained himself, which does make sense in the larger context of the story: in the Bhagavad Gita, Vishnu reveals his true form to Arjuna (delivering the famous line after his transformation) in order to persuade Arjuna to do his duty as a warrior, leaving the consequences (for good and ill) to the gods alone.

4. Yeah, that was… uh… intentional. I didn’t accidentally write 2k words when I set out to write five hundred.

5. Also, justices of the Barbie Supreme Court are visibly morons, unanimously applauding when Activist Lawyer Barbie announces that Citizens United was wrongly decided and that attempts to preserve core political speech from government regulation are actually an attempt to impose plutocracy. (She doesn’t use quite those words.)

However, this may have been a legal error by the filmmakers, not a deliberate attempt to communicate to the audience what a disaster Barbieland is. Many people, surprisingly, continue to think that Citizens United was wrongly decided.

6. …though I especially enjoyed the part where the Barbies won a crucial election by engaging in an organized, conscious campaign of mass voter suppression targeted directly at a protected class.