She was chic, sophisticated, unnerving. I loved her, in an unrequited fashion. The blush-tinted scarf that came with her sultry black chanteuse outfit was the only hint of Barbie’s future, which, from the 70s, would be remorselessly pink.
I played with her and that fuzzy-scalped afterthought, Ken, into my teens, by which time we had J. Robert Oppenheimer’s handiwork to worry about. The Cuban missile crisis, air raid warning sirens … People down the road built a bomb shelter. Then, Barbenheimer meant walking to my friend’s house in North Vancouver to play Barbies with my sweater up over my nose in case of fallout.
The movies: pink vs grey, like Mum’s 50s kitchen. Both are cautionary tales about what can happen when you eat forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge. F*** around, as we say now, and find out. Oppenheimer does his science because he can and unleashes the potential for humankind to cancel itself. Even Barbie suffers an existential crisis. Life in plastic isn’t that fantastic. She frets about death, leaves Barbieland for the real world and lets slip the dogs of patriarchy: our Kendom comes. You could see a parable about how easily women’s rights can be lost in there, taken by a bunch of idiots like the Kens. Unfortunately for the film’s diverse but girly sisterhood, Ryan Gosling’s Ken steals the show.
When it comes to that warzone, gender, the film is a dizzy ride in a pink Barbie Corvette. The movie is ever desperate to undercut its merch-pushing origins. To doll-averse teen Sasha, Barbie is a “bimbo” who makes girls feel bad about themselves. As Pinocchio wants to be a real boy, Barbie wants to be a real woman. In a fairy tale, that probably wouldn’t involve a trip to – spoiler alert – her gynaecologist.
Meanwhile, Oppenheimer lets the genie out of the bottle. He inhabits a wartime world of politics, paranoia, and rivalry. He was Jewish. He helped get family and scientists out of Germany. The idea that Nazis could beat America to the bomb supplied urgency. The movie doesn’t satisfactorily deal with the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Did Oppenheimer have post-war remorse? He warns against the even more destructive hydrogen bomb. There’s a scene in which he tells President Truman, “I feel I have blood on my hands.” Truman informs him it’s presidents, not scientists, with the power over such things. As he leaves, he overhears Truman call him a “crybaby”.
The Barbenheimer phenomenon: you have to appreciate the wit behind the hilarious and strangely potent memes: “I am become Barbie, the destroyer of worlds.”
And Oppenheimer is a reminder – as is Barbie, in its ridiculous way – that there are no guarantees that what the terrible gift of human inventiveness produces can be corralled or safely consigned to history. We’re watching Oppenheimer to the backdrop of a war that again threatens nuclear destruction. And to such headlines as, “Five ways AI might destroy the world.”
In Oppenheimer there’s an exchange between scientists. Oppenheimer: “When I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world.” Einstein: “I remember it well. What of it?” Oppenheimer: “I believe we did.”
