My take on Barbienheimer

By: Javier Ramos

The author and his friends after watching his preferred movie in this conflict (can you guess which one it is)?

The month of July 2023 was a significant month for cinema. Two movies reached our theaters, centering the entire Internet discourse around the question: Which movie was the biggest hit? “Barbie”—a fantasy about a sentient doll that faces a journey to become human (not Pinocchio), or “Oppenheimer”—a historical war drama centered around a Jewish physicist and his social ineptitude (broadly speaking). There was conflict between people deciding which movie was better, at least on social media and among content creators, and there was the discussion of conflict within the actual themes of the two movies.

On the one hand, there is the movie “Barbie”, directed by Greta Gerwig. Beyond the pink fence and a cheesy whimsical façade, we have a social commentary on gender equality and the difficulties in achieving this goal. Watching the movie, I felt the argument for gender equality being dumbed down enough for me to fully understand it, and also being able to explain this issue to others. I can now explain how this is a men’s world where most of the media content created is targeted directly to men. We could see as an example the vast amount of superhero movies and how the heroines in them adopt a masculine personality. With this clear goal in mind, Gerwig gives us her own weird, funny and thoughtful reflection on what it means to be human; and more specifically, what it means to be a woman in this world built by men and for men.

On the other hand, we have “Oppenheimer”, directed by Christopher Nolan. We don’t appear to get a clear view into the Oppenheimer character, and we don’t even get a view or opinion from Nolan. So my interpretation of the main theme of the movie would be the moral dilemma behind personal success in science when the result is creating a devastating weapon. The movie follows how the physicist Oppenheimer works on developing the nuclear bomb, his romantic conquests, and his trials for treason against the United States government, even if none of these tangents are explored fully in the movie. For example, the religion of our main character is briefly mentioned as a cause of his behavior, but soon into the movie this fact is forgotten.

As a movie fanatic and film major, I can see why these two movies boomed in social media discourse and among moviegoers. Both had great publicity. Both were promoted almost as if together. They are two big projects that could not be any more different. There were posters, billboards, and a lot of content creators expecting both movies to sell a lot of tickets months before their releases. Billions of dollars prove that the movie producers and companies achieved success, but beyond that it’s all about personal taste. Regarding the theme of this month’s edition, “conflict”, we want to look into how the two movies address this concept. There’s no way to quantify how much a movie can solve, but one of these two movies will be remembered more than the other one for what it managed to touch on.

There’s no denying that “Barbie” presents an accurate and compelling image of misogyny and patriarchy, especially for men or other people who might not have much exposure to feminist theory or personal experience of oppressive patriarchal structures. When a male character, Ken, gets out of a woman-run world to enter our real world, he only learns and adopts the most negative traits of being an “empowered” man. Empowered only by masculinity and the irrational “hero complex”, he goes back to a woman-run world and disrupts it with real-world ideas. The destruction of a utopian world seems to me like a direct image for everyone to take home and think about how this fantasy accurately portrays one of our society's bigger problems. We live in a world that still segregates based on race, gender, religion and even age. A movie like “Barbie'' expresses this heavy topic in a fun, digestible way, which aids in including a broader audience.

“Oppenheimer”, in contrast, puts aside the rhetoric of following the journey of a hero to just present us with a historical personality in a direct way. Oppenheimer, incapable of putting his personal quest for knowledge aside, creates the most dangerous weapon in our modern world. The movie does not appeal to the general audience, quickly rushing the story with little explanation, as if everyone read a book on the topic before going to the movies. It tries to go for the typical “Oscar buzz” that makes our visits to the movie theater way longer than desired, giving us three hours of a great cast delivering lines that do not move the story forward. There’s many nude scenes that go minutes long without adding much to the story or the character's development. The “conflict” presented, and the importance of approaching it with critical thinking goes out of the window when the only point of view expressed is from one side of this war conflict. The movie feels more like a reminder of this war crime than a discussion of how technology and science can get out of hand in the wrong hands. In my opinion, the movie falls short in having a clear and loud message for the moviegoers by not having a clear agenda from the very beginning. It was interesting to me, since I knew nothing about the nuclear bomb or the events explored by the movie, but it lacked any essence or a clear purpose for me to invest my feelings in it.

I believe the film industry dictates the way a lot of people think, because through movies you are inherently sharing an opinion, perspective, or certain narrative. Most of the time feelings precede thought, and therefore every message charged with any type of feeling will have a lot more power than someone simply stating their viewpoint. For that reason, I believe that the Barbie movie will be remembered longer, as it has brought about much discussion on an important topic. Conflict might have a negative connotation, but the understanding of it can help us explain it to our future generations in a way that it foments real change and understanding. This is why I think the thesis in “Barbie” makes it a success. Through watching it, I saw the topic of gender equality expressed in a different way. Watching “Oppenheimer”, on the other hand, was more of a testing of my patience and attention span.