Seven Things You Should Have Learned From The Barbenheimer Phenomenon
A good time for film lovers
I’m back. My wife and I just moved to Houston. I became a school teacher and began applying to law school. A fun time. A tough time. But onward to the writing. Thanks for sticking around.
Please share if you find something interesting, whether you agree or not. It helps me to get up and continue the work, if I can call it that. See you in the comments.
I know I’m late, but the movie event of the year thus far has been the double release of one-word titles named for their central characters, Barbie and Oppenheimer. The duality of the cultural moment has been palpable, the bright pink tones of the life-size playhouses against the darkness of mortal terror in the race to nuclear armament. The movies swung for big themes; Capitalism and Feminism and War and Science’s Role In The Revolution. And they were largely successful in telling us something, if those that have ears hear.
But the lessons are more than the various cultural and political commentators have tried to illuminate. In fact, their reactions are some of the best teachers for the rest of us, part of the cultural moment in general. Their hot takes, bad takes, and wrong takes have helped form the corpus of criticism during the last several months.
The things I have gleaned from the whole Barbenheimer saga is partially an attempt to add to and change that corpus while trying to recognize that there are still cultural artefacts we can learn from, even ones about bombs and dolls.
Thanks for reading.
1. Conservatives are bad at culture.
I don’t mean that they aren’t politically relevant; I think conservative resistance to mainstream media has garnered much power and influence. But in terms of creating impactful art, music, films, etc., they simply are not very good.
By consequence, they are not very good at talking about the cultural moments of the last century. In fact, they can’t even see when the Left accidentally, as has been happening for a long time, puts out a piece of honest, good, and largely conservative art. This is what good art does. It defies the artist and takes on a life of its own, bringing forth the beautiful and the true in perfect matrimony. The muse lives.
Which brings me to my hottest take. I will work with Oppenheimer next, but forgive me for using the atomic metaphor of missile engagement. Prepare for deployment and detonation.
I did not think Barbie was good. I thought it was excellent.
Yes, yes, I know. This may be the end of my Substack. I am not being at all facetious when I write that it is the movie of the year thus far. It is one of the most clever screenplays I have ever seen.
I wanted, like the center-libertarian-conservative intellectual that I consider myself to be, to hate it. But alas, I started to have fun. Then I transcended fun into amazement, and amazement into moral fulfillment at the messaging, subliminal though it may be. If you hate it, or think it’s what’s wrong with America, that’s ok. We can still get along.
So when conservatives trashed it for being bad, I was disheartened. It is one thing to say that you disagree with its message, or that you are tired of being lectured to (at). But to say it was bad was to ignore the incredible performance by Ryan Gosling, who was utterly committed. The fever dream aspect of it. The script, which was full of quips and references and new moments and turns. The fun of it.
Conservatives have become so focused on messaging, that they have forgotten how to have fun. Maybe this is why they have lost influence in every major cultural institution extant in American life today. And because they are have a predisposition to dislike Hollywood’s offerings, they miss when the prevailing culture-creators deliver a conservative and moral message, even by accident. They abdicate their responsibility to use the tools in front of them.
Like when a movie about a doll masquerades as a feminist parable, but ends up being an ode to femininity and legitimate motherhood. But I get ahead of myself.
2. The Left is bad at staying on message.
All I heard was how bad the movie was, how it was feminist propaganda. And in the opening scene when little girls smash their baby dolls against a desolate backdrop of clay and cliffs, I thought, here it is, the militant feminist propaganda.
But I should have seen it from the beginning. The way in which the dashing of babies’ heads against the rocks, the biblical image of divine vengeance, is the opening image.
The messaging did not end there. There are two ways to read the onslaught of liberal messaging, including America Vergara’s speech that has become the best argument against my own.
This is really a message about depth. The surface of Barbie is a feminist trope. There are speeches attesting to the impossibility of womanhood. There is the Kens’ exploration of patriarchy. And the aforementioned baby-smashing. So you could read it as a shallow and repetitive wave of imaging.
But upon further examination, all of the surface imagery bows to a more reasoned, dare I say traditional, image of gender identity and the concept’s relationship to society.
Again, I don’t think Gerwig and Co. intended this, necessarily. By all accounts the machine behind Barbie (and it is a machine, see some of the later points) comes from the recesses of the left. And yet, a truer message shines through every major left-wing talking point.
Consider the now famed speech from America Vergara. She goes on and on about the impossibilities of womanhood. And yet, she finds her solace and ultimate fulfillment not in her career at the Mattel offices, but in her relationship with her daughter, and in imparting visions of motherhood to Barbie by proxy. Womanhood, then, is only impossible insofar as it correlates to the fleeting concept of patriarchy and the role of women in the workplace. Womanhood is sufficient, even inherently fulfilling, when it is developed in concert with motherhood. These are not my words, boiling women down to their capacity to procreate. I am not talking about birthing, I am taking about mothering. This is the essence of the film. The climax of the film is Barbie experiencing a montage of images of mothers interacting with their daughters.
Barbie’s realization of her own womanhood is synonymous with her realization of motherhood. This culminates in what acts a cold close scene where Barbie goes to the gynecologist, implying that her first act of womanhood is to asses her physical body, a direct contravention of the prevailing idea of the gender debate.
If motherhood is the essence of womanhood, then the body matters. The baby doll dashing scene is a false prophecy, and Barbie precedes a regression away from the biblical judgement. The baby dolls are recovered, taken up again through Barbie’s idealism.
This is true of Oppenheimer too. It is meant to tell us of the implacability of Science and her men. Of how, when trusted with the important moral questions of our day, they find an equal and opposite equivalence in scientific advancement.
Oppenheimer is persecuted for his communist affiliations, and his scientific achievements placed on the backburner of history. And yet, the message is lost again.
Oppenheimer is not a good man, at least as portrayed in the film. A genius, and a leader, but morally corrupt. His scientific achievements notwithstanding, his detractors have a point. We now see what the world looks like when the Marxist world powers attain nuclear capability. The message is lost in the truth of our current moment. I am not sure if the leftist institution of Hollywood is incapable of getting their message right, or if they are unaware that their offering often end up having a deeper message, but these movies turned out to be traditional, even conservative. Barbie, becomes a kind of anti-woke satirical masterpiece, and Oppenheimer an ode to the American marriage of science and moral philosophy. Call me crazy.
3. Good art still exists, by God.
The fact that a movie about the development of the nuclear bomb, with a star-studded cast, a gargantuan budget, and a bevy of historical material to work with places all its stock on the buildup to and subsequent retreat from a single explosion scene is an incredible risk. If it pays off, and it did, then the result is true art.
If Barbie was fun, then Oppenheimer was a story. Really, it was two stories, the personal life of the man and the scientific achievement, if it could be called that, that changed the world. The story is not an imitation of life, it is a window into the artistic nature of what life can be, and it draws you in to who the men were and were made into by their moment.
This is what art is meant to be. It is meant to tell stories about life, or a version of life that keeps us invested in learning and being present. All the tropes about art are true in the moment of explosion in Oppenheimer, that it imitates life, comforts the afflicted, afflicts the comfortable, etc.
But more than that, it made you want to see the next moment, and allowed you to learn something, think something at the same time. If art is good for this, then these films are that. Color me impressed.
4. Parents are the only acceptable party for educating and protecting against cultural indoctrination.
A bit of a sideswipe here. While I think the conservative outrage against Barbie is mistaken based on misinterpretation, I do understand the cautions against children seeing the movie. It isn’t a kids movie. And the promotion machine behind the movie took no labors to make that known. They sold the tickets anyway. It is vulgar at times, and strange, and requires a depth of understanding both in the moral and narrative space, and the onus is on parents to determine if their kids are equipped for that.
But the answer is not just restriction. It is equipping the next generation to grapple with the narrative in a way that illuminates truth. Is Oppenheimer just a story about the Bomb and its adulterous, narcissistic creator? Or is it a story about the image of God that allows the sinful person the capacity to create things, to let there be light? Is Barbie feminist propaganda, or a public grappling with what womanhood means and how it relates to a world of men who have abdicated their own responsibilities?
If it is up to parents to monitor what their kids intake on the cultural front, it is also up to them to equip their children to grapple with real questions. The grappling is how we move forward.
5. You must either treat injustice with deadly seriousness, or with complete mockery.
Oppenheimer is a deadly serious film. It treats the war and the Bomb with seriousness, and does not back down from the moral question of it. And it treats the injustice of the McCarthy era and the resulting show trials of Oppenheimer and some of his cohorts with the same seriousness. The stakes are high and the viewer feels it.
One of the best parts of Barbie is that it does the opposite. It is funny to see Mattel’s logo plastered all over the films landscape while Will Ferrell takes swipe after swipe at the stereotypical male corporate executive working for Mattel by name. This is not to say that capitalism is inherently unjust, but that Mattel and other companies like it have certainly engaged in some spurious marketing tactics throughout the years, changing the expectations on the female body in our culture. It is almost touching to see the company make fun of itself for that. Almost… until you realize how much money they made by doing so.
My favorite moment of this kind is when the young female character Barbie seeks in the real world calls her a fascist, and Barbie, in all her perfect blonde femininity, begins to weep. She points out the absurdity of the insult, through tears, citing that she doesn’t “control the railways or systems of commerce.” The injustice of such an insult, leveled at many in the current political debate, can only be treated with this kind of mockery, or with an absolute sense of rejection. Half measures will not do.
6. America rules.
There may not be two more American figures than Barbie and Oppenheimer. One, the emblem of the capitalist impulse to commoditize the body, and to commoditize capitalism itself. The other, the scientist who stood against political tyranny while participating in its militaristic prowess.
The two are immortalized in another American staple, the silver screen. When you add in the fact that both movies do a fair amount of poking fun and asking questions of American systems, you realize that they are distinctly American pieces of art.
And it’s awesome.
7. Truth finds its way to the light.
Jesus utters interesting words as he cries out to God from the cross, as he looks down on his tormentors, the whole world of crucifiers. “Forgive them Father, they know not what they do.” In context, he intercedes for them to God, because the people had no idea that Jesus was who he claimed to be, and they were committing the purest form of evil.
But to me the phrase has always been a double entendre, or at least holds a double meaning. They did not know that their act of barbarism was not only that, but also a crime against the Almighty in bodily form. But they also had no idea that their sin would pave way for God’s redemption of humanity. They, and we by extension, did not know what magnitude of evil they were committing, and they did not know how much good God would work from it either.
I do not know if Gerwig or Nolan intended to make propaganda, or if they intended to make as much money possible, or if they knew that their films held underlying messages of deep wrestling and truth.
But the messages were there, plain for us if we dig and see through the veneer. Because that is what the truth does. There is always a remnant, a leftover people, a set of truths still waiting to be uncovered.
There is always a resurrection. The truth will out. Always coming up through the façade of talking points like daisies through concrete.
We can denigrate and remove ourselves from culture. Or we can see the shadows of resurrection and point out the light from which they come, in hopes that the culture eventually renews itself and allows the truth to shine rather than bury itself under a layer of nonsense and dirt.
For now, we should dig where we can. Good art, and the truth that can be found in it, demands it of us.
Always an enjoyable read. Lots to chew on here.