The Wolfman of Frankensteins

 

Barbenheimer

starring Margot Robbie, Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh, America Ferrera, Ryan Gosling, Ariana Greenblatt, Kate McKinnon, Matt Damon, Issa Rae, Simu Liu, Michael Cera, Will Ferrell and Robert Downey Jr. and and Rhea Perlman

directed by Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird, Little Women) and also Christopher Nolan (Memento, some Batman thing). Some unholy union between the two. Call it Gretstopher Nolwig

---

AT THIS POINT, YOU CAN'T MAKE ME GIVE A SHIT ABOUT SPOILERS. BESIDES, YOU ALREADY KNOW HOW HIROSHIMA TURNED OUT, DON'T PLAY COY

---

I should point out that circumstances ended up dictating that I saw these films in the wrong order. Because of some illness and the fact that I'm now forced to try to coordinate goings-out to event movies with my adult children who thoughtlessly sometimes insist on having other things to do, we pushed up seeing Barbenheimer Part II: Oppenheimer because we were afraid it wasn't going to be in IMAX for another week. It was important to us to see the cataclysmic fireball and the subsequent moral angst in retina-distorting side-of-a-building proportions. That was never a consideration for Barbenheimer Part I: Barbie because it never got a shot in the IMAX out here. Strike one, patriarchy. Strike one.

Luckily for us we weren't too lost going in to Oppenheimer because it turns out the two parts of Barenheimer aren't really that connected, narratively speaking. It took me a while after seeing both to put together how or why they were related at all, but the best I can figure it: a child's toy is imbued with life by demonic forces (capitalism, misogyny) and charged with judging the human race. In the end the only just solution she can arrive at is to set the Scarecrow on a course to blow up the entire world with one bomb and kill all the men. It would end up taking all the women with it as well, but it seems a small price to pay to ensure all the people who can't properly contextualize Joe Rogan get ashed.

NO BUT SERIOUSLY, I know they are different movies and there isn't really a "phenomenon" here past people who schedule movie releases for studios not really seeming to know what they're doing at all. To be fair, the coincidence of releasing both of these films on the same day turning into a doofy meme isn't really something studio flunkies can predict, but even absent that, as "counterprogramming" this is super fucking weird. Sure, Oppenheimer is a Christopher Nolan film, one of the few directors whose name means box office to some degree, but this has looked from the jump like a slick-but-dour period piece with a bunch of rumination on the Big Question like "should we just because we can?" It's as present and relevant a question as ever with looming similar potential disasters like profit-captured AI, or recently realized ones like that big ole country boy doing a cover of "Fast Car" by Tracy Chapman. Heavy stuff.

Both movies do kind of ask the same question: can we live with what is? The main difference is in Barbie, there's a built-in obliviousness in a bespoke fantasy world peopled by literal playthings and the reckoning starts with an existential jolt (in this case a pretty funny literal one, Barbie contemplating the idea of death). In Oppenheimer, it's the most knowing humans who ever knowed seeing what is coming and still willing it into being, with full pre-existing knowledge about what was on the other side: a world defined by the explicit threat of humans finally having a weapon large enough to kill themselves with. And also, sneakily, consequences they couldn't foresee in the form or Robert Downey Jr.

In terms of conflict, both of these movies are defined by their antagonists, Ryan Gosling's semi-red-pilled, awakened (but never "woke") Ken and Junior's simmering death-ray of resentment in a tailored suit Lewis Strauss. It's great, great tribute to the direction of Greta Gerwig and the screenplay by her and Noah Baumbach that the obvious shallow, defensive, hurt-feelings expectation of gratification is the underpinning of all the desperate defensiveness that is patriarchy. It's petty and punitive in an irreducibly Republican way, a zero-sum calculation built around a hoarding (of resources, of status trophies, of political leverage) designed not to glorify but to deny the enemy they see in women, making up a very dangerous 50% of any population. The real-world backlash from the obvious quarters echoed the exact same message without irony: my god, what if these women ever realize they're not actually the minority we treat them like? We told you chicks not to see this movie, what business does it have making a literal billion dollars? But that's as deep as patriarchy really goes. The fact that Ken conflates it with horses as an idea is as brilliant and concise a summation as I can think of.

Robert Downey Jr. shows up in just a few scenes, in a role both on the page and in any director's note on set was probably simply "Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture," in what seems like should be a B-plot considering there's a literal atom bomb over there to consider, but turns out to be the thing around which the whole narrative turns. Like Barbie, it's pettiness and resentment that ends in frustration for him and some level of defeat, which feels almost as much like a fantasy as the denouement of Barbie. The fact that the "bad guy" gets served some level of comeuppance in such a real-world setting in a fact-based film almost feels pretend or at least at odds with reality in the last 7-8 years.

One of my first impressions of Barbie overall was that Margot Robbie got stuck playing the straight-lady to a bunch of goobs and dinguses in Barbieland and in the Real World, but after sitting with it for a while, she's the entire emotional pivot of the thing, working closely in concert with America Ferrera and Ariana Greenblatt. Emoting something real and making all the plastic and doll features mean something is a feat. The film even directly comments on the irony of an uncommonly beautiful person like Robbie undoing an ecosystem built on fabulousness and pretty things. It's a high-wire act, but she does the thing, less in her few monologues and more in a subtle expression, a softening of the eyes here and there, a dip in a smile's full wattage registering unexpected hurt or dissonance. It's not Laurie Metcalf in Lady Bird, but few things are. Considering she starts off as an avatar of a literal inanimate object, it's a whole-ass journey, definitionally a transformation.

Cillian Murphy conversely gets asked to be in virtually every scene of a very long film, the center around which everything else revolves, in a movie that is unironically at least partially about self-regard. He's the most problematic of problematic men, stuffing down reservations and ideals in favor of the conquest of a thing, even if in this case the thing conquered is just about the tiniest thing imaginable. At one point a slightly miscast Matt Damon has to yell at another scientist about "the most important thing in the history of the fucking world" (the one off-note line delivery of the whole movie) when contextualizing the work at Los Alamos, but nobody had to cajole ole Oppie. He believes that from Frame 1. Hell, he's even got some feel-bad poetry quotes ready to go when the Big Bang happens and creates the Cold War military industrial complex in a magaton fireball of both human tragedy and apotheosis.

After the opening in the traditional Nolan-esque style of a mini-avalanche of fast-cutting exposition scenelets, it settles in and becomes by far his most conventional film. He can't help but fuck with timelines, but even then they just feel like flashbacks more than anything novel and twee, like he did with Dunkirk. He takes some swings with some art-house flourishes, mostly involving a naked Florence Pugh, that don't really land and then at the end with a few short, clunky scenes with ICBMs. Given that this is the guy who trapped Matthew McConaughey in a multiverse behind a bookcase and did whatever the fuck he was going for in Tenet, considering a Cold War planet-wide holocaust from the sky that never came has the benefit of at least being graspable as an idea. 

I loved Barbie but going to graduate school means it just kept firing in my brain "there is no space for resistance in hegemonic systems of control," which skewed my ability to embrace the sociocultural pushback in it. I can cynically get stuck considering that "girl movies" are really about developing a marketplace in a system that will tolerate anything, even something as radical as real anti-patriarchal feminism, as long as it can sell it as advertising down the line. But I remind myself these aren't the roles of mass market studio films. You sneak in what you can sneak in. Mostly both were an opportunity to talk to my GenZ boy children about the complicated legacy of Barbie or what it was like to live in a period where nuclear annihilation was as prevalent an everyday threat/consideration as climate change is now. Anything done well is about building context and altering perspective. Both of these are brilliantly made films by filmmakers absolutely in their pomp, but Barbie does way more of that than Oppenheimer, which, to be fair, wasn't made as a companion or comparison piece on purpose and also does have some really good explosions in it.