Long-awaited Shtetl-Optimized Barbenheimer post! [warning: spoilers]
I saw Oppenheimer three weeks ago, but I didn’t see Barbie until this past Friday. Now, my scheduled flight having been cancelled, I’m on multiple redeyes on my way to a workshop on Large Language Models at the Simons Institute in Berkeley, organized by my former adviser and quantum complexity theorist Umesh Vazirani (!). What better occasion to review the two movies of the year, or possibly decade?
Shtetl-Optimized Review of Oppenheimer
Whatever its flaws, you should of course see it, if you haven’t yet. I find it weird that it took 80 years for any movie even to try to do justice to one of the biggest stories in the history of the world. There were previous attempts, even a risible opera (“Doctor Atomic”), but none of them made me feel for even a second like I was there in Los Alamos. This movie did. And it has to be good that tens of millions of people, raised on the thin gruel of TikTok and Kardashians and culture-war, are being exposed for the first time to a bygone age when brilliant and conflicted scientific giants agonized over things that actually mattered, such as the ultimate nature of matter and energy, life and death and the future of the world. And so the memory of that age will be kept alive for another generation, and some of the young viewers will no doubt realize that they can be tormented about things that actually matter as well.
This is a movie where General Groves, Lewis Strauss, Einstein, Szilard, Bohr, Heisenberg, Rabi, Teller, Fermi, and E.O. Lawrence are all significant characters, and the acting and much of the dialogue are excellent. I particularly enjoyed Matt Damon as Groves.
But there are also flaws [SPOILERS FOLLOW]:
1. Stuff that never happened. Most preposterously, Oppenheimer travels all the way from Los Alamos to Princeton, to have Einstein check the calculation suggesting that the atomic bomb could ignite the atmosphere.
2. Weirdly, but in common with pretty much every previous literary treatment of this material, the movie finds the revocation of Oppenheimer’s security clearance a far more riveting topic than either the actual creation of the bomb or the prospect of global thermonuclear war. Maybe half the movie consists of committee hearings.
3. The movie misses the opportunity to dramatize almost any of the scientific turning points, from Szilard’s original idea for a chain reaction to the realization of the need to separate U-235 to the invention of the implosion design—somehow, a 3-hour movie didn’t have time for any of this.
4. The movie also, for some reason, completely misses the opportunity to show Oppenheimer’s anger over the bombing of Nagasaki, three days after Hiroshima—a key turning point in the story it’s trying to tell.
5. There’s so much being said, by actors speaking quickly and softly and often imitating European accents, that there’s no hope of catching it all. I’ll need to watch it again with subtitles.
Whatever it gets wrong, this movie does a good job exploring the fundamental irony of the Manhattan Project, that the United States is being propelled into its nuclear-armed hegemony by a group of mostly Jewish leftists who constantly have affairs and hang out with Communists and deeply distrust the government and are distrusted by it.
The movie clearly shows how much grief Oppenheimer gets from both sides: to his leftist friends he’s a sellout; to the military brass he’s potentially disloyal to the United States. For three hours of screen time, he’s constantly pressed on what he actually believes: does he support building the hydrogen bomb, or not? Does he regret the bombing of Hiroshima and (especially) Nagasaki? Does he believe that the US nuclear plans should be shared with Stalin? Every statement in either direction seems painfully wrung from him, as if he’s struggling to articulate a coherent view, or buffeted around by conflicting loyalties and emotions, even while so many others seem certain. In that way, he’s an avatar for the audience.
Anyway, yeah, see it.
Shtetl-Optimized Review of Barbie
A friend-of-the-blog, who happens to be one of the great young theoretical physicists of our time, opined to me that Barbie was a far more interesting movie than Oppenheimer and “it wasn’t even close.” Having now seen both, I’m afraid I can’t agree.
I can best compare my experience watching Barbie to that of watching a two-hour-long episode of South Park—not one of the best episodes, but one that really runs its satircal premise into the ground. Just like with South Park, there’s clearly an Important Commentary On Hot-Button Cultural Issues transpiring, but the commentary has been reflected through dozens of funhouse mirrors and then ground up into slurry, with so many layers of self-aware meta-irony that you can’t keep track of what point is being made, and then fed to hapless characters who are little more than the commentary’s mouthpieces. This is often amusing and interesting, but it rarely makes you care about the characters.
Is Barbie a feminist movie that critiques patriarchy and capitalism? Sort of, yes, but it also subverts that, and subverts the subversion. To sum up [SPOILERS FOLLOW], Barbieland is a matriarchy, where everyone seems pretty happy except for Ken, who resents how Barbie ignores him. Then Barbie and Ken visit the real world, and discover the real world is a patriarchy, where Mattel is controlled by a board of twelve white men (the real Mattel’s board has 7 men and 5 women), and where Barbie is wolf-whistled at and sexually objectified, which she resents despite not knowing what sex is.
Ken decides that patriarchy is just what Barbieland needs, and most importantly, will finally make Barbie need and appreciate him. So he returns and institutes it—both Barbies and Kens think it’s a wonderful idea, as they lack “natural immunity.” Horrified at what’s transpired, Barbie hatches a plan with the other Barbies to restore Barbieland to its rightful matriarchy. She also decisively rejects Ken’s advances. But Ken no longer minds, because he’s learned an important lesson about not basing his self-worth on Barbie’s approval. Barbie, for her part, makes the fateful choice to become a real, mortal woman and live the rest of her life in the real world. In the final scene—i.e., the joke the entire movie has been building up to—Barbie, filled with childlike excitement, goes for her first visit to the gynecologist.
What I found the weirdest is that this is a movie about gender relations, clearly aimed at adults, yet where sex and sexual desire and reproduction have all been taken off the table—explicitly so, given the constant jokes about the Barbies and Kens lacking genitalia and not knowing what they’re for. Without any of the biological realities that differentiate men from women in the first place, or (often enough) cause them to seek each other’s company, it becomes really hard to make sense of the movie’s irony-soaked arguments about feminism and patriarchy. In Barbieland, men and women are just two tribes, one obsessed with “brewsky beers,” foosball, guitar, and The Godfather; the other with shoes, hairstyles, and the war on cellulite. There’s no fundamental reason for any conflict between the two.
Well, except for one thing: Ken clearly needs Barbie’s affection, until he’s inexplicably cured of that need at the end. By contrast, no Barbies are ever shown needing any Kens for anything, or even particularly desiring the Kens’ company, except when they’ve been brainwashed into supporting the patriarchy. The most the movie manages to offer any straight males in the audience, at the very end, is well-wishes as they “Go Their Own Way”, and seek meaning in their lives without women.
For most straight men, I daresay, this would be an incredibly bleak message if it were true, so it’s fortunate that not even the movie’s creators seem actually to believe it. Greta Gerwig has a male partner, Noah Baumbach, with whom she co-wrote Barbie. Margot Robbie is married to a man named Tom Ackerley.
I suppose Barbie could be read as, among other things, a condemnation of male incel ideology, with its horrific desire to reinstitute the patriarchy, driven (or so the movie generously allows) by the incels’ all-too-human mistake of basing their entire self-worth on women’s affection, or lack thereof. If so, however, the movie’s stand-in for incels is … a buff, often shirtless Ryan Gosling, portraying the most famous fantasy boyfriend doll ever marketed to girls? Rather than feeling attacked, should nerdy, lovelorn guys cheer to watch a movie where even Ryan-Gosling-as-Ken effectively gets friendzoned, shot down, put in his place, reduced to a simpering beta just like they are? Yet another layer of irony tossed into the blender.