The Free Press
I really wanted to hate Barbie. I certainly pre-hated it. I tried to avoid the marketing blitz around the movie, but since I have eyeballs, that wasn’t really an option.
Simply existing in America over the past few months meant having the bronzed images of Margot Robbie as Barbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken staring you down everywhere you turned, not unlike Mao Zedong’s portrait in Tiananmen Square. Every single store in downtown Manhattan seemed to have a Barbie collab: there are jewelry, shoes, clothes, candles, makeup, luggage, and rugs. Even the internet got plastered in pink. I regrettably invite you to Google director Greta Gerwig or any other cast member.
It got to the point that every article of pink clothing that I’ve spotted in the past week has felt suspicious, even corporate.
So when I walked into the theater when the movie opened on Thursday and eyed a thirtysomething woman in a matching bubblegum pink tank top and tennis skirt, holding a real Barbie doll wearing a teal minidress perched in her seat’s cupholder, I nearly screamed.
But then something happened that I could not control: I started to have fun.
Christopher Nolan is one of the finest filmmakers working today, and Oppenheimer is perhaps his greatest achievement to date.
Oppenheimer is structured like a double helix, in two integrated parts: fusion, the bringing together of atoms, shot in black and white; and fission, their tearing apart, shot in color. Scientifically, both processes create vast amounts of potential energy.
The fission sections of Oppenheimer tell the story of the bomb’s creation by tracing the development of its creator: Julius Robert Oppenheimer. We see his intellectual development as a theoretical physicist at Cambridge and then as a professor at Berkeley—where he would meet crucial collaborators like Ernest Lawrence, who features prominently in the film—and his eventual assignment to the top-secret atomic testing facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he was to become the father of the atomic bomb.
Braided together with the color sections of the movie are the black and white fusion sections, which center around the Senate confirmation hearings of Lewis Strauss, an Oppenheimer rival whom President Eisenhower had nominated for a Cabinet post.
The interplay between fission and fusion generates an enormous narrative energy that courses through the film. It never feels as though you’re toggling between two separate stories. Rather, it feels as though the story is vibrating, and this vibration—alternately unnerving and exhilarating—gets to the fundamental theme of the film.
But the big question is: Why this story? And why now?
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Origins are everything: Barbie was originally the German Lilli doll, an adult toy for men, a joke about acquisitive beautiful women. She was "a gold digging sex symbol" for drunk men. And low and behold little girls liked her so much she became their favorite doll. So "Barbie" by definition is a symbol of the sexual relationship between men and women. If you leave men out of the Barbie story you deeply misunderstand and misrepresent the ambivalence women have about their power in relationship to male sexuality. Lilli was a savvy comic strip seductress and that is why German men found the doll funny. Yes, there really is no fool like an old fool, and men seem to start right out as old fools. Lilli knew that and the doll emphasized it. https://www.messynessychic.com/2016/01/29/meet-lilli-the-high-end-german-call-girl-who-became-americas-iconic-barbie-doll/
Entertaining review for Barbie. The Oppenheimer review started strong but strayed into territory that wasn't actually film criticism.