The Barbenheimer double feature actually works surprisingly well. Here’s how Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan tell similar stories in different ways.
Barbie and Oppenheimer’s box-office fates have been enmeshed until the movies have reached portmanteau status, jointly christened “Barbenheimer” as if People Magazine caught the physicist and the foot-tall plastic doll canoodling together on a Malibu beach. The films’ shared release date inextricably linked the narratives of their success or failure, and a hybridized fandom evolved from viral memes to custom T-shirts and mass ticket sales for back-to-back viewing of the two movies.
Those intrepid souls going that double-feature route have used social media to ponder the optimal schedule for ingesting two massive hunks of movie. That deliberation has generally boiled down to a binary choice between good vibes at one pole, and devastation on an epochal scale at the other.
But Barbie hinges on an existential crisis spinning into a depressive spiral set in motion by the fear of death, while Oppenheimer finds plenty of room for popcorn wisecracks between its weighty considerations of oblivion. Either way you watch them, these seemingly disparate blockbusters can read as two halves of a single thematic whole.
The most overt connections between these unlikely duelists for the summer movie crown are just about classification. They’re uppermost-tier productions made under studio banners with budgets to match, respectively commandeered by a pair of name-brand auteurs: Greta Gerwig for Barbie, Christopher Nolan for Oppenheimer. The directors have both spent plenty of time thinking and talking about the state of the Great American Movie; they’re de facto keepers of its flame, and their concerns have now filtered into the subtext of their latest works. In tonal registers far removed from each other, Barbie and Oppenheimer each focus on an icon wrestling with responsibility and complicity, trying to grasp how enormous and central they are to the fabric of their world.
Through the struggle to maintain autonomy while functioning with large institutional systems — a concept that bridges these movies’ gap between gender politics and just plain politics — they reach conclusions at different points in the same thought process. Exasperated yet inexhaustible, Barbie reads like a statement from an artist doing her optimistic best to remain herself while maneuvering through the Hollywood machine. Bleak and defeated even in its triumphs of craft, Oppenheimer comes from someone who has long since abandoned hope for the big picture of big pictures.
Gerwig opens on an allusion to 2001: A Space Odyssey presented — like almost everything in her chronically self-aware riff on itself — with plastic tongue partially in cheek. Margot Robbie takes the place of the towering obsidian monolith that bestows the gift of invention on the crafty apes of prehistory in Stanley Kubrick’s classic.
