"Do You Guys Ever Think About Dying?"
Film Review: Barbenheimer and post-culture structural drama
Hollywood finally has a couple of summer money-makers on its hands:
Barbie has gone bombshell, now surpassing 1 billion at the global box office on a 100-200 million total budget, a certified record-making blockbuster, both for the genre of female-led comedies and a first of its profit-size for a female writer/director. My instant reaction was to call it smart, mindless entertainment—and it is, but it is something worse too.
Oppenheimer has done half the business with roughly the same total budget, so very profitable but not a true banger; impressively in the black nonetheless, a color well-matched to its pessimistic themes about world destruction and the moral chaos of war-time decision-making. At three hours, it moves very quickly, owing that to masterful direction/editing and superb acting. My instant reaction, however, was to call it fast-paced but dull, like a bomb with asymmetrical implosion.
The two summer successes have a lot in common beyond being structurally undramatic clunkers. Neither was dreadfully hard to watch but both missed their marks.
Unfortunately, the most important characteristic binding these two films isn’t their success; it isn’t their existential search for the limits of a single life and mind, of a civilization (they both do this)—it’s their inability to cohere as dramatic structural narrative. If these are our best filmmakers, both more than competent in their assigned strengths, (Greta Gerwig’s wit generates genuine LOLs; Nolan’s eye and timing are exact.) they both fail at story-telling.
Barbie fails in the third act; but it also prefers the online quip style of comedy to its chivalric-romantic plot during the entire film; Oppenheimer fails in the first and third acts. The first act is far too expository to produce rising tension; the characters say, “Oppenheimer!” many more times than the Barbies intone “patriarchy”. The second act of Oppenheimer showcases its central drama: the making of the A-bomb with a nice but undeveloped secondary spy plot. This act should have been extended as the whole film, possibly showing scenes of Heisenberg’s attempt to make one for the Nazis, who fail, likely because Heisenberg sabotaged the science. All of this would have made for more dramatic engagement and would not have diminished Oppenheimer’s biographical interest.
The oddest thing about Barbie is the comedy, having little to do with the existential crisis-journey of the romance at the center of the plot. It seems ashamed of Barbie and Ken’s obviously romanced destiny when the ending—its most woke, most earnest, most flattened mid-lib self-care tropism: “It’s Barbie AND it’s Ken”—turns the pink to grey. (Mostly, I missed this at first because it ran too long, and I was ready to leave the theater.)
The jokes are good but isolated, almost outside of the plot, hovering over it, as if composed by an X-obsessed wit or something approximating that (say, like Twitter): in tune with the frequencies of top-tier pop-esoteria while placating the earnestness of the mid-level head-nodders. One of a handful of smart, anon X accounts I follow,
, posted: “The Barbie movie is a text. Very explicitly. It invites exegesis because it is self-consciously full of tropes and call-backs to and quotations from The Discourse.”Insightful and telling. The Discourse (i.e. smart posts about the socio-political wars) is composed of fractured, or ever-blooming ironies, burgeoning like a nuclear cloud, one take more layered than the next. But there is rarely narrative cohesion to these “tropes, call-backs and quotations”. It’s all just great fodder for inside jokes among the ironists and their admirers. Like if Ferris Bueller starred in War Games, volleying clever barbs about global thermonuclear annihilation with the voiced computer-character, while ignoring their pursuit of it.
The central conflict of Barbie initiates when she admits to thinking about dying, because she pretends Ken doesn’t really exist—he’s a replicant, and she’s somehow not. The movie takes great pains to show all the many multi-racial, multi-professional Barbies as if she (“stereotypical Barbie”) isn’t the holy-one-and-only around whom the entire Dreamland revolves. But somehow, her subconscious mind (the writer’s who is playing with this doll) wonders if she should exist at all. A great, unexploited irony here is that most “plastic” people—real human beings obsessed by youth and looks—are morbidly preoccupied by their mortality. In this moment, Barbie becomes potentially human—The Little Mermaid only self-obsessed.
In a better and truer comedy, if she’d learned anything at all, Barbie would have fallen head-over-heals for “stereotypical” Ken, her most loyal suitor or rejected him outright to be the cosmic and eternal queen bitch Barbie she and the film suggests she should rather be. But neither occurs. The unshaped, textual resolution of the ending is its most contemptuously contemporaneous feature. It proposes the film’s most woke moment: self-abnegation by eternally-single self-care.
Oppenheimer fails as fast-paced dullness. Like a great History Channel documentary but no great drama. The story’s arc is weak, almost nonexistent. The last hour when he’s interrogated with a McCarthy-like, Red Scare intensity is superfluous. We learn nothing we didn’t already know. There is no dramatic conflict except that he’s been framed by a capitalist would-be political actor in Lewis Strauss (played very well by Robert Downey Jr.) But Strauss is a flat character given too much screen time, barely interacting with Oppenheimer’s more important threads, and seems to be scorned by a casual humiliation (relative to its importance) which is a flimsy point of drama within an otherwise hefty moral subject. Strauss would have been better featured in that more developed spy plot. Oppenheimer’s script also seems too influenced by social media threads that attempt to chronicle something and end up becoming a distracted mess of competing “what-about-isms”.
It is another paradoxical film. It ends just as uninspiringly as Barbie; however Nolan distracts the viewer from this by finally reminding us of the world-changing bomb that was central to that period in history. But for the hobbled drama at play, it feels like a gimmick.
It’s a compelling-enough film for reasons of craft and because that period in history, the Manhattan Project itself, have so much moral tension; but my same complaint with Nolan’s films remains: the script/story arc is often the weakest part: too expository at times with unbalanced dramatic interests. Oppenheimer is unresolved as a dramatic story; it is too much of the life writ large. Dramatic biopics should focus on the life as history most remembers them and extrapolate character through tighter dramatic structure, with a little mystery, a little sense, and as many new insights as could be allowed without fabrication.
Both of these highly watchable films are very well made in every way at the expense of their stories. Barbie ignores its central conflict for the self-glamorizing glitz; Oppenheimer tries to convince us of too many.
My friend and I went and saw Tenet in the theaters, and we both walked out wondering what the fuck happened to Christopher Nolan. He used to make incredible movies. After doing a little poking around, I came to the conclusion that the genius because those stories was his brother Jonathan who wrote the scripts. Memento and Prestige remain two of my favorite movies to this day. I don't know what happened between the two of them, but it's sad that Christopher lost his writing partner. Because now his movies are all spectacle and, if there is a story to be told, it's too boring or convoluted to follow with ease.
I appreciate you doing this write-up on both of these movies, by the way. I was starting to feel like I was missing out by not seeing either, but between what you've had to say and what Heather Heying wrote about them, I think I'll pass.