Barbenheimer is a better double feature than you’d think

Barbie And OppenheimerBox-office fates are entwined until the films have reached portmanteau status, collectively dubbed “Barbenheimer” as if People magazine caught the physicist and the foot-tall plastic doll together on a Malibu beach. The shared release date of the films was inseparable from the stories of their success or failure, and a hybridized fandom evolved from viral memes to custom T-shirts and massive ticket sales for back-to-back viewing of the two films.

Those intrepid souls who go that dual feature route have taken to social media to think about the optimal schedule for shooting two huge chunks of film. Those deliberations generally amounted to a binary choice between good vibes at one pole and groundbreaking-scale devastation at the other.

But Barbie revolves around an existential crisis spiraling into a depressive spiral set in motion by the fear of death Oppenheimer finds ample room for popcorn shenanigans among his weighty considerations of oblivion. Whichever way you look at them, these seemingly disparate blockbusters can be read as two halves of one thematic whole.

The most overt connections between these unlikely duelists for the summer movie crown are only about classification. They are top level productions, made under studio banners with budgets to match, advanced respectively by a pair of brand authors: Greta Gerwig for BarbieChristopher Nolan for Oppenheimer. The directors both spent a lot of time thinking and to talk about the state of the Great American Movie; they are de facto guardians of the flame, and their concerns have now filtered into the subtext of their latest works. In tone registers that are far apart, Barbie And Oppenheimer each focuses on an icon struggling with responsibility and complicity, trying to understand how vast and central they are to the fabric of their world.

Struggling to maintain autonomy while functioning with large institutional systems – a concept that bridges the gap between gender politics and mainstream politics in these films – they reach conclusions at different points in the same thought process. Annoyed but inexhaustible, Barbie reads like a statement from an artist doing her optimistic best to remain herself as she maneuvers through the Hollywood machine. Gloomy and defeated, even in his triumphs of craft, Oppenheimer comes from someone who has long since given up hope of the big picture of big pictures.

Gerwig begins with an allusion to 2001: A space odyssey presented – like almost everything else in her chronically self-conscious riff on itself – with plastic tongue partially in cheek. Margot Robbie takes the place of the towering monolith of obsidian that bestows the gift of invention on the crafty apes of prehistoric times in Stanley Kubrick’s classic. That image positions the Barbie doll as the most important creation in our species’ timeline.

To some degree, the film believes this to be true: voiceover narration by Helen Mirren steps in to explain the deep meaning of the adult surrogacy these toys offer young girls. The script introduces Barbie as a feminist role model who inspires the girls of America to seek doctorates, Nobel Prizes or the presidency. It then admits that’s way too much to expect from a Mattel product, especially one with a record of promoting problematic body proportions.

And yet, there’s no denying that countless girls still feel a connection with their best friend while playing. As Barbie travels from her fantasy dimension of artifice to reality and back, she continually challenges her self-image, eventually arriving at a simple humanity caught in a perfect punch line.

BarbieThe third act’s ambivalence about What Barbie Means never really resolves, but Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach float around the idea that she can be whatever she needs to be to whoever wants her to be. It is a close follow-up to the statement about femininity, summed up in a monologue by America Ferrera’s normie character, at the end of her tether with the unrealistic expectations and absurd double standards imposed on women. They should be compliant without coming across as con artists, sufficiently feminine but not big-headed, serious but not at serious. The feelings at parting take the form of a plea to let women live simply, out of love for God. (For the purposes of the movie, God is Barbie creator Ruth Handler.)

And it’s easy enough to apply this tolerant attitude to Gerwig herself, as she takes into account the demands and constraints of commercial filmmaking. A contract to oversee one of Warner Bros.’ the year’s most expensive box office bids come with 145 million terms, but she held on to the personality and insight that earned the trust of her benefactors in the first place. A subversive highway streak animates Barbie’s surreal adventures, in which the word “patriarchy” is used more often than you might expect on an afternoon at the multiplex.

At the same time, Gerwig puts her dazzling achievements in soundstage production design on the dime of a toy manufacturer who will benefit directly and materially from her labor. That’s an inconvenient truth turned into winking, self-deprecating jokes. The film’s general policy of enduring pragmatism applies here, too: Gerwig takes the money, gets away with everything she can, and just tries to make something she can proudly put her name to. “It is what it is” may not be the strongest rationalization, but it gets many of us through the day.

Barbie sweat the contradictions of being an original, expressive, individualistic work of art produced under the auspices of a company, which changes Oppenheimer in a nightmare projection of its worst-case scenario. Nolan follows the moral arc of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project physicist who turned to fighting nuclear proliferation after witnessing the combustion he enabled in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

In Nolan’s film, Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy) gets into arguments with government officials over and over during the development process, determined that Promethean’s terrible ability to split an atom should be used to enforce peace rather than bolster strategic advantage. His naivete, combined with his confidence that the Nazis will build the atomic bomb if he doesn’t, leads him to unleash a destructive ability that humanity should never have used. Just as Oppenheimer has woken up to the full catastrophic scope of his handiwork, the FBI conspire to squeeze him out of the program he started by tarnishing his reputation and focusing on his former communist ties. Being the smartest guy in the room for so much of his life, he couldn’t tell when he was being used.

As recommended in submolecular crafting, Oppenheimer runs his lab and test site at Los Alamos with the utmost care, placing full confidence in the expertise of his carefully selected collaborators. However, once the eggheads reach their target, Uncle Sam’s servants tow away the A-bomb with plans to exponentially increase its megatonnage by using hydrogen. The account of a man convincing himself he’s making something personally meaningful, only to watch in horror as his government appropriates it and uses it for its own dystopian purposes lends itself to the allegory of industry twinning the “father of the atomic bomb” with the father of the modern superhero tentpole.

Nolan made his Batman trilogy live up to the lofty standard he sets himself, only to set off a chain reaction that now bombards the market with factory CGI eyesore. Given all his impassioned encouragement for analog film technology, it stands to reason that Nolan has looked down at his hands and wondered what horrors he’s wrought at least once or twice upon seeing the latest developments in the DCEU.

Massive, idiosyncratic displays of studio-level directorial vision are so rare that a neutral contingent within Team Oppenheimer and Team Barbie can agree on this weekend’s double dose as a sign of robust health for the movies. The content of the films themselves tell a different story. Both films are uneasy — to the point of outright desperation — about whether people have the leeway to do the right thing under a system militantly opposed to independent will. Whether portrayed as a flawed fantasy land or a vast spiritual wasteland, Hollywood makes for hostile territory. Even for those with the determination to traverse it and the stamina to reach the higher grounds, reaching the top, as these two films have done, gives a clearer picture of just how rough things have gotten up there.

Barbie And Oppenheimer are both in theaters on July 21.