My Barbenheimer Experience

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

There really is nothing quite like a good old double feature. Two films intentionally curated to be screened back to back and shared by a collective audience who can use one film to build up to another, it’s an idea so fundamental to the film-going experience that at least one film has opened with a song dedicated to the glory of double features (albeit ones of the Science Fiction variety). 

Some of my best film memories involved double features, from the insane laughter brought on during a screening of Antichrist by an audience who had just sat through Irreversible to the joyful delights of a recent pairing of Silent Killer and Flesh for Frankenstein. Sadly getting a good curated double feature is something usually reserved for film festivals so if you want to get a good double feature going you have to do it yourself… and just like that, Barbie and Oppenheimer have come to give us the ultimate homemade double feature.

Releasing both of these films on the same day was an absolutely bonkers decision by the companies, but also possibly the only good decision that the higher-ups at the studios have made in several years (PAY THE WRITERS AND ACTORS WHAT THEY DESERVE!) and for a while now it has become memetic to bring up the idea of doing a Barbie/Oppenheimer double feature, a Barbenheimer if you will. It’s a duo that promises glorious cinematic whiplash, but the two films also have a lot in common. 

• Both are directed by modern auteurs (Christopher Nolan and Greta Gerwig)
• Both have huge Oscar buzz in several categories
• Both have star-studded main casts
• Both are based on real events 

Clearly, this is a perfect combination of films. 

Honestly, the only question one could have about this double feature is “Which film do you see first” and that question is basically answered by whichever one has seats available in the first screening on the day that this double feature (a double feature that will last a bare minimum of 5 hours just based on the runtime of both films, not factoring in commercials and any time between screenings)… so what film did I get to start my Barbenheimer journey with?

Duh, Barbie!

Barbie (Margot Robbie) is your perfect doll with a perfect smile and perfect teeth and perfect hair that always sits just right underneath her perfect hat. She lives in a perfect dream house with all her other perfect Barbie friends (Played by an assortment of perfect-looking celebrity women) who live perfect lives that occasionally intersect with their perfect boyfriend Ken (Ryan Gosling, and also dozens of other perfect-looking celebrity men) in a perfect little world known as Barbieland. Everything seems to be going exactly as it should be… Until Barbie wakes up one day and starts having existential feelings of dread that make her contemplate the concept of death, which can really ruin the fun of a dance party with bespoke music and flawless choreography. Also, her feet actually touch the floor now which is the real horror going on. 

All this combined means that Barbie needs to go on a quest to figure out what’s wrong with her, a quest that will take her and Ken into the real world where Barbie might have to learn some uncomfortable truths about how her idealized image has actually impacted the world, and Ken might learn about something called Patriarchy and try to apply those teachings to the feminist utopia of Barbieland. Yes, this is all happening in the movie based on the little doll with funky outfits and no genitalia, because cinema is fun like that.

On its own, Barbie is a gloriously plastic indictment of the patriarchal culture that we undeniably live in, in a way that’s shockingly deep for a film built entirely around such seemingly superficial characters. Barbie cleverly spends the first chunk of the film making a world that seems like it has to be perfect for the women involved, playing everything up to be as positive and cheery as could be before letting reality slowly slip in and get to the deeper point about how hard it actually is for women to maintain that insanely perfect image that’s expected of them (a moment exemplified in an absolutely brilliant speech by America Ferrara who plays one of the few truly human characters in the movie). I know, shocker, the Barbie film which was made by the director of Lady Bird and Little Women wanted to talk about feminism… this is only a shock if you’re an idiot like Ben Shapiro, everyone should’ve known this coming in.

The other way that Barbie really interrogates modern attitudes around gender politics is with Ken learning about Patriarchy and wanting to try it out because someone finally saw him as his own person and not just Barbie’s accessory. This storyline might be the smartest thing that the entire film does as it lets them not only mock patriarchal nonsense attitudes (which are always worthy of mockery) but also point out how the exact opposite isn’t great either, showing that sometimes men need to be able to talk about their emotions and sometimes they need to understand that being friends with women is OK.

Also, contrary to some alarmists (re: idiots who call everything woke) claims it does this without straight up making men the villains because the problem isn’t masculinity but TOXIC masculinity, a line that’s drawn very clearly in the film. It turns out this is a very nuanced issue and Barbie manages to handle it all well, it just requires the audience to be able to tell the difference between calling out men and calling out toxic assholes… this is all said in the same film that has an extended scene where multiple Ken’s promises to “Beach off” each other, it’s a wild tone to maintain but it actually ends up working.

Perhaps the biggest shock is that in a film designed to create a dozen female icons from a dozen assorted Barbies (and it does, every single Barbie in this movie is brilliant in their own way) the performance that stands out is Ryan Gosling as the central Ken. It’s one of the wildest comedic performances in a mainstream film that you’ll see all year, everything is played to just enough of an extreme that it’s a clear character choice and it’s a delight any time he’s on screen. What also helps is that he really is a perfect accessory to Margot Robbie, knowing how to give her the performance she needs to work off of in order to shine.

Shine is an understatement for what Margot Robbie does with Barbie, she dominates and delights in every possible way. She’s the beating heart of the entire movie, everyone else gets to really lean into extremes and stay there while Margot runs the gamut of emotions, dancing between killer comedy and heartbreaking emotion. She shows no shame, holds nothing back and really is a perfect Barbie girl in her own Barbie world… Also, it’s kind of amazing when the film literally points out how hard it is to pull off an “I don’t feel OK” storyline with a person that looks like Margot Robbie. The fact she went with that kind of joke is stunning to me. 

As part of a double feature, Barbie is the joyous dessert that makes finishing the vegetables worthwhile. It’s the shot of sugar that gets you going in the morning, the bright sunlight that guides the way. If you want to see both films in this Barbenheimer double feature then you have to choose if you want to start on a high or end on a high, because Barbie is that high you seek and it’s certainly a lot more fun and enjoyable than Oppenheimer, a good movie that is good.

Oppenheimer is a biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), a brilliant quantum physicist who has been tasked with working on what would eventually be the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The film goes through major moments of Oppenheimer’s life, including his marriage to Katherine Oppenheimer (Emily Blunt) and assorted scandalous affairs with Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), his potential ties to the communist party and how those ties threatened to ruin his reputation and an ongoing feud with Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.). All of this is put alongside the arduous process of building the hydrogen bomb and Oppenheimer’s realization that his theoretical studies have evolved into a practical device that might end up destroying the world, a device that would forever brand Oppenheimer as the Father of the Atomic Bomb.

Where Barbie was a pleasant surprise in how great it truly was, Oppenheimer isn’t a surprise in the slightest. Christopher Nolan made a film about the guy who invented the atomic bomb, you go into that film expecting something great and sure enough Oppenheimer absolutely delivers. Over the course of three hours, you are witness to the insane intellect of Robert Oppenheimer and his team of brilliant physicists who pulled off something that’s both miraculous and apocalyptic. It’s a gloriously well-filmed, perfectly performed piece of cinema designed to be considered in the upper echelon of modern movies. 

There is no denying it, Oppenheimer is truly one of the best things that Christopher Nolan has ever assembled and every detail of it is kind of staggering. The cast is impossibly perfect, every actor giving the best performance of their careers (especially Cillian Murphy, who no doubt just secured his spot in the Best Actor category at next year’s Oscars) with one of the tightest and tensest scripts that Nolan’s ever given a cast. Without the visual gimmicks Nolan used to excess in films like Inception or Tenet, Nolan actually can just focus on the real story and emotion of Oppenheimer’s life and the reality of creating one of the most destructive weapons known to man. 

Oppenheimer also excels at selling the raw power of that bomb, the big stunt of the film is just somehow making the audience feel like it’s witnessing a nuclear blast through the medium of film and it does so expertly. The choice to repeatedly use that same visual language in moments of emotional destruction to help compare Oppenheimer’s mental strife with the impact of a nuke is a stroke of genius. It’s a gorgeous thing to behold that really shows off the filmmaking talents of everyone involved. It’s a powerful way to show just what this moment meant to Oppenheimer and his crew… but we will never really get to see how this affected the people of Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

Perhaps the biggest failing of Oppenheimer is that, in trying to tell the story of one man, it almost completely ignores the victims of the device he created. Obviously, the core story is about how this was meant to end the war and ended up creating a “destroy the world in 7 seconds” button that multiple countries can hit at any time and I don’t think anyone expected a cutaway to Hiroshima to see the impact, but it relegates the people whose lives ended because of it to offscreen consequences to be talked about instead of real people who died. The emotional climax of the film is not “Oh shit, I just killed thousands of people” but the ending of the feud with Strauss. It just feels like these real people are relegated to a footnote, meanwhile more time is spent learning that Oppenheimer did a lot of sex with someone who wasn’t his wife. It just feels off.

To put it bluntly, Oppenheimer is pretty much the exact film that you would expect when you first heard that Christopher Nolan was making a biopic about the guy who made the first nuke… for better or worse. Its ambition is matched only by its insistence that the audience takes it dead seriously, it wants to be considered Cinema with a capital C and will not accept being seen as anything less. It’s so certain of its own importance that you know that it’s going to be inevitably thrown on a list of films titled “The only good films left” by dude-bros online for years to come. Oppenheimer is a great film without a doubt, but it’s a great film that you only need to watch once to get everything it has to offer. 

As a combo, Barbenheimer is a fascinating exploration of the extremities of cinema. Barbie is the light fluffy fun time that sneaks in an important message alongside the fun times while Oppenheimer is dark and intense and wants to tell an important story without holding the audience’s hand. Barbie is a movie, Oppenheimer is Cinema. Barbie is the film you go back to see multiple times with friends, all dressed in the brightest pink outfits you can find and have a good time. Oppenheimer will be put on lists that film classes are expected to watch and study in order to understand how editing and cinematography can create intense feelings like being near a nuclear blast. Barbie is enjoyment, Oppenheimer is education.

Barbenheimer is something to be done as a gag if you have the spare 6 hours to give to both films but if you only had to pick one of them it’s wild to think that Barbie is the better film but it just is. While Oppenheimer is good, it’s so self-important that you almost feel obligated to sit there and take it seriously but Barbie is actually a fun watch from start to finish and also manages to deliver an important message without being so intense about it. If you have to pick between the two then you need to accept that it’s Barbie’s world, we’re just living in it.