Barbie's 'Will Smith' Moment

Here's why Barbie is great, Oppenheimer is not, and why he deserved to have his face slapped.

Author photo of iPad at kitchen table with image detail of The New Yorker magazine’s “Slappenheimer” cover.

It was only a matter of time

before the “Barbenheimer” Rom-Com came to an end. The couple was too incompatible to live happily ever after. Hollywood endings only happen in the movies.

But at the live Oscars telecast anything can happen. Which is why it was fun to see Barbie pull a Will Smith on Oppenheimer during this year’s Academy Awards telecast. Even if it only happened on the cover of The New Yorker magazine.

“Slappenheimer,” by cartoonist Barry Blitt in the magazine’s March 11th edition, reminded us that The Slap seen round the world has become memory-resident.

Like other viral acts of violence, you never know when someone else will try it. Which is why Ted Koppel asked Jimmy Kimmel on CBS Sunday Morning if he expected someone to get hit during this year’s show. It’s why EGOT Rita Moreno brought it up during her Red Carpet interview.

Most of us probably don’t want to see the actual slap again. But a metaphorical reenactment is okay. Seeing Barbie slap the s-h-i-t out of Oppenheimer on a New Yorker cover is somehow satisfying. He created a “gadget” that could destroy the world.

I don’t condone violence. But I’m fine with that slap.

Christopher Nolan’s outstanding film serves up a sympathetic portrait of the complicated Father of the Atom Bomb, but doesn’t he deserve to have his face slapped? And especially by Barbie?

She’s already beat him at the box office, earning $1.446 billion dollars so far to Oppenheimer’s $960 million. But Barbie beats the scientific genius in another way too. Barbie is great. Oppenheimer is not.

Before I explain why, consider this—

When I was an undergraduate, my political friends and I were fond of quoting Benjamin Disraeli, who once said: “It is easier by far to be critical than correct.”

Several years later, while interviewing James Baldwin at a book-signing party for his novel If Beale Street Could Talk, I quoted a review in the New York Times, which said Baldwin’s Beale Street was not as good as his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain. I’ll never forget his response.

“That’s not my problem,” Baldwin said. “My problem was to write the novel. Their problem over at the New York Times is to talk about it. I’ve solved my problem. The critics are still trying to solve theirs.”

Keep those two statements in mind as you read my reasons for saying Barbie is great; Oppenheimer is not.

First, a definition

Somewhere in my literary graduate studies, I came across this definition of greatness: In order to have a great story, you must first have a great theme. Not everyone agrees with that these days. But I still like it.

Take Madame Bovary for instance. It’s the story of an adulterous middle-class housewife, who tries to escape her bored country life by living out unrealistic fantasies found in romance novels. Along the way, she runs up a lot of debt, commits fraud to support her lifestyle, and swallows arsenic to get out of the mess she’s created.

It’s quite a breathy read.

But where’s the greatness in that?

Nowhere. It’s Flaubert’s language, irony, and innovations that elevate Madame Bovary to its current status in college classrooms and a thousand pages of mostly unread PhD dissertations. But is it a great novel? Lots of people think so.

Not me, though. Because it doesn’t have a great theme. It’s a very good cautionary tale. This is what comes of idle daydreaming and living above your means. It’s also a reminder of a verse in the Book of Proverbs: “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.”

That’s good stuff, but is it great stuff? Frankly, I’ve always hated Madame Bovary.

Oppenheimer falls prey to the same difficulty as poor deluded Emma Bovary

Don’t get me wrong. I was riveted by Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. He took a 720-page biography and turned it into a 3-hour film, which doesn’t feel like a 3-hour film. He found the visual language to explain to lay audiences all over the world the complex laws of physics, which led to the explosion of the first weapon of mass destruction.

The film is a brilliantly crafted work of art. It deserved to win its seven gold statues, especially Robert Downey, Jr.’s Oscar for Best Actor in a Supporting Role.

But is it great? In the long run, will Oppenheimer stand up to Avatar or Titanic? Can it hold its own against Citizen Kane, Ben Hur, The Ten Commandments, or Casablanca?

Watching Oppenheimer is like watching the Super Bowl.

Part of its brilliance is that it makes us care about the first nuclear arms race even though we’ve known for almost 80 years how the story will end.

To keep us hooked, the director uses a device we’ve seen before in films like The Social Network and The Blind Side. Namely, the courtroom drama with its built-in dramatic tension.

In Oppenheimer, that quasi-legal tribunal is a rigged effort to silence the physicist, set in motion by the jealous and resentful Lewis Strauss. That integrated subplot is a big reason the movie doesn’t feel like a 3-hour film.

But what is Oppenheimer about really? It’s the story of a gifted genius, driven by fear, who led the effort to build the first atom bomb, and winds up feeling that his creation will probably destroy the Earth. It’s also a story about karma—how it comes back to bite Lewis Strauss in his hindquarters.

Terrific. But is that great?

Doesn’t seem like it. By focusing on American Prometheus, Oppenheimer never offers the viewer much beyond that depressing double-ending. It doesn’t give us anything to love or believe in.

Titanic, on the other hand, tells us we can survive great loss through the power of love. Avatar tells us we can achieve a lot if at least one other person can really “see us.” Casablanca says sometimes you have to give up personal happiness to achieve a greater end. Oppenheimer says we’re all gonna die, and karma is a bitch.

Compare that to what William Faulkner says

about the nuclear bomb four years after Hiroshima in 1949 when he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature:

There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse…

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance…

We don’t get anything like that

in Oppenheimer from any of the characters. The film doesn’t even consider whether Oppenheimer was on the autistic spectrum, as some suggest. And it doesn’t show us the impact of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (See my short story below on why Barbie broke up with the dude.)

There is an interesting sex scene in which Florence Pugh’s Jean Tatlock gets Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer to translate part of the Bhagavad Gita from Sanskrit, while she holds the book for him.

But except for that and for all its technical prowess, Oppenheimer misses the opportunity to frame the atom bomb in a mythopoetic context as the opera Doctor Atomic does when it references the Bhagavad Gita, John Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV, and Native American song in its retelling of what happened at Los Alamos.

Barbie doesn’t do any of that, either.

But it succeeds where Oppenheimer fails. Because Barbie gets what Faulkner said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Namely—what it means to be human.

Barbie may seem all pink and frilly, and even silly, but it has very big fish to fry as Director Greta Gerwig makes plain in the film’s opening scene. Her nod to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is not just a nod to film history.

It’s a nod to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, with its themes of the Superman and the will to power.

But Gerwig’s Barbie isn’t just nodding to the philosopher. Visually, this larger-than-life doll delivers a big message. She’s replacing The Superman with The Superwoman. She also gets to Nietzsche’s will to power later in the film when Ken takes over Barbie Land, and a struggle for control ensues.

In addition to all that, Barbie is a contemporary iteration of Pinocchio, the puppet who wanted to be a real boy. She’s Haley Joel Osment as David in Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a robot who wants to be human. She’s Ariel in The Little Mermaid. She’s Mr. Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation. All those human-like creatures want the same thing.

What does it mean to be human?

What do we have that separates us from our machines? What is the number one ingredient?

Barbie goes looking for the answer to those questions in the real world—and her discovery makes her cry. To be human is to feel.

Where Oppenheimer gives us death, Barbie gives us transformation. She gives us a potent reminder of who we really are. And a weapon to combat the desensitized numbness of the human heart. The terrible affliction that rationalizes the dehumanization of others—acts of terrorism that take out 1200 people in a single day; acts of war that wipe out 30 thousand people within a few months. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. September 11th.

Barbie says a lot of other things too, but that by itself is enough. Which is why I say Barbie is great—Oppenheimer, not so much.

©2024 Andrew Jazprose Hill

Thanks for reading/listening.

Why Barbie Broke Up with Oppenheimer