Barbenheimer and the Humanities
Can the two blockbuster movies of the summer save the movie theater business, luring enough viewers off their couches and into the multiplex to stanch the flow of content to streaming services?
I have no idea. What I do know, having shelled out my money to join the crowds flocking back to the movies this summer, is that whether you choose Barbie or Oppenheimer or both, what you’re getting is a rallying call for the power of and need for the humanities. Yes—in a movie about a doll that is one of the most successful consumer products ever and a movie about the scientist whose fascination with quantum theory led to the creation of the atomic bomb.
Let’s start with the second one first. The argument is at first familiar—we need science to explore what is possible, but we need the humanities to help us decide what is right; science enables us to find many answers to “what CAN we do?” while the humanities force us to find all the conflicting answers to “what SHOULD we do?” But Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer blows past that question, acknowledging right off the bat—as did the historical figure the movie is based on—that perhaps unleashing the power of the atomic bomb was a disaster for humankind and many other living beings AND was inevitable at the time and in the historical circumstances. (Sidenote: the scene with Jean Tatlock/Florence Pugh where we first encounter Oppenheimer saying, “I am become Death, destroyer of worlds”—is that historically accurate? Is that where/how that phrase got lodged in his memory, to be fished out and used when he realized the destructive power of turning his theories into reality? If not, I’m really interested in Nolan’s choice to present that phrase in that setting first. If so…well, I don’t really know what to think about that.)
What is—to me, at least—much more interesting and central to the movie’s plot and structure is the question of how we understand Oppenheimer, how the meaning of who he was and what he did has been shaped and re-shaped in a series of narratives constructed around him. He will be both hero and villain, according to the needs of those in power around him; his scientific achievement will never protect him from the consequences of a carefully crafted interpretation of his actions; he will be dragged out again to receive the plaudits of a grateful nation when it suits yet another story—this is what Einstein (Tom Conti) warns him about, and we see the dawning realization of this truth even though Oppenheimer’s gone into every bit of this with eyes wide open (and very VERY blue, thank you, Cillian Murphy). In Nolan’s film, one of the great scientists of his time (and there were many in the 20th century), who transformed the world that we live in, couldn’t control his own story because he thought the science and the achievement spoke for themselves.
In Greta Gerwig’s Barbie we have instead someone who decides to take the reins of her own story, even if means choosing a) death and b) a vagina, or maybe I’ve got that in the wrong order. There is so much more to say about this movie, but let’s just look at the end of the movie, when Margot Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie tells Ruth Handler (played by Rhea Perlman), the original creator of the doll, that she wants to become human, because she wants to be the one making meaning, shaping the story; that having saved her world from the patriarchal takeover orchestrated by the Kens is nice but not enough for her to stay there, because that would mean never changing, never exploring complexity, never living in uncertainty. These are the things that the humanities enable us to do—to sit with complexity and discomfort (having a vagina in this world can cause a whole lot of complexity and discomfort—just ask Susan Faludi) in the process of making meaning and opening up more worlds to explore.
So even if these two movies can’t save the in-person movie theater business, wouldn’t it be nice if the crowds of people rushing to see them take their messages to heart, and decide, like Barbie, to be the ones making meaning out of the complexity of our world?
Hi Barbie!
Elizabeth Meadows is Associate Director of Vanderbilt’s Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, Principal Senior Lecturer with the Department of English, and Faculty Head of House.