A late letter to Barbieheimer

       

        At the moment of writing this entry, it's been almost a month of the release of both Barbie and Oppenheimer, phenomenon that, a year ago, was named as Barbieheimer due to the absurdity of the fact that two highly anticipated movies, differing wildly in tone, from two of the best directors of our times just happen to be releasing the same day. It's been a ride. I attended to the cinema a total of four times for this, three of which belongs to Oppenheimer (the last one being five days ago), and after clearing my mind, I think I'm ready to give some of my own perspective on what's been like the last month.

        Also, both movies have already collected, together, almost two billion dollars, making it an event hard to ignore for the producers and studios of the distant land of Hollywood. They noticed it, and they're gonna make decisions about future projects. All we can hope is that they learn from the correct lessons here...

 

        The Barbieland Side:

        I knew where I was getting into it when I walked into the theatre. I was introduced to Greta Gerwig as a director before as an actress (in fact, I'm yet to watch any movie with her acting). If 2019 was my "big new-era hollywood blockbuster" phase, 2020 is my "indie movies made with two cents and barely any plot released in the last decade" phase. Some of the films I watched for the first time during that time was Call Me By Your Name (2017), Blue Jay (2016), and Lady Bird (2017), which wasn't the first time that I heard about it (sorry but I was rooting for Chris in 2018's Oscars), but it definitely wasn't going to pass by my head ever again since that time. Some months later, I watched Little Women (2019) with my mom, which I regretted the moment I finished it because I didn't have any faith in it being other thing that another period drama (no, I didn't read the book), and usually I watch movies alone for greater impact. In short, Greta Gerwig made an emotionally-charged entrance into my life with those two films, and I was surely going to see whatever she made next.

        When the news of her co-writing and directing a Barbie adaptation, I was blown away by the fact that she was going to work with a big company like Warner Bros. Not taken back by any means, but it was such a leap jumping from A24 to the company that produced Batman v. Superman and Suicide Squad (the unfunny one). Greta's films so far had been characterized by, well, characters, and their everyday lives which could easily by yours, whether they took place on 2002 or in the 1860's. There was an emphasis on how the little aspects and moments of our lives shapes us forever. And, of course, women, but like, Women. A Greta Gerwig film had so far those two key aspects, but only one seem to survive the Warner Bros. modus operandi.

        This is one of the reasons why is so hard to analyze this film...

        The 21st of July arrives, and so does the movie. A lot of people goes to see it. And then more. And more. And more. And of course, some people goes to watch it again. And the numbers came. 90-120 million (when there were predicted 75). 200. 300. 500. A week passes and the drop of tickets is negligible. 700. It surpasses blockbuster movies whose box office was widely open to Chinese market and were part of cinematic universes. 1 billion. Greta Gerwig becomes the first female director to ever raise 10 digits in the box office. August is two weeks away from finishing, but the numbers don't seem to stop growing any sooner.

        To say, at this point, that the only responsible for this amount of money are A24/Greta fans and people who went for the meme is outrageous. Even Warner didn't expect to blow up the way it did. And most importantly, the movie hits a strange spot between being a streaming-service movie with standard plot and a surrealistic critique of the patriarchy. The general consensus is positive; it angered conservatives around the world, it wasn't poorly written and it had a stacked cast, so it's hard to hate it. But some friends of mine came out of the cinema with mixed feelings. They were expecting that Greta Gerwig film, the one thoughtfully crafted with complicated characters and no clear plot-resolution at the end, but an emotional one. Instead, in their own view, they got a funny and self-aware blockbuster minus the action (except for that car chase). On the other hand, apparently people who had no idea of who the director was capable of, ended up with an existencial crisis due to the unexpected character resolution of Barbie.

        This movie is extensible an open question of the "meta" kind. Searching a concrete, one-sided answer as to why this had the impact it had is a futile quest filled with contradictions. It's a movie written and directed by a woman whose filmography is all about nuanced characters, yet it chooses to say out loud its own beliefs with a touch of humor and self-awareness, not pushing any more barriers than a Marvel flick. It's a social-media phenomenon, mostly headed by the oldest of Gen Z, yet the cinemas where filled with kids alongside their parents. It approaches to capitalism and the expectations that men put over themselves, but by the end it ignores the former. Greta was given full creative autonomy with her husband, but there's barely any sign that it is a movie about the people who made Little Women and Marriage Story. It's a non-Disney stand-alone film, but it surpassed (currently) other 23 franchise blockbusters in box office...

        If I need to come up with an answer, I would say it's femininity, and not feminism. For a good decade now, we were tricked into believe that superhero, disney and franchise reboot/sequel films are somewhat the "standard" for a blockbuster, and minorities were offered a slight variation on the formula; "The First Female/Black/Gay Protagonist/Superhero in X Type of Movie" were some of the headlines I saw the most in the last years, reinforcing the idea that females, black and queer people are not the norm, but a variation of the cishet white man. But when a movie like Barbie, led by a female character that is not part of a greater, male-centered team or a gender-bended version of an iconic (male) character, came to the spotlight advertised as the next-to-see-movie, people, especially women, were instantly drawn into it.

        It is kind of one-sided in its views? Yes. It could have been an A24 film disguised as a Warner Bros. one? I hoped that. It pushes forward a complicated, nuanced feminism critique of society at the same time it deconstructs stereotypes about the idea of womanhood? No. But with all of that, seeing the motivational speech that kicks off the third act of a film being shouted by a 40-year-old mom about her everyday struggles in a male-centered society is something that is gonna resonate with any woman, regardless if it was written to change the history of cinema and humanity itself or to just be a nice touch to solidify the theme of the movie.

        In any case, I hope Barbie doesn't end up being a curious chapter in cinema history, but rather a pivotal, starting point to change the way industry thinks about making movies.

        

        "Let's go recruit some scientists"

        "WATER DROPS FALLING INTO THE GROUND. Then, we cut to: OPPENHEIMER, watching the water drops forming WAVES."

        I haven't read the script (yet), but that's how I imagine the first lines describing the opening shots of the film, before a rumbling roar starts filling your whole body while the most beautiful and terrifying images shows before your eyes. As is usual in a Christopher Nolan movie, the first seconds mirrors the last, like Cobb appearing and disappearing from the crowd of London in Following (1998), or the duplicated hats and the dead bodies of "Angier" in The Prestige (2006). And Oppenheimer (2023) is not the exception, where in this case the first shots mirrors the future existential fear of the protagonist. Existential fear that, in our current times, does everything but disappear.

        I'm gonna be the first to confess: I'm both a Nolan fan and a yet-to-be physicist. Whether this is a good combination or not for society as a whole, I'll let history decide. But for now, I'll try to do my best to synthesize the experience of watching this movie now three times in cinema.

        This is a dream come true in almost every sense. Christopher Nolan had always a fascination with science and scientists, but they always occupied secondary (and explanatory) roles in contrast to the more active protagonists. In Interstellar (2014) this gap got thinner, but never before a movie of his was protagonized by a scientist, let alone an historic one. The history leading to the making of the film is as exhilarating as the film itself. Having been mentioned in his previous film, Tenet (2020), the idea of adapting the life of American physicist Robert Oppenheimer was present in Christopher's mind for a long time, until it's narrated that it became a reality when Robert Pattinson gave him the book "American Prometheus" as a gift.

        September 2021. The movie is confirmed. I couldn't be happier and somewhat angry at that fact. Turns out that I became interested in the life of the physicist back when I was finishing high-school, in 2018. It was a nauseating and troubling year for me, and I found myself relating to Oppenheimer's self-destructive tendencies during his time in Cambridge. I never had the opportunity to write a single page of that script, as it happened with another script I had in mind about the Chernobyl accident... event that was also adapted into the 2019 series "Chernobyl". I better hurry up with that script about the Tsar Bomba...

        And then, the casting announcements began. October 2021. Cillian Murphy is confirmed in the protagonist role. We were waiting the moment that he would lead a Christopher Nolan film for ages at that point, and our dream became true. November 2021; RDJ and Matt Damon joins the cast. Really, knowing that RDJ would work with Nolan in his second film after Endgame got me super hooked, as I always wanted to see him in other non-Marvel roles. But then it continues. I was super excited to see Jack Quaid being added, although I didn't know the role he was playing. And also Dane Dehaan was confirmed, and I thought my head was about to explode because he and Jack are big crushes for me (Dehaan even being part of my childhood movies). And then Josh Peck. Josh. Peck. From Drake and Josh, was confirmed. At this point it was settle. This wasn't going to be just a movie for me. But the cast kept expanding. Florence Pugh, Emily Blunt, and even Rami Malek were in it. The cast was so big I even was surprised by Rami when a saw him in the movie because I totally forgot.

        When the movie was announced, me and nearly every other person on the Earth who knew about it joked about Nolan making a nuclear explosion without CGI. I mean, he didn't (that would imply that the budget would have to cover the insurance of thousands of deaths by the radiation cloud), but he created a big explosion without CGI. I was ready for that, but not the other things he did without CGI. And sorry for sounding like a letterboxd-chronically-addicted Nolan fan, but that is a technical achievement. It really is. I said before that he's passionate about science and scientists, and I think that's in part because he would have been a physicist in other life (he already has the outfit and the vibe of a 1950's physicist). In every occasion he encounters, he pushes the engineer’s minds inside the production to come up with ideas for making something impossible real. That's, of course, a three-fourths forgotten art in the big movie industry nowadays, when CGI is so tied to the concept of making a movie that we're seeing the next barrier being opened, that is "AI" generated images. But as he puts it, "You know when you see it, even if you can explain it.". We humans have a trained eye for danger and the uncanny, thanks to thousands of year of having to fear for our lives in the pre-homo-dominated era. When you show a clip of Iron Man flying to a person, they know it's not real. Even when you work the minutest detail and the more invisible pixel, they know. Because they may not know the physics behind aerodynamics, or how light reflects on different materials, but they sure know how those things don't work in the real world. And the CGI, even with the largest numerical simulation, can't totally recreate the raw feeling that seeing a real image can. Except, of course, if you build a real suit, put the actor in it, elevate them half a kilometer over the ground with cables on an helicopter (later removed with VFX) and shoot the image. Then, the viewer is left with an awkward, subconscious question of whether what there are watching is real or not; "It can't be... but it feels real". That subconscious feeling is Wonder. You know when a magician shows you the card you choose that they don't have psychic powers, but you yourself had shuffle the deck, so they couldn't possibly track where you put the card... That is the same feeling achieved when you watch a Christopher Nolan movie.

         But I think the movie (and the box office phenomenon it is) represents an equally important role. As I said, I'm a yet-to-be physicist, but also I'm a science enthusiast (if you are surprised that those things do not necessarily come together, don't feel bad, I was too). That means that, beyond knowing how to find the eigenvalues of a nxn matrix, or how to solve the Schrödinger equation for a 1D square well, I know about science history. I was introduced to science with it before calculus and linear algebra were even a thing in my life. And it's no accident. Nearly every science enthusiast becomes one because they were amazed by Einstein's life history, or Newton developing Calculus during a pandemic, or Jocelyn Bell's erasure in the Nobel Prize after discovering pulsars. History of science (and therefore their protagonists' history) are as important (if not slightly more) as the discoveries and equations they are known for. Not knowing it and applying science blindly doesn't mean missing on a couple of quirky facts to tell in a party. In Argentina, we have a saying since the last dictatorship in the country ended: "Memoria, Verdad y Justicia". Memory, Truth and Justice. It's a variation on the old saying of "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it", but with an inclination towards the "...and fuck fascists". This is something that science should not be stranger to, but sadly a non-negligible portion of the hard sciences flex their "superiority" by claiming that the social and humanitarian sciences are inferior and useless to society. And science communication is not well-funded around the world these days. So this is why this movie, being made by a director who's known for bringing lots of people to cinema, regardless of the subject matter or if it's in the middle of a global pandemic, is so important. A movie portraying one of the most pivotal moments from the last century (possibly from all human history) from the perspective of the morally complicated scientists that were crucial in the making, being shown to audiences massively around the world, is an event that I hope that it will have its positive repercussions. Right now, it has revived the debate about nuclear regulations and the current arsenal of nuclear weaponry. Let's hope that this is just the start.

        But, well. Let's talk about the movie. If you saw it, you know it can be divided in two parts, whether is the Memento way or the Pre-Trinity/Post-Trinity way. But for me it was three, maybe even four different movies, combined into one. I feel like I watched a totally different movie the first time I saw it then the one the rest of the theatre saw that night. While everyone was following the first half like a normal movie, I was already in a state of pure ecstasy and overstimulation so much that I kind of dissociated for the rest of the movie (that is, a new record for me: dissociating watching a Nolan movie). While everyone saw a fifteen-second scene with an unknown character, I was about to cry and explode watching Richard Feynman appearing on the movie for the first time. Like, really, that montage was the most adrenaline-injecting piece of cinema I've experienced in a while. That whole part is a different movie on its own. The second one, actually. The first one is the part that shows Oppenheimer on his time on Cambridge. Listen, when I say that Christopher Nolan was a physicist in another life, I mean it. The first 15 minutes or so of the movie, even before the arrival at Berkley, was like living in a fantasy world. The "Can You Hear The Music" montage is probably one of the best things I've experienced in my whole life. I know this is getting very detached from a "critical" view (whatever that means in art), but its undeniable that Chris wanted to make a love letter to the wonderful and terrifying journey that going deep into learning physics is. The line of Oppenheimer in which he says he was suffering from "visions of an unknown universe" sent chills down my spine.

        I didn't even talk about Einstein in the movie, or Benny Sadfie as Edward Teller, or the cameo of Matthias Schweighöfer as Heisenberg (another actor I was so excited to see in a Nolan movie), the sound design, or that actor who shook me up (not in a very good way) when I saw it on screen, but I think you get the idea. I was so extremely blissful and blown away by the first hour of the movie that my brain wasn't functioning well for the rest of the runtime. Not until I went for a second viewing and relaxed my ass for the first half that I had the opportunity to see the movie as a great movie and not the best thing currently on existence. Then, there's the third movie, which is the trial. I never imagined that Christopher Nolan could pull out a Social Network script and direction, and make it as exciting and frightening as the moments leading to the Trinity Test, but be sure that he did. There's not much else I have to say personally about this part. Not saying it isn't great by any means (on the contrary), but there's so much of the first half that I feel a personal attach to it that completely outshines the second half. Surely in a future I'm gonna start giving the second half the appreciation that it deserves from me.

         The world is changing. It was changing yesterday, and it will tomorrow. We live in unstable times where the nonlinearity y chaotic nature of our world-scale economic system it's slowly reaching its limits, and our leaders are being pushed into a wall where two options are only available: control every aspect of our lives in order to have a slight chance of generate "wealth" now, or let the other political party do that for them. Our biggest treat is not only the nightmares of Oppenheimer about a nuclear war, but the prevalence of a political and economic system that let the proliferation of nuclear weapons to exist. Barbie and Oppenheimer are opposites in the nature of their thesis, so much that the internet made a whole event out of that fact, but yet they share a common ground. The later is a cautionary tale on how great minds can be utilized by the fear of the otherness in order to blindly trust their political figures, only to realize their mistakes too late, and the former is an optimistic view on how fearing the opposites is not only perjudicial to everyone, but the answer lies in having compassion and compression for them. Because, deep down, everyone is curious for the little waves formed by water drops.