Barbenheimer's polar opposites

 Quite interesting, the recommendation (half-serious, surely) to tackle Barbenheimer head on and see 2023’s two blockbusters one after the other. This is because Christopher Nolan’s opus can be seen as the polar opposite of Barbie’s patriarchy-smashing, and not just because all the significant characters in Oppenheimer, all those suited scientists busily working to destroy personkind, were male. The two female characters in Oppenheimer, played by Florence Pugh and Emily Blunt, are cyphers, seemingly just there for either a bit of cheesecake, or a moaning harpie continually warning Robert that it will All End Badly. 

It is a common observation that Christopher Nolan “doesn’t do women” and this long, long film bears that out. Pugh is a magnetic screen presence but her character was superfluous, even if this was not the case in Oppenheimer’s life. Had she, a Communist, been the proven cause of his downfall then her presence would have been justified, but there was little if any evidence of this, and she faded out of the picture after a couple of nude scenes – one of which has upset India because Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) makes his famous quotation from the Bhagavad-Gita, “I am become death … ” while in bed with Jean Tatlock, Pugh’s character. 

It was all about men – one female character does arrive to work with the Manhattan Project, and she is very predictably told to make tea, but her presence doesn’t go much further than that. Undeniably, that was what the world was like then, and men did all the real things while women had babies and kept the home fires burning. It’s odd that Nolan, who is only 53, has this blind spot. Does he just not bother, or dismiss realistic women characters as tiresome wokery? 

It doesn’t spoil the film, but makes it less great. It would be the same if any character were so perfunctorily sketched in – and to be fair that might apply to Matt Damon’s General Groves, but Damon plays him so robustly that the two-dimensionality is not apparent.

So the Barbenheimer double bill is not as ludicrous as it sounds at first. But you would have to take a full afternoon off to watch Oppenheimer, be awed, have dinner, and then toddle off to Barbie for a hilarious if, pun unavoidable, barbed vision of the doll challenging “the patriarchy” and transforming her world into somewhere females rule and men are given the opportunity to “try hard, and you might get to where women are in the real world”.

*Image: Sandra Gabriel/Unsplash