Shabbat shalom y’all,
Every movie is a ritual to induce a vision. Like any vision, what you see is yourself.
I’ve been having a good summer of movies. I wanted to write a review about Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City but that got too long and unwieldy. Then Barbie, but then I wanted to wait to compare it to Oppenheimer. But then I was daunted to write about Barbenheimer— the spectrum of Western modernity— but found some medicine in Bayo Akomolafe’s post: “Might there be more than one way to participate in viewership that does not collapse at the feet of a complete assessment?”
(FYI: I will never warn you about potential spoilers)
Obviously, whatever I saw in these movies says more about me than it does about the movies or their writers. Any film critic attempting to discuss culture only reveals what they feel about culture.
With that said, these movies were about men.
In Asteroid City, a televised-play-within-a-movie, we see not just atomic bomb testings and the young brainiacs who would ostensibly work in future weapons testing, but the writer (Edward Norton) using these plot devices to depict some unknowable, ineffable quality of man and the cosmic reasons man does what he does.
In the play-within-the-movie, the alien embodies the mystery of humanity’s relationship to the cosmos. In the production of the play, the actor playing the protagonist (Jason Schwartzman) steps out of the theater onto the fire escape to contemplate why his character would inexplicably harm himself. On the fire escape, he meets another actress from another stage production (Margot Robbie) who he had auditioned with but ultimately didn’t get the part. What did she say to provide him insight into his role? I have no idea, I don’t remember. All I could remember was the marquis of “Death of a Narcissist” behind them. Like the alien within the play, Robbie’s character steps in from another story, another universe, to provide (ostensibly) some sort of perspective or insight into the role of the protagonist’s ego within the wider universe.
Robbie returns to the movie screen as an alien inspiration to womankind in Barbie. The narrator describes how before the advent of Barbie, girls only played with baby dolls as mothers, but Barbie was a woman and a woman could be anything.
Ken starts out loving Barbie and competing with other Kens for her attention. They come into our world and Ken learns about the patriarchy and loves it and brings it back to Barbieland and all the Barbies become dumb bimbo wenches for all the Kens.
To save the female imagination from the imported and internalized patriarchy, Barbie stages a coup where she wakes up the other Barbies (with a pretty bland monologue) to their innate wisdom and defeat the Ken patriarchy by pitting the Kens against each other. The war scene is excellent and fun and joyous and then… Barbie (and the viewers) have to hold Ken’s hand as he comes to the realization he’s not the center of the universe and Barbie doesn’t have to like him for him to have a meaningful life or whatever.
A lot of awkward moralizing throughout the movie. They had a token trans Barbie and a token fat Barbie. All of the story arcs about men (except for the dance sequences) fell flat. Nevertheless, the dance sequences outweighed all the virtue signaling. Barbie was the most fun I’ve had in a theater in a long time.
Then I watched Oppenheimer. Watching it inspired me to be great, but I noticed my body was absolutely still for the whole three hours. It felt like a movie Ken would make. Three hours of a beautiful man in a cool hat seducing mentally unstable and married women. But he’s not just a beautiful man, he’s a mysterious man who scienced a star on earth!
I enjoyed it and might see it once more in my life. It was a sports movie cum political melodrama where boy scholars (like Josh Peck, Jack Quaid, Michael Angarano) became men weapon manufacturers, saints and martyrs of the political crusade against science.
Eileen Jones’ review highlights some of Oppenheimer’s reckless life decisions that, if included in the film, would have shown him as a hubristic opportunist rather than a morally ambiguous visionary.
How does Barbie pull more moral weight than Oppenheimer? Wes Anderson, for once, contemplates our existential place in the universe and can’t help but make it all about himself writing the story?
I enjoyed all these movies. But can’t we contemplate death and have fun without making it all about us and our own sense of morality? We do it all the time. Why can’t we just let ourselves enjoy it?
I want some wisdom, something that doesn’t come from my culture, something that has survived apocalypses, something like that old Ohlone song,
I am dancing. On the edge of the world I am dancing.
Thanks for reading.