Along with my co-writer, we did a double bill of Barbie and Oppenheimer at the Picturehouse. The audience for Oppenheimer was serious. The audience for Barbie was clearly there for a good night out. There was fancy dress and bottles of bubbly being taken in. Whoops and cheers, not such a British thing, greeted the opening titles. From the audience demographic it would have looked like these films had nothing in common. However….
Talking with my co-author’s partner after Oppenheimer, we came up with the term ‘intellectual popcorn’. Nolan has long been a prime purveyor of this, alongside, perhaps, Tarantino, Fincher, etc. Whilst the term sounds sniffy, it’s not meant to be. Cinema is a pretentious art. A film has two, in this case three, hours to compress its intellectual discourse, whereas a book can play out over much more time, permitting a more nuanced exploration of the themes the author wants to tackle. Nolan is something of a master of the exploration of time, and he has explored this with a certain verve, investigating the aesthetics and physics of time in a way that is entertaining, luring a paying audience in to not only sit back, but also to think. The theme of physics is of course central to Oppenheimer, and the ambition of Nolan’s film can only be applauded. Who else is managing to make big budget films about dead physicists?
Gerwig has been criticised for selling out, as Barbie is a film about a toy manufacturer’s product, which is also financed by said manufacturer. On paper this sounds awful, and when said manufacturer’s logo appears in the titles, it’s even more disconcerting. However, Gerwig and screenwriter, Baumbach, are more than smart enough to be aware of the feminist discourse around Barbie, and dolls in general. They turn this into the meat and drink of the film itself, which is a softcore intellectual thesis on contemporary feminism, the patriarchy and also, slyly, the crisis of masculinity in the late patriarchal age.
As such, both films feel a bit like being given a lecture on their respective topics by a trendy professor. Gerwig’s effort is far more aware of this, and therefor more playful and ultimately, to this viewer, effective. Both seek to drown the discourse in aesthetics. In Nolan’s case, the key drivers are the frenetic edit and the relentless score, along with the use of slightly mannered cameos from the likes of Oldman and Affleck, C. In Gerwig’s case, the key driver is art design: the cheesecake tones of the Barbie aesthetic which is then contrasted with the washed out tones of ‘the real world’. (Is California really the real world?) Both employ a device at the start of the movie which they soon drop: Oppenheimer using abstract visuals to represent the complexities of the physicist’s brain; Gerwig using the acid tones of Mirren as a narrator, who soon largely disappears, save for one acerbic and on-point zinger, a zinger that perhaps highlights the weaknesses of Gerwig’s neo-feminist standpoint, when Mirren pops up to comment on the fact that Margot Robbie’s almost artificial beauty is in no way representative of the ‘normal’ female.
Neither film is particularly good at what might be described as emotional intelligence. Gerwig introduces some ‘normal’ people to seek to root her story in a more mundane reality, which half-works, half-doesn’t. (The cheesy husband cameo being the best example of this). These aren’t real people, they are ciphers in an intellectual argument, who are there to do exactly this, as both mother and daughter articulate with great clarity the apparent feminist thesis of the film, hitting nail effectively, if heavily, on head. Nolan’s Oppenheimer remains an aloof presence. Supposedly a bon viveur and a loose cannon, attributes which lead him to flirt with communism and therefore become his Achilles heel in the McCarthy era, he becomes ever more sphinx like as the film progresses, almost drifting into the background of his own story. Robert Downey Jr, as his supposed antagonist, starts to take over, despite having been a secondary character in the first two acts. (Act 1, Oppenheimer’s development as scientist; Act 2, Los Alamos; Act 3, post-war vilification.) The intriguing story of Oppenheimer’s relationship with a suicidal Communist party member feels like a contrived attempt to humanise the distant scientist, and her character, played by Pugh, is brushed off lightly. More than anything, one comes away with the sense of a film trying to bite off more than it can chew, with the manic edit supposed to be a propulsive force but ending up giving the film the feel of a never-ending montage sequence, punctuated by one little Atomic bomb.
On balance it felt as though Gerwig’s intellectual popcorn exercise was more effective than Nolan’s. In a way both films are just as laudably pretentious, but Gerwig shows more self-awareness, wearing her discourse on her sleeve, and this permits her film to feel less heavy-handed. Nolan’s film feels as though it is striving to achieve a transcendence which it will never attain, and the underlying issues of the film, the heavy shit which audiences don’t want to share with their popcorn, (nuclear war, the arms race, the possibility of mass destruction) are roller-skated over. In spite of myself I couldn’t help but think about Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, another film which addresses the horror of nuclear war in a roundabout way, which one suspects Nolan watched and borrowed from, but one which achieves an altogether more harrowing and emotional bond with its public, even if that public is unlikely to be watching the film whilst munching popcorn. In a similar way, for all the ingenuity of Gerwig and Baumbach’s film, one doesn’t come away feeling as though the patriarchal order has been shaken by its roots. One comes away thinking that this is a nice enough film which little girls will enjoy as much as the adults and will help to sell merchandise which is the prime reason for the financiers to have sought out Gerwig to direct a film about their product. This is where high-end Hollywood is at: making films which seek to find a way to infiltrate mainstream society with some kind of intellectual discourse, but, recognising this is a Sisyphean task, veer towards smart, sassy or bombastic filmmaking that they hope will please the crowd, as both of these films clearly have done.
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