Summer notes: Barbenheimer (Newsletter #28)
The opening salvo of the post-Labour Day, most-of-the-year round-up. I'm backlogged for ideas and haven't sat down to do any writing since January, so one must start with bite-sized portions and go from there. Also, I imported y'all from TinyLetter to the stable-seeming and hustle-optional Buttondown. If you encounter anything weird with the switchover, don't be a stranger, let me know! How has summer treated you?
Barbie (2023): in newsletter #27 I described Netflix's Arcane as "if Parker Brothers had shopped the Monopoly IP and gotten back All The Money In The World." Which Apollo's handball is now an earnings-call-ready enterprise roadmap, if not quite an aesthetic manifesto.
I took a friend. All for a good laugh at the Cineplex. He had an unavoidable family dinner so instead of finishing late with fishbowl margaritas and Barbie in the VIP, we had to start early and program around the 2pm IMAX showing of Oppenheimer. It was the better approach, in the end, because the former was such a slight confection as to melt like candy floss in swimming pool water. Mid-ness might be its superpower, in that readings — even the ungenerous or the right-wing — multiply without the heft to cancel each other out or even drive discourse. For ex, the Ken storyline made me un-comfy: like Kylo Ren, he was simply too astute a diagnosis for cartoon fantasy, and I resent the marketing for mis-selling the character as a positive himbo in the Magic Mike vein. But am I going to jump down the throat of my nice female colleague who saw it as a humorous reversal of patriarchal clichés? It’s summer, for goodness’s sake.
What pleased me about the movie were the references, commercial or otherwise. Margot Robbie and Kate McKinnon’s plastic-jointed physical comedy. The 1980s outfits, defrosting some Spencer-ian neural net — I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe — Earring Magic Kens lining the shelves of Toys "R" Us… The sequence in which Barbie gets up on the wrong side of her Dreamhouse bed, redolent of Jeanne Dielman’s missing button and ruined potatoes (does Jeanne Dielman contain everything there is? Say, the latter-day meme of the "girl dinner"?) California Dream Teresa in the credits, and a sidewise sidle into memoir.
Ebay narrows the year to 1987, my second American Christmas. One of the Cornell-affiliated ladies who took an interest in my family back then decided to gift me a Barbie, but not a Barbie of un-relatable complexion (she explained her angle, and I paraphrase only lightly now); since Barbie had no As-Am homegirl back in the day, she settled on Christie, the Black friend. Well. You see how this was well-meaning, but it stung, and I suppose I let that show. There was some question of whether to return her and get Teresa, the ruffle-tastic Latina Yellow Ranger, instead. No question arose as to whether I was the sort of American-in-waiting who could aspire to blonde-ness. From the Han Chinese-in-China human default position, I had been assigned the role of brunette sidekick at immigration, the way a Wisniowski gets whittled down to a White.
In the end I think I elected to keep Christie — of course, I was putting a damper on the dinner party — but also Christie’s outfit had the most timeless swag, and I could read that even then. I don’t know what happened to the doll, and I never got another. In the intervening decades I don’t think I ever stopped being the brunette(tm), on which psychological base one could layer various counter-programmatic qualities that made it a fruitful position, especially in the nineties. What’s more, the one I actually wanted — a whole other set of impossibles to articulate — was Midge: I’ve always had a fondness for redheads. Let Midge be a sexy mama, Greta, you coward!
Oppenheimer (2023): No such autobiographical detours. Turing is the one I can’t be normal about — the historical parallels in post-war ingratitude by their respective governments are mind-provoking — and if I felt that way about Oppie I might have hated this as much as The Imitation Game. Must an entire man's life be shoehorned into a Nolan Twist Structure(™)?
Much as with Zach Snyder, I get mildly mad at the man’s films in the same ways every time, but not enough that I stop shelling out $20 for pharma-grade IMAX bad vibes. Pace Kode9, someone should win an Oscar for the sonic warfare. Not the visuals. Not even Trinity — Big Very Boom Yes — but Oppenheimer’s post-Hiroshima speech, the technical achievement of which I couldn’t parse but was sure would show up as all sorts of interesting jagged lines on my Fitbit graphs. (It did not.) What more morbid intimation of the Great Filter than that two-minute exercise in surround sound? Should Christopher Nolan of all directors have to slather Asian-ethnic extras up in radiation burn rubber makeup to garner an empathy? I mean, thank God he had more class.
Lest we forget: Japanese WWII movies are equally inextricable from moral context. A good thematic double bill for Oppenheimer would be Miyazaki Hayao's The Wind Rises, whose protagonist's war efforts parallel Oppenheimer's in time but belong to another technological generation. Jiro Horikoshi's fanboy unworldliness is as much an indictment as Oppenheimer's ambition and cowardice, but Miyazaki caught flak for making the character too likeable — and, I guess, for being too obviously into the planes themselves. But this was necessary. The master has to expend his art to show you, to guide you into the beauty he can't un-see: even knowing all that he does now. It's a film so marinated in self-loathing he had to cast Hideaki Anno to get a fraction of it across.
Other callouts to keep a sense of humour about: Bongo Physicists Assemble. Having Rami Malek show his face for 10 seconds so that when his character turns up at the end, you remember the exact 10-second scene during which you got mentally sidetracked hoping Rami Malek took scale pay for a laugh. The jUnIOr SEnAtoR frOM mAsSaCHusSetTS. The fact that I jumped into one of those perennially tiresome Film Twitter threads re: sex scenes in movies, saying Nolan should hit me, I can take it, and someone told me I would be delighted with Oppenheimer. Do you suppose the only sex dreams Nolan has ever had are ones in which he’s naked in front of a committee? It would explain a lot (about Inception).
More reviews hopefully soon,
Sabina